------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
British nuclear sub finally leaves Gibraltar
Commerce Ruling Favors U.S. Company
Depleted Uranium Weaponry Ban Online Petition
US Officials Start European Tour
India Troops Hold Largest Exercise
TEPCO to shut 1.1 gW reactor to check malfunction
The new nuclear "theology"
Trick or Treaty
NMD´s new supporter
Missile defense untenable, global laws needed
The real debate about missile defense
Pentagon to Explore Missile Defense
United States Woos Allies on Missile Defense Plan
Japan Stops Short of Supporting Missile Plan
Savannah River Site to ship radioactive materials along I-20
Radioactive trash to cross metro area
Cheney Defends Nuclear Waste Dump
The Toxic Waste of Nuclear Power

MILITARY
Taiwan Wrangles Over U.S. Arms Offer
Bosnian Serb Crowd Beats Muslims at Mosque Rebuilding
Macedonia Bombards Rebels as Diplomats Strive for Unity
Powell to Pressure Yugoslavia
Bush Names Hutchinson as New Counter-Drug Chief
New Zealand Scraps Air Combat Force
Rumsfeld Seeks Overhaul of Pentagon Space Effort
U.N. cut U.S. off as drug monitor
Lessons of a Defeat
Pentagon to strengthen Air Force's jurisdiction
Military Space Operations Unified etc.
On Alert for Looming Base Closings

OTHER
Free AIDS Care Brings Hope to Botswana
Decrease in Chronic Illness Bodes Well for Medicare Costs
Bush: Free trade good for jobs, environment
Officer Charged in Killing That Roiled Cincinnati
Flaws in Chemist's Findings Free Man at Center of Inquiry
Mass Prison Transfer Creates Crisis
Amnesty Says Torture Still Common in Brazil Jails
China Rejects U.S. Proposal to Fly Spy Plane Off Island
China: US Spy Plane Can't Fly Home
U.S. renews flights off China
U.S. Resumes Its Spy Flights Close to China
Washington worries about terrorism
Bush Creates New Terrorism Office
Cheney to Focus on Terrorism Threat as Head of New Federal Office

ACTIVISTS
Falun Gong Protests Greet China's Leader in Hong Kong
Hong Kong Protesters Have Field Day


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

British nuclear sub finally leaves Gibraltar

GIBRALTAR: May 8, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10737&newsDate=8-May-2001

GIBRALTAR - A British nuclear submarine stranded in Gibraltar for nearly a year finally pulled out of the British colony yesterday, ending a controversy that strained relations between London and Madrid.

The HMS Tireless, a Trafalgar-class submarine able to fire Tomahawk missiles, was escorted from the harbour in Gibraltar by Royal Navy patrol vessels after lengthy repairs to the cooling system of its nuclear reactor.

Officials declined to reveal the submarine's destination after it pulled out of the colony on Spain's southern coast, but they have previously suggested it could head for Devonport in southern England.

The Tireless arrived in Gibraltar in May last year after developing a small crack in the cooling system of its reactor while on duty in the Mediterranean and leaking a small amount of contaminated water into the sea.

The presence of the submarine led to protests from environmentalists and residents in Gibraltar and southern Spain who demanded it be towed away.

Spanish and British government officials and authorities in Gibraltar all said there was no safety risk.

Spain has long sought the return of Gibraltar, a rocky peninsula which it reluctantly ceded to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.

The submarine revived debate about the colony's status and tested the close relationship between Spain's centre-right Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Aznar, under pressure from the Socialist opposition, suggested last December that Britain take the submarine home for repairs even though experts said moving the vessel would create a greater risk to public safety.

The colony, famous for its towering "Rock of Gibraltar," is home to more than 30,000 English-speaking people.

-------- business

Commerce Ruling Favors U.S. Company

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Uranium-Trade.html
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/010508/21/uranium-trade

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Commerce Department said Tuesday that European countries have subsidized the uranium enrichment industry, a preliminary ruling that favors the United States' only producer of fuel for nuclear power plants.

The department said the French have given a subsidy of nearly 14 percent, while Germany, the Netherlands and Britain provided subsidies of less than 4 percent each.

U.S. Enrichment Corp., based in Bethesda, Md., filed the trade case against Eurodif, a French company, and Urenco, which exports uranium from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

USEC complained that it lost millions of dollars worth of business because government subsidies let Eurodif and Urenco charge less for power plant fuel.

The European companies fought the complaint, arguing that USEC's prices were high because of its electricity-intensive, World War II-era technology and because it was weighed down by a money-losing contract to sell uranium retrieved from former Soviet weapons.

Backing up the position of those competitors were lawmakers from North Carolina and South Carolina who said they didn't want their constituents to pay more for electricity.

North Carolina gets more than 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, and nuclear power plants generate more than 56 percent of South Carolina's electricity, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Even though the latest ruling is only preliminary, it can have a swift impact on prices because importers will have to pay a bond to cover the amount of the punitive duty, should that duty be upheld in a final ruling.

USEC filed its trade complaint in December following more than a year of declining profits.

To cut its costs, the company is preparing to end production at its plant in Piketon, Ohio. That will leave the USEC-operated plant in Paducah, Ky., as the only place in the United States where uranium is enriched to the grade used in power plants.

-------- depleted uranium

Depleted Uranium Weaponry Ban Online Petition - Please sign!

http://www.petitiononline.com/3d4b/petition.html

To: All Concerned Humanitarians

We, the undersigned, demand an immediate ban on all depleted uranium weaponry. This highly carcinogenic poison is killing babies and children by the tens of thousands in Iraq and will soon be doing the same in the Balkans. It is a form of genocide and a severe environmental threat. We are not winning a war by giving babies cancer. We are not necessarily endorsing an end to war, only an end to using depleted uranium. These countries were once our allies and may someday be our allies again. Our problems are with the leaders of these countries, not with the children, babies, parents, and grandparents who are people just like us. The depleted uranium will poison the Earth long after the wounds of war have healed. It is not in the best interest of the UN, NATO, nor the United States of America, to poison large segments of the population indiscriminately and it will not be tolerated. The handling of these weapons may poison our own servicemen and women. We are supposed to be the defenders of the weak and disenfranchised. We are not supposed to play the role of the Great Satan that so many now see us in. Let's return to the role of the Peacekeeper and leave genocide for the bad guys on the other side. There can be no winners in a war fought between two evils.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

View Current Signatures
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?3d4b

The Depleted Uranium Weaponry Ban Petition to All Concerned Humanitarians was written by Douglas E. Baker. This petition is hosted at http://www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service.

-------- europe

US Officials Start European Tour to Explain Missile Defense Project with NATO Talks

May 8, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/breakingnews/2001/05/08/missile_defense_project.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) _ Senior American officials visited NATO headquarters Tuesday to discuss President George W. Bush's decision to erect a missile defense system which has provoked only lukewarm support from the allies in Europe.

Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and Stephen Hadley, deputy assistant to Bush for national security affairs, will move later in the day to London for meetings with British officials.

They are part of a group of high-ranking U.S. officials visiting capitals worldwide this week to explain the merits of an anti-missile defense system.

The visits to the NATO allies will also include calls to the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Turkey.

The Bush administration has outlined a system that includes an airborne laser weapon as well as missiles on sea and land shooting down incoming missiles in mid-flight.

Bush has said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has identified ``near-term options'' that could allow the United States to deploy an ``initial capability'' against limited attacks, possibly as early as by the end of Bush's term in 2004, although a complete and fully tested defense is believed to be at least a decade away.

A national defense against missiles would conflict with a ban in effect since the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. That agreement assumes that the lack of an adequate defense against a retaliatory missile attack serves to deter launching an attack in the first place.

Bush views the treaty as a relic of the Cold War era and an unnecessary restriction on current defense needs. Russia and China would like the treaty to remain in effect, viewing it as a barrier to bigger offensive arsenals. Many of the U.S. allies are skeptical and publicly noncommittal.

-------- india / pakistan

India Troops Hold Largest Exercise

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-India-Military-Exercise.html?searchpv=aponline

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- In the desert near the Pakistani border, Indian troops were engaged Tuesday in the nation's largest ever military exercise, including training in case of a nuclear strike, officials said.

At least 50,000 soldiers and 120 aircraft were deployed to the Thar Desert in western India to practice battle scenarios. And while the enemy is never named in the exercise, India's bitter rival Pakistan is only 45 miles to the west.

Air force combat jets have made more than 750 sorties since the exercises began on May 5, including deep strikes into areas demarcated as ``enemy lines.''

Pilots were trained in intercepting enemy aircraft and how to react if there is a nuclear attack, military officials told journalists. Battle scenarios included ones involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

India and Pakistan conducted back-to-back nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

``Modern warfare is electronic warfare,'' Air Marshal S. Krishnaswamy, commander of India's western air command said. ``The first thing is to knock out the enemy's command communications and control networks and jam its radars.''

The exercises will end on May 14 with a massive demonstration of firepower at India's Pokharan test range, the site of India's May 1998 nuclear test.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they became independent from British colonial rule in 1947 and border skirmishes are frequent.

-------- japan

TEPCO to shut 1.1 gW reactor to check malfunction

JAPAN: May 8, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10742&newsDate=8-May-2001

TOKYO - Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) said yesterday it has started to manually shut down a 1.1 gigawatt (gW) reactor in northern Japan due to a technical problem in a unit which supplies water to the nuclear reactor.

TEPCO said in a statement that no radiation had escaped into the environment from the Fukushima No 2 power plant's No 2 nuclear reactor as a result of the incident, classified as zero minus on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The unit in question supplies water to the nuclear reactor when the water level falls below normal levels in an emergency.

TEPCO, Japan's largest power company, said that it had been testing the unit when it discovered the malfunction in the unit's valve controling the flow of water.

It began to manually suspend operations from 5:30 a.m. Monday (2030 GMT Sunday) to conduct checks, and expects to complete the shut down at around 3:00 p.m.

Japan has 51 commercial nuclear reactors which provide about a third of the nation's power.

-------- missile defense

The new nuclear "theology"
Under Bush, missile defense is for new foes. "Assured destruction" still holds for old ones.

By Peter Grier (grierp@csps.com)
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/05/08/p1s2.htm

WASHINGTON - President Bush's push for missile defenses would change - but not eliminate - the "theology" of nuclear standoff with which the United States has calculated its national security ever since the Soviet Union acquired its own atomic arsenal some 40 years ago.

In his speech last week at the National Defense University, Mr. Bush referred to mutually assured destruction (MAD), the basic tenet of this theology, as a grim relic of another era. His implication: In a defense-dominated nuclear world, MAD would be as obsolete as bomb shelters, civil defense sirens, and the cold war itself.

Maybe some day. The hard reality of the situation is that, absent a perfect shield, the logic of MAD will remain an integral part of strategic arithmetic. Bush, as so many presidents before him, will be forced to grabble with the difficult moral realization that the safety of the US populace depends at least in part on allowing them to remain vulnerable to Armageddon.

Under the administration's plan "we're downsizing MAD, but we're not casting it aside," says Michael Krepon, a senior security analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington.

The MAD theory has its roots in the early 1960s, when US officials first struggled with the notion that nuclear weapons were far more than just extra-powerful regular bombs. The catastrophic damage that would be caused by even one thermonuclear weapon meant that war plans needed to focus not on the best way to fight nuclear war, but on the best way to prevent it from ever beginning.

The Pentagon first moved to adopt "assured destruction" as its strategy during the tenure of Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's secretary of Defense. The concept was simple: The US and the Soviet Union would never attack one another with nuclear weapons if both realized that, if they did so, they would inevitably be struck with a devastating strike in return.

It took a nuclear theorist from outside the government, Donald Brennan of the Hudson Institute, to publicize the ethical difficulties of this position. He slapped "mutual" on "assured destruction", coining the acronym MAD, and pronounced himself opposed to living under a nuclear sword of Damocles.

"We should not deliberately create a system in which millions of innocent civilians would, by intention, be exterminated in a failure of the system," he wrote.

Popular culture satirized MAD as a mutual suicide pact, most notably in Stanley Kubrick's film "Dr. Strangelove."

But Strangelovian or not, MAD remains the foundation of the way the US regards nuclear weapons today. The basic problem, generations of strategists found, was that any attempt at protecting one side of the superpower standoff made the other feel vulnerable, and thus more likely to strike out first.

Fast forward to 2001.

Bush and his advisers want to begin deploying a defensive system meant to protect the US against single missiles launched by a rogue dictator, or by mistake from an established nuclear power.

Their problem is that any attempt to guard against what they see as a new and developing threat interferes with the status quo vis-à-vis the old, established rival: Russia. And there's the little matter of a treaty, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile pact, that codifies the no-defense, assured-destruction posture.

The solution: create a two-level nuclear strategy. Defenses are for new threats. Yet the status quo will largely still exist for the old.

"Deterrence can no longer be based solely on the threat of nuclear retaliation," said the president last week. The key word there may be "solely." In other words, MAD lives.

"As long as we have nuclear weapons, there is going to be some element of mutual assured destruction," says Jack Spencer, a Heritage Foundation defense analyst.

The president needs to convince Russia of this, however. If Moscow begins to believe that any US defenses are in fact aimed at shielding America from a notional Russian attack, relations could turn frosty, or worse.

That is because the calculus of realpolitik would hold that a US safe behind a missile shield might be more likely to lob weapons at Russia. For the Kremlin, professed good US intentions might not be enough.

Thus Bush has included an offer of further reductions in offensive weapons, and is studying "de-alerting" of missiles and other MAD downsizing methods.

"Some aspects of MAD are being cast aside," says Mr. Krepon of Stimson.

He adds that the key political distinction in the United States is no longer nuclear hawks vs. doves. It is between schools of thought about how to move toward a changed nuclear regime that could contain some defensive element.

In essence, the split is over how much geopolitical muscle the US should use, if any, to force such a change on the rest of the world. "Call them dominators vs. cooperationists, or unilateralists vs. multilateralists," says Krepon.

For further information:

US missile defence plans consign ABM Treaty to history, but where do the allies go from here? Janes.com
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/misc/bmp010503_1_n.shtml

National Missile Defense Department of Defense
http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/nmd.html

National Missile Defense
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/nmd/index.html

Special Weapons Monitor FAS
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/

Online NewsHour: National Missile Defense
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/nmd_splash.html

SpaceWar.com - Your Portal To Military Space
http://www.spacewar.com/

Coverage: Missile Defense Systems Lateline News
http://lateline.muzi.net/cc/english/19072.shtml

----

Trick or Treaty

Washington Post
By Art Buchwald
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60908-2001May7?language=printer

Just when I thought our nuclear defenses were going well, President Bush said he wanted to tear up the ABM treaty, which we signed in 1972, and start all over again.

The estimated cost would be anything from 200 dollars to 100 billion, but knowing what antimissile defense shields cost, I would bet on the upper figure.

The plus is that the new missile shield would give us a chance to knock down any missile before it reaches our shores. The minus is no one knows how to make one.

Advocates of the plan say that even if it doesn't work, the fact that the enemy thinks it does is enough for our defense plans. The ABM defense never worked before, but it kept us from having a war for 30 years.

As with everything in Washington, the Republicans (read conservatives) are for it and the Democrats (read liberals) are against it.

The Democrats say there is nothing in Bush's plan to counter "suitcase" bombs that can be taken onto a 747.

Let's say Abdul Ben Rabat, a millionaire terrorist, manages to buy an atomic bomb in a souk to deliver to Buffalo.

He stops an American tourist and says he wants him to deliver it to his cousin. No missile shield can stop it because it is in a Louis Vuitton bag. In New York, the bag winds up lost at Kennedy Airport and is transferred to another plane, but the flight is canceled and this plane never gets off the ground. The suitcase goes to Toledo instead because the Pentagon people did not have the funds left over for two bomb-sniffing dogs. Cost of dogs: $130.

So while the foolproof antimissile system is perfected, miniaturization in atomic weapons will also be realized and you'll be able to Federal Express your weapons anywhere you want.

When the president calls in Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, he says, "What happened to Toledo?"

Rumsfeld says, "It's gone. We shot every missile that came near it from the air, but nobody bothered to check suitcases being delivered through FedEx."

Mr. Bush tells Rumsfeld, "I want a FedEx shield to replace the ABM shield."

