------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Today In History
Cold warriors ride again
Russia Unsure of Missile - Shield Need
Nevada: from viva Vegas to nuclear dump
DOE Puts Declassification Into Reverse
Bush, Putin to Meet June 16

MILITARY
Colombian Chief Sells Cocaine Plan
Colombian Police Link Blast to Terrorist Feud
U.S. Guns Smuggled Into Mexico Aid Drug War
Israelis Fire on Palestinian Areas
Israel Says Warplanes Are a Message
Arabs urged to sever Israel ties
Dutch Firm Is Hired to Raise Sub
Military Emphasis On Space Criticized
Lost in Space
U.N. Security Council Mission Hits Snag in Congo
Survey: Some Okinawans Back US Base

OTHER
Bush Shows His Green Side to Sell Agenda
Motorists May Turn to Ethanol
Bush Orders Quicker Power Plant Approvals
U.S. Reconsiders Enforcement of Pollution Laws
Nichols Lawyer Claims F.B.I. Hid Evidence
Awards for Heroism Go to Spy Plane Crew

ACTIVISTS
Close Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant Petition


-------- NUCLEAR

Today In History

May 19
The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010518/aponline200050_001.htm

In 1967, the Soviet Union ratified a treaty with the United States and Britain banning nuclear weapons from outer space.

-------- australia

Cold warriors ride again

By Phillip Adams
The Australian
19may01
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign - nonukes@foesyd.org.au

MY first memory is of the end of the world. I'm one year old, toddling beneath the peppercorns beside our home, the congregational manse. There's a great noise in the sky and looking up I see, through the foliage, that the sky is on fire. I rush through a torn flywire door into the little room that serves as the Reverend Charles Arthur Adams's study, and the memory ends as my father looks up from his desk, where it's highly probable that he was working on the following Sunday's sermon.

Although it's probable that what I saw in the heavens wasn't an apocalyptic vision but simply summer lightning, the experience seems to have predisposed me to a heightened sense of personal and planetary mortality. For the years ahead would be clouded, mushroom clouded, with dread.

I was born as World War II was beginning. The skies of Europe were truly ablaze, with countless children doomed by man-made storms, by the thunder and lightning of mighty weapons. And the terrors wouldn't end with armistice and surrender.

My first nickname, at East Kew State School, was Adambomb. And I would grow up in the Cold War, with nuclear Armageddon seeming a certainty. Oh, the end of the world might begin a long, long way away but the radioactive clouds would, finally, get to Melbourne. Thus Nevil Shute's On the Beach wasn't a fiction. It was a prediction.

I spent my early teens in the hills of Eltham. Land was cheap and, acre by acre, the eucalypts were axed to make room for the frames of houses being built for, and by, young couples. Who'd proudly wheel their babies along the rutted, unmade roads. And I'd silently scream at them and their foolishness. How could they have hopes, let alone children, when the US and the Soviets were playing their insane game of MAD, the monstrous acronym for mutual assured destruction?

"What are you going to do if you grow up?" was the question my generation asked itself. We knew the odds were stacked against us but found refuge in the absurdities of Spike Milligan, the adolescents' Samuel Beckett, doing the voices of Eccles and Bluebottle from The Goon Show. And I decided to join the Communist Party, becoming perhaps its youngest recruit.

I'll never forget the day, long before the Cuban missile crisis, when World War III broke out. The announcement I heard on radio turned out to be a mistake but, in that nanosecond, it was no more than the confirmation of long-held fears. I can recall looking out the window of the building where I was a 15-year-old office boy, watching people rushing through the rain to catch trains and buses. It was simply the end of a work day but I was convinced they were hurrying home so that they could die with their families.

It didn't happen that day but would almost happen on many others. When there were hiccups with the Strategic Air Command's "fail-safe" flights - or when Washington or Moscow went on red alert because of a diplomatic blunder or because flights of migrating birds had been misconstrued as incoming missiles.

The Cold War was carcinogenic, producing a great malignancy in the human soul. Its symptoms included a culture of despair, violence, addiction and self-pity. Many increasingly familiar social problems were detonated by the underlying dread of mass destruction. It must have been 100 times worse for people living in US or Soviet cities, or in the capitals of Europe, but it was also a part of the air that Australians breathed. The air we knew was being poisoned by strontium 90 produced by thousands of nuclear tests.

Cold War terrors played an important part in Australian politics. Elections were fought on, of all things, foreign policy. I remember the Democratic Labor Party commercials depicting the red menace and the domino theory.

Australia became a site for bomb tests. And when the Cold War became hot wars in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, Australia was always there.

A-bomb. H-bomb. ICBM. B-29. Missile silos. "Duck and cover" campaigns. MAD. Megadeath. McCarthyism. Overkill. Nuclear retaliation. Fallout shelters. Paranoia and terror grew like tumours. Billions believed themselves to be on death row as, slowly but surely, the time for mass extermination approached. What physicists called the nuclear clock was just seconds from midnight. It was going to be one hell of a cure to the population problem.

There was no doubt that the human race was about to obliterate itself when, suddenly, it was all over. Extraordinarily, miraculously, the nuclear clock stopped. The Kremlin capitulated, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. And the enormous release of tension would, I was sure, lead to an outbreak of joy without precedence. The heavens would ring to the sounds of swords being beaten into ploughshares and there'd be an outburst of optimism, of creativity. There'd be an evaporation of personal neuroses, of a popular culture polluted with violence, of a drug culture created by despair. There'd be a renaissance of the human spirit.

Well, it didn't happen. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said we'd had the Third World War in instalments and those decades of nightmares had infected every cell, giving us a morbidity we couldn't escape. Once the US stopped dancing on the USSR's grave, once capitalism tired of congratulating itself over the defeat of communism, we merely refocused our fears and anxieties. If anything, our world became more violent, our societies and citizens more self-destructive.

Now the wheel is turning and we've a White House reviving the billion-dollar nonsense of a missile shield, thus ensuring that, particularly in our region, the Cold War will start again. Prodigious amounts of money will be wasted on something that will not deliver safety or certainty. Only immense profits. As for the "rogue states", any rogue with half a brain can easily carry bubonic plague into New York in a briefcase, or the components for a nuclear bomb in a backpack. The world knows that Bush's missile shield will make catastrophe more likely, yet we've got a Foreign Minister who welcomes it with grovelling enthusiasm. This afternoon, at the farm, while dictating this column, I saw lightning through another row of peppercorns. And I had the strangest feeling. This is where I came in.

-------- missile defense

Russia Unsure of Missile - Shield Need

New York Times
May 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010519/aponline144650_000.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lengthy talks with the Bush administration have failed to sway Russia to approve anti-missile defenses or to scrap a landmark treaty that bans them, the country's foreign minister said Saturday.

``I will be frank with you. The offered reasoning fails to convince us and the majority of the world,'' Igor Ivanov said before flying home.

President Bush, who met with Ivanov for a half-hour Friday at the White House, has dismissed the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as a relic of the Cold War that should not block protecting the United States from missile attack.

Bush sent teams of State Department, Pentagon and White House officials to the four corners of the world this month to try to persuade other governments that North Korea, Iran and other states might launch a long-range missile attack.

But Ivanov said Russia and most other countries were not convinced ``the potential threats require the dismantling of the entire body of the agreements on disarmament and the jeopardizing of nonproliferation regimes.''

His statement reflects the view held also by many American analysts and members of Congress that a missile defense would inspire other countries to develop weapons to pierce a shield, thereby igniting a new nuclear arms race.

But, Ivanov said, ``We have agreed to continue the dialogue on all the aspects of the issue of strategic stability at the political and expert levels.''

Besides Bush, his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell also talked to Ivanov about the dispute on Friday.

Powell will meet with Ivanov again in Budapest, Hungary, at the end of the month. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin will have missile defense at the top of their agenda when they meet June 16 in Slovenia.

At a State Department news conference Friday, Powell stressed the Bush administration would ``act on what we believe are our own best interests at that time'' if agreement is not reached with Russia and other countries.

But Ivanov on Saturday counseled patience and waiting for the results of the consultations. ``We do hope a mutually satisfactory result will be achieved,'' he said.

In fact, Ivanov said, there is ``some concordance of opinions'' on reducing U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons arsenals.

Under the 1993 START II Treaty, the two nations are committed to reducing their warhead stockpiles to the range of 3,000 to 3,500 each.

Ivanov said Russia would like to work out an agreement for a ceiling of 1,500 warheads or less for each side, while the Bush administration prefers making cuts unilaterally.

Last year, Russia presented the United States with a draft of a START III treaty, but the Clinton and now Bush administrations have not agreed to negotiations.

``We certainly have our own differences,'' Ivanov said at a news conference before returning to Moscow.

But he said he left ``fully confident that Russia and the United States share a common understanding of the basic principle -- that new global challenges and threats can only be met through equal and usually beneficial interaction between our nations.''

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

-------- nevada

Nevada: from viva Vegas to nuclear dump
America's big new atomic waste site will be at Yucca mountain - unless a coalition of opponents can stop it

Saturday May 19, 2001
The Guardian
Duncan Campbell in Amargosa valley, southern Nevada
From: Sally Light <sallight1@earthlink.net>

The only sound is the humming of desert flies, the only movement is of lizards and ground squirrels, but in the wake of George Bush's stated intention this week to increase nuclear power and found a big national dumpsite for the resulting waste, this patch of other-worldly beauty in the Nevada desert is set to become the focus for a battle.

Its name is Yucca mountain - six miles of flat-top ridge and some of the land around - and the fight will not only be about the future of the nuclear industry and the environment but also about the legal rights of native Americans and the authority of individual states that decide to challenge the federal government.

"My energy plan directs the department of energy and the environmental protection agency to move expeditiously to find a safe and permanent repository for nuclear waste," President Bush said in announcing his new energy policy on Thursday. No one in Nevada has any doubt where that repository will be.

For more than a decade, Yucca mountain - where, 90 miles north of Las Vegas, a smaller dump already exists - has been top choice for big storage site.

Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, has said: "There is ample scientific basis for making a decision to dispose of used nuclear fuel at Yucca mountain."

Already $6.7bn (£4.7bn) of government money has been spent on the Yucca mountain project. The plan is that within 10 or 12 years, the country's nuclear waste, currently stored near nuclear plants in 31 different states, will be buried at a greatly expanded facility there.

The attraction of the site is that it is deep in the sparsely populated Nevada desert; the adjoining area has been used by the military for missile and weapons testing for the past half century.

But there is a growing coalition against the dump, and it includes not just environmentalists but everyone from the governor, Kenny Guinn, to local farmers, casino owners and tribal leaders.

Legal fight

John Wells is the southern representative of the Western Shoshone, a tribe of around 10,000 who have lived for hundreds of years on the land under dispute. A carpenter by trade - and a former rugby player who has toured England and Wales with his side - Mr Wells sees the battle over the dump as vital not only for the environmental but also as a test for Indian rights.

He argues that because the Ruby valley peace treaty signed by the Shoshone and the US government in 1863 contains no nuclear reference, use of the area for that purpose is disallowed.

"The treaty states quite specifically what is allowed - and storing nuclear waste is not allowed. Our consent has never been forthcoming," Mr Wells said over an iced tea at a grillhouse in Las Vegas where he lives. "This is our land. Our people have lived here and are buried here so it is sacred land."

The tribe has a long-running campaign for compensation for a big expanse of the land it claims belonged to its ancestors - 23m acres, in which Yucca mountain occupies a corner.

A settlement offer of more than $100m is on the table, and some in the tribe want to accept. No resolution has been reached since a meeting of tribes last year, when Carrie Dann was among Western Shoshone activists speaking out against acceptance.

This existing land and compensation issue has become entangled with the nuclear one. According to Mr Wells, the majority of the Shoshone are opposed to the nuclear plan.

He believes that the Indians have an unanswerable legal case when it comes to the land in question, and that Nevada could benefit from that if the battle goes to the courts, as it inevitably will. Others in the area have different reasons to fight the plan. Ed Goedhart, whose Ponderosa dairy farm in Amargosa valley has one of the largest organic herds in the country and provides Nevada with 25% of its milk, is only a brief journey from the proposed site.

Sitting in his office with his Blue Heeler dog dozing at his feet and some of his 6,200 Holstein cows are being milked on another cloudless Nevada day, Mr Goedhart is deeply critical of the government's behaviour and its initial report on the economic impact of a nuclear-waste site in Nye county: it said 120 worked in agriculture, forestry and fishing in the county, while the true number, he said, was about 550.

He is the area's biggest employer, with 100 people on his farm and 700 workers in related industries dependant on it, but no one contacted him before producing these simple figures, he said: "The whole thing is a charade, a joke."

The authorities "have not dealt fairly with us and I could be put out of business", Mr Goedhart said. All it would take, he said, would be for a competitor to point out that Ponderosa milk was being produced next to a nuclear dump.

Last year, he questioned the accuracy of the government's study at a public meeting. The next day, he alleges, three government registered cars were cruising up and down outside his property but their occupans did not come to talk to him. "I feel as an American that this is a justice issue. If a private company tried to do what the government's doing right now, the officers would be in prison."

Contamination fear

Kalynda Tilges, of the local Citizen Alert group, who pays many visits to the site in her ancient Dodge camper van, said that he group knew that as soon as Mr Bush became president the move towards the dump would accelerate.

"Now Bush is in, the corporations and utility companies feel they have blank cheque but in the long run this may gal vanise the public on a national level. We're not saying 'not in Nevada' we're saying 'not anywhere'. As the Western Shoshone say, we all breathe the same air and walk the same earth. We need to phase out nuclear power."

Judy Treichel of a campaign group called Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force said that it was clear that Yucca mountain was the intended site, though Mr Bush did not mention it in his speech: "They're only looking at one site. I found his speech outrageous." She suspects that members of congress who get financial backing from the nuclear industry are "already be at work on drafting legislation".

A national organisation founded by Ralph Nader in 1971, Public Citizen, has alleged in a report that "if this permanent storage facility is built, it is certain to release radioactivity into the environment. No one can guarantee the integrity of waste storage casks for the 10,000-year period that their contents would remain dangerously radioactive."

It also believes that radioactive mater ial could leak into the groundwater and, since there is some seismic activity in Nevada, the safety of nuclear storage in the state is open to question.

But some locals see benefits in the scheme. They expect the nuclear site to bring work so that their children will not have be croupiers or lifeguards at the Las Vegas hotels. They also believe the project could increase the value of their property.

Ed Goedhart is sceptical about a jobs windfall, saying that the project work so far and the adjoining military base has put little into the local economy. "All that money has gone somewhere else. It's lined the pockets of lobbyists and highly paid consultants who live in Denver, Colorado or some other yuppie place and the workers are flown in or shuttled in."

In Shoshone lore, the Yucca mountain is a snake. If the government and the nuclear industry do press ahead with the waste dump scheme, as now seems inevitable, they could find that the mountain and its diverse supporters still carry a potent bite.

For storage: 77,000 tons

. Proportion of electricity in the US generated by nuclear power: 20%

. Decision due on nation's main nuclear dump site: 2002

. When site could become operational: 2010

. Period that nuclear waste remains dangerously radioactive: 10,000 years

. Estimated total cost of Yucca mountain nuclear dump project: $58bn. Money spent so far is $6.7m

. Quantity of nuclear waste to be stored: 77,000 tons

. Official Nevada state web- site on issue: www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/

-------- us nuc politics

DOE Puts Declassification Into Reverse
Reviewers Combing Historic Files at Archives for Data to Reclassify as Secret

By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46729-2001May18?language=printer

The Energy Department censors arrived in force at the offices of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project the morning after a tiny news item in the March 28 Washington Post said that records of the late president's National Security Council were about to be made public.

Between 10 and 15 reviewers took a look at the subject-by-subject descriptions of what had been laboriously declassified by staffers at the project, part of the National Archives complex in College Park, and fanned out among the stacks to hunt for nuclear secrets that might be compromised by disclosure.

They found about 14 pages, out of more than 100,000, that they decided had to be kept off-limits. Nixon project staffers were bewildered. What was at issue, they say, was "basic stuff," background papers about nuclear missile strengths that the United States and the Soviet Union had informed each other about in 1972 during negotiations over the SALT I strategic arms limitation treaty. Nixon's national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, disclosed many of the numbers publicly at a May 27, 1972, news conference in a Moscow nightclub, observing wryly that "[s]ince I have given out the Soviet figures, I might as well give out the American figures."

"They reclassified them," said one archives official who asked not to be named. "We had experts from the Department of State and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency who said there would be no sensitivity because we were giving the information to the other side."

DOE officials defend their action even while saying they have no information to tell them whether it was given to the Soviets or not. Rules, they say, are rules.

"Stockpile information is classified," said Kenneth Stein of DOE's Office of Nuclear and National Security Information. "The information is protected under current DOE classification guidelines."

The hurried visit to the Nixon project was part of a congressionally ordered Energy Department review of documents at least 25 years old, earmarked for release to the public under a 1995 executive order signed by then-President Bill Clinton. Congress ordered the double-check in 1998 to protect nuclear weapons information that might be buried in the files. The Clinton declassification order did not apply to nuclear secrets, which are protected by the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, and DOE said its preliminary surveys showed that some weapons information had been improperly released and one document had even been posted on the Internet.

Under the program, now in its third year, the Energy Department has trained close to 1,300 declassification officers at government agencies to be on the lookout for restricted data (RD), information concerning the design and development of nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors, and formerly restricted data (FRD), dealing with the use of nuclear weapons, such as their location and design.

The most expensive part of the project, costing $6 million to $7 million a year, is centered at the National Archives, where the Energy Department has stationed 45 reviewers, hired by a private contractor, and three federal managers to inspect millions of pages covered by Clinton's declassification order. Twenty other censors travel the country looking for secrets in the records of the presidential libraries and regional warehouses.

"They're all college graduates," said Joseph S. Mahaley, director of Energy's Office of Security Affairs. "Some are nuclear physicists and scientists. I think they're sort of the unsung heroes of this saga."

Some archivists have less flattering descriptions. "They have carte blanche authorization to go into the stacks, and sometimes that's been disruptive to [archives] staff in doing their jobs," said Peter Jeffrey, president of the American Federation of Government Employees unit for archives workers. "There's a general impression among most people here that they spread out and look at files that don't necessarily need to be looked at to justify their presence."

The war in Vietnam is a case in point. The National Archives has more than 18,000 boxes of records about U.S. forces in Southeast Asia, stretching from 1950 to 1975, and Energy Department officials are looking at each one, even though no nuclear weapons were used in the conflict. The boxes are stuffed with 15 million pages covering 1,500 topics. Energy officials say they've checked out 1,100 and have just 400 to go. Among the papers awaiting review are 31 boxes of applications to marry Vietnamese women.

Archives officials had proposed designating the entire Vietnam record group as "highly unlikely to contain RD/FRD" information, a step that would have freed it from further scrutiny, but assistant archivist Michael J. Kurtz said the Energy Department rejected the idea. He said he couldn't quarrel with the decision because the review teams have found some information they set aside as RD/FRD.

What they've been looking for, said Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis, are records that might expose "the inventory of nuclear weapons carried on naval ships during the Vietnam War." Mahaley said such papers could have been misfiled in any box, no matter what the label says.

Mahaley bristles at the thought that the Energy Department is "reclassifying" documents rather than finding protected information that was never properly declassified. He also said his reviewers spend little time checking a box to see if it needs page-by-page review. He said they've "sampled" about 200 million pages of declassified documents so far, "surveyed" or taken a closer look at about 107 million, and set aside about 30 million, or 15 percent, for page-by-page review.

At this point, he estimated, they have about 1.4 billion pages to go. He said it would probably take five to seven more years of "what I would characterize as a fairly large effort and then we will be able to scale it back."

