------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Green group says wins UK concession on nuke plant
Skeptical Senators Question Rumsfeld on Missile Defense
Senate Democrats discern softening on missile defense
The real space cowboys
One killed in Russian factory blast
Radioactive Russia?
Senate Panel OKs Uranium Mine Fund
ARKANSAS NUCLEAR PLANT LICENSE RENEWED FOR 20 MORE YEARS
Colo. Workers' Case in Final Arguments
USEC role uncertain on new power plant during moratorium
Review Of Oak Ridge Operations Office
Senate Panel Cool To Defense Plans
Rove cancels meeting with Pentagon officials
Kissinger Offers a Realist's Reflections on Foreign Policy
Nuclear waste shipments to pass through KC this summer

MILITARY
Ukraine's Arms Deals
Ukraine and the Arms Embargo
U.S. won't commit troops to mission
Yugoslavia Expected to Pass Decree on War Crimes
Robertson on Balkans: 'Not a Hopeless Case'
Censorship at the National Press Club
Six Students Found Guilty of Telling the Truth
Gaza's Kids, Israeli Troops Battle
NATO set for third mission to Balkans
Deceiving your allies
U.N. Approves Vieques Resolution
UN to pay $243 mln for Gulf War environment studies
Losing battle
2-war plan outdated, Rumsfeld tells panel
Pentagon Asks for $18.4B Increase
Pentagon Paid $409 Each for Sinks

OTHER
Judge Halts Calif. Coastal Drilling
House Vote Stalls Gulf Drilling Plan
House Acts to Bar Drilling Off Fla.
China pulls plug on baths and saunas to save water
E.P.A. to Issue Air Rules to Protect Park Vistas
Bush Plans to Shift Some EPA Enforcement to States
COMPUTER DISPOSAL COULD COST CALIFORNIANS $1 BILLION
Bush Leans Against Support for Stem-Cell Research, Aides Say
Genetic Study Dates Malaria to the Advent of Farming
AIDS Group Demands Treatments for Developing World
Delegates Still Deadlocked on UN AIDS Declaration
Monitors Say China Pushes Tibet Monks From Study Site
Turkish Court Bans Islamic Opposition
Relying on Hard and Soft Sells, India Pushes Sterilization
Overmatched by Technology
CIA: Russia, China working on information warfare
Florida retiree denies spying for Soviets
The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes
14 Indicted by U.S. in '96 Saudi Blast
US: No Proof Iran Behind Khobar Blast
Iran Denies Bombing Involvement
Another Arrest in India Bombing Case

ACTIVISTS
Protesters jeer tankers in Bosphorus straits
U.S. Receives Threat in the Middle East
American Forces in Gulf on Highest Alert
Support for Embassy Security Waning
Police use tear gas, rubber bullets on protesters


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

Green group says wins UK concession on nuke plant

UK: June 22, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11286

LONDON - Environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth said yesterday the British government had conceded in part to a legal challenge against plans by state-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) to start up operations at a nuclear fuel plant.

"The government has conceded a key part of the legal challenge over plans by BNFL to start operations at the Sellafield Mixed Oxide fuel plant", Friends of the Earth's Mark Johnston told Reuters.

The group took the government to court last month arguing the government was acting unlawfully firstly in not allowing the 482 million pound construction cost of the Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP) to be taken into account when its economic viability is assessed and secondly in not allowing comment on an independent report by consultants Arthur D Little on the plant's viability.

Johnston said the treasury's solicitor yesterday told Friends of the Earth the Arthur D Little report will be published and four weeks set aside for comment.

But not everything in the report will be made public. Deletions will cover information which "cause unreasonable damage to BNFL's commercial operations or to the economic case for the Mox plant itself."

Friends of the Earth's legal adviser Peter Roderick said it was "startling" the government thought it proper to exclude information from public scrutiny that might expose the lack of a sound economic case for the plant.

"We will be going through this report with a fine tooth comb to ensure that all the information the public needs for an informed debate is included", he said in a statement.

The controversial Sellafiel Mox Plant has lain idle since its completion in 1997 as regulatory approval to start up has been witheld over fears there are not enough customers for the fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium oxides.

Before it is allowed to start operations the plant has to pass a test of justification required by European law, proving the benefits of a practice involving ionising radiation outweighs any adverse environmental impact.

In late 1999 BNFL's Mox fuel created an international furore after revelations that quality control data on a pilot batch of fuel sent to Japan had been falsified. The scandal led to import bans by a number of potential overseas customers for Mox and raised questions about the size of future export markets.

Critics of Mox, including green groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth say it is more expensive than uranium and requires modifications to most reactors before it can be burnt.

They say the fuel has no real market and increases stockpiles of highly toxic plutonium.

But BNFL argues Mox is a good way of re-using a valuable commodity and says its order book for Mox has reached the 40 percent break-even point.

Friends of the Earth's Johnston disputed this. "In terms of firm orders that figure is actually 9.6 percent," he said.

-------- missile defense

Skeptical Senators Question Rumsfeld on Missile Defense

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/politics/22MILI.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, June 21 - Senate Democrats sharply questioned Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld today about the high cost and unproven effectiveness of a national missile defense system, and they raised deep concerns about the administration's threats to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty if the Russians refused