When the president launched his new antimissile program, he thought he had all his bases covered if he could shoot down an enemy missile. What makes this thing really complicated is that at the very moment he called for the abandonment of the ABM treaty he also announced a tax cut and a study of Social Security. He'd better check valise bombs first.

----

NMD´s new supporter

Washington Times
May 8, 2001
Doug Bandow
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010508-79798288.htm

The Bush administration has announced its intention to alter or eliminate the 1972 ABM Treaty and deploy a national missile defense (NMD) as soon as feasible. Russia´s neighbor, Ukraine, has offered to help Washington turn NMD into a reality.

NMD has faced its sharpest opposition abroad, from Russia and, reflecting Moscow´s criticism, many NATO members. However, Kiev is actively rebutting their objections.

Sounding like U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who recently told Congress that "the ABM Treaty was designed in a different time," leading Ukrainian officials uniformly agree that change is necessary. Sergiy Pyrozhkov, director of the National Institute of International Security Problems, opened a conference last week in Kiev on the ABM Treaty co-sponsored by his organization and, even more significantly, the Council of National Security and Defense of Ukraine, the equivalent of America´s National Security Council. He noted that when the accord was originally ratified the two signatories "said it could be changed; how it will be changed just hasn´t been decided yet."

In a later interview, Volodymyr Horbulin, chairman of the State Commission on the Defense Industry of Ukraine his nation´s leading voice on the treaty pointed to today´s dramatically different threat environment. When the accord was signed, nuclear stability primarily involved two nations. Today it involves a plethora of states, some of which are "rogues." He was backed by Boris Andresyuk, chairman of the Rada´s national security and defense committee: "The situation has changed enough for us to change the way that we keep strategic stability."

Moscow disagrees, of course, even though Vyacheslav Dukhin, counselor to Russia´s ambassador to Ukraine, admitted at the conference that "there have been changes in the world, and these changes require a response." But Mr. Horbulin contends that Moscow is mistaken in believing that NMD "would destroy global stability." He echoes Washington´s argument that NMD is not designed to stop a large-scale strike from a country like Russia, but instead to "protect the U.S. from nuclear attack from rogue states, such as North Korea." Thus, "the global balance wouldn´t be affected by creation of an anti-missile complex in the U.S."

Particularly noteworthy to conference participants was Andrei Sakharov´s admonition to his Soviet superiors that missile defense was not only possible, but desirable. Mr. Andresyuk observed that "It´s like domestic laws. They aren´t enough to prevent burglary. You also need to take measures like alarms."

Kiev speaks with authority as a successor state to the ABM Treaty. Indeed, Ukraine´s status is recognized by the 1997 Memorandum signed by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the United States. Washington has yet to ratify the accord, however. U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pasqual told the conference that doing so would have to wait until Washington decides whether to jettison the ABM framework.

But, complains Mr. Horbulin, only Russia and the United States are discussing this issue. He wants Ukraine to take part as well. Although Belarus and Kazakhstan also hosted Soviet missiles, they had far fewer and "never produced them," Mr. Horbulin points out. Ukraine voluntarily gave up the world´s third largest nuclear arsenal, and has since complied with a variety of arms control agreements.

In doing so, Ukraine has left itself vulnerable. Over the last decade "a number of countries, like India and North Korea, have created middle-range missiles. Ukraine cannot now feel fully protected," complains Mr. Horbulin. While the ABM Treaty addresses global security, it "doesn´t provide any guarantees for regional security."

Kiev proposes revising the ABM Treaty to allow the kind of missile defense envisioned by the Bush administration. Mr. Horbulin argues for moving the "philosophy of the ABM Treaty" away from one oriented to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction between the United States and Russia. Regional systems to protect other countries could supplement the U.S.-Russia agreement, with the possibility of technical cooperation among nations.

Mr. Horbulin points to the two early warning stations in Ukraine dating back to the old Soviet Union: With "certain modifications they could be used to create a protective system in Ukraine." Moreover, he adds, Kiev is interested in helping to produce America´s defense network. "Ukraine possesses plants that could create part of an early warning system. And we have research institutes that helped create an anti-missile system." Employing Ukrainians would yield the ancillary benefit of deterring people who once worked in nuclear and missile research "leaving for troubled countries."

Washington has yet to formally react to Kiev´s proposal. At last week´s conference, Mr. Pasqual explained that the administration was high on consultation, but he not so subtly sidestepped Ukraine´s potential role. "Consultation teams" are slated to hit Europe next week; one should visit Kiev as well.

In any case, it will soon be difficult for Washington to avoid giving an answer. Mr. Horbulin is planning a trip to Washington. Not only has he served as head of Ukraine´s equivalent of the National Security Council. He is one of President Leonid Kuchma´s closest confidantes, with an association that stretches back 40 years.

Washington should bring Ukraine into negotiations over NMD and the ABM Treaty. Doing so would help loosen what some observers fear is a tightening embrace with Moscow. Moreover, involving Ukraine would bolster the decision to deploy NMD. Who better to deflate Russian objections than a fellow inheritor of the treaty? Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Reagan.

----

Missile defense untenable, global laws needed

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,
May 8, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010508-32522412.htm

"America´s enemies are spreading nuclear, chemical and biological technologies to rogue states and terrorist groups around the world," Commentary columnist Cal Thomas states ("Security awakening," May 6).

Mr. Thomas may well be right that there are individuals in the world who would not shrink from obtaining and using such weapons of mass destruction. Those individuals most likely would try to use them against the countries, such as the United States, that are the most vulnerable. In fact, Mr. Thomas may not be aware of it, but scientists have been warning about the dangers of proliferation for decades.

The increasing threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction must be addressed, but it cannot be addressed meaningfully by "star wars" or a national missile defense. Mr. Thomas appears to think of national missile defense as an issue of left vs. right. I do not agree. Nonetheless, I cannot agree with either the right or the left as Mr. Thomas presents them. His right advocates a national missile defense, while his left holds that such a system simply might not work. I would go a step further and say that the whole idea of national missile defense is an impractical pipe dream that never can be put into practice.

Whether we like it or not, the capability for massive destruction has become cheap, plentiful and relatively accessible. A missile capable of destroying a city might cost a few million dollars. A target city is, of course, infinitely more valuable because of the lives and property within it. The cost of a missile defense system lies somewhere in between.

All a determined enemy has to do to accomplish his objective is to make a single hit. He merely needs to accommodate for a defense system by calculating how many missiles he needs to send in order to get one through. Even more tellingly, he does not even have to use a missile; a smuggler with a large suitcase can cause immense damage without anyone ever being able to find out who did it. In short, even an immensely expensive national missile defense system cannot knock out every last missile, and such a system will not defend against an attacker who chooses a delivery method other than missiles.

However much we might wish it were different, there is no technological solution to the problem of weapons proliferation. Rather, our country must do its part to create a civilized world in which conflicts are solved through the force of law rather than by the law of force. Our only rational choice for achieving a degree of safety from nuclear terrorism and other dangers is to develop the United Nations into a democratic world federation with proper institutions for the enactment, enforcement and adjudication of democratic world law. More than 200 years ago, the Founding Fathers of the United States accomplished this goal by developing a Constitution for our country. We must learn to follow in their footsteps on a global scale.

FELIX ROSENTHAL
Annandale

----

The real debate about missile defense

May 8, 2001
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010508-995874.htm

It was one of the more memorable examples of the phenomenon of "damning with faint praise." Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle was talking about George W. Bush´s speech to the National Defense University, in which the president forcefully laid out his arguments for defending the United States, its troops and allies against ballistic missile attack and launched international consultations to help sell his vision.

Mr. Daschle said Mr. Bush has begun "one of the most important and consequential debates we will see in our lifetime." What he really meant, though, was that the president is making grave mistake and that he and other opponents of missile defense intend to prevent W. from perpetrating it on the rest of us.

To be sure, Mr. Daschle will likely take exception to being called an opponent of missile defense. In so doing, however, he will underscore the disingenuousness of the debate he intends to make among the "most important and consequential" of the present era.

Specifically, what those like Tom Daschle of South Dakota and his comrades (notably, liberal Democrats like Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and John Kerry of Massachusetts and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri) mean when they say they support missile defenses is that they don´t -- except under circumstances calculated to render such support meaningless.

Specifically, such critics tend to assert that: (1) Any U.S. anti-missile system must meet some ill-defined but very exacting performance standard, yet not be so capable as to prevent Russia or even China from being able to threaten to destroy this country. (2) It must not cost too much to deploy, although how much would be acceptable is rarely spelled out. And, perhaps most importantly, (3) the United States must not proceed "unilaterally."

Let´s examine each of these conditions in turn. First, it is a safe bet that the United States can produce the technology needed for a reliable territorial anti-ballistic missile system. But it can only do so if we stop trying to develop such technology within the limitations imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that explicitly forbids us from having that capability an idea the critics abhor.

Obviously, the costs of such a missile defense will be a function of the sort of system or, more likely, the layers of anti-missile capabilities chosen for deployment. As it happens, the approach pursued half-heartedly by the Clinton administration was one of the most expensive and least capable options. Far more effective, global protection could be acquired for considerably less if the Navy´s existing investment in Aegis fleet air defense ships is utilized as the basic infrastructure for near-term defenses while space-based sensors and weapons are brought on-line. These systems are not compatible with the ABM Treaty though, and thus are non-starters for many of the critics of missile defense.

The real Catch-22, though, is the line that the United States can only go forward if our allies and potential adversaries agree. After all, in the event President Bush allowed the left-wing governments running virtually every allied government at the moment to make the call, few (if any) would give their blessing. For them, arms control treaties are sacred writ or, in the case of the ABM Treaty, "the cornerstone of strategic stability." What is more, most of them (especially the French) foolishly believe it to be in their nations´ interests for the United States to be hobbled militarily.

The allies are rapid supporters of missile defenses though when compared to one-time and potentially future foes like the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans. They very much fancy the American vulnerability that gives their missile threats strategic and commercial value. So long as they think they can exercise a veto, they will try to do so. Those who would make our defenses contingent upon blessings from these quarters should be seen for what they are: inveterate opponents of U.S. missile defenses who prefer not to be identified as such.

As a result, the challenge for Mr. Bush will be not merely to advocate a technically viable and affordable anti-missile system worthy of broad support at home and abroad. Increasingly, he must also make the case for U.S. leadership at a time when it is being vilified as "unilateralism." He must unapologetically extol American exceptionalism at a moment when the nation is under growing pressure to conform to the lowest-common-denominator served up by the so-called "international community."

The reality is that American sovereignty and security cannot be safely entrusted to those who do not have this country´s best interests at heart and/or who labor under delusions about the consistency of world governance and international norms. The latter group´s nostrums are all the more untenable insofar as these arrangements are increasingly being defined by whatever terms are agreeable to the likes of Moammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein and their patrons. For evidence of this phenomenon, one need look no further than the absurd outcome of last week´s vote on membership for the U.N. Human Rights Commission which seated Sudan, Cuba, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Russia and China while unseating the United States.

The emissaries Mr. Bush has fanning out around the world this week to explain and promote his visionary "framework" must establish America´s determination to defend its people, troops and allies, come what may. We can always make arrangements not to protect nations that decline to have our help. But we can no longer afford to allow their opposition to prevent us from taking the steps with respect to the ABM Treaty and the development and deployment of affordable, effective missile defenses that are so clearly needed in today´s world and tomorrow´s.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.

-------

Pentagon to Explore Missile Defense

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rumsfeld-Space.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration plans to explore as many as a dozen different approaches to missile defense after consulting with Russia, China and U.S. allies, and it has not yet devised a plan that is ``all firm and all fixed,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

On the day Rumsfeld's top deputy left for Europe to discuss missile defense with government officials in France, Germany, Poland and Russia, the defense secretary told reporters that some people have the mistaken impression the administration is ready to implement a missile defense blueprint.

``People think, you know, my goodness, they obviously have something in their heads that's all firm and all fixed and they're going to suddenly pull open the curtain and there it is,'' Rumsfeld said, his voice rising. ``Not true.''

As a presidential candidate last year, George W. Bush said he would build a missile defense as soon as possible and that it would be more extensive than the one the Clinton administration was pursuing.

In a speech last week, President Bush committed the United States to developing a missile shield to protect not only the United States but also its friends and allies abroad, but he provided no details on how he would do that. Some in the administration hope to have a missile defense ready by 2004.

Rumsfeld said the administration intends to pursue as many as a dozen different approaches, including some like sea-based and airborne defensive weapons for which testing is prohibited by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. He said some approaches will fail and be dropped while others will be carried through.

But first, he said, the administration will consult abroad and with the Congress. He seemed irritated, even a bit angry, at the suggestion that the administration is dragging its feet on missile defense decisions.

``We're not dancing around,'' he said.

Rumsfeld added, ``These consultations are serious, they're real. This is a big important issue to discuss.'' He indicated he believes Russia, China and other critics eventually will accept the administration's approach, although it will ``take some relearning'' on their part.

``It's going to take a willingness on the part of people to recognize the difference in our circumstance today from what the circumstance was in the Cold War,'' he said. ``We're going to do that, and we're going to do it well.''

Rumsfeld made his comments at a news conference at which he announced a series of organizational changes designed to sharpen the Pentagon's focus on U.S. defense interests in outer space.

Critics were quick to denounce the reorganization as a step toward a weapons buildup in space, although Rumsfeld insisted to reporters that the changes have ``nothing to do with'' the issue of space weapons. Rumsfeld himself has said space sensors for detecting and tracking missiles will play an important role in missile defense, and some in the administration believe space weapons may be needed.

Karl Grossman, a State University of New York journalism professor who is writing a book on the subject, called Rumsfeld's announcement ``a major step by the U.S. government in turning the heavens into a war zone.''

Rumsfeld will put the Air Force in charge of planning and purchasing decisions for all of the Defense Department's space programs, which currently are spread among the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

He also directed that the four-star general who heads Air Force Space Command be someone other than the commander of U.S. Space Command. Under the existing arrangement, Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart holds both jobs. Rumsfeld did not name the new commander of Air Force Space Command.

The Pentagon's space programs encompass a wide variety of activities, from satellites that detect and track ballistic missiles to military communications, navigation and intelligence-gathering efforts.

``Space issues are complex and merit a renewed focus,'' Rumsfeld said, adopting some of the recommendations of a commission he led before becoming defense secretary.

The changes, he said, ``will help the U.S. to focus on meeting the national security space needs for 21st century.''

---------

United States Woos Allies on Missile Defense Plan

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-us.html?searchpv=reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Senior U.S. diplomats launched a global charm offensive Tuesday to drum up support for President Bush's controversial missile defense plans.

At NATO headquarters, the first stop on a European leg of a diplomatic drive that also takes in Asia, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman said NATO allies welcomed the consultations and recognized new threats from the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Washington's European allies have been lukewarm rather than enthusiastic about the proposed anti-missile system that would detect and destroy long-range enemy missiles soon after launch.

The system could ultimately be based around a global network of missile interceptors, that would require upgrading existing U.S. early warning radar stations in Britain and Greenland.

But British officials said that in briefings in London, the U.S. team offered few concrete details and made no request to use British facilities, nor did Britain offer them.

Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has adopted a ``wait and see'' stance, is keen to avoid the divisive issue during the campaign for a June 7 general election, which he called Tuesday. The Conservative opposition has been goading him to embrace Bush's missile defense policy and offer British participation.

Many Europeans are skeptical about the proposed missile shield's capability after some test failures. They are also concerned that the United States should not tear up key arms control treaties with Russia that limit such defenses.

British officials said the U.S. team was asked but did not specify whether Bush would seek to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow. But Washington was clearly talking in terms of a ``new framework'' rather than existing treaties.

``We would be happy as long as it is in an agreed framework between the United States and Russia,'' a British official said.

JAPAN CAUTIOUS

In Tokyo, Japan told other U.S. envoys that it understood the missile defense plans but, mindful of Chinese opposition, stopped short of giving it clear backing at this stage.

Three high-level U.S. delegations are touring the world to explain and seek support for Bush's bold vision of 21st century security based on smaller offensive nuclear arsenals, and defenses capable of intercepting missiles fired by so-called ''rogue states'' such as North Korea or Iraq.

Grossman said the key for now was to talk closely with allies rather than try to get down to specific details.

``This close relationship with friends and allies and the consultative process is extremely, extremely important,'' he told reporters in Brussels.

``I know our allies would like even more consultations and we're certainly committed to that.''