Steven Garfinkel, who is in charge of encouraging government-wide declassification efforts as director of the Information Security Oversight Office, said the biggest fallout from the Energy Department program is that it has delayed public access to historically valuable records. Garfinkel had hoped that the "highly unlikely" designation would speed release of many records, but no one has used it.

"There is a tremendous reluctance on the part of the agencies to take that chance," Garfinkel said. "They are taking the rather-be-safe-than-sorry approach. They don't want DOE to go into the files and tell them, 'Here's something you missed.' "

In reports to Congress, officials at Energy say they headed off the "inadvertent release" of 22,500 pages containing a smattering of RD or FRD data in the program's first year and the next year found 40 pages, out of 52 million reviewed, that should not have been declassified. Another report is expected shortly.

In only one instance to date, according to DOE, a case involving "deployment of nuclear weapons in a foreign country in the early 1950s," did an outside researcher gain access. Mahaley declined further comment, but the document apparently was a 1961 State Department report on Jupiter missile sites in Italy that the nonprofit National Security Archive put on its Web site several years ago. The report said in part that "[i]t clearly makes no sense to continue to classify the existence of the Jupiters and their location, but the Italian government seems to want it that way, for political reasons."

Critics contend that information about where weapons were deployed decades ago is far from a threat to national security, but the legislation Congress passed gives Energy Department officials no choice but to hunt for it with a fine-tooth comb.

"Nuclear-armed vessels and aircraft were essentially all over the globe at some time," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "The problem is that Congress has said we don't want classified information disclosed without looking at how much nonsense is classified. They have set up a process that is inordinately expensive and time-consuming. It is a bad law. In a better Congress, it would be modified."

Mahaley said: "Whatever we do, we do because the law requires it. I don't have any leeway here. If it's classified, it's classified."

----

Bush, Putin to Meet June 16
Missile Defense, Nuclear Arms Top Agenda for Slovenia Summit

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46714-2001May18?language=printer

President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed yesterday to hold their first meeting June 16 in Slovenia to discuss U.S. plans for missile defense, which Moscow has resisted, as well as deep cuts in nuclear arsenals and a variety of regional issues.

The summit was announced during a day of meetings with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who said he expected the talks to be "lively . . . full of content and very directed at discussing very specific issues." Ivanov met three times yesterday with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, as well as with Bush, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and members of Congress.

The Bush-Putin summit, experts said, is aimed at putting U.S.-Russian relations back on track after some initial tension over Bush's determination to push ahead with missile defense and over the mass expulsions of nearly 50 diplomats on each side because of espionage allegations.

Missile defense remains the most contentious issue, and Ivanov and Powell said yesterday at a joint press conference that they had established two working groups, one on potential threats to international stability and the other to examine the role and future of arms control agreements. Talks on missile plans continued last night between Undersecretary of State John Bolton and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov.

Bush has called the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, a relic of the Cold War and has urged a new strategic "framework." Critics, including many leading political figures in Europe and China, have argued that Bush's plan could destabilize international arms control accords and spark a new arms race.

Ivanov said Russia was willing to talk about the issue to "determine what the challenges to stability are, and how to resolve them." He had earlier told reporters following talks with Bush that, "There can be no breakthrough on missile defenses. There can only be lengthy consultations. This is not a question to be resolved in a single day."

Though Ivanov and Powell struck a friendly tone in their press conference, Powell did warn that the talks with Moscow over missile defense would not be allowed to obstruct U.S. plans indefinitely.

"Consultations can't be a substitute for action. So we will take the necessary time to get the views of all who have an interest in this matter and factor those views into our consideration," he said. "At the time when we think there has been enough consultation and we've reached agreements with others, then we will act on those agreements or act on what we believe are our best interests at that time."

Powell said the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana was chosen as the site of the summit because it was hospitable and convenient for both leaders' schedules.

But Slovenia, once a republic of Yugoslavia, also provides a symbolic backdrop for the Bush-Putin summit meeting, said Russia expert Thomas Graham of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, because it is one of the countries usually mentioned as a possible candidate for membership in NATO. It is also high on the list of countries to be admitted to the European Union when the EU expands into Eastern Europe.

Graham said that while the choice of Slovenia enables the United States to make a statement about the possible expansion of NATO, the decision for Bush to make a special stop to meet Putin could bolster the Russian president's prestige at home.

Powell and Ivanov also discussed a range of other issues yesterday, including United Nations sanctions on Iraq. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia -- meet next week in New York to discuss a British and American proposal to refocus the sanctions on the regime by loosening restrictions on civilian goods and tightening the embargo on military and "dual-use" items. Each member has veto power.

"We also have our own proposals," Ivanov said without elaborating. But he added that "we have a common understanding of the final goal that we are striving to reach."

Powell said the U.S. side had expressed concern about freedom of the press in Russia, especially in the wake of the takeover of an independent television station that had been critical of Putin's government.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), one member of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who met Ivanov, also raised the issue of press freedom. "If not resolved, these human rights violations could become a huge impediment to the progress of U.S.-Russian relations," he said later in a statement. Powell also said he raised U.S. concerns about the situation in Chechnya, where Russian troops have been battling Chechen nationalists. He said Ivanov had promised that Russia would allow an assistance group from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to return to Chechnya.

At the press conference, Ivanov said he would convey U.S. protests over the jailing of John Tobin, a U.S. exchange student sentenced last month to 37 months in prison for possession of a small amount of marijuana. Tobin's family has cited his e-mail messages to the U.S. Embassy as evidence that he was framed after refusing to spy for Russia.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Colombian Chief Sells Cocaine Plan

MAY 19, 12:35 EST
By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=CSA&STORYID=APIS7C3A4600

VILLA GARZON, Colombia (AP) - Months after the arrival of U.S.-trained troops and fumigation planes, President Andres Pastrana ventured into the world's cocaine heartland to sell the ``soft side'' of his Plan Colombia antidrug initiative.

It was a hard sell.

In a sun-splashed plaza in Villa Garzon, chanting demonstrators repeatedly drowned out the president this week as he tried to explain that the biggest-ever injection of economic development aid into Putumayo state had begun.

Tens of thousands of peasant farmers in the southern state grow coca - the main ingredient of cocaine - because it is about the only business that will give them a meager profit.

Plan Colombia has drawn criticism, because while the aerial fumigation of coca and the deployment of U.S.-trained counternarcotics troops and helicopters began late last year, the social side - also supported with U.S. aid - has lagged far behind.

By making his symbolic visit to Putumayo on Thursday and Friday, Pastrana tried to show that delivery of infrastructure improvements and funds for alternative development was underway, and would gather steam. But in a state historically neglected by the central government, Pastrana found skepticism.

``We must make a new Putumayo, one that is tranquil, at peace and without coca,'' Pastrana, flanked by Cabinet ministers and military commanders, said during his first stop in this town nestled below emerald mountains.

``We will make Putumayo a model state,'' Pastrana declared from a balloon-festooned podium.

``Liar!'' someone shouted from 3,000 people packed into Villa Garzon's plaza. A few dozen people picked up the chant: ``Liar, liar!''

They then switched chants: ``Pastrana, Pastrana, don't deceive the people!''

Pastrana, wearing a white polo shirt emblazoned with the words ``A New Putumayo,'' plowed ahead with his prepared remarks and ignored the protesters.

Putumayo produces most of the coca in Colombia, which in turn produces most of the world's cocaine. The crops are protected and ``taxed'' by leftist rebels and rival paramilitary forces.

To stem the flow to the United States and beyond, Washington has deployed fumigation planes and trained soldiers to protect them from being shot down, and is sending combat helicopters.

Anger in Villa Garzon at Washington's military support was evident, underscored by a sign that read: ``We don't want more weapons or helicopters, but instead more classrooms and books.''

``The United States thinks they're the boss here,'' fumed a resident. ``We don't want fumigation, and we don't want money from Uncle Sam.''

The audience of villagers and farmers, many of them coca growers, looked on blankly as Pastrana, making the first visit ever by a Colombian president to Villa Garzon, told of the huge sums that would be spent.

Pastrana's aides said $60.9 million in Colombian government funds, some of it loaned by the World Bank and similar institutions, would be spent in Putumayo. About three-fifths of the money would go for schools, hospitals, aqueducts, expanding the electrical system and other projects, and the rest for roads.

The only burst of applause came when he announced that paving had started on a highway leading from the state capital, Mocoa. There are few roads in Putumayo, and most are pitted dirt tracks.

Two young coca harvesters drank cold sodas alongside Villa Garzon's plaza, listening to Pastrana's speech.

``The money will never reach the people,'' predicted one, Jorge Ceron. ``It always goes into the politicians' pockets.''

Pastrana said it would be up to communities to ensure the funds are properly spent. He insisted he was not coming with empty promises.

He handed out vouchers to a dozen poor families in Villa Garzon. The government is also building a processing plant for heart of palm, one of the crops being touted as an alternative to coca, near the village of Santana.

Pastrana said 20,000 families had agreed to cut down their own coca plants in exchange for aid.

----

Colombian Police Link Blast to Terrorist Feud

New York Times
May 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/world/19COLO.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 18 (Reuters) - A feud between right-wing paramilitaries and criminal gangs was blamed today for a powerful car bomb that exploded in a crowded park in the Colombian city of Medellin on Thursday night, killing 8 people and injuring 137.

"All indications are that this is a retaliation stemming from a war between the A.U.C. and criminal bands, specifically the Terrace band," said Gen. Tobias Duran, director of operations at the National Police. The A.U.C. is the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which uses the initials of its Spanish name.

A car bomb packed with 44 pounds of explosives ripped through an upscale neighborhood in Medellin, north of Bogota, hurling shards of debris and glass onto people enjoying a night out at a park bordered by cafes, restaurants and night clubs.

It was the second car bomb to explode in less than 15 days in Colombia, torn by a 37-year-old war that has killed 40,000 people in the last decade.