Asked if the United States was sizing up allies' readiness to help with the costs of developing the missile defense system, Grossman said: ``We're not there yet.''

``What we were trying to do today was to expand people's minds and see how we want deterrence to function in the 21st century. The decisions about how, when and how much are still to come.''

Grossman accepted that not everyone agreed with all Bush's ideas but said there was ``a general recognition that we need to do much, much more together in the areas of non-proliferation'' to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said Tuesday's talks were the beginning of ``a thinking process'' in which allies would look closely at security challenges and open a genuine dialogue with Russia and China, nuclear powers which oppose Bush's plan, arguing it could trigger a new arms race.

Grossman said Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz would travel to Moscow Friday for talks on missile defense strategy.

The delegation is also due to visit France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Italy and Turkey before the talks with Russia.

--------

Japan Stops Short of Supporting Missile Plan

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/arms-usa-japan.html?searchpv=reuters

TOKYO, May 8 (Reuters) - Japan told a visiting U.S. envoy on Tuesday it understood Washington's missile defence plans but stopped short of offering clear support in an apparent attempt to avoid angering neighbouring China.

Japanese officials told U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that Tokyo shared Washington's concern over the proliferation of ballistic missiles, adding that it understood President George W. Bush's idea to set up a system to protect the United States and its allies.

``Our country understands the U.S. plan to study missile defences to tackle the proliferation of ballistic missiles,'' the foreign ministry quoted a senior Japanese official as telling Armitage.

Armitage and his delegation are in Tokyo to seek support for Bush's initiative. They are due to visit South Korea and India later this week.

Asked whether Japan had given a ``positive'' response to the idea, a foreign ministry official said: ``That is up to you to decide.''

Armitage, who later in the day paid a courtesy call on Prime Minister Junichi Koizumi, also declined to say whether Tokyo had thrown its support behind Bush's idea.

``I would not characterise the prime minister's views,'' he told reporters after meeting Koizumi.

The Japanese official added that Tokyo welcomed Washington's plans to discuss the scheme not only with its allies, but with nations such as Russia and China.

Moscow and Beijing have long opposed missile defence, saying it would trigger a new arms race. Key U.S. allies in Europe and Canada are also deeply sceptical of the idea.

PUSH FOR REGIONAL MISSILE DEFENCE

While Japanese officials refrained from voicing strong support for Bush's plan, they did stress the importance of regional missile defence to protect Japan and U.S. troops based in the country.

``Such a system is vital in the defence policy of our country,'' the foreign ministry official said.

Tokyo and Washington are studying such a defence system, which has met with opposition from China, and Japanese officials agreed with Armitage to continue the project.

Tokyo began looking into the system after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan in August 1998. But China fears the system could be extended to cover Taiwan, which it views as a renegade province.

Tokyo and Washington boosted their military alliance in 1998 to its highest level since the end of World War Two, setting off fears in China that the stronger ties were aimed at protecting Taiwan in the event of Chinese military action.

China was invaded by Japanese forces in the first half of the 20th century and has repeatedly warned against closer security ties between Japan and the United States.

Apart from a standoff over the security issue, Japan has been locked in bitter disputes with China over a string of trade and diplomatic issues, including a controversial visit to Japan last month by former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui.

In their meeting, Armitage welcomed Koizumi's stance that ties with Washington were the most important for Tokyo, adding the United States would also work to improve the relationship.

``I pointed out that we will do our best to be good partners in the alliance, both in security and economic matters,'' Armitage told reporters.

He said he had handed Koizumi a letter from Bush, in which the president extended an invitation to the prime minister to visit Washington at the ``earliest possible time.''

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

-------- georgia

Savannah River Site to ship radioactive materials along I-20

Tuesday, May 8, 2001
Savannah Morning News
http://www.savannahmorningnews.com/smn/stories/050801/LOCplutonium.shtml

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The first of dozens of shipments of radioactive materials from the Savannah River Site will begin their westward trek across the South on Tuesday, heading to New Mexico for burial.

The 60,000 pounds of transuranic wastes -- materials like clothing and rags that have been exposed to plutonium will travel in drums on a flatbed truck along Interstate 20 through South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Georgia Emergency Management Agency officials have trained 2,500 public safety personnel in how to handle the waste if it should spill or the truck should be involved in a wreck. But no problems are expected, said Lisa Matheson, a GEMA spokeswoman.

"There's such a minimal risk to the general public," she said.

The trip from the plant near Aiken, S.C., to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground repository in southeastern New Mexico, begins at 10 a.m. and will take about 36 hours.

Matheson said GEMA expects 34 such shipments to be transported through Georgia this year.

State officials do not plan to escort each truck but will monitor their movements via satellite, she said. Also, "every 100 miles or every two hours, the trucks will stop for safety checks," she added.

Tuesday's shipment will consist of 42 drums, the maximum possible in a single load, said Dale Ormond, the Department of Energy's senior manager for the transuranic waste program at SRS.

The items in the 55-gallon drums were contaminated with plutonium during the Cold War years, when the plant manufactured nuclear bomb materials, Ormond said.

The plant has spent about $15 million to earn certification to send the wastes to WIPP and to prepare for the first shipment, he said.

Supporters of the shipments consider them evidence that a cleanup is under way at SRS. Critics say the Energy Department should concentrate its efforts on cleaning up polluted soil and ground water at SRS.

"I would far prefer to see the dollars, the research and the energy going into addressing that significant threat to both South Carolinians and Georgians," said state Rep. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta. "My concerns are that we're kind of dabbling around the edges with this WIPP transportation and missing the core of the problem."

Pat Ortmeyer, field director for nuclear-waste issues at Women's Action for New Directions, agrees.

"It's just more of the example that they are not addressing the most urgent priorities generally in the Energy Department," Ortmeyer said. 'This is not the critical waste to be shipped."

SRS supporters disagree, saying the waste could pose a long-term risk to the environment if it remains at the site.

"While it's being stored safely there now, it certainly isn't designed to be stored there for the next hundred or thousand years," said Bill Reinig, a former SRS official who is vice chairman of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness, a pro-nuclear group based in Aiken.

On the Web

Savannah River Site: www.srs.gov Women's Action for New Directions: www.wand.org Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness: www.c-n-t-a.com

----

Radioactive trash to cross metro area

Associated Press
Tuesday, May 8, 2001

Augusta --- The first of dozens of shipments of radioactive materials from the Savannah River Site will begin its westward trek through Atlanta and across the South today on its way to New Mexico for burial.

The 60,000 pounds of transuranic wastes --- materials such as clothing and rags that have been exposed to plutonium --- will travel in drums on a flatbed truck along I-20 through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Georgia Emergency Management Agency officials have trained 2,500 public safety personnel in how to handle the waste if it should spill or the truck should be involved in a wreck. But no problems were expected, said Lisa Matheson, a GEMA spokeswoman.

"There's such a minimal risk to the general public," she said.

The trip from the plant near Aiken, S.C., to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground repository in southeastern New Mexico, will begin at 10 a.m. and take about 36 hours.

Matheson said GEMA expects 34 shipments to be transported through Georgia this year.

State officials do not plan to escort each truck but will monitor the movements via satellite, she said. Also, "every 100 miles or every two hours, the trucks will stop for safety checks," she said.

Today's shipment will consist of 42 drums, the maximum possible in a single load, said Dale Ormond, the Department of Energy's senior manager for the transuranic waste program at Savannah River.

The items in the 55-gallon drums were contaminated with plutonium during the Cold War years, when the plant manufactured nuclear bomb materials, Ormond said.

-------- us nuc waste

Cheney Defends Nuclear Waste Dump

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Cheney.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration's turn to nuclear power as a long-term energy strategy will necessitate a permanent nuclear waste dump, Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

``Now, with the gas prices rising as dramatically as they have, nuclear power looks like a pretty good alternative from an economic standpoint, if the permitting process is manageable and if we find a way to deal with the waste question,'' said Cheney, who is developing energy policy recommendations for President Bush.

In an interview on CNN, the vice president said his recommendations would include changes meant to speed federal permits to utilities seeking to build nuclear power plants. The industry has not sought a government permit to build a new plant in more than 20 years, since before the accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island spread fear about nuclear power.

Nuclear power provides 20 percent of the nation's electric capacity today.

As to the thorny question of nuclear waste, Cheney said: ``Right now we've got waste piling up at reactors all over the country. Eventually, there ought to be a permanent repository. The French do this very successfully and very safely in an environmentally sound, sane manner. We need to be able to do the same thing.''

He did not say where the government might put such a site but Nevada officials fear it would almost certainly be built in their state.

In 1987, Congress passed a law designating Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's only high-level nuclear waste repository. Such a site would receive waste from both nuclear power plants and from defense uses.

Nevadans have been bitterly fighting the proposal for 14 years.

Shedding more light on the energy policy that Bush is scheduled to unveil next week, Cheney left open the possibility that Bush will seek the so-called ``power of eminent domain'' to construct new electrical transmission lines. Such authority allows the government to appropriate private property for public use. The federal government already has such authority with respect to laying gas pipelines.

``The issue is whether or not we should have the same authority on electrical transmission lines, that's never been granted previously. That's one of the issues we've looked at. We'll have a recommendation when we release the report next week,'' Cheney said.

He defended his energy-policy work against critics who say he has focused too much on increased production -- boosting coal burning and drilling for oil and natural gas.

``You'll find that most of the financial incentives that we recommend in the report go for conservation or renewables, for increased efficiencies. Now, we don't have a lot of new financial incentives in here to go out and produce more oil and gas, for example, so, we believe in conservation, we believe in renewables, we believe in wind and solar and all of those other technologies,'' Cheney said.

But, he added, renewable forms of energy provide just 2 percent of national electric generating capacity and cannot alone solve the nation's problem of demand exceeding supply.

--------

The Toxic Waste of Nuclear Power

New York Times
May 8, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/opinion/08COLL.html?searchpv=nytToday

To the Editor:

Richard Rhodes ("Nuclear Power's New Day," Op-Ed, May 7) appears to buy into a myth about nuclear power: that it is clean energy and that it can help fight global warming and air pollution.

According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, for nuclear power to make a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, commercial reactors would have to not only supply much of the world's electricity growth but also replace many coal-fired plants as they are retired. This would require the construction of approximately 2,000 nuclear power plants around the world over the next several decades.

The main global warming gas, carbon dioxide, is emitted at each step of the nuclear fuel chain, from uranium mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication, construction of the reactor, transportation and storage of radioactive waste, and decommissioning of old reactors. Each of these stages is also a source of radioactive pollution and long-lasting, highly toxic waste.

KYLE RABIN
Dir., Nuclear Energy Policy Project, Environmental Advocates
Albany, May 7, 2001

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Taiwan Wrangles Over U.S. Arms Offer

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-ta.html?searchpv=reuters

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan military planners and politicians are debating how best to deal with the U.S. offer of Kidd-class ships rather than destroyers with the high-tech Aegis air defense system the island had asked for.

But analysts say Taiwan is likely to accept what's on offer because otherwise they might end up with nothing.

President Bush riled Beijing last month when he offered the biggest arms package for Taiwan in a decade, including eight submarines, four Kidd-class destroyers and 12 anti-submarine P-3 ``Orion'' aircraft.

Taiwan's defense ministry put the entire package at $8.2 billion, the Central News Agency said.

But Bush deferred a decision on the island's request for Arleigh Burke destroyers equipped with the missile-hunting Aegis radar system, tying it to future Chinese behavior.

Defense Minister Wu Shih-wen told parliament last week Taiwan would not give up efforts to buy the Arleigh Burke destroyers.

And many in the navy and members of parliament are torn between what to do: accept the Kidd ships or hold out in the hope of eventually receiving the Arleigh Burke system.

A group of deputies recently joined the fray by floating the idea of Taiwan's state-owned China Shipbuilding Corp building destroyers with technology transfers from the United States, but defense analysts said this was not feasible.

President Chen Shui-bian, who has the final say, will decide in one to two months based on the recommendations of the navy and the military chief of staff, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

Ties between Taipei and Beijing have been touchy since Bush offered to arm Taiwan and pledged to help the tiny democratic island of 23 million defend itself against its giant neighbor.

Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has no qualms about using force to reunify it with the mainland.

PROS AND CONS

Those in favor of the 9,900-tonKidd ships argue they could be refurbished and delivered to Taiwan in three years, while the 8,500-tonArleigh Burke destroyers will not be available for eight to 10 years.

They said a refurbished Kidd costs about US$200 million, while a new Arleigh Burke costs $1 billion.

``Like a Mercedes-Benz 500, the Aegis-equipped Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is no doubt a very nice ship. But if all you need is an ordinary means of transportation, a locally made car will do,'' Shuai Hua-ming, a retired general, told Reuters.

Chen Chung-hsin, a deputy in President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party, said the Arleigh Burke was also not a foolproof safeguard.

``There is no way the Aegis will be able to intercept incoming missiles 100 percent,'' Chen said in an interview.

``The desire for the Aegis is more psychological than anything else,'' Chen said. ``Acquiring it would be tantamount to establishing a quasi-military alliance with the U.S.''

The Kidd-class ships were designed to be robust platforms for anti-air, anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare as well as protection of amphibious forces, according to Jane's Defense Weekly.

They could provide Taiwan with a more immediate capability to counter China's growing threat to the island via amphibious assault, naval blockade and air attacks by fighters and ballistic and cruise missiles, Jane's said.

But Lee Ching-hua, a deputy in the opposition People First Party, argued against buying Kidd destroyers, saying they were too old and too big to berth at any Taiwan naval base.

``Maintenance costs will be exorbitant,'' Lee said. ``And we will have to expand our port facilities.''

-------- balkans

Bosnian Serb Crowd Beats Muslims at Mosque Rebuilding

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08BOSN.html

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia and Herzegovina, May 7 - Angered by plans to rebuild a mosque in their city, a Bosnian Serb crowd beat dozens of Muslims today and forced United Nations and other Western officials to take refuge inside the Islamic center here.

More than 1,000 Serbs broke through a police cordon and attacked people at a ceremony to begin the reconstruction of the mosque, which Serbs razed in 1993.

Smoke billowed from five burning buses and a car. A bakery was set afire as protesters chanted, "This is Serbia," and, "We don't want a mosque."

The Serbs beat visitors and set Muslim prayer rugs on fire. One man was left lying on his prayer rug, his face bloodied. To insult the Muslims, the Serbs chased a pig onto the site where the mosque stood. They climbed on top of the Islamic center, burned a flag there and hoisted the Bosnian Serb flag.

About 250 Muslims were trapped in the building along with the head of the United Nations in Bosnia, Jacques Klein; the British, Swedish and Pakistani ambassadors; and other international and local officials at the ceremony.

Hours later, the Bosnian Serb police formed a barrier and removed those trapped in the building. In New York, a spokesman for the United Nations, Fred Eckhard, said all had been brought out safely.

"There are a few people hurt from thrown rocks, with bloody foreheads, broken skin," Mr. Klein, an American, said by phone while trapped in the building. Police Chief Vladimir Tutus of Banja Luka said 18 Muslims had been injured along with 24 Serbs, including 11 of his officers.

The 16th-century Ferhadija mosque was leveled by the Serbs along with all the other mosques in Banja Luka after Muslims were expelled from the city early in the 1992- 1995 war. Banja Luka is now the main city in the Serbian half of Bosnia. The 1995 peace accords left Bosnia formally one nation, but split it into a Serbian half and a half shared by Croats and Muslims.

About 1,000 Muslims who had lived in Banja Luka were bused here today for the ceremony. Bosnian Serb leaders had grudgingly agreed to the reconstruction, part of international officials' efforts to return refugees to their houses across the country.

Before the ceremony, Serbian protesters gathered across the street from the site, playing nationalistic songs and throwing stones, eggs and firecrackers over the heads of the police officers. They chanted the name Radovan Karadzic, their wartime leader who is now the country's most-wanted war crimes suspect.

One stone smashed through a car windshield and struck Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija of Bosnia in the head. He said he was not hurt.

Chief Tutus told reporters that his officers moved to remove the trapped people after NATO-led forces threatened to intervene.

The chief international administrator of Bosnia, Wolfgang Petritsch, criticized Bosnian Serb authorities for permitting extremists to "spread ultranationalism, intolerance and violence."

The American ambassador, Thomas Miller, said the ceremony `'`should have been a symbol of peace and reconciliation."