The blast came hours after gunmen of the A.U.C. - an outlawed militia that targets leftist guerrillas - assassinated the leader of the Terrace, a Medellin-based criminal gang, said Gen. Alfredo Salgado, the deputy police chief.

The armed forces chief, Gen. Fernando Tápias, said the attack was the work of "demented terrorists" and called for special antiterrorist legislation.

The 8,000-member A.U.C. is locked in a feud with the Terrace, its former ally in an alliance of drug traffickers, street criminals and anti-Communist fighters, since the A.U.C. leader, Carlos Castaño, ordered the killing of its leaders in what was believed to be a settling of scores.

The surviving Terrace leaders then threatened to turn over to prosecutors evidence linking high-profile assassinations and kidnappings carried out by the gang on Mr. Castaño's orders.

General Duran said the police were investigating reports from witnesses that two men and two women were seen leaving a red Renault sedan at Parque Lleras park shortly before the explosion. No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing.

-------- drug war

U.S. Guns Smuggled Into Mexico Aid Drug War

May 19, 2001
By TIM WEINER and GINGER THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/world/19MEXI.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/world/19MEXI.html?pagewanted=2

MEXICO CITY, May 18 - Though public attention focuses on the drugs smuggled from Mexico to the north, officials here are increasingly concerned by an ever more lethal flow of guns south from the United States.

The growing number of assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons showing up in shootouts and assassinations has bolstered the arms caches of Mexico's drug cartels, officials in both countries say. And they feed one of the highest rates of gun homicide anywhere in the world.

This weekend, Attorney General John Ashcroft is coming here to meet with the nation's top law enforcement officials, and the firearms issue is on the agenda. High-level American and Mexican officials will meet here on Tuesday to discuss the problem.

But such meetings have been going on for years with little result, save a 1997 treaty, which the United States Senate has yet to approve, aimed at reducing the illegal traffic. And when he was a senator, Mr. Ashcroft consistently opposed stricter gun laws.

United States officials "had not put this issue at the same priority level that they put the issue of drugs," said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, national security counselor to President Vicente Fox. But the arms are being "used by people who are doing exactly those things that most concern the United States, drug trafficking," Mr. Aguilar Zinser said.

Mexico has strict if poorly enforced gun laws and strong criminal syndicates. In contrast, the United States has perhaps 200 million firearms, 103,718 federally licensed dealers and some of the world's least stringent firearms statutes. Most of the guns in Mexico were bought in the United States, then smuggled across the border, and officials of both governments say little can be done to stop that traffic.

"This is a large problem," said Gary Thomas, chief of the firearms division at the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It is magnified, he said, by the increasing number of high-powered semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles entering the country. "These firearms are utilized more by the narcotraffickers and organized crime groups," he said.

The profit margin in gun-running rivals that of cocaine; the potential penalties do not.

A $125 handgun sold in San Diego sells for three times that sum in Tijuana, 18 miles away, and $500 or more farther south. And violations of some United States gun laws - for example, falsifying gun-sale records - are mere misdemeanors that rarely lead to long prison terms.

One Mexican federal police officer, Alfonso Cuéllar Guevara, made more than $100,000 in less than two years buying 231 handguns from Texas gun shops and smuggling them to Mexico City. He received an 18-month federal sentence in Texas. Had he smuggled $100,000 worth of cocaine into the United States, he would have faced at least 15 years in prison.

No one knows the precise number of weapons illegally imported from the United States to Mexico, although it is assumed to total hundreds of thousands over the last decade. Mexican officials believe that guns from the United States account for 80 percent of the weapons in this country.

The border states of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, with a total of 12,706 licensed firearms dealers at gun shops and pawnbrokers, are thought to be among the big sources. Mr. Thomas said Florida was also emerging as a major provider of weapons sent by air and sea.

Typically, the weapons are smuggled in small shipments, hidden in secret compartments in car doors or washing machines, stashed in stolen automobiles, sent as checked luggage on commercial flights - or, most commonly, carried over the border in a car trunk or a suitcase.

Mexican officials call that last kind of smuggling "ant traffic." The ants, they say, can be members of sophisticated criminal organizations or migrants making a little extra cash. "When there are thousands of people crossing the border each day, there are only a certain number that can be stopped and searched," said Nicolas Suárez Valenzuela, intelligence coordinator for the Federal Preventive Police. "And usually, it's a very small number."

"There is always some new way of smuggling guns into the country," he added. "We have found guns in boxes of powdered milk. We have found guns in marmalade."

Not long ago, United States Customs officials in California seized two cargo containers of weaponry abandoned by the United States military after the fall of Saigon in 1975, headed to Mexico from Vietnam.

The smaller-caliber handguns from the United States go mostly to common criminals and ordinary citizens, but they are increasing the violence of everyday life in Mexico, law enforcement officials in both countries say. Mexico's rate of gun homicide - about 10 murders for every 100,000 people, compared with 6.3 per 100,000 in the United States - is surpassed only by Colombia, South Africa and possibly Brazil.

One of Mexico's murder capitals is the state of Sinaloa, whose governor, Juan S. Millan, calls it "the birthplace of Mexican drug trafficking." Governor Millan said killings in Sinaloa usually involved high-powered weapons, like AK-47's. Last week, President Fox sent more than 1,000 federal police officers to Sinaloa in response to the murders and kidnappings plaguing the state, the second such deployment this year.

The worst mass murder in Mexico's history was committed by the country's most violent cocaine cartel, the Arellano Félix gang, at Rancho el Rodeo, about 60 miles south of the border from San Diego, in September 1998.

The killers came to settle a score with a man who had crossed them. The 19 dead included two infants, six children and a pregnant 17-year-old. Two Chinese assault rifles lay where the assassins had dropped them. The Mexican police picked them up and sent their serial numbers to the American Embassy in Mexico City, which sent them to a federal crime lab in Martinsburg, W.Va.

At the crime lab, run by the firearms bureau, an agent had sifted through thousands of pending gun trace requests filed by Mexico. She saw that the guns were part of a pattern: 5 identical rifles, with consecutive serial numbers, had turned up after a 1996 shootout where Arellano Félix enforcers killed two Mexican soldiers; 15 more had been seized after another battle with the gang. The agent called the two federally licensed firearms dealers in the United States to whom the guns could be traced on paper. The first was Loretta Welch, who ran a weapons shop just outside San Diego called the Shooter's Emporium. The second was a man who ran a small mom-and-pop gun shop in Nevada. Ms. Welch faxed paperwork to the firearms agent showing that she had sold the 80 assault weapons to the Nevada dealer. He adamantly denied it.

"I now have one gun dealer who's lying to me," the firearms agent said in an interview. "I thought it was a huge problem."

Search warrants and interviews revealed that Ms. Welch's paperwork was phony. She had sold 80 of the Chinese assault rifles, along with 14 used handguns, to a Tijuana weapons dealer she met at a California gun show in 1995.

So far, 21 deaths have resulted from that $27,000 transaction. Ms. Welch faces a maximum prison term of four years at her May 29 sentencing.

Since arriving in Mexico in 1991, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has reached the point of being able to track more than 40 percent of the guns used in crimes seized by the Mexican authorities back to their sources, up from less than 10 percent.

But the bureau has only two people in Mexico, and in the United States there are fewer than 500 inspectors to audit the more than 100,000 licensed weapons dealers. And, as the following cases illustrate, corrupt dealers conduct business as if they know that "their chances of being audited are not all that great," said Keith Heinzerling, the agency's country attaché in Mexico.

After a shootout in 1996, Mexican officials seized a .50-caliber machine gun owned by a member of the Arellano Felix organization. The firearms bureau traced the weapon back to RNJ Guns in Carson, Calif., one of Los Angeles County's largest gun stores.

The owner, Romulo Reclusado, had sold it off the books to a straw buyer named Octavio Espinoza, who counted among his close relatives a midlevel member of the Arellano Félix gang. Mr. Espinoza and three of his relatives in the United States bought at least two dozen assault rifles and three .50-caliber weapons from RNJ. Five of those assault rifles were seized in Mexico in 1999 after yet another battle with the Arellano Felix gang. Mr. Reclusado was sentenced to 27 months for conspiracy and selling machine guns. Mr. Espinoza received a sentence of a year and a day.

William H. Eckenrode, a convicted felon, illegally sold more than 1,000 weapons he had amassed in Texas, including fully automatic rifles, the firearms bureau says. Mexican officials say they found two of his weapons in 1997: one after a shootout in which drug traffickers killed two Mexican military officers, the second in the apartment of Gen. Jesus Gutiérrez Rebollo, Mexico's drug czar, who was convicted of working with cocaine traffickers. In 1998, Mr. Eckenrode was sentenced to six and a half years in prison; one of his straw buyers, Richard Garcia, received three years' probation.

Edward L. Leduc and Gary L. Wofford were federally licensed firearms dealers in Texas who, according to the firearms bureau, were suspected of illegally selling scores of firearms to Mexican citizens. They each pleaded guilty to a count of selling weapons to "unauthorized persons," and received probation - no jail time - in 1998.

-------- israel

Israelis Fire on Palestinian Areas

By Mohammed Daraghmeh
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010519/aponline172554_000.htm

NABLUS, West Bank (AP) - Israeli helicopters shelled Palestinian police headquarters in two West Bank towns on Saturday, despite calls by the United States and other countries for an end to the violence.

The rocket attacks came a day after Israeli warplanes struck for the first time in eight months of fighting in retaliation for a deadly bombing near Tel Aviv.

Palestinians said Saturday that Israel had given the Bush administration prior information of an air strike on Friday - an allegation the U.S. embassy denied.

In Cairo, members of the 22-nation Arab League issued a statement calling on all Arab governments to sever contact with Israel until it halts military action against Palestinians. The move cast doubt on whether Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab countries to have signed peace agreements with Israel, would continue efforts to mediate a cease-fire.