Mr. Klein said the crowd was well organized, adding, "You don't get that many people into a square without some organization and structural arrangement."

On Saturday, a similar ceremony to rebuild a mosque in a southeastern town, Trebinje, was also disrupted by Serbian nationalists. Several visitors were injured, including Daniel Ruiz, the local representative of Bosnia's top international official.

--------

Macedonia Bombards Rebels as Diplomats Strive for Unity

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08MACE.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia, Tuesday, May 8 (Reuters) - Macedonian troops pounded ethnic Albanian rebel positions with helicopter gunships on Monday, but the country's leaders backed away from declaring a state of war.

Instead, officials said that political party leaders were close to forming a national unity government in a new tactic to undermine the insurgents.

Early this morning, Macedonia's prime minister, Ljubco Georgievski, said that two main opposition parties - the Slav-dominated Socialists and the ethnic Albanian Party for Democratic Prosperity - would join the government.

It currently comprises three parties including the main Albanian D.P.A. grouping and Mr. Georgievski's Slav party.

"The great percentage of the deal is done," Mr. Georgievski said, after negotiations that included Javier Solana, the European Union's security affairs chief. He added that there was still fine-tuning to be done on a coalition agreement.

The state news media reported on Monday that a parliamentary session scheduled for today that would have addressed whether to introduce a state of war had been postponed.

Mr. Georgievski said the idea of imposing a state of war was off the agenda for now because "Macedonian security forces conducted a successful operation" on Monday.

The army has been shelling ethnic Albanian rebel positions in two northeastern villages for the last five days to dislodge guerrillas who killed 10 members of the security forces in ambushes in the previous week.

The government's decision to shelve the state of war debate, which threatened to wreck the coalition between Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanians, was clearly also influenced by the European Union and NATO, which had both argued against it.

Mr. Solana and NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, had came to Macedonia in a bid to talk the government out of declaring a state of war.

In Western eyes, the ideal strategy centers on depriving the nationalist guerrillas of political support, in part through a unity government, while driving them out without inflicting major civilian casualties.

And some political parties voiced strong reservations about declaring a state of war, which would expand the powers of the presidency and security forces.

In New York, the United Nations spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said Secretary General Kofi Annan was in touch with Mr. Solana and Lord Robertson and "fully supports their ongoing activities as part of a concerted effort aimed at helping the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia avert a deeper crisis."

The main battleground is 20 miles northwest of Skopje, near the main Greece-to-Hungary highway.

---------

Powell to Pressure Yugoslavia

The New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Yugoslavia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell promised Tuesday to maintain pressure on Yugoslavia to cooperate with the tribunal in The Hague on bringing Slobodan Milosevic and others accused in Balkans atrocities to justice.

Powell made the assurance to Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia. He's expected to repeat it to Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica when they meet Wednesday in a session also arranged to discuss continuing strife in the Balkans.

In the meantime, Powell told Del Ponte he has put a hold on U.S. aid to Yugoslavia beyond $100 million already pledged for this year, and on backing for a donors' conference in June to raise more assistance.

``The secretary confirmed that future U.S. assistance to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia continues to depend on further cooperation with the tribunal,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

The administration declared Belgrade eligible for what remained of this year's assistance in early April after Milosevic was arrested.

The tribunal indicted Milosevic in 1999 for alleged atrocities against Kosovo Albanians when he was Yugoslav president, and seeks his extradition.

Hundreds of Kosovo Albanians died at the hands of Yugoslav security forces two years ago and about 740,000 others were persecuted or displaced.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, and the ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wrote to James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, saying they were sympathetic to Serbia's economic situation.

However, they said, ``donors should not provide assistance without obtaining the explicit commitment of the Serbian government that it will continue to cooperate'' with the tribunal by surrendering indicted Serbs.

``As long as war criminals remain at large they will continue to impede the development of democracy in Serbia and threaten the political and economic stability of the entire Balkans region,'' the senators wrote.

Boucher said ``we haven't seen enough progress in terms of Yugoslav cooperation with the tribunal to merit a setting of the donors conference at this stage.''

-------- drug war

Bush Names Hutchinson as New Counter-Drug Chief

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/politics/08CND-DRUGS.html

WASHINGTON, May 8 - Representative Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican who was a House prosecutor in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, has been chosen by President Bush to head the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Mr. Hutchinson's nomination is expected to be announced this week, according to people close to the selection process. Mr. Hutchinson would succeed Donnie R. Marshall, a career agent who has headed the D.E.A. since July 1999, when Thomas A. Constantine, a Clinton appointee, retired after five years in the post.

Mr. Hutchinson, 50, was elected to Congress from a district in northwest Arkansas in 1996. The post of the drug agency's administrator requires Senate confirmation. Mr. Hutchinson has amassed a generally conservative voting record in Congress and is the younger brother of Senator Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is part of the Department of Justice. It was created in 1973, during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, at a time when use of illegal drugs was coming to be seen as a menace to society in general. The agency now has more than 9,000 employees.

Mr. Hutchinson was the United States Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas from 1982 to 1985. He graduated from Bob Jones University in South Carolina in 1972.

John C. Lawn, who was D.E.A. administrator from July 1985 to March 1990, has been reported to be under consideration to succeed Louis J. Freeh as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

-------- new zealand

New Zealand Scraps Air Combat Force

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-New-Zealand-Military-Makeover.html?searchpv=aponline

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- New Zealand's government Tuesday said it would strip the air force of all of its fighter jets and cut the navy in the biggest shake-up in the armed forces since World War II.

The move comes despite warnings from critics that it would leave the country virtually defenseless.

Prime Minister Helen Clark insisted her left-of-center government was improving the armed forces with increased spending on equipment and plans to upgrade the army.

She said the government would increase military spending by about $820 million over the next 10 years.

The plans, which would make New Zealand the first advanced nation in the world to almost strip itself of air defenses, has triggered strong protests from opposition groups and warnings from some allies.

All of New Zealand's 17 aging Skyhawk fighter-bombers and 17 Aermacchi jet trainers will be axed along with some 700 air force personnel by the end of the year.

The cuts will also see the navy lose half of its large warships and focus more on coastal and fisheries protection with small patrol boats. It will retain two advanced frigate warships for international operations, while the air force will be mainly a transport and patrol force.

``New Zealand is a small country and it cannot afford to do a wide range of capabilities well,'' Clark told a press conference.

The reforms would create a small, but effective force capable of playing a full role in regional security, she said.

New Zealand's closest ally, Australia, warned earlier that drastic defense cuts could affect New Zealand's ties with its allies. New Zealand also has defense ties with the United States, Britain, Malaysia and Singapore.

``Every time a country takes a decision about the size and the readiness of its defense force, that decision has both domestic and international consequences,'' said Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

New Zealand's conservative opposition and ex-defense chiefs have accused the government of crippling the military's ability to defend the nation by stripping the air force and the navy of much of their combat power.

The main opposition National Party said Tuesday it would seek to reverse the cuts and retain a fighting air force if it wins elections due in 2002.

The smaller New Zealand First party slammed the defense cuts as leaving the country vulnerable to foreign threat.

New Zealand has a history of going its own way on defense issues. It was excluded from an alliance with the United States and Australia in 1984 after refusing to allow nuclear-capable allied warships to visit its ports.

Successive governments have refused to abandon the policy despite strong pressure from the United States and other allies.

-------- space

Rumsfeld Seeks Overhaul of Pentagon Space Effort

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08CND-SPACE.html

WASHINGTON, May 8 - Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld proposed today a sweeping overhaul of the Pentagon's space programs, sharply increasing the importance of outer space in strategic planning.

The proposal was the first step toward making space a focus of Pentagon spending and was intended to emphasize the importance the administration places on developing weapon systems for outer space, military officials said.

"Space issues are complex and merit a renewed focus," Mr. Rumsfeld said. He outlined his views in a letter to Congress and at a news conference, adopting some of the recommendations of a commission he led before becoming defense secretary.

In his first major policy announcement, Mr. Rumsfeld called for the establishment of a new Pentagon post for a four-star Air Force general to serve as an advocate for what could become a new space force. He said the new steps "will help the U.S. to focus on meeting the national security space needs for the 21st century."

Space programs currently represent only $8 billion of the Pentagon's $310 billion annual budget, and are splintered among a hodgepodge of offices.

The Pentagon spends billions of dollars more in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency on space surveillance programs, including spy satellites. (Those budgets are classified.)

Consolidating and reorganizing the programs will give them a higher profile in the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy and make it easier for them to compete for dollars, aides to Mr. Rumsfeld have argued.

Mr. Rumsfeld and to a lesser degree President Bush have publicly expressed interest in developing costly and complicated space weapons systems, including lasers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles and satellites designed to attack other satellites.

"In space, we'll protect our network of satellites essential to the flow of our commerce and the defense of our common interests," President Bush said in February in his first major speech on military policy. "All of this requires great effort and new spending."

Future plans could also include building a space plane to transport weapons rapidly around the globe or spy on other countries, as has been recommended by experts who are reviewing military policy for Mr. Rumsfeld. NASA canceled funds for such a plane, known as the X-33, earlier this year because of cost overruns and delays.

But any efforts to build such weapons are certain to be opposed, particularly by China, Russia and European nations, and by arms control advocates.

"I think weaponizing space would be a badly premature idea," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit policy group. "It may be inevitable. It may be impossible to keep space a sanctuary. But the United States has no interest in breaking that taboo."

Mr. Rumsfeld's proposal was the first of several military announcements in coming weeks, which are expected to culminate with the presentation in June of a detailed Pentagon budget for the fiscal year that begins in October.

The announcements will reflect the work of some of the two dozen panels appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld to study ways to modernize the armed forces. Among the many ideas are proposals to shrink or reorganize the Army, to expand the use of long-range bombers and unmanned aircraft, and to overhaul the policy of preparing to fight two major regional wars almost simultaneously.

It was not surprising that Mr. Rumsfeld would choose to focus on space early in his tenure because until December, he was chairman of a Congressional commission that studied military issues in outer space.

"He already had his ideas on this from Day 1 in the Defense Department," a Pentagon official said. "It was much easier for him than the other reviews."

In its final report, the commission concluded that the United States had become "an attractive candidate for a space Pearl Harbor" in which a sneak attack against American commercial and military satellites could cripple business activities and leave the Pentagon blind to foreign troop and ship movements.

The commission called for an overhaul of the Pentagon's space programs, large new investments in research and development on military space technology and the creation of a space force with its own acquisition and training programs.

Though the report emphasized defending American satellites from attack, it also called for greater "power projection" from space, a phrase that is widely viewed as meaning putting offensive weapons into space.

"The present extent of U.S. dependence on space, the rapid pace at which this dependence is increasing and the vulnerabilities it creates, all demand that U.S. national security space interests be recognized as a top national security priority," the report said.

Although Mr. Rumsfeld left the commission before the final report was issued in January, it is generally thought to reflect his views.

The commission called on the Pentagon to set up a new position of undersecretary of defense for space, intelligence and information. But Mr. Rumsfeld stopped short of that recommendation on Tuesday.

Instead Mr. Rumsfeld, a former chief executive of a pharmaceutical company who has vowed to streamline the way the Pentagon does business, proposed bureaucratic changes intended to strengthen space programs and raise their profile.

First, he proposed setting up a position staffed by a four-star general whose sole job will be to run Air Force operations within the United States Space Command, which oversees much of the military's satellite programs, Pentagon officials said.

He also called for making the Air Force the lead service in organizing, training and equipping the nation's space forces, a task that until now has been split among all the services. As part of that consolidation, Mr. Rumsfeld called for making an undersecretary of the Air Force the chief acquisition officer for space programs.

And he proposed that the Defense Department exert more control over the National Reconnaissance Organization, which is now jointly run with the C.I.A. It is not clear whether the agency will continue to have some role in running the organization, which operates spy satellites.

"This would be very much a reflection of Rumsfeld's priorities," said Gordon Adams, director of the Security Policy Studies Program at George Washington University. "With Rumsfeld, it wouldn't surprise me for space to take center stage."

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

U.N. cut U.S. off as drug monitor

May 8, 2001
By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010508-3440704.htm

The United States was voted off the U.N. international drug monitoring agency last week, on the same day it lost its seat in the U.N. Human Rights Commission, U.N. and U.S. officials said yesterday.

Both actions caused outrage on Capitol Hill, and legislators vowed retaliation, possibly including a freeze on the payment of almost $600 million in long-postponed U.N. dues.

"The United Nations stuck their finger in our eye. There is a danger that the United Nations made a serious mistake here, and there will be consequences," said John Feehrey, spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican.

Anger that the United States has been voted off the U.N. human rights agency in Geneva is "broad-based and bipartisan," said one senior Republican aide. But agreement on what to do next is not.

The House is scheduled to vote this week on an $8.2 million State Department authorization bill, which contains $582 million in back dues to the United Nations. Many members are talking about introducing an amendment before a deadline at noon today that would withhold the payment in retaliation.

Other lawmakers said American interests would be better served by trying to force reforms in the way the commission operates.

Either way, "there will be action and a clear signal will be sent," said the GOP aide. "It will be a bad week for the U.N."

On Thursday, the 53 members of the U.N. Economic and Social Council voted in New York to determine next year´s Human Rights Commission membership. Western Europe -- including the United States, Canada and New Zealand -- is allotted three seats, and this year there were four candidates.

The United States, which has been a member since 1947, was promised at least 40 votes in the secret ballot, but managed to get just 29. France, Austria and Sweden were elected instead.

The United States also lost its seat on the International Narcotics Control Board, officials said yesterday.

Washington campaigned for a third term for U.S. Ambassador Herbert Okun, who had served as vice president on the INCB. He was voted off Thursday in the same secret-ballot procedure and by the same countries that cost the United States its seat on the human rights commission.

"That, we find very regrettable," U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday.

"We intend to continue our engagement on the international narcotics issues. We will continue our cooperation with and strong support for the U.N. international drug control program as well as with the International Narcotics Control Board."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke briefly to reporters yesterday upon his arrival at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

"I can understand the frustration, shock and surprise," Mr. Annan said. "This was a decision by the member states. It is one of the vagueries of democracy. When people vote, you don´t know which way it will come out."

A U.N. spokeswoman in Washington said the United Nations should not be punished for actions beyond its control.

"We hope the United Nations will not be held responsible for a vote by the member states," said Marie-Catherine Parmly.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican, who was in Geneva last month to lobby for the censure of Sudan, China and Cuba for human rights abuses, said the commission needs to develop rules setting minimum standards for membership.

"This action underscores the hypocrisy of the United Nations, and it makes payment of the back dues very difficult," he said yesterday. "What are Syria, China and Sudan doing on the committee in good standing? It is outrageous."

Mr. Smith said one of the options discussed was to find a way to force countries to open their doors to U.N.-appointed human rights monitors or internationally recognized organizations like the Red Cross or Amnesty International.

"The issue of membership is paramount. There needs to be a minimum threshold for membership," he said.

Mr. Smith said he believed the loss of the seat was "payback" from European nations, which resent the United States for its strong stand against human rights abuses. He said Europeans, in pursuit of business with "rogue nations," favor a more tepid response to human rights violators.

"They were all worried about their next contract from Beijing," he said.

----

Lessons of a Defeat

Washington Post,
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60939-2001May7?language=printer

THERE'S NO shortage of analysis of what the United States did wrong to lose its seat after a half-century on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and no shortage of advice on how it should set itself straight. Some have attributed the U.S. defeat to President Bush's positions on climate change or missile defense. On the facing page today, Harold Koh, an official in the Clinton State Department, urges the Bush people to participate more actively in international forums on AIDS, racism and democracy.

We don't necessarily disagree, but when Mr. Koh describes the passing of an "era of automatic global deference to U.S. leadership on human rights," we have trouble remembering such a time. It seems to us that the fight for human rights has always been uphill work. It also seems to us that last week's vote wasn't really about the Kyoto treaty on global warming or nuclear nonproliferation or even supposed Bush unilateralism but on, not surprisingly, human rights. The United States, though often too circumspect, is one of the more forthright nations in calling attention to human rights abuses. The abusers, a powerful bloc in the United Nations and on the commission itself, don't like that; neither do some democratic nations that generally prefer to kowtow rather than make impolite remarks. France and China sounded similar themes as they crowed about the U.S. defeat. France won its seat due to its foreign policy "founded on dialogue and respect," the French U.N. ambassador said. China's government said the United States had "undermined the atmosphere for dialogue."

What exactly do the Chinese mean by "dialogue"? Presumably they're not looking to talk about Liu Yaping, a Chinese American businessman who was dragged off a street in China by security forces on March 8. Mr. Liu has been held incommunicado ever since, though his brother has been handed hospital bills for treatment of vomiting, slurring of speech and loss of vision, the New York Times reported yesterday. Is he a victim of torture? No, he's in "good health," police say. Nor are the Chinese interested in dialogue on the Princeton-trained demographer Li Shaomin, a U.S. citizen also being held for unknown reasons; nor about Gao Zhan, the American University researcher who is in detention and whose 5-year-old also was hauled away for a month. They're not looking for fruitful exchange on the 79-year-old Catholic Bishop Shi Enxiang whom they've imprisoned, the churches they've razed, the Falun Gong practitioners who have died in jail, the Tibetan monks who are locked up, the Democracy Party activists in labor camps.

These, presumably, are some of the matters France believes should be approached with more "respect." Fellow commission members Sudan, Libya, Cuba and Vietnam no doubt agree. And when Denmark once supported the United States in trying to raise such issues at the U.N. commission, China predicted that the issue would "become a rock that smashes on the Danish government's head. Denmark, the bird that pokes out its head, will suffer the most." That kind of talk has an effect.

None of this means the United States should, or can, give up on the United Nations; as Mr. Koh argues, it must keep working there. That the Bush administration was blind-sided last week reflects badly on its preparations and professionalism. But if the administration learns from this defeat that it should get along more collegially with those governments that bully and abuse their own citizens, or with those that don't much care, it will have learned the wrong lesson.

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

Pentagon to strengthen Air Force's jurisdiction

05/08/2001
By Andrea Stone,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-05-08-pentagon.htm

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will announce today a major restructuring of the Pentagon's space programs that puts most military and intelligence space operations under the Air Force, a defense official said.

The move increases the Air Force's existing control over space operations, but it stops short of setting up a separate "Space Corps," which some say is needed to reflect the growing importance of space to national security and 21st century warfare.

In a letter to Congress, Rumsfeld says "a new and comprehensive national security space management and organizational approach is needed to promote and protect our interests in space."

The U.S. military relies more heavily on satellites than any other nation. The Pentagon uses them for communications, surveillance, weather forecasts, navigation and weapons targeting. Space technology may also be integral to a missile-defense system proposed by President Bush.

Rumsfeld's first major restructuring plan stems from one of the 18 review panels that have been looking at ways to improve the military.

Before becoming Defense secretary, Rumsfeld chaired a congressional commission that warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" unless the United States reduced the vulnerability of its space assets. In January, the commission recommended making space a national security priority. It laid out organizational changes to give space a higher profile and more budget clout.

Among the recommendations that Rumsfeld plans to adopt:

Split off the Air Force Space Command in Colorado Springs from the U.S. Space Command and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. All three are now commanded by one Air Force general.

Appoint a four-star general to lead the Air Force Space Command.

Give the Air Force control of the clandestine National Reconnaissance Organization, which operates spy satellites and is currently controlled by the CIA.

Although the changes won't create a fifth military branch, one commission member said that they create "a de facto space service" in the Air Force.

"That does not go nearly far enough," said John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense research group. "We ought to set up a completely separate space force" that is not controlled by the Air Force.

The Center for Defense Information, which opposes the militarization of space, welcomed the changes.

"In the case of space, there really are too many players with too many missions that need to be put under one roof," said Bill Blair, the center's president.

----

Military Space Operations Unified etc.

WASHINGTON IN BRIEF
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60928-2001May7?language=printer

Coordinated Response To Terrorism Sought

The Bush administration plans to announce a new effort today to coordinate the government's response to a major terrorist attack, administration and congressional officials said yesterday.

Joe M. Allbaugh, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will announce a plan to coordinate recovery from nuclear, chemical, biological and computer attacks. Vice President Cheney and other officials have been working on the initiative for several weeks, officials said.

The National Security Council, the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, the Pentagon and other agencies are involved. The announcement comes as three days of terrorism hearings begin on Capitol Hill, with Cabinet secretaries scheduled to testify.

Military Space Operations Unified

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is putting all U.S. military space operations under Air Force command in a move to tightly coordinate the use of space in intelligence, communications and warfare, defense officials said.

The Air Force oversees most of the nation's military space efforts, but the officials, who asked not to be identified, said Rumsfeld would announce today that all remaining operations would also be placed under control of the service.

----

On Alert for Looming Base Closings
Lawmakers, Communities Gear Up to Fight Shutdown of Military Installations

By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 8, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58487-2001May7?language=printer

Elaine Scruggs is a Republican and a supporter of President Bush. She is also the mayor of Glendale, Ariz., a rapidly growing suburb of Phoenix and home to Luke Air Force Base. And therein lies a potential conflict.

In its first budget outline, the Bush administration bluntly declared that the U.S. military has too many bases for the size of its forces. The Defense Department, it said, "wastes money on infrastructure it does not need" and, as a result, "new rounds of base closures will be necessary to shape the military more efficiently."

At this point, there is no way to know whether Congress will authorize more base closings, or if Luke AFB would become a candidate for closure if it does. Luke appears to be an unlikely target. It is the only base where the Air Force trains pilots to fly F-16 fighters and is in the district of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Bob Stump (R-Ariz.).

But Scruggs and the city of Glendale are taking no chances. Last month, the city signed a contract with a retired Air Force general who will serve as a consultant, offering advice on how best to protect the base.

"We want to be ready, and one never knows when you have to be ready," Scruggs said.

Glendale's preemptive move illustrates why closing bases is so difficult. Communities tend to identify with their military installations, for both patriotic and economic reasons. Fighting to save a nearby base is a cause around which local business, labor, community and political leaders can rally.

But for the Bush administration and Pentagon planners, the key issue is how effectively the Defense Department spends its money. During the campaign, Bush accused President Bill Clinton of neglecting the military. He also promised expensive changes, from better pay and living conditions for military personnel to the deployment of missile defense systems.

Closing a few bases, or even dozens of them, would not immediately free up money to fulfill those promises. In the short term, closing a military base costs more than it saves. But advocates of the process argue that in the long run, eliminating unnecessary installations allows the military to put its funds to better use, not just for exotic weapons systems but also for training and spare parts that affect readiness for combat.

For all its tough rhetoric on the need to close more bases, the Bush administration has not asked Congress to do anything -- yet. Like many other defense decisions facing the administration, this one has been put off until Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld completes a "strategic review" of the military and its mission, while the president pursues his highest priority: a tax cut. But few in Congress doubt that eventually they will be asked to approve one or two more rounds of base closings.

There have been four rounds of closings since 1988 -- the last was in 1995 -- that shut 97 major bases around the country, according to Pentagon statistics. But that left the military with 23 percent more "infrastructure" than it needs to support current U.S. forces, the administration says. The reason is that since the end of the Cold War, base closings -- painful as they have been to many communities -- have not kept pace with the reduction in the country's military.

In an analysis this year, the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service said that the four Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commissions had reduced the military's base structure by 21 percent, but that the force structure had declined 36 percent. Until about 1997, the cost of base closings exceeded the savings they brought, the report said. But the General Accounting Office estimates that by the end of this fiscal year, the four earlier rounds of base closings will have produced net savings of $14 billion and will save about $5.6 billion a year from now on.

Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan group that advocates changes in the Defense Department's business practices, established a "Tail-To-Tooth Commission" to explore ways the Pentagon could find the money that military leaders say they need. In a report earlier this year, it concluded that about 70 percent of the defense budget goes to support functions, overhead and infrastructure, and only 30 percent to combat forces. At the height of the Cold War, the ratio was about 50-50, the report said.

The business executives recommended steps to streamline Pentagon practices, including more base closings, and estimated that two more rounds could save $20 billion by 2015 and $3 billion a year after that.

Sounds good, but the problem, said Ken Beeks, vice president of the Tail-to-Tooth Commission, is that "these bases are all in somebody's district, so they represent jobs in their districts and revenue coming into the district." Luke AFB, for example, employs 6,500 military personnel, 1,000 civilian federal workers and another 1,000 civilians who work for contractors.

Congress finally acknowledged this political reality in the late 1980s when it created the BRAC process. Prior laws made it almost impossible to close a military base, and virtually none were shut down from 1976 to 1988. The BRAC process attempted to get around the political roadblocks by giving Congress a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.

Under this system, the Pentagon submits a list of bases that it wants to close or downsize. A commission, appointed by the president, reviews the recommendations and holds public hearings. The commission is not bound by the Pentagon's list, but in practice more than 80 percent of the bases recommended for closure by the Defense Department have been closed. The commission then submits its own recommendations to the president. He can reject them only as a whole, not piecemeal. If he forwards them to Congress, lawmakers have 45 days to pass a resolution of disapproval, or the entire package goes into effect.

Even then, the process is painful. "It is the worst job, without question, that I ever had in my life," said former senator Alan Dixon (D-Ill.), chairman of the 1995 BRAC commission. He recalled driving through communities where people lined the roads with signs pleading that their bases be spared.

Then there was the unrelenting pressure from his former colleagues in Congress. "There is one southern senator who won't speak to me to this day," Dixon noted.

Dixon said "there is still excess capacity out there today." But, he added, each base that is proposed for closing will become its own battleground. "You can make a case, standing alone, for any base," Dixon said. "The fat's gone."

One reason there have been no BRAC commissions since 1995 is objections to how Clinton handled that round. The 1995 commission recommended closing maintenance operations at McLellan and Kelly Air Force bases, in the electorally critical states of California and Texas. The commission gave the Pentagon the option of shifting the work to other Defense Department facilities or turning it over to private firms. To preserve jobs, especially in California, Clinton seized on the latter idea, keeping the maintenance work at the California and Texas locations.

Republicans screamed that Clinton had injected politics into the process and vowed to oppose any new BRAC rounds while he was in office.

With Bush in the White House, that obstacle is gone. Yet enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for more base closings is minimal at best. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have introduced legislation for two more rounds. Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) said he strongly supports one, but not two, rounds.

The strongest opposition is in the House. "I don't see a lot of support for additional BRAC rounds on the subcommittee or the full committee," said Rep. Jim Saxon (R-N.J.), chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on military installations. "We have not been able to identify a lot of savings that come from the BRAC process, and we know there are some definite upfront costs. . . . It's hard for us to justify it."

-------- OTHER

-------- health

Free AIDS Care Brings Hope to Botswana

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08BOTS.html?pagewanted=all

JWANENG, Botswana - The work horn wails while the sun sleeps and the rumbling buses carry the miners to the pit. In this vast, sandy canyon that is Africa's richest diamond mine, the diggers are scrabbling for the precious stones that are the lifeblood of Botswana's thriving economy.

Here, where the blasting drills and clawing forklifts leave the earth shuddering, one of every three employees is H.I.V.-positive. Since 1995, the number of AIDS-related deaths has tripled at Debswana, the diamond mining giant and this nation's largest private employer.

Yet today, in this corner of this AIDS-ravaged continent, infected miners are planning on living, not dying.

In coming months, most of Botswana's H.I.V.-positive men and women will gain access to the life- sustaining drug cocktails that, for many sufferers in the West, have transformed AIDS from a killer into a chronic illness. This month, Debswana became the first company here to cover 90 percent of the cost of treating its infected employees, even for those who go to private doctors.

In September, the government - the first in sub-Saharan Africa to commit to providing AIDS treatment for all its needy - expects to begin offering free triple-therapy treatment in public hospitals in Gaborone, its capital of 110,000, and in Francistown, its second largest city with about 45,000 people. Patients will be required to produce their national identity cards to receive such care.

And so, while poorer African nations can only dream of buying or managing the complicated drug regimen, this diamond-rich nation is negotiating with drug companies, upgrading its health care system, poring through the medical literature and moving forward in an effort to save its most precious industry and its people.

The news has sent hopes soaring in this country, where 36 percent of the adults are believed to carry the AIDS virus. In the gleaming hospital here in Jwaneng, which is run by Debswana, the number of people requesting H.I.V. tests has surged by 30 percent as people have learned that a positive result means likely treatment, not certain death, doctors say.

"Two years ago, if you asked employees to get tested, they would say, `What for? Why should I know if I'm dying if there's no cure?' " said Tsetsele Fantan, the director of Debswana's H.I.V. program, in a recent interview in Gaborone.

"Now, we have an answer," Mrs. Fantan said. "People check their blood pressure and there's no cure, but you manage it. People check for diabetes and there's no cure, but you manage it. It will become like those diseases."

Dr. David Marumo agrees. He treats most of Jwaneng's AIDS patients and has watched most of them die. As many as 80 percent of his patients are H.I.V.-positive, he says. But these days, when he bustles through the hospital wards, listening to coughs and studying X-rays, his heart is immeasurably lighter.

"We used to say there is nothing we can do, but we are going from hopeless to hopeful," Dr. Marumo said one recent morning, marveling at the wonder of it.

"If you are H.I.V.-positive now, it doesn't mean you are dying," he said. "If you want to go to school, you should go to school. If you want to buy a car, you should buy a car. Most people now are planning."

All this is possible because Botswana's bountiful diamonds have made it rich enough to buy the medicines at prices that have fallen sharply as drug companies have slashed prices in recent months. The gross national product per capita here - about $3,600 - is seven times higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank statistics show.

Debswana, a joint venture between the government and the mining giant De Beers, recovered 24 million carats from its mines last year, and diamond sales accounted for more than 40 percent of government revenues. In 1999, the last year in which such statistics are available, the company reported $1.8 billion in revenue.

Unlike neighboring South Africa, which has a population of about 44 million, Botswana has only 1.5 million people. The United Nations estimates that 50,000 people are ready for treatment here, compared with 400,000 in South Africa. Dr. Banu Khan, the national AIDS coordinator in Botswana, says the government expects to pay about $600 per person for a year's treatment.

Just as important is the sheer determination of government leaders and corporate executives to help those who are ill.

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa - which United Nations experts say has the largest number of H.I.V.-positive people in the world - has repeatedly questioned the safety of AIDS drugs and the causes of AIDS. In his state of the nation address this year, he devoted only two sentences to the epidemic that is ravaging his nation.

President Festus Mogae of Botswana, however, devoted about half of his national address to the disease. He has personally led the crusade to save his people from what he describes as the "threat of annihilation." But even in a country as rich in natural resources and as willing as this one, painful decisions have been made.

At Debswana, for instance, executives wrestled for months over whether to cover the dependents of employees. And when the company decided to cover the costs of AIDS drugs for one spouse per worker - and no children at all - employees gasped.

How can the company let children die, some workers asked angrily.

And how could such a policy be adopted in a society where polygamy is acceptable, asked Topo Autlwetse, a senior official with the Botswana Mining Workers Union. "What about the miners with more than one wife?" he asked.

Company officials, who have allocated $5 million to cover the cost of the program this fiscal year, say they will stand firm on the one- spouse rule. Husbands will have to choose which wife will have access to the medicines. But officials may reopen the debate on children.

They acknowledge that there are other potential pitfalls ahead.

Some counselors fear that increasing numbers of employees, who no longer fear dying from AIDS, will give up condoms and revert to riskier sexual behavior. Doctors worry that patients who cannot comply with the rigorous regimen of daily pills will contribute to the spread of drug-resistant strains of the virus.

"We spent sleepless nights with these issues," Mrs. Fantan said.. "There was a lot of tension, a lot of anger. But we felt we could paralyze ourselves into inaction if we were to wait to have all the t's crossed and the i's dotted. And we had to ask ourselves, `Will we exist as a nation if we do nothing?' "

Officials at Debswana, which employs about 6,000 workers, said they decided that they had to act. Their bulldozers were still biting into the walls of the pits. Their machines were still grinding rock and sorting through rubble. The number of carats unearthed company-wide was still increasing. But their employees were falling sick, one by one.

When workers agreed to take H.I.V. tests in 1999, the company discovered that more than a third of workers between the ages of 24 and 40 were infected with the AIDS virus, company officials say.

An exhaustive examination of death certificates and sick-leave reports over the last five years painted a frightening portrait for the future.

In 1995, seven employees died of AIDS-related illnesses, a figure that represented less than a third of the deaths in service companywide, the company says. Last year, the number jumped to 25, which represented about 60 percent of deaths companywide. Between 1995 and 1999, the number of sick days taken by employees at the Jwaneng mine alone surged to 9,384 from 2,032.