No Palestinians were killed in Saturday's rocket attack on Tulkarem and Jenin, but three Palestinians were killed in other clashes.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Israel's air strike on Friday was "clearly improper use of military force." President Bush said that the violence makes it "so difficult for there to be any political settlement."

Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Middle East leaders to speak out more directly against violence.

In Cairo, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat told the Arab League meeting that Israel's air strikes were part of "the decisive battle for Palestine" and said the Palestinians would stand firm.

"We are courageous people and no one can defeat or make this people kneel down or be humiliated," Arafat told reporters.

In Saturday's helicopter strike, about 30 Palestinians were injured in Tulkarem when missiles hit security headquarters. Three buildings and seven vehicles were heavily damaged. No one was injured in the Jenin strike, which targeted offices of the elite Force 17 guard and intelligence forces.

The Israeli army said in an announcement that the strikes were part of a fight against "Palestinian terror."

Violence erupted Saturday at several points in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following funerals for 12 Palestinians killed in Friday's Israeli air raid.

"A million martyrs will march toward Jerusalem," tens of thousands of Palestinians chanted in the West Bank city of Nablus as they paraded behind police pickup trucks carrying the flag-draped bodies of 11 of the victims.

About 700 Palestinians marched from the funeral toward an Israeli checkpoint, where they threw stones at Israeli soldiers. A Palestinian was killed and seven others injured when the troops responded with gunfire, witnesses and doctors said.

Twelve Palestinians were injured in the West Bank city of Ramallah when an exchange of fire broke out near an Israeli army position after another funeral.

A Palestinian policeman at a checkpoint was killed when shots were fired from a passing car that fled toward Israel, Palestinian officials said. The army said soldiers opened fire when three Palestinian policeman approached their vehicle.

In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian farmer was killed by Israeli fire near the Karni crossing with Israel, Palestinian witnesses said. The army said soldiers shot a Palestinian in the leg when he ignored orders to drop a weapon.

Four mortar shells were shot Saturday toward the Jewish settlement of Gadid in the Gaza Strip. No injuries were reported.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo charged that the United States was "primarily responsible for the escalation of Israeli aggression against our people."

"Israel's military attack yesterday would not have taken place without the prior notification of the U.S. administration," Abed Rabbo said in a news release.

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy, Larry Schwartz, refuted Abed Rabbo's accusation. "I strongly deny that the United States was given prior notification," Schwartz said.

Hinting that the Bush administration may have put off plans for a meeting this week between Arafat and Powell, Abed Rabbo said the Americans had turned the meeting into "a bargaining chip."

The Palestinians have lobbied hard for a meeting between Powell and Arafat. The Bush administration warmly welcomed Sharon in an official visit to Washington in March.

On Friday, the Israeli air strikes targeted Palestinian security offices in Nablus, Ramallah, Tulkarem and areas around Gaza City. They were in retaliation for a suicide bombing earlier in the day that killed five Israelis.

----

Israel Says Warplanes Are a Message

MAY 19, 15:14 EST
By YOAV APPEL
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=MIDEAST&STORYID=APIS7C3CF400

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's use of warplanes in raids on Palestinian territories was meant to send a signal to the Palestinian Authority that it must rein in militant groups responsible for suicide bombings, a senior official said Saturday.

The airstrikes on Friday - which left 12 Palestinians dead - were the first time Israel has used planes to attack targets in Palestinian territories since the 1967 Mideast War.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said upon returning to Gaza from Cairo on Saturday that the raid was a ``dangerous aggression'' in the nearly eight months of fighting.

In a meeting of the 22-member Arab League, General-Secretary Amr Moussa said the attack constituted a ``very dangerous escalation'' in nearly eight months of Palestinian-Israeli fighting.

The airstrikes targeted Palestinian security buildings in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus and Ramallah and points in the Gaza Strip. They came in retaliation for a suicide bombing on Friday that killed five Israelis and the Palestinian bomber.

An aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel chose warplanes instead of helicopters Friday in an effort to get the Palestinian Authority to stop suicide bombings.

``This is a serious message to stop suicide attacks,'' Raanan Gissin told The Associated Press. ``This more serious attack is a message to the other side that the deteriorating situation, caused by the suicide bombing, will not be accepted.''

Gissin accused Arafat of trying to escalate the conflict by allowing the suicide bombings in order to attract international attention.

The Palestinians will only stop the violence if Israel reacts harshly to their attacks, Gissin said.

Israel television reported Saturday that Sharon may have ordered the warplane attack in an effort to appease growing internal dissent among Israelis who feel increasingly defenseless in light of 12 suicide bombings since the clashes broke out eight months ago.

Senior Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, are concerned the air raid will seriously harm the country's image abroad, the television said.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer suggested Saturday that Israel had reservations about using warplanes against the Palestinians.

``I'm not exactly happy about all the bombastic actions that I am forced sometimes to go along with,'' Ben-Eliezer said in a visit south of Tel Aviv. ``Sometimes you don't have any choice.''

----

Arabs urged to sever Israel ties

05/19/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/mideast/2001-05-19-arab-league.htm

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Arab governments must sever political contact with Israel until the Jewish state ceases military action against Palestinians, representatives of Arab countries demanded Saturday, throwing into doubt whether Egypt and Jordan would continue efforts to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire. A meeting of Arab foreign ministers and delegates made the recommendation. Arab League calls are not binding on governments, but the foreign ministers and other senior officials who attended Saturday's meeting were believed to have been in contact with the highest levels of their governments during the eight-hour gathering. "The meeting called for severing all Arab political communication with Israel as long as the aggression of the siege on the Palestinian people and their national authority continues," according to a statement issued at the end of the emergency meeting.

Anger in the Arab world is at fever-pitch as Israeli-Palestinian fighting has escalated to the use of warplane attacks, which Israel used Friday in retaliation for a suicide bombing.

The ministers also called for an economic boycott of goods exported from Israeli settlements, which Arab ministers reiterated Saturday that they reject.

There have been calls in the Arab world for boycotts on Israeli products for some time, especially since the beginning of Israeli-Palestinian fighting last fall. Arab countries including Lebanon and Syria do not have any economic relations with the Jewish state, while others, including Egypt and Jordan, do.

Israeli political reaction to the decision was swift.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the Arab League decision was self-defeating by not urging Yasser Arafat to stop the violence and, instead, giving the Palestinian leader a "prize" for his actions.

"This is not a decision, it's propaganda," Raanan Gissin said. "They need peace exactly as much as we do. Who will they talk to? Each other?" He added that the league decision "will turn around like a boomerang and work against them."

Lending weight to the call to sever Israeli contacts were Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, who spent years mediating with the Israelis and Palestinians as Egypt's foreign minister, and Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdul-Illah Khatib. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher also supported the statement.

Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab countries to have signed peace agreements with Israel. Both also have been pushing hard for a diplomatic resolution to the latest violence, which has left more than 500 dead since Sept. 28.

"Our intention is not to talk about or fall in the trap of talking about peace proposals while we see that the Israeli government does not really mean it," Moussa said. "The attacks against the Palestinians will have to stop, otherwise we will be acting under the point of the gun which we totally and utterly reject."

Khatib did not answer directly when asked whether Jordan's diplomatic efforts would now end, instead saying, the move "reflects the uselessness of political contacts that do not succeed in stopping the violence and lifting the siege on the Palestinian people."

On his return to Gaza late Saturday, Arafat told reporters the league position "reflects the Arab solidarity and stand" with the Palestinians following Israeli F-16 warplane and Apache helicopter attacks in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Arab League statement criticized the Israeli government for its reluctance to accept cease-fire proposals, including an Egyptian-Jordanian initiative. Like the Egyptian-Jordanian proposal, the committee called on Israel to freeze settlement construction. Sharon resisted efforts to halt construction.

Earlier Saturday, Arafat told the Arab League gathering in Cairo that the conflict has escalated into a "decisive battle for Palestine." Moussa had described recent Israeli actions as "systematic killing of the Palestinians with the aim of exterminating them."

Moussa reiterated Arab calls for an international peacekeeping force in the Palestinian territories - a proposal that Israel and the United States have rejected.

The countries that attended the talks at the League's headquarters in Cairo were Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.

-------- russia

Dutch Firm Is Hired to Raise Sub
Russia Shifts Plans, Saying Kursk Could Be Retrieved This Year

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 19, 2001; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45764-2001May18?language=printer

MOSCOW, May 18 -- The Russian government hired a Dutch transport firm today to lift the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk from the bottom of the Barents Sea in hopes of retrieving the 118 dead crewmen and discovering more about what caused one of the worst accidents in Russian military history.

The controversial and costly contract with the Dutch firm Mammoet calls for the 20,000-ton submarine to be raised 355 feet to the surface and brought to the docks by Sept. 20.

Russian officials said they chose Mammoet after negotiating with a consortium of Dutch and Norwegian firms because Mammoet promised to carry out the operation this year. Its methods were also more reliable, they added. Consortium officials said they had to wait until next year to start the operation for safety reasons.

Two explosions ripped through the sub last Aug. 18 as it was on maneuvers, and a bungled Russian rescue effort exposed major military shortcomings. Public outrage was fueled by the faulty official response and by attempts to cover up a trail of incompetence.

The last-minute switch in contractors to raise the vessel was an instant topic of debate among experts. "To change partners when factually two or 2 1/2 months is left [for the effort] is unreasonable and simply beyond comprehension," said Alexei Vasiliev, a professor at State Sea Technical University.

Some specialists questioned whether the immensely complicated endeavor is misguided. Yuri Senatsky, a Russian rear admiral and specialist on vessel salvage, said it was "absurd" to lift the Kursk in hopes of recovering the remains of perhaps 40 sailors not incinerated by the explosions.

As for the need to recover the Kursk's two nuclear reactors to prevent pollution from fuel leakage, Senatsky said the same area contains eight other reactors in more dangerous condition that should be recovered first.

He also questioned the government's plan to slice away the Kursk's mangled nose, where the explosions occurred, and decide whether to lift it after examining the sub underwater.