Despite its prevalence, the disease is considered so shameful that some workers say they are afraid to take part in the company's plan; they fear that their colleagues will find out and that the whispers will spread.

Typically, miners who are believed to be infected are shunned. They sit alone in the buses that carry workers to the pit. They eat alone in the company kitchens because their colleagues are afraid to share utensils and crockery with them.

Under Debswana's plan, employees must first be tested and assessed by doctors selected by the company before they are permitted to begin treatment. "I have been hopeful all along, but there's no privacy now," said one miner who is H.I.V.-positive and spoke on condition of anonymity. "There's no secrecy."

Company officials say they hope to dispel such concerns in briefings in coming weeks. In time, they believe, the stigma will fade and growing numbers of employees will come forward to be tested.

Of the treatment plans, Dr. Khan said, "It will bring more people in for testing; it destigmatizes the whole pandemic."

Priscilla Masiapetlo, the 34-year- old wife of a miner, is H.I.V.-positive and has struggled for months to pay for AIDS drugs. Some months, when her money ran out, she had to go without. With Debswana's plan, she says, she has the security of knowing she will have an uninterrupted supply of the life-sustaining medicines.

Ray Contho, 36, a Debswana hospital orderly who is H.I.V.-positive, said he, too, breathed a sigh of relief. His health insurance benefits were about to run out, he said, and he had no idea where he would come up with the money to cover his AIDS treatment until Debswana announced its program.

"I was very worried," Mr. Contho said . "This money I use, it was going to run out. I was thinking, `What will be next?' Now, I've started having hope. Maybe somewhere along the line they will find a cure. Meanwhile, I can keep living."

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Decrease in Chronic Illness Bodes Well for Medicare Costs

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/health/08CARE.html

The chances that elderly Americans will be devastated by chronic disabilities like stroke and dementia have declined sharply, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday. If the trend continues, researchers said, spending on Medicare could actually stop increasing.

The number of older people who become severely disabled has been declining gradually for more than a decade, but the decline became much sharper at the end of the 1990's, according to the new study, which looked at a sample 19,000 Americans, age 65 and older.

Scientists at the National Institute on Aging, which sponsored the study, said the decline probably resulted from a variety of factors, including more widespread knowledge of the benefits of diet and exercise, fewer people smoking, new drugs for heart problems and other illnesses, and advances in eye surgery. Advances in prescription drugs and medical technology have also contributed to the the decline.

Some economists questioned whether the trends would continue in the long run and whether the high cost of dying would simply be postponed, but not reduced.

The study's principal author, Kenneth G. Manton, director of the Center for Demographic Studies at Duke University, said recent research showed that costs in the final two years of life were lower for people who lived longer. "The older you are when you die, the less expensive the last two years are," he said.

Dr. Manton and XiLiang Gu of Duke reported their findings in the May 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The implications for Medicare planning will be explored on Thursday at a Senate Labor Committee hearing on the economics of medical advances.

"The new study emphasizes the importance of focusing on improving the health of the elderly rather than enacting destructive cuts in the Medicare program," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

"Healthier senior citizens need less medical services and that's good for the elderly and good for Medicare," Mr. Kennedy added.

The health improvements among the elderly are also reflected in nursing home statistics, the Duke researchers said. Over the past decade, the number of nursing home residents declined by 200,000, indicating a savings of billions of dollars in payments to nursing homes, even though the number of so-called old- old people, those 85 and older, was rising rapidly.

Savings on medical costs would also benefit those private employers that pay for part of the health care of retirees. It is not clear how many healthy retirees are doing part-time work or volunteering.

The Duke researchers have looked at the records of 19,000 elderly Medicare beneficiaries each year since 1982, a total of 43,000 people as some died and were replaced in the study. Until 1994, the number who were struck by a chronic disability was declining by 1.6 percent each year. The decline was steeper, reaching 2.6 percent in the latest five years in the study, from 1994 to 1999.

Dr. Manton said that even if the lower, 1.6 percent rate of decrease in disability continued, "the demand for Medicare services would be fairly static" despite the surging numbers of aging baby boomers.

"The government's projections of Medicare costs are too high because there is no adequate adjustment for changes in the statistical distribution of health status and disability," he said.

The rate of decline accelerated even faster for black Americans, although they had a higher proportion of disabilities to start with. Their disability rates were increasing in the 1980's. That changed to a decline of 4.7 percent from 1989 to 1994 and a drop exceeding 5 percent from 1994 to 1999.

In 1982, 7.1 million, or about 26 percent, of the 26.9 million elderly were disabled as measured by being unable to perform such daily activities as eating, bathing and getting dressed. By 1994, the number was 7.5 million, even as the elderly population increased to 33.1 million. But by 1999, the total had dropped to seven million, or 19.7 percent, despite the overall growth to 35.3 million of the population over age 65.

"The numbers are really astounding," said Dr. Richard Suzman, an associate director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.

If the prevalence of chronic disabilities had not changed, the number of elderly people affected would have been 2.2 million higher, he said.

"The lesson is that we have increasing control over how we age, replacing the fatalism of 15 years ago when there was no vision of cures or even prevention" of chronic geriatric illnesses, Dr. Suzman said.

Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel prize winner in economics at the University of Chicago, said the proportion of people "who ever get chronic diseases is becoming smaller, and for those who do, the severity is not as great as it used to be."

For example, the proportion of the elderly population with severe forms of Alzheimer's disease or other dementia who were unable to take simple tests declined, Dr. Manton said. The survey did not measure the total number of Alzheimer's and dementia patients.

"This is good news for the individuals and good news for the Medicare trust fund and other sources of support for long-term care and health care," said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who is president of the Urban Institute, a research center in Washington.

But Mr. Reischauer insisted it was "unlikely to represent a major contribution to solving the long-run financial problems faced by Medicare and Medicaid."

It was unclear whether improvements in the health status of the elderly would lead to a permanent slowdown in health care costs or whether the slowdown would be only temporary, Dr. Reischauer said. He added that it was not known whether "the people who don't have chronic disabilities at 75 will be alive and at age 85 will have the disabilities at that point, or maybe a different set of problems that will be equally, or more, expensive to treat."

Dr. Fogel said the cost issues needed more study.

The new study raises questions that will set the agenda for the next round of research, he said.

-------- imf / world bank / nafta / fast track

Bush: Free trade good for jobs, environment

05/08/2001
By Mark Memmott,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-05-08-trade.htm

The White House began a week of lobbying for its free trade agenda with President Bush warning that "a new kind of protectionism" threatens workers and the environment. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that democracy flowers when trade is free.

"Did NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) hurt democracy in Mexico? No," Powell said. "Today Mexico has a president elected from the opposition, the first in 70 years." Both spoke to the Council of the Americas, a business group meeting in Washington.

Bush said that this week he will ask Congress to grant him "fast-track," or "trade-promotion," authority. That gives the administration the right to negotiate agreements that Congress can approve or reject, but not amend. The authority expired in 1994.

Environmentalists, labor unions and many Democrats oppose fast-track authority because they want Congress to be able to make changes if a trade pact would lead to the loss of U.S. jobs or spur companies to move production to countries with weak environmental regulations. However, Bush said that free trade boosts U.S. employment by lifting exports and gives developing nations income needed to improve environmental standards. The president said he wants fast-track authority by the end of this year. Many Republican and Democratic lawmakers have said they doubt that he'll get it before early 2002.

-------- police

Officer Charged in Killing That Roiled Cincinnati

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/national/08CINC.html

CINCINNATI, May 7 - Two misdemeanor charges were filed today against a white police officer who shot an unarmed black man to death last month, a killing that sparked four days of protest and street violence in this racially tense city.

The policeman, Officer Stephen Roach, was charged with negligent homicide and obstructing official business in the death of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, the Hamilton County prosecutor, Mike Allen, announced this evening.

Mr. Allen held a 6 p.m. news conference to broadcast the widely awaited results of the grand jury investigation and to give city officials advance notice to prepare for any renewal of last month's violence.

Some black residents had urged felony homicide charges against the officer. But the grand jury, described as racially balanced, returned the misdemeanor charges after concluding that Officer Roach's behavior in shooting Mr. Thomas after a long police chase showed some negligence in the act as well as the official obstruction of investigators after the shooting.

Mr. Allen said the latter charge apparently was based on the differing versions of the shooting that the officer offered investigators, a clash that grand jurors decided had "hampered" the investigation. Negligent homicide, which Mr. Allen said would involve a "substantial lapse of due care," carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail, while obstructing official business carries a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail.

"I know emotions are running high over the tragic death," Mr. Allen said as city officials put the police on alert and vowed to restore last month's all-night curfew if street disturbances were renewed.

Four nights of street protests and violence followed the April 7 shooting, with dozens of stores vandalized. Black leaders said it was the latest of 15 fatalities at the hands of the police in the last six years, with all those slain being black.

The police have replied that officers' lives were directly at stake in most of those cases.

"Please withhold your judgment until you know all of the facts," Mr. Allen pleaded after a month of speculation and demands in black and white communities about how the shooting should best be handled to ease the tension. "The proper place for judgment is in a trial."

Black leaders said that in the last week there had been speculation about a possible misdemeanor charge and that there was no immediate sign that there might be renewed protest or violence. Black church leaders urged calm tonight. Some shop owners, mindful of last month's vandalism and arson, boarded up their show windows.

"All we can do is trust the grand jury process, trust the law and hopefully have calm tonight," Mayor Charlie Luken declared. He reiterated promises to address the issues of economic opportunity and racial profiling most often cited by black leaders "or else the people will lose trust." But he added, "Tonight the message is respect the process, respect the law."

A crowd of 75 people awaited the grand jury's finding outside the courthouse and a few instances of rock throwing and trash-bin vandalism were reported.

As the decision was announced, police officers streamed into Over- the-Rhine, the black neighborhood where most of the vandalism took place. But a score of patrol cars and dozens of officers gradually withdrew. Rainstorms arrived with the announcement, a coincidence that cheered city officials facing a night- long alert.

There was no immediate reaction from the Fraternal Order of Police, the police union whose leaders had earlier expressed concern that Officer Roach's civil rights would be sacrificed to the city's need to pacify protesters and maintain order.

The incident last month began at 2 in the morning after Mr. Thomas was recognized as having 14 outstanding warrants, most of them for traffic infractions but two for previously fleeing from police officers.

Officer Roach has maintained his innocence, reportedly telling associates that he thought Mr. Thomas might have been reaching for a gun in his waistband. Mr. Allen, the prosecutor, said investigators noted that Mr. Thomas, who had been fleeing pursuers, had been wearing baggy pants, and witnesses said he seemed to be holding them up as he fled.

In March, a coalition of black civil rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio filed suit in federal court in Cleveland accusing Cincinnati of a "30-year pattern of racial profiling." The suit contends that blacks are routinely singled out by police officers for minor offenses far more than whites are and that officers "tend to use excessive and deadly force against African-Americans more readily than against whites."

In reacting to complaints, the city today initiated a new police procedure in which officers who stop people on the basis of suspicion of a possible crime must list the race of the person on official forms so any pattern might be studied.

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today that the Justice Department's civil rights division would investigate the Cincinnati Police Department.

Mr. Ashcroft, who was traveling in the Southwest, issued a statement saying the inquiry would attempt to determine whether there was "a pattern or practice" of constitutional rights violations in the city's police department.

The inquiry will examine the use of excessive force, deadly force policies and the department's overall approach to dealing with suspects in potentially confrontational settings.

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Flaws in Chemist's Findings Free Man at Center of Inquiry

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By JIM YARDLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/national/08LAB.html

OKLAHOMA CITY, May 7 - When Jeffrey Pierce was convicted of rape in 1986, he lost his freedom and his family. He and his wife decided to divorce and she left Oklahoma to raise their twin infant sons as if he did not exist. To survive in prison, he learned to do two things - to mind his own business and to lift weights.

But today, after maintaining his innocence throughout the 15 years he spent behind bars, Mr. Pierce, 39, was freed because DNA testing refuted the crucial testimony against him from an Oklahoma City police chemist long accused of shoddy work and now the focus of one of the most wide-ranging investigations into a police laboratory.

"The citizens of Oklahoma County have been duped," Mr. Pierce said outside Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington, Okla., today after a state judge, Susan P. Caswell, vacated his conviction and 65-year sentence. "The juries have been lied to for the last 20 years. There are going to be a lot more victims."

This afternoon, Mr. Pierce left the prison with his mother and his brother, Gary, who fought for years to overturn the conviction. He will soon meet the two sons, now 15, whom he has only seen through photographs since they were infants.

Mr. Pierce had been a landscaper who happened to be working near the scene of the rape. The DNA test results that cleared Mr. Pierce, as well as a separate review of his case by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, set in motion the larger inquiry into the chemist, Joyce Gilchrist. Last week, the federal Justice Department began an investigation while Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma ordered a review into every felony conviction linked to Ms. Gilchrist to make certain that no one else has been wrongly convicted.

Among those hundreds of cases are 11 in which the defendant was executed and 12 in which the defendant is on death row. Mr. Keating has expressed confidence that no innocent person has been executed.

The investigations into Ms. Gilchrist, who analyzed forensic evidence like blood, hair, semen and fibers from 1980 until she was promoted in 1994 to a supervisory position, come as other police laboratory scientists are under scrutiny in Illinois, West Virginia and Florida. But the scope of the investigation into Ms. Gilchrist could be unparalleled.

"The truth is finally being known," said Mr. Pierce's lawyer, David Autry. "Nobody has listened to us for 15 years, and now science has advanced enough to prove what we've known all along: that Jeff Pierce is innocent."

The case dates to May 8, 1985, when a woman was raped and assaulted inside her apartment by a man she described as having blond hair. Mr. Pierce, who has blond hair, was doing landscaping work in the complex and a police officer initially pointed him out to the victim from a short distance. The woman had only had glances of her attacker, but she told the officer that Mr. Pierce was not the rapist. But 10 months later, she identified him in a photo lineup. He had had no prior criminal record, his brother said, other than a disorderly conduct arrest in his youth.

Ms. Gilchrist, who has declined to comment about the continuing investigations, provided the critical evidence to bolster that questionable identification. She testified in court that she had collected scalp hairs, pubic hairs and semen samples from inside the apartment and, after analyzing them under a microscope, had matched them to Mr. Pierce.

Mr. Pierce's lawyers argued from the outset that Ms. Gilchrist had overstated the certainty with which hair comparisons could be used to identify a single person. Also, she violated a court order by failing to forward any of the hair evidence to a private laboratory hired by the defense, meaning that the defense could not fully analyze her work before trial. The evidence she did send leaked out of the package and could not be analyzed, defense lawyers said. The state appeals court said her action "absolutely violated the terms of a court order" but nonetheless upheld the conviction, saying Ms. Gilchrist's failure to turn over the evidence was not enough to overturn the conviction.

The Pierce trial came not long before Ms. Gilchrist's work began coming under criticism from her peers, defense lawyers and judges. She was reprimanded by one professional organization and expelled from another. Despite the criticism, the local police and prosecutors never scrutinized her work.

For Mr. Pierce, the conviction collapsed the framework of his life. He and his wife, now Kathy Wahl, had recently had twin sons, but after a few painful prison visits, the couple decided to divorce. Ms. Wahl's birthday was the same day that the rape occurred, and Mr. Pierce bought her diamond earrings on a shopping trip that day with two co-workers. This was his alibi in the trial, but the jury was not swayed.

Ms. Wahl, who sold the earrings to help pay for her move to Michigan and once survived on welfare, remarried but then divorced again seven years ago. She works two jobs and said her twin sons seemed to know not to ask about their father. They were never told that he was in prison.

"I just told the boys, `Don't ever let anyone ever tell you that you don't have a dad,' " she said in a telephone interview today. "He loves you just as much as I do, but he can't see you right now."

As for the mutual decision to divorce, she added, "Jeff and I have beautiful kids, and I know that Jeff would not have wanted them to see their dad in a prison environment."

Mr. Pierce's brother, Gary, became his primary link to the outside world. He occasionally brought pictures of the twins sent by their grandmother from Florida. In October 1987, he mailed a three-page, typed letter to news organizations nationwide detailing his brother's case and pleading for help.