"I think this is a way of hiding the causes of the tragedy," Senatsky said. "The entire cause-and-effect picture is in this part of the submarine." Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov has said the forward compartment must be treated separately because it is filled with live torpedoes that could explode.

The cost of raising the Kursk from the Arctic waters has been estimated at about $80 million, a huge sum for the perennially cash-strapped Russian government. Government officials said tonight they have resolved problems with financing.

They also expressed confidence the contractor can overcome the many technological obstacles of lifting the equivalent of five freight trains. The Dutch firm plans to attach steel cables to the Kursk's hull and tear it off the seabed using computer-synchronized hydraulic jacks over eight to 10 hours. The consortium had planned to use cranes instead of jacks.

The submarine will then be dragged 62 miles to the coast, connected to pontoons and parked at a dock, government officials said.

After a nine-month investigation, a government commission has yet to conclude why the Kursk plunged to the bottom of the sea. Many outside experts have concluded one of the Kursk's torpedoes misfired during a training exercise. But Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, the navy's commander in chief, said tonight he believes the Kursk collided with a foreign submarine.

-------- space

Military Emphasis On Space Criticized

Associated Press
Saturday, May 19, 2001; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47709-2001May18?language=printer

The man who guided the Army's first post-Cold War cutbacks says the Bush administration appears headed toward the "easy but erroneous" conclusion that space and missile defense, rather than ground forces, should be the main building blocks of U.S. security.

"Diminishing the capabilities of our major ground force to support or finance untested technological solutions and theories for the distant future is, in my opinion, ill-advised," retired Army Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan said in remarks prepared for delivery today at an Army Reserve conference.

He was referring to indications that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a leading proponent of large-scale missile defenses, may be considering reducing the size of the Army, both active and reserve units, and scaling back or canceling some weapons programs.

Rumsfeld announced last week a major reorganization of the Pentagon's space programs to increase the importance of outer space in strategic planning and make space a focus of Pentagon spending.

Sullivan was Army chief of staff from 1991 to '95, a period in which all the military services cut back on troops and budgets. It was a particularly tumultuous time for the Army, in part because it pulled thousands of troops out of Europe and began peacetime commitments in the Balkans and elsewhere.

Sullivan is president of the Association of the United States Army, a booster group based in Arlington.

In his speech, the text of which was provided to the Associated Press, Sullivan said it is natural that the Bush administration would undertake a review of national security strategy and examine how to make the military more efficient. He said it would be wrong, though, to cut troops.

----

Lost in Space

June 4, 2001 (available 5/19/01)
by KARL GROSSMAN & JUDITH LONG
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/images/20010604space.jpg
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010604&s=grossman

This is not a picture from your kid's sci-fi comic. It's an illustration from a report by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Space Commission. The report advocates circumventing the intent of international laws (notably, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967) that seek to keep space free from war and urges that the President "have the option to deploy weapons in space." National Missile Defense, begun as Star Wars under Reagan, is just one layer of this much larger scheme to "control" space and "dominate" the earth, in the words of the report. "The United States is seeking to turn space into a war zone," maintains the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). To read the entire Space Commission report go to www.defenselink.mil/pubs/spacechapter2.pdf.

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

U.N. Security Council Mission Hits Snag in Congo

May 19, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 8:36 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-congo-d.html

KINSHASA (Reuters) - A U.N. Security Council mission to breathe new life into the Democratic Republic of Congo's peace process hit a snag when President Joseph Kabila's African allies took an unexpectedly hardline stance.

Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia on Saturday accused countries backing rebels in Africa's third largest country of killing 2.5 million people in genocide since 1998 and urged sanctions to push Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi to withdraw their troops.

``These were unusually tough remarks. It was a clear message that the allies are prepared to stand with Congo to the end, and that implementation of any peace deal would be on their terms,'' an African ambassador in Kinshasa told Reuters.

The aim of the mission, which includes 12 of the 15 Security Council members, was to build momentum for a peace process that was revitalized in January with the assassination of Congolese President Laurent Kabila and his replacement by his son Joseph.

What the mission heard from Congo's allies in the war for the mineral-rich former Zaire were similar arguments to those the elder Kabila often used to justify his defiant stand.

``Two-point-five million have been massacred. The genocide continues to take place, carried out by Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. Such genocide cannot be allowed in the 21st century,'' Namibian President Sam Nujoma said after a summit of allied leaders.

U.N. officials said Nujoma complained that the United Nations was not doing enough to force the countries backing rebels fighting the Congolese government to withdraw unconditionally.

U.N. Security Council spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters: ``There is a recognition of a need for a comprehensive solution to the problem that finger-pointing won't solve.''

COUNCIL SEEKS AGREEMENT ON KEY ISSUES

The 12 Security Council ambassadors are seeking agreement on the key issues of withdrawal of foreign troops, disarmament and an internal Congolese dialogue to chart the country's future after the conflict dubbed ``Africa's World War One.''

Kabila and his allies agree on all three issues but say further movement can start only after Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda pull out of Congo.

Rebel factions backed by Rwanda and Uganda hold most of the country's north and east. The government and its allies control the capital Kinshasa, copper and cobalt-rich Katanga province and diamond center of Mbuji-Mayi.

Rwandan military strongman Major-General Paul Kagame has repeatedly said he would withdraw all of his troops from Congo, but only after Congo secured the border with Rwanda.

Kagame accuses Congo of harboring militia blamed for the deaths of an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The Security Council has authorized a small U.N. force to monitor a pullback of armies and is awaiting decisions among the combatants on a timetable for withdrawing all foreign armies.

Regional analysts said the United Nations, unable to field the vast number of troops that would be needed to enforce peace in a country the size of western Europe, would be at pains to respond to the tough stance taken by the allies.

The United Nations has deployed some 1,300 observers. Although the force could be increased to 5,500, it would still be far smaller than the armies facing each other in the jungle heart of Africa.

The council team heads to Zambia on Monday for meetings with President Frederick Chiluba and ministers involved in the peace process.

It will also visit Burundi, where a civil war is raging, and Tanzania to speak to Burundian rebel leaders. The council trip ends in Rwanda and Uganda on May 24-25 for talks with their leaders and the rebel groups they support.

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

Survey: Some Okinawans Back US Base

May 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Japan-Okinawa-US-Military.html

TOKYO (AP) -- For the first time ever, a government survey found that more Okinawans support keeping the U.S. military base on the southern islands of Japan than oppose it, newspaper reports said Sunday.

The Cabinet Office poll, conducted in February, found that 45.7 percent of residents say they accept the U.S. military presence there, while 44.4 percent want the troops to leave, according to the newspaper Yomiuri.

The survey, carried out in February, asked 2,000 residents, 1,374 of whom responded, the Yomiuri said. The poll, taken every few years since 1974, did not give a margin of error.

It was the first time that opinions weighed in favor -- albeit slightly -- of the U.S. military base since the government began asking the question in 1985.

The Asahi newspaper carried a similar report.

Many residents back the U.S. forces because of the job opportunities on the base, Yomiuri reported.

The poll figures came as Okinawa's governor visited the United States. Gov. Keiichi Inamine has urged U.S. officials to cut military forces on his southern Japanese island, following a recent series of crimes and embarrassing remarks by U.S. troops and officers stationed there.

Located 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo, Okinawa is home to half of the 47,000 U.S. military forces stationed in Japan.

It has been an important U.S. base in the Pacific since it was occupied at the end of World War II, but residents have long sought a reduction in U.S. presence, complaining of crime by servicemen, crowding on the island, environmental issues and other problems.

In January, a U.S. Marine was arrested on suspicion of setting fire to a restaurant and bar on Okinawa. He pleaded guilty to the arson charges.

A month later, the commander of U.S. forces on Okinawa, Lt. Gen. Earl Hailston, was forced to apologize following reports that he called local leaders ``wimps'' and ``nuts'' when they complained about U.S. military conduct.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Bush Shows His Green Side to Sell Agenda

May 19, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/politics/19BUSH.html?searchpv=nytToday

CONESTOGA, Pa., May 18 - To sign his executive orders speeding federal approval of energy projects around the country, President Bush came to a Depression-era hydroelectric station today that stretches across the Susquehanna River and marveled at the "fish lift" that now enables shad to take an elevator ride over the huge dam to their spawning grounds.

The backdrop was carefully chosen, the latest of several settings that cast Mr. Bush in the role of the compassionate conservationist. For the past two days, at energy plants in Minnesota, Iowa and here, Mr. Bush has acted like a man certain of his green credentials - and a bit surprised that not everyone shares his confidence that American ingenuity will allow the country to drill in an Arctic refuge, build 1,300 power plants, keep driving sport utility vehicles and barely nick on the environment.

"I firmly believe we can solve this problem," Mr. Bush said today. "I know we can't solve it without a plan, and that's why I've laid one out."

But in laying it out, Mr. Bush has weighted his public remarks on his commitment to conservation, rather than the details of how to increase the energy supply that lie at the core of the 163-page report outlining his strategy. Without question, he found it easier to make an optimistic case here than he would have exactly 28 miles upstream.

There, just above the Safe Harbor Dam that he visited today, the four cooling towers of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant loom over the river, site of the accident 22 years ago that came to define a generation's understanding of environmental risk.

Mr. Bush never mentioned that accident today. He came close once, telling his small but enthusiastic audience that "nuclear power is much safer than it's ever been," his way into an argument that the long moratorium on building new nuclear plants must now end.

Not once in the past two days has he publicly mentioned another key recommendation in his report: to re- evaluate an American ban on breeder reactors and the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a once-promising technology that was abandoned in the Carter administration as too risky and too likely to let separated plutonium slip into the hands of terrorists.

There is little doubt that Mr. Bush speaks from the heart when he insists that the United States should not be forced into what he calls a "false choice" between energy production and environmental conservation. His love of the outdoors is obvious. He tells friends he lives for his moments at his ranch in Texas, where the Brazos River cuts through his land, and he escapes to Camp David on almost any weekend when a trip back home seems too difficult.