"I have a very strong feeling that this is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Joyce Gilchrist helps to put an innocent man in jail or even worse, to death," he wrote. He did not get a single response.

Inside the state prison that had now become his home, Mr. Pierce met an inmate who gave him plain advice on how to survive in a world inhabited by convicted killers: get strong and keep to yourself. He went to the weight room. "He has told me stories about a guy who got stabbed, a guy who got gang raped, a guy who died in the cell," Gary Pierce said.

The key break in the case came late last year when, under a new state law, the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System won approval to submit the forensic evidence in the case for independent DNA testing, something Mr. Pierce's lawyers had sought for years.

Last month, the preliminary results showed that the DNA taken from the rapist's hair did not match Mr. Pierce. In addition, an F.B.I. analysis of the hair samples contradicted Ms. Gilchrist's original hair testimony. In March, Ms. Gilchrist was placed on administrative leave.

Gary Pierce, who has attributed his brother's troubles not only to Ms. Gilchrist but to the office of the Oklahoma County district attorney, Robert H. Macy, said he hoped the entire criminal justice system in Oklahoma City was scrutinized as a result of the new evidence. Officials in Mr. Macy's office have denied accusations that they encouraged Ms. Gilchrist to sharpen her testimony to win convictions.

"Everybody asks me, `Why did they keep her?' " Gary Pierce said. "She got convictions. They didn't care about the methods she used."

Though plans are not complete, Ms. Wahl said her sons would meet their father later this week. Three weeks ago, after she learned that the preliminary DNA report had pointed to Mr. Pierce's innocence, she told her sons about their father. Everyone is now nervous but excited about the meeting, she said. "They are excited but sad to think this could have happened to Jeff and them," she said. "They've been robbed for 15 years of a wonderful person."

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Mass Prison Transfer Creates Crisis

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Jail-Overcrowding.html

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- Alabama's troubled corrections system was thrown into crisis Tuesday when two sheriffs sent more than 200 inmates from their overcrowded jails to state prisons where cellblocks are already packed.

Armed with a court ruling, sheriffs in Jefferson and Houston counties delivered inmates who were supposed to be in state lockups -- not in crowded county jails where prisoners have little choice but to sleep on floors and tables.

The transfer is the latest problem in Alabama's decades-old struggle with too many inmates in often squalid jails and prisons. The state has one of the nation's highest rates of incarceration but no plans to build more prisons.

More than 26,000 people are incarcerated in Alabama, or 571 per 100,000 residents; only five states have higher rates.

``State prisons are full, county jails are full and the probation officers are loaded up with cases,'' said Allen Tapley, executive director of the Sentencing Institute, a private research group.

Gov. Don Siegelman said state prisons will absorb the transferred inmates. But with little extra bed space, he said state lawyers have asked a judge to halt the influx.

``This is not a situation where counties, quite frankly, should be doing what they're doing today,'' Siegelman said. They should look for alternatives and not ``simply wash their hands of the situation.''

``We're all in this together -- as a state and not as individual counties,'' Siegelman said.

Three years ago, the state agreed to accept inmates who had been in county jails more than 30 days after being sentenced to a state prison term.

But backlogs have built up: In Jefferson County, a jail built to house 620 inmates holds about 1,000. In Houston County, a 200-bed jail has 300 prisoners.

U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon last month described jail conditions in Morgan County as ``medieval,'' with inmates squeezed into quarters so cramped they resembled a ``slave ship.'' He ordered 104 moved to state prisons, a job completed Monday.

While more inclined than other states to lock up offenders, Alabama has been slow to build new prisons to hold them. Prison system spokesman John Hamm said an old canning plant at a prison in Elmore County is being turned into a dormitory with 300 beds, but after it opens later this month, no other building projects are planned.

Corrections officials have also complained to legislators about a critical shortage of guards. Six inmates, including three murderers, escaped from a prison in January, partly because no one was watching a large section of the fence.

Even as the situation worsens, the biggest corrections issue at the Legislature is the governor's push to make violent criminals serve 85 percent of their sentences. If enacted, it would result in even more stress on the prison system, critics say.

Corrections experts and prison officials say the solution includes more community corrections programs, drug courts and parole for inmates with convictions for nonviolent offenses. But those alternatives are a tough sell in a political environment that favors jail time for even nonviolent crimes.

The crisis is reminiscent of problems in the early 1980s, when a federal judge -- with the approval of then-Gov. Fob James -- ordered the mass release of nonviolent offenders because of prison overcrowding. A decade earlier, a judge described Alabama's prison system as ``barbaric,'' ruling that state inmates have a constitutional right to adequate living conditions.

In county jails, some 2,000 state prisoners have been locked up longer than the 30-day court-approved maximum.

While they languish, the state pays county governments $1.75 per inmate for food, though officials say it costs counties about $30 a day to house a prisoner.

Relief at the county level is typically a quick fix -- an annex is built or double-bunking is instituted. In DeKalb County, prisoners will soon be housed in two fiberglass domes in a parking lot at a cost of $300,000, while a Morgan County commissioner has suggested an aluminum tent serve as a temporary jail until the county builds a new one.

The situation came to a head in Houston County last December, when judges ordered state inmates removed from the jail in Dothan. The judge threatened to leave the inmates handcuffed to a prison fence if the state did not accept them.

The Alabama Supreme Court blocked that order until Monday, when it lifted the stay -- and the sheriff promptly sent his inmates to a state lockup in Montgomery.

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Amnesty Says Torture Still Common in Brazil Jails

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-brazil-.html

GENEVA (Reuters) - Rights group Amnesty International said on Tuesday that Brazilian police and jail guards continued to use torture on prisoners 11 years after the country signed an international treaty outlawing its use.

As the United Nations Committee against Torture began a special hearing on Brazil on Tuesday at its twice-yearly meeting in Geneva, Amnesty said that degrading and inhuman treatment ''continues unabated and largely unpunished.''

Brazil ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in September 1989, but had so far failed to meet its obligations under the international treaty, Amnesty said.

``Torture is regularly used as a means to extract confessions, to dominate, humiliate and control those in detention,'' it said in a statement.

Brazil's delegation is due to present its first report on implementation of the treaty to the U.N. committee, composed of 10 independent experts.

U.N. officials said that it was unusual for such a long period to elapse between a state signing the treaty and the presentation of its first report.

``I expect Brazil will be asked why,'' one official said.

The session follows a report last month by a separate U.N. special investigator on torture, Sir Nigel Rodley, who said he had found ``widespread and systematic'' torture of detainees, especially poor, black, petty criminals, during his recent trip.

Amnesty said there was also a worrying trend for corrupt police officials to use torture as a means to extort money from people.

``For some members of the police, often under-trained and under-resourced, extracting confessions under torture has become a de facto replacement for professional and scientific methods of investigation,'' it added.unpunished, the government was effectively encouraging its use, the group said.

``The consistent failure to punish acts of torture committed by police and prison guards is conducive to more violations being committed,'' Amnesty said.

Amnesty, which submitted its own report on Brazil to the U.N. Committee against Torture, said it understood the difficulties the Brazilian federal government faced in seeking to contain widespread crime and street violence.

But the government had to ensure that public security measures were not adopted ``at the expense of its citizens' rights,'' it added.

-------- spying

China Rejects U.S. Proposal to Fly Spy Plane Off Island

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08CND-PLANE.html

BEIJING, May 8 - China today officially rejected a plan by United States military officials to repair and fly out of the country a damaged American spy plane now stranded on China's Hainan Island.

"The Chinese side has several times stated clearly in relevant Sino-U.S. negotiations that it is impossible for the U.S. EP-3 plane to fly back to the U.S.," said Sun Yuxi, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman.

The Chinese did not reject the other method the United States has considered: dismantling the plane and sending it home in pieces.

The Chinese rejection of a proposal to fly the plane out came a day after the United States military, over Beijing's objections, resumed surveillance flights in international airspace off China's coast. Mr. Sun said China would make "serious representations" to the United States about the resumption of the flights, which China considers a threat to its national security.

The flights were suspended after the April 1 midair collision between the EP-3 surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet that was closely tailing it.

The Chinese jet crashed into the sea and the pilot died. The badly damaged EP-3 made an emergency landing on Hainan Island, where it still sits on the tarmac, setting off a diplomatic crisis.

While the surveillance plane's 24 crew members were released after 11 tense days, the Chinese have not said when or if they will release the aircraft, despite repeated demands by the United States.

"We are interested in the fastest return of the airplane," the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said today. "We think that is in China's interest as well as ours."

Touching upon the plane episode at a Pentagon news conference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that the United States would continue to try to recover the plane through diplomatic means.

The EP-3, worth $80 million, is one of Washington's most sophisticated surveillance planes. Although crew members tried to destroy the sensitive information and equipment aboard the craft before Chinese military personnel in Hainan boarded it, experts say it is likely that the Chinese garnered much useful information from what remained.

Last week, for the first time, Chinese officials allowed the United States to inspect the damaged craft in detail. After the inspection, a team of technicians from Lockheed Martin reported that they believed the plane, which lost its nose cone and a propeller in the collision, could probably be repaired sufficiently to fly it out of China.

Mr. Rumsfeld had said he expected the Chinese to ultimately release the plane, asserting that "they wouldn't have allowed an inspection team to go there if they didn't plan to return the airplane."

But many Chinese, both in the military and out, oppose the plane's return. And the United States decision to resume surveillance flights before the fate of the EP-3 has been hammered out, is likely to strengthen this group's resolve.

-------

China: US Spy Plane Can't Fly Home

By MARTIN FACKLER
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/main.html?PACKAGEID=china

BEIJING (AP) - China protested the resumption of American surveillance flights near its coast and said on Tuesday that it will not allow the damaged U.S. Navy spy plane detained after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet to fly home under its own power.

Without ruling out the plane's return, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said the EP-3E Aries II aircraft will not be allowed to be repaired and flown back to the United States.

Spokesman Sun Yuxi said China already made its opposition to the flight clear to Washington.

``The Chinese side has several times stated clearly in relevant Sino-U.S. negotiations that it is impossible for the U.S. EP-3 plane to fly back to the U.S.,'' Sun said. ``The U.S. side should take a pragmatic and constructive attitude so that the issue on handling the U.S. plane could be properly settled.''

The statement, released by the government-run Xinhua News Agency, did not say why China opposed allowing the spy plane to fly home.

Sun also said his government opposed Monday's resumption of U.S. spy flights off China's coast.

The Navy plane has been sitting on a military runway on China's Hainan Island since making an emergency landing April 1 after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet.

The pilot of the Chinese jet was lost in the collision and the 24 crew members of the U.S. plane were held on Hainan for 11 days.

The U.S. plane was badly damaged, though officials say the Chinese probably harvested valuable intelligence from it despite the crew's apparently successful efforts to destroy the most sensitive information aboard.

The plane collects and analyzes electronic signals to monitor military communications and activities.

The U.S. military on Monday sent its first surveillance flight along the coast since the collision. The unarmed Air Force RC-135 was not opposed by Chinese jets and returned safely to Kadena Air Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, U.S. officials said.

China will ``lodge serious representations with the United States'' over the flight, Sun said.

The United States should ``draw a lesson'' from the April 1 collision and ``correct such wrongdoing,'' Sun added.

The United States is considering cutting the four-engine aircraft into pieces to ship back on a barge or in a cargo plane.

In Washington, a U.S. defense official said Monday that the Lockheed Martin technicians who inspected the plane last week determined that repairs would probably take several days.

----

U.S. renews flights off China

By Rowan Scarborough
May 8, 2001
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010508-74563810.htm

The Bush administration, without fanfare, resumed military surveillance flights off the China coast yesterday but avoided the militarized southern region where a Navy spy plane was struck by a Chinese fighter and forced to land on Hainan island.

An Air Force RC-135 "Rivet Joint" aircraft flew a solo reconnaissance route off northeastern China, the first such patrol since the Navy EP-3E and a Chinese fighter collided in flight April 1, creating a tense international standoff. The American plane managed an emergency landing on the Chinese island, and its crew of 24 was detained by Chinese authorities for 12 days.

China, which released the crew only after the United States expressed regret for the loss of the Chinese fighter pilot, has demanded that the Pentagon stop all reconnaissance flights near the mainland.

Yesterday´s mission violated that demand, but the Bush administration kept the milestone low key. It was not announced by the Pentagon, and the White House declined to discuss it. The approach reflected the sensitive nature of gradually resuming intelligence flights without inflaming relations with Beijing.

Military planners kept the RC-135 in the less-contentious northeastern region. The ultimate target for such intelligence gathering is the South China Sea, where the Chinese launch ships, including submarines, and have positioned hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan.

"They try out their toys down there," said a retired Air Force general. "That´s the really sensitive area."

The four-engine jet which like the EP-3E is equipped with powerful eavesdropping antennae was unarmed and flew unescorted from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan. The mission ended about 8 a.m. Eastern time (8 p.m. local time). China did not dispatch fighters to intercept the RC-135, a Pentagon official said.

The Pentagon is considering sending fighter escorts when flights resume farther south, where Chinese pilots have a history of maneuvering jet fighters dangerously close to the slow-moving U.S. reconnaissance planes. The tactic proved fatal April 1, when a fighter flew into the EP-3E´s propeller and then broke up, sending the Chinese pilot and wreckage into the ocean.

The People´s Liberation Army is still holding the EP-3E, even after their technicians stripped the aircraft of any valuable intelligence information. A U.S. Lockheed Martin crew spent two days evaluating the aircraft last week and tentatively reported the plane could be flown off the island after extensive repairs. China has not yet agreed to release the plane.

"I´m sure we´ll get the plane back," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on CBS´ "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "It´s an $80 million aircraft, and it´s ours. ... They wouldn´t have allowed an inspection team to go in there if they didn´t plan to return the airplane."

At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer reasserted the U.S. right to conduct such patrols.

"Right from the beginning it has always been the position of the United States that it is our prerogative and right to fly over international airspace to preserve the peace by flying reconnaissance missions, but I´m not going to entertain any questions about any specific missions."

An intelligence official said the United States has had no EP-3E surveillance flights since the April 1 collision. The lack of flights has limited the ability of Pentagon intelligence agencies to learn more about Chinese military operations, the key target of the electronic interception of radio and telephone communication.

The EP-3E is considered a "tactical" collection system that is targeted primarily at military communications.

The RC-135 is a "strategic" intelligence collector. Strategic intelligence includes information on nuclear weapons, such as tests and new deployments. The hog-nose, high-altitude RC-135 is a militarized version of the Boeing 707.

Assigned to the 55th Wing at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., Rivet Joint is stuffed with antennae arrays. It provides "vital real-time battle management information to mission planners, commanders and warfighters," Air Force documents say.

Bill Gertz contributed to this report.

----

U.S. Resumes Its Spy Flights Close to China

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08PLAN.html

WASHINGTON, May 7 - The United States resumed reconnaissance flights off the coast of China today for the first time since a collision on April 1 between a Navy surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet bruised relations between the two nations, defense officials said.

An unarmed Air Force RC-135 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, flew its mission in international airspace off China's northeastern coast during daylight hours there and returned to its base without incident - and without being trailed by Chinese interceptors, officials said.

"There was no reaction from the Chinese," one Defense Department official said today after the RC-135, a military version of the Boeing 707 that is designed to collect and analyze communications signals, had landed.

Officials said the Air Force jet, which can carry a crew of up to 27, was sent without an escort of United States fighters. After the collision last month, some officials said future reconnaissance flights should include armed escorts, but those suggestions have clearly been rebuffed, at least on the northerly circuit flown today. Chinese pilots have been less aggressive in intercepting American flights in this area than they had been over the South China Sea.

China had demanded that American patrols be halted off its entire coast after the collision of the Navy EP-3E surveillance plane and the Chinese fighter over the South China Sea, which resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot and the detention of the 24-member American crew for 11 days after it made an emergency landing on Hainan island.

That incident presented the Bush administration with its first foreign policy challenge, and even now a resumption of military-to-military contacts between the two nations is being reviewed case by case. Conservatives criticized the administration for what they perceived as an apology to Beijing, when the Pentagon had said it was the Chinese pilot who caused the collision. The resumption of surveillance flights demonstrated that the United States was returning to what it considered normal military operations, Pentagon officials said.

The officials declined to say when the next intelligence-gathering mission would be ordered to fly near China.

And Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said he would not comment on the resumption of surveillance flights "other than to say that, as you knew right from the beginning, it has always been the position of the United States that it is our prerogative and right to fly in international airspace, to preserve the peace by flying reconnaissance missions."

Technicians from Lockheed Martin Corporation who were sent last week to inspect the damaged Navy aircraft, which is still on Hainan, reported that the plane could be flown off the island after one or two of its engines were replaced and propellers and flight-control surfaces like flaps and rudders were repaired, military officials said.

Pentagon officials had expressed concerns that the aircraft's left wing had been so badly damaged in the collision that it could not support the load of takeoff, and that the plane would have to be taken apart, crated and carried away by barge. But the wing was found to be structurally sound, officials said today.

"The plane is flyable," one military official said. "We know we can change out engines. That's not a simple task, but we can do it in a week."

Chinese officials, however, have not given permission to repair the plane or to fly it out of Chinese territory. Administration officials said today that it was possible China would not allow the plane to fly off the island and would, instead, require the aircraft to be cut apart and hauled away.

Military officials who have been briefed on the engineering review of the Navy surveillance plane said the Lockheed Martin technicians were unable to say whether the Chinese had culled useful information from any equipment or computer programs not destroyed by the crew during the emergency landing.

"The Chinese restricted what the team could do inside the plane," one military official said, pointing out that the Chinese could have dismantled and examined what was left of the gear and reinstalled it before the American technicians arrived.

"They reported that it all looked quite orderly," the official said. "It was all spruced up."

The crew members of the Navy surveillance plane reported that they had completed their emergency procedure for destroying sensitive equipment and computer programs aboard the plane in the harrowing minutes after the crash and before they were ordered off their crippled aircraft after landing on Chinese territory. Even so, with the plane remaining in Chinese custody for several weeks, administration officials said they could not rule out that the Chinese had gained some intelligence windfalls from the downed craft.

The technical team from Lockheed Martin has been huddling with engineering and maintenance experts from the Pacific Fleet and the Naval Air Systems Command to propose the best options for recovering the aircraft, officials said.

Their analysis will be presented to Adm. Dennis C. Blair, commander of American forces in the Pacific, who is expected to forward his recommendations to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later this week.

-------- terrorism

Washington worries about terrorism

05/08/2001
By Ana Radelat, Gannett News Service
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-05-08-terrorism.htm#more

WASHINGTON - The White House and Congress focused Tuesday on whether the federal government is prepared to respond to terrorism, even as attacks on Americans at home and overseas are on the wane. Warning of the dangers posed by hand-carried nuclear weapons and biological or chemical agents, Vice President Dick Cheney announced the creation of an office at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate federal response to domestic terrorist attacks. On Capitol Hill, Republican senators began three days of hearings to determine whether government agencies are prepared to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the first to testify, warned that new technology and the trend toward globalization will make fighting terrorism more difficult.

"I'm sure there is somebody out there who has figured out a way to get through our intelligence screen, to get through our police screens and to conduct a terrorist act," Powell said.

The senators holding the hearings - Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Pat Roberts of Kansas, Ted Stevens of Alaska and John Warner of Virginia - are concerned about coordinating the more than 40 agencies with terrorism-fighting duties. Their worries were sparked, in part, by a training exercise in Cincinnati last year that revealed that the city's hospitals and law enforcement agencies were unprepared for a large-scale terrorist attack.

Some senators warned that the United States may suffer terrorist attacks deadlier than the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 that killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh is to be executed for the bombing May 16.

"We have to alert the American people that terrorism is out there and it won't go away," Shelby said.

Yet State Department and FBI reports indicate that terrorist attacks on Americans at home and abroad have decreased.

Last year, 19 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks overseas; all but two in one attack, on the USS Cole. From 1990 to 2000, 88 U.S. citizens were killed in terrorist attacks overseas, compared with 585 during the 1980s, a State Department study shows.

Besides the Oklahoma City blast and the bombing of New York's World Trade Center in 1993, which resulted in six dead and more than 1,000 wounded, domestic victims of terrorism are rare.

In 1998, the last year to be reviewed by the FBI, the agency determined that five Americans died in terrorist attacks. FBI spokesman Steven Berry said incidents of domestic terrorism have been in "a holding pattern" since then.

In addition, the Montgomery, Ala.-based Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, there's been a marked decrease in the number of homegrown militia groups that would be prone to committing terrorist acts.

Rand Institution terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman said Americans continue to be safer than other people from terrorist threats.

"A country with 16,000 homicides every year has more to worry about than terrorism," Hoffman said. "We shouldn't exaggerate it or create fears, the sky isn't falling."

The most violent terrorist groups in the world have been linked to ethnic and religious conflicts, including Spain's Basque independence movement, Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East and Northern Ireland's Catholic and Protestant factions.

But Brian Levin, head of the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, warned of a new, deadly home-grown terrorist: someone mentally unstable with easy access to explosives and bomb-building information and the "inspirational ideology to push them over."

"After the lone wolf McVeigh, the genie is out of the bottle as to who could commit a terrorist act," Levin said. "There are a relatively small number of ticking time bombs out there who are capable of great destruction."

---

Bush Creates New Terrorism Office

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terrorism.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush created a new office Tuesday to assess the nation's ability to deter terrorism and to coordinate a ``harmonious and comprehensive'' response to terrorist attacks, including those involving biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.

``Prudence dictates that the United States be fully prepared to deal effectively with the consequences of such a weapon being used here on our soil,'' the president said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government body that deals with floods, tornados, and other natural disasters, will head the anti-terrorism effort through the newly created Office of National Preparedness.

Bush also said his vice president will lead an administration working group to assess terrorist threats. Dick Cheney, during a CNN interview, said the team will ``figure out how we best respond to that kind of disaster of major proportions that in effect would be manmade or man-caused.''

Cheney's group was expected to report its findings to Congress by Oct. 1, with the recommendations to be reviewed by the National Security Council.

The announcements Tuesday came as a Senate panel held the first of three days of hearings on the subject.

``The president's purpose is to bring clarity to the 46 agencies that have a piece of the pie,'' FEMA director Joe Allbaugh told members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary.

``Preparedness is the key to everything, whether you are talking about tornados or flooding or terrorism events,'' Allbaugh said. ``I'm an old Boy Scout, and I believe in the motto, 'Be Prepared.' And the way we can be prepared is to educate and to train, particularly those who are the first responders -- those who put their lives at risk every day.''

Allbaugh stressed that the office will serve only as an organizer to make sure local and state agencies are prepared for terrorism: ``We are not a deterrence agency, we are not in the intelligence business.''

The new office created some concern among lawmakers who feared the effort might cause additional confusion for local governments unsure of who they must report to during an attack. Many roles that will be examined by FEMA now fall under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department or other federal agencies.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., cited a training exercise conducted last year to gauge the ability to respond to a major terrorist attack. He said many ``bodies'' lay on the ground for hours while emergency workers tried to figure out ``who was in charge.''

Allbaugh said that kind of problem will be among those examined by his new office, as well as Cheney's working group.

In additional to Allbaugh, other administration officials appeared before the Senate panel to testify about the increasing difficulty of combating terrorism because of new technology and growing economic connections between nations.

Many senators expressed unhappiness with government efforts to face the growing threats of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

``Our programs are both fragmented and overlapping,'' said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va. ``Fortunately, Congress and the executive branch both appear to recognize this fact and both branches of government are working or at least beginning to work to find solutions.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell called terrorism ``part of the dark side of globalization.'' He said he was comfortable receiving ``all the information it is possible to have'' about national security.

But he acknowledged that ``there is somebody out there who is going to find a weak link.''

--------

Cheney to Focus on Terrorism Threat as Head of New Federal Office

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/politics/08CND-TERROR.html

WASHINGTON, May 8 - President Bush today acknowledged a growing concern about the nation's vulnerability to terrorist attacks, instructing Vice President Dick Cheney to head a special group to study the topic and creating a new office within the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Both Cheney's group and the new office, called the Office of National Preparedness, would be devoted to making sure that the country is ready in particular to recover from any use of weapons of mass destruction on American soil, a situation that would require coordination among various federal agencies.

What Mr. Cheney would be looking into - and what Joe Allbaugh, the director of F.E.M.A., would be implementing - is a system to make sure cooperation between those agencies is as smooth as possible.

"It is clear that the threat of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons being used against the United States - while not immediate - is very real," President Bush said in a written statement delivered to a group of senators who began hearings today into the country's counterterrorism efforts.

"Should our efforts to reduce the threat to our country from weapons of mass destruction be less than fully successful," the president said, "prudence dictates that the United States be fully prepared to deal effectively with the consequences of such a weapon being used."

Mr. Bush's actions and statement reflected a consensus among scholars and policy makers that terrorism is an increasingly urgent threat to national security and that the country needs to do more to prevent and prepare for it.

Mr. Bush's remarks also came as the attention of Americans was about to be focused anew on the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the country's history. Next week, Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be executed for making and detonating a truck bomb that blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and killed 168 people.

But several counterterrorism experts said that giving F.E.M.A. primary responsibility for managing the consequences of weapons of mass destruction might not be the best approach.

"It's an interesting question whether F.E.M.A. can herd all that cattle," said one of these experts, a former government official. He noted that it is smaller and less well funded than many of the other agencies involved in counterterrorism efforts.

Mr. Cheney's appointment to head a task force that will guide F.E.M.A.'s efforts sent at least a symbolic signal that the administration was taking the matter seriously. Mr. Cheney, who also led the administration's ongoing review of national energy policy, is the administration's point man for complicated challenges, with a plate already groaning under the weight of other responsibilities.

In an interview broadcast on CNN today, Mr. Cheney noted that some experts had recommended a separate government agency to deal with counterterrorism efforts but that Mr. Bush had decided instead to create the new office within F.E.M.A. Mr. Cheney's task force is expected to issue recommendations to Congress by Oct. 1, after first having those recommendations reviewed by the National Security Council.

Mr. Allbaugh was among a parade of high-ranking administration officials - including Secretary of State Colin Powell and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill - who appeared today at the joint hearing of members of the Senate Armed Services, Appropriations and Intelligence committees.

These officials described ways in which counterterrorism efforts had been improved, steps that still needed to be taken and the sad truth that 100-percent security and safety from terrorism could not - and perhaps should not - be achieved.

"If we adopted this hunkered down attitude, behind our concrete and our barbed wire, the terrorists would have achieved a kind of victory," Mr. Powell told the senators. "At the end of the day, what America is to the world is not only what we say or do, it is who we are. And we are not helmeted giants huddling in our bunkers awaiting the enemy."

-------- activists

Falun Gong Protests Greet China's Leader in Hong Kong

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/08/world/08CND-HONG.html

HONG KONG, May 8 - President Jiang Zemin of China championed the freedom of Hong Kong today, as protesters from the Falun Gong spiritual movement rallied throughout the city, accusing Mr. Jiang of imprisoning and torturing their members on the Chinese mainland.

Mr. Jiang was the main attraction at a business conference held by AOL Time Warner, the new media and publishing conglomerate. Time Warner's executives spent part of the gala dinner at which Mr. Jiang spoke trying to figure out among themselves how to persuade China to lift a ban on the company's flagship magazine, Time.

It was an awkward day for this former British colony and the American corporation, both of which have deep, complicated ties to China.

Hong Kong struggled to balance its commitment to civil liberties with its desire not to offend Mr. Jiang, who has led the campaign against Falun Gong. AOL Time Warner juggled its desire to cultivate Mr. Jiang and the Chinese government with its need to defend one of its most prominent magazines.

Only the Chinese president, who jauntily greeted a parade of well-wishers, seemed not to notice the conflicts.

"Hong Kong residents have enjoyed full freedom and more democratic rights than ever before," he declared, referring to the semiautonomous status Beijing granted Hong Kong after China resumed sovereignty here in 1997. "The Chinese government will never waiver in or change this policy, come what may."

As Mr. Jiang spoke, adherents of Falun Gong tested his claim outside the convention center, mounting the first major protest against the president on Chinese soil since before the sect was banned on the mainland in July 1999. It is still permitted to operate here.

The police did not interfere in the protests, though Falun Gong members complained they were kept blocks away from where Mr. Jiang spoke. The group also said that nearly 100 of its members who had traveled to Hong Kong to join the rallies were turned back at the airport on Monday and today.

The American Consulate here said United States citizens had been among those refused entry. A spokeswoman, Barbara A. Zigli, said the consulate had sought an explanation from the Hong Kong government.

Ms. Zigli expressed concern that the authorities had acted arbitrarily in stopping the visitors, which, she said, "could have the effect of limiting freedom of association and belief, and restricting the free flow of ideas."

The editors of Time have been concerned about these issues since early March, when the magazine stopped being available on newsstands in mainland China, although it continues to be sold here. The ban came 10 days after it published an article about the activities of Falun Gong in Hong Kong.

"We regret it appears Time's distribution in China has been restricted," said Walter Isaacson, the editorial director of Time Inc. and the former managing editor of Time. "We're making inquiries, but either way, Time's journalists in China will continue to do their jobs vigorously."

Mr. Isaacson, who was seated at the head table with Mr. Jiang and Gerald M. Levin, the chairman of AOL Time Warner, then excused himself to exchange a toast with officials from China's central bank.

A delegation from the company met with Mr. Jiang this afternoon, but Time's status was not broached. As executives mingled with Chinese officials this evening, their understanding of the situation became murkier rather than clearer. Some officials told them that Time had not been formally banned.

But nobody was in the mood to play sleuth at what was supposed to be a conference about the opportunities for American business in China.

In his remarks, Mr. Levin described Mr. Jiang as a "man of honor" and called him "my good friend." He used the same phrase two years ago, when Time Warner held this conference, the Fortune Global Forum, in Shanghai.

Some of AOL Time Warner's guests have gone farther than Mr. Levin to win favor with the Chinese leaders. James Murdoch, the 28-year-old son of Rupert Murdoch, said in a speech in Los Angeles in March that Falun Gong was an apocalyptic cult that "clearly does not have the success of China at heart."

Worried about protests by Falun Gong, the Hong Kong police mounted the most intense security operation since the handover in 1997. But at designated parks around Hong Kong, the members were allowed to practice their exercises in peace. At one rally, two men held up a banner that said, "Jiang Zemin cannot shirk responsibility for the persecution of Falun Gong."

Nearby, Wong Tung Yin described being nabbed while protesting in Tiananmen Square last Jan. 1. A native of Beijing who lives in Hong Kong, Ms. Wong said she was pushed to the ground and kicked by a plainclothes officer. She was sent back to Hong Kong and told she could not return to mainland China for five years.

"I am very touched that Hong Kong has given me the freedom to practice what I believe in," Ms. Wong said. "In my heart, I believe there are people in the Hong Kong government who support us."

--------

Hong Kong Protesters Have Field Day

New York Times
May 8, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-hongkon.html

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong residents jumped on the protest bandwagon Tuesday, taking to the streets to air grievances ranging from tainted pork to ``stolen'' ancestral homes during a two-day visit by China's President Jiang Zemin.

The Falun Gong spiritual movement, banned in mainland China, took the spotlight and other anti-communist demonstrations also drew attention but more exotic issues were also aired, including a lonely fight by a 70-year-old woman to preserve a palm tree.

Police controlled the locations and limited the numbers to ensure Jiang was not embarrassed but Hong Kong residents embraced the opportunity to use their special freedoms in communist China.

Hong Kong's seven million residents were given a high degree of autonomy, and a continued common law system, after Britain returned the former colony to China in 1997.

``We want the Hong Kong government to thoroughly check imports of Thai pork,'' said Fung Kin-chung, secretary-general of the Hong Kong Livestock Industry Association.

Fung plans to lead some 700 pork farmers in a protest during Jiang's stay for an international economic forum, which will group some 700 political and business leaders.

Making her voice heard opposite the downtown conference venue was Ma Yuk-lan, 70, who goes by her Muslim name Aishah.

Ma is at odds with the Hong Kong government, which wants to move her six-story tall date palm tree to make way for a public road project.

``This is a present from Allah, I don't want to lose it,'' said Ma, who has tended to the tree for the last 50 years. ``I hope Jiang Zemin can help me so they will not take it away.''

Jiang's visit also drew pro-democracy activists, who called for an end to communist China's one-party rule and the release of political detainees on the mainland.

Families of mainland Chinese fighting for Hong Kong residency were also out in force from Monday night.


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