But in January, Mr. Bush also told two visitors to his ranch that "I understand the Western mentality, and I want the Western mentality represented in this administration."

"It's part of that big swath of red on the map," he said, referring to the states he swept in the November presidential election. In that conversation, Mr. Bush remarked somewhat dismissively about his opponent for president, Al Gore, characterizing his view as "we will conserve our way out of the crisis."

This week, Mr. Bush has modified that message. Perhaps mindful of the polls that show many Americans worrying that his administration is too attuned to the desires of the oil and gas industries from which several cabinet members have sprung, he has waxed on about the wonders of renewable energy. Thursday, it was a plant that burns wood chips and turkey waste, and a biomass plant that burns agricultural byproducts. Today, it was the shad-friendly hydroelectric dam.

"I hope some day that these renewables will be the dominant source of energy in America," Mr. Bush said, adding, "I'm not so sure how realistic that is."

Even his drive to clear away the bureaucratic hurdles to new energy plants has been hedged with assurances that he is not about to sacrifice the environment. He simply wants to balance the cost-benefit equation, he suggested today when he signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to issue an "energy impact statement" along with the long-required "environmental impact statement." And he said that whenever his administration searched for new places to drill, he would be "mindful of the environment."

But he carefully sidestepped imposing standards that industry must meet, notably standards for greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental groups leaped on that decision.

"Climate is the elephant in the middle of the living room that the authors of the report didn't want to talk about," said Joseph Goffman, the senior lawyer at Environmental Defense, a research and lobbying group that was highly critical of Mr. Bush's decision to declare the Kyoto treaty on global warming dead. "There is nothing in there that would require the integration of policies to bring down greenhouse gas emissions."

Mr. Bush's other political calculation is to make clear that he is asking for no sacrifice from consumers.

He talked today about his enthusiasm for more fuel-efficient cars, and his report calls for a $4 billion tax credit for consumers who buy a new generation of hybrids, which combine gas and electricity, and charge their batteries from the energy lost when drivers hit the brakes. But he never made reference to the American love affair with sport utility vehicles.

A report released last month by the Council on Foreign Relations, and presented to Vice President Dick Cheney's task force, noted that if the fuel efficiency requirements for sport utility vehicles matched that of cars, the savings would amount to 225,000 barrels of oil a day. If the requirements were applied to all light trucks, the savings would amount to over 900,000 barrels a day, or 50 percent more than Mr. Bush would extract from the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

Asked about sport utility vehicles on Thursday, Mr. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, noted that the House minority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, also seemed unconcerned about the symbolism of the gas-guzzlers when arriving at an event to release a Democratic energy plan.

"The president thought the fact that Dick Gephardt was driven to his news conference in an S.U.V. should not be used against him," Mr. Fleischer said.

--------

Motorists May Turn to Ethanol

New York Times
May 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-autos-ethano.html

DETROIT (Reuters) - Sickened by record high gasoline prices, more than 1 million American motorists driving ''flexible-fuel'' vehicles can instead fill up with a cheaper mix of gasoline and ethanol, a renewable resource made from corn.

Problem is, many people don't realize they own cars or trucks that can run on both unleaded gasoline and E85, a federally subsidized blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

Over the last three years, General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG have built an estimated 1.2 million cars and trucks fitted with flexible fuel systems to help the automakers meet stringent fuel-economy standards.

The price of regular grade unleaded gasoline has soared in some Midwestern states, to as high as $1.96 a gallon on average in Illinois, second only to California's $2.01 a gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. Some industry observers fear prices could rise to $3 a gallon this summer.

Conversely, the average price of E85 ethanol-gas mix is about $1.65 in the Midwest states, according to the industry trade publication Oxy-Fuel News.

But because there are fewer than 200 fueling stations selling E85 across the United States, most in the corn-growing states of the Midwest, automakers have been reluctant to market the vehicles aggressively.

``The customer may order an ethanol-compatible vehicle without knowing it,'' said Sharon Bedley-Parham, assistant brand manager for alternative fuel vehicles with General Motors.

President Bush's energy report released on Thursday acknowledged the lack of ethanol use at the nation's pumps, but added that further study must be done to promote its use.

Flexible-fuel vehicles are able to run on standard gasoline, or E85, or a mixture of the two. The system is fitted as standard, at no extra charge, on many versions of some of the most popular-selling vehicles, including the Ford Taurus mid-size car, DaimlerChrysler's Dodge, Chrysler and Plymouth minivans and GM's Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban large sport utility vehicles.

Discriminating drivers may notice a peppier performance since E85 has a higher octane rating than regular unleaded gasoline, and a sweeter-smelling exhaust. But otherwise, there is almost no perceptible difference.

GAS-GUZZLING TRUCKS

Before gasoline prices spiked higher, even those living near filling stations selling E85 had little incentive to fill up with ethanol.

That has led some environmental groups to deride programs supporting E85 and other alternative fuels such as compressed natural gas and methanol, charging that they simply allow automakers to sell more gas-guzzling SUVs.

``Flex-fuel vehicles, from our view, are a fraud,'' said Howard Geller, former executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which publishes the annual ``Green Book'' environmental guide to cars and trucks.

To lessen America's dependence on foreign oil, the U.S. government established corporate average fuel economyratings that mandated an automaker's car fleet must average 27.5 miles per gallon, or 20.7 mpg for pickup trucks, SUVs and minivans.

Automakers receive special CAFE credits for alternative-fuel vehicles, which they can apply to their fleet ratings. Even if the owners of the flexible-fuel vehicles never fill their tank with ethanol, the vehicles help raise the automakers' average CAFE ratings.

John DeCicco, a senior fellow at the research firm Environmental Defense, said the alternative fuel credits only contribute to more gasoline use. ``I think the country really needs to rethink its alternative fuel policy,'' he said.

CORN-FED CARS

However, rising gas prices are now starting to make E85 an economical alternative, particularly in Minnesota, where 57 filling stations selling ethanol are located. About 10 are located in the Chicago area, and more are expected in Milwaukee and Denver.

Since the engines in the flexible-fuel vehicles are calibrated to burn gasoline most efficiently, and ethanol contains less energy than gasoline, flexible-fuel vehicles tend to get about 5 or 6 percent less mileage using E85, said Phil Lampert, executive director of the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition.

Now with higher gas prices, ``ethanol becomes a viable form of fuel,'' Lampert said.

-------- energy

Bush Orders Quicker Power Plant Approvals

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 19, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46628-2001May18?language=printer

SAFE HARBOR, Pa., May 18 -- President Bush ordered federal agencies today to speed up approvals for refineries and power plants as aides stepped up efforts to explain the president's energy policy, which has come under more widespread criticism than they expected.

One day after unveiling his plan, Bush traveled to a hydroelectric dam on the Susquehanna River to promote his blueprint as a balanced approach toward energy development and environmental protection. "We don't want either of them snarled in bureaucratic tangles, as local governments or entrepreneurs seek permit after permit from agency after agency," he said.

The president asked for the public's help in combating critics of his program. "When you hear these folks -- it doesn't matter what side of the debate they're on -- who are willing to kind of castigate somebody who may have a good idea, stand up and let them have it," he said.

The wide-ranging energy blueprint released by the White House Thursday seeks to reduce regulations to encourage oil, gas and nuclear production. It also calls for tax incentives to boost coal output as well as to promote conservation and the development of renewable fuels.

In addition to the expected attacks from Democrats and environmentalists, however, the White House has received unanticipated criticism of its plan from free-market groups that charged Bush with interfering in the energy market when the country's energy problems could resolve themselves without government intervention.

An analysis from the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, argued that power plant expansion is already underway and "will probably produce an electricity glut in the near future."

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said it is studying the spending and closed-door policies of the energy task force, led by Vice President Cheney, that produced the plan. Congressional Democrats asked for a GAO investigation in part because of the panel's policy of holding its meetings in secret.

The National Parks Conservation Association, a private group that acts as an advocate for the national park system, also criticized the president's plan, charging that it "seems a clarion call for weakened government regulation."

Bush advisers, while expecting a tough reception for the energy plan, said they have been surprised by the negative coverage, particularly on network television.

Seeking to counter the coverage, senior administration aides fanned out today to promote the program.

Cheney called conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh's radio program and said the administration is confident in its ability to implement the energy policies. He denounced some of his critics as "people who don't have the knowledge or the guts to address us on the policy issues."

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham went on NBC's "Today" show to defend the energy blueprint as "a balanced one and a good [one] for the American people."

Aides said Bush can begin implementing major parts of his energy program without waiting for Congress -- 85 of the recommendations made by Cheney's energy task force can be carried out by executive action, while just 20 depend on Congress.

Among the actions planned by the executive branch are a streamlining of the regulatory process for coal-fired electricity generation, a review of fuel economy standards for automobile manufacturers and a study on funding for renewable fuel research, which Bush had cut from his budget request for next year but may restore.

Appearing on a foggy morning with the hydropower plant silently generating electricity behind him, Bush said many Americans probably assume his energy plan is just "another report that's going to sit on a shelf in Washington."

"I can assure the American people that mine is an administration that's not interested in gathering dust," Bush said. "We're interested in acting."

He began by signing an executive order establishing an Energy Department task force that will seek ways to speed up the processing of permits for the construction of power plants, refineries and other facilities. He also ordered government agencies to issue energy impact statements when promulgating any new regulations that would adversely affect energy supplies. In the statements, the agencies will be required to state whether energy-friendly alternatives to the orders exist.

Administration officials said they see these energy impact studies as companions to environmental impact statements.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Bush's chief economic adviser and a member of the energy task force, took on one of the most visible critics of the administration's energy policies -- California Gov. Gray Davis (D) -- who accused Bush on Thursday of "turning a blind eye to the bleeding and hemorrhaging" that are occurring in his state.

Lindsey said in an interview that he has letters from the governor thanking Bush for his help with the state's energy crisis. "It's startling to watch him," Lindsey said. "Any reasonable request that has come from him we have acted upon."

Lindsey was cool to the short-term measures to ease the California energy squeeze that have been circulated on Capitol Hill. He dismissed the notion of energy price caps, the suspension of the federal gasoline tax or the additional easing of environmental regulations.

Bush plans to show his concern for California by traveling there a few days after Memorial Day -- his first trip since Election Day to the nation's largest state, which voted heavily for Vice President Al Gore in November.

Responding to the Cato Institute criticism, Lindsey argued that current regulations are distorting the energy market, creating "inappropriate costs" for producers that affect their choices about where and when to build power plants, and whether to move power freely around the country. Asked whether the market could resolve such problems, he said: "I don't think so."

Staff writer Dana Milbank contributed to this report.

-------- environment

Production in Mind, U.S. Reconsiders Enforcement of Pollution Laws

May 19, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/politics/19REFI.html

WASHINGTON, May 18 - At least half of the country's 152 oil refineries are believed to be violating air-pollution laws, federal officials say, but with the refineries stretched near capacity, the Bush administration is debating how hard to crack down.

Refinery capacity, Vice President Dick Cheney has said, is among the issues at the center of the country's energy problems and has been a major factor in the recent surge in gasoline prices. The report released on Thursday by Mr. Cheney's energy task force orders the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department to review their enforcement of the pollution laws in light of the potential to discourage refinery expansion.

The review comes despite a campaign that began two years ago and has continued under the Bush administration, in which about 30 percent of the refining industry has agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce illegal air pollutants from several dozen refineries. Other refining companies are in settlement talks with the administration.

But still other companies have resisted the effort to bring them into compliance with pollution standards, federal officials say. Among these are the ExxonMobil Corporation, the largest of the refinery owners. Officials of that company have argued that the E.P.A.'s interpretation of the laws has been overly strict and that uncertainty over enforcement of the pollution standards has deterred refineries from much-needed expansions.

An ExxonMobil spokeswoman, Lauren A. Kerr, said today that the company was "pleased that the administration has recognized the importance of this issue, and we look forward to seeing the results of their study."

In testimony before Congress last month, D.H. Daigle, director of Americas refining for the ExxonMobil Refining and Supply Company, urged that enforcement of the rules be suspended "to prevent enforcement policies from interfering without tangible benefit to industry's ability to meet our energy and fuel supply needs." As Mr. Cheney's task force was preparing its report, two senators, James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, wrote to him to request that the enforcement of the rules be suspended while the environmental agency reviews their impact.

But environmentalists have warned against any weakening of enforcement, saying it is vital to keep necessary curbs on an industry that represents one of the most significant sources of air pollution.

Under a provision of the Clean Air Act known as "new source review," refineries and power plants that make changes resulting in an increase in pollutants must seek permits from the E.P.A., which require that plants offset additional emissions with cuts elsewhere. That provision, which was enacted in the late 1970's, has routinely been ignored, agency officials say, so the enforcement effort has aimed both to bring violators into compliance and to establish a road map for the future.

"Our fear is that they will waive the requirements for new source review for pollution-increasing projects at the refineries, and so you might get more production but you'll also get more pollution," said David Hawkins, a former senior E.P.A. official who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.

The latest large refinery to reach agreement with the agency is Marathon Ashland of Ohio, whose settlement was announced last Friday. In news releases, both Christie Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, and Attorney General John Ashcroft praised the agreement as an important example of cooperative efforts by government and industry to reduce pollution.

A spokesman for Marathon Ashland, Chuck Rice, said the agreement with the government had provided a basis for more flexible regulation that would reduce emissions and allow the company to expand its operations.

Marathon Ashland "will continue to be a responsible citizen with the environment and community where they conduct business," Mr. Rice said.

On average, the companies that have agreed to install advanced air- pollution controls under the settlements will reduce their emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide at refineries by 70 percent, said E.P.A. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 90-day review ordered by Mr. Cheney covers the standards on new source review for both refineries and coal-fired power plants. In the reconsideration, the E.P.A. and the Justice Department will determine whether the pollution standards have been applied too harshly. The outcome could determine whether the government drops some cases, approaches others more leniently, or even renegotiates settlements already reached.

Three power plant owners have reached settlements with the government over pollution, eight more have been served with complaints filed in federal court, and others are still being investigated. An environmental agency spokeswoman, Tina Kreisher, said today that for both the refineries and the coal-fired plants, enforcement efforts and settlement negotiations would continue while the review is under way.

But industry divided between those who have struck deals and those who have not, and those who are still being investigated clearly hoping the rules will be revised, E.P.A. officials said they did not expect much progress until the review is completed.

In a statement, Ms. Whitman said she looked forward to working with Mr. Ashcroft toward "making new source review more effective while maintaining environmental protections."

The companies that are pressing for a more lenient interpretation of the rules say the E.P.A. has been too harsh in trying to police modifications that were made long ago or that did not result in any pollution increase.

With refineries now using 96 percent of their capacity, one of the highest levels in several years, according to the American Petroleum Institute, the critics say enforcement efforts have deterred companies that might be considering expansions.

Bob Slaughter, general counsel for the National Petrochemical Refiners' Association, said the strict interpretation of the rule served as "an additional burden on the industry that prevents us from going forward with different things."

But companies like BP Corporation, which settled a dispute with the agency in January by agreeing to pay $10 million in penalties and spend $650 million in improvements to reduce air emissions from eight refineries, would presumably not be happy to see their competitors wind up with a better deal.

Over the last 25 years, only one oil refinery has been built in the United States, and more than 100 of the country's refineries (most of them small ones) have been shut down since 1980. Oil companies have kept up with rising demand for oil, gasoline and other refined products mostly by adding capacity at existing sites, but the amount of excess capacity has shrunken steadily.

With local opposition and strict environmental laws still weighing heavily against refinery construction, industry experts have said that expansions in the years ahead will be confined to upgrades of existing plants, but they have said its pace could be affected by how the environmental agency enforces the pollution laws.

Because the E.P.A. is continuing its investigations, agency officials declined to provide an estimate of how many companies might be violating pollution laws. But in addition to the roughly 30 percent who have reached settlement with the government and are no longer considered to be violating pollution laws, 25 percent are in negotiations, a sign that they may be prepared to acknowledge violating the standards, the officials said. Those companies were among the earliest singled out by the agency, which typically initiates settlement negotiations by notifying companies that they appear to be in violation of environmental laws.

Another 25 percent of the refineries are believed to be violating the law and are targets of active investigation, while the rest have not yet been approached because of a lack of resources, one E.P.A. official said.

Other federal officials said a safe assumption was that at least half of all refineries, and perhaps many more, were still operating in violation of the pollution laws.

-------- police

Nichols Lawyer Claims F.B.I. Hid Evidence

May 19, 2001
New York Times
By JO THOMAS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/national/19NICH.html

The lead lawyer for Terry L. Nichols, Timothy J. McVeigh's conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing, has told the Supreme Court that he suspects the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still holding back investigative material from the case, even from prosecutors.

In a court filing released yesterday, the lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, said his legal team was comparing more than 3,100 pages of newly released F.B.I. documents, many of them interview reports called 302's, with 700 boxes of documents the government had already handed over.

The comparison has yielded references "to interviews that were done, yet no F.B.I. 302 shows up in the files," Mr. Tigar said. "We have reason to believe that the F.B.I. agents may have consciously failed to memorialize interviews in the form of F.B.I. 302 reports, in order that their work would not be discoverable."

John E. Collingwood, an F.B.I. spokesman, said yesterday, "During this exhaustive review, we have seen no evidence that suggests any intent to withhold evidence from the defendants."

On May 8, prosecutors told lawyers for Mr. Nichols, who is serving a life sentence, and Mr. McVeigh, who has been sentenced to death, about the documents. Three days later, Attorney General John Ashcroft postponed the execution of Mr. McVeigh, set for May 16, for a month.

Mr. Nichols immediately filed a new appeal with the Supreme Court.

The documents are covered by a protective order forbidding disclosure by lawyers. But the lawyers and the F.B.I. have said the documents included interviews conducted shortly after the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Federal Building with witnesses who claimed to know about a suspect who came to be known as John Doe No. 2. That person was never found.

Although prosecutors and Mr. McVeigh have since said that John Doe No. 2 does not exist, Mr. Nichols's lawyers have argued that this unknown man, and not Mr. Nichols, was Mr. McVeigh's conspirator.

In the filing, Mr. Tigar said he had found at least two instances, which he did not describe, in which prosecutors tried to impeach the credibility of defense witnesses with assertions that are contradicted by the newly disclosed F.B.I. files.

The F.B.I., Mr. Tigar said, hid from prosecutors "evidence that the defense was presenting truthful, reliable evidence."

-------- spying

Awards for Heroism Go to Spy Plane Crew

New York Times
May 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/national/19SPY.html

ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md., May 18 - The 24 members of the Navy spy plane crew at the center of last month's standoff with China were decorated for heroism today and personally thanked by the defense secretary.

The pilot, Lt. Shane Osborn, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for regaining control of his crippled plane and safely landing it in China after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea.

The other 23 crew members received the Air Medal for exceptional achievement. Lieutenant Osborn and the crew's senior enlisted member, Senior Chief Petty Officer Nicholas Mellos, of Ypsilanti, Mich., were awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for leadership during the crew's 11-day detention.

Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saluted each crew member after pinning on the medal in a ceremony held beneath gray skies that threatened rain. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld stood beside General Shelton.

"We thank each one of you for your service to our country," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a ceremony framed by flags and a row of F-16 fighter jets.

-------- activists

Close Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant Petition

Personal comments from "ChocolateHanson@HansonHouse.com":
Sat, 19 May 2001

Do you like nuclear power? If not, then please sign a petition to close Sellafield Nuclear Power Plant in England. Please forward this to your friends. http://www.petitiononline.com/close/petition.html Thank you, Amanda Ryan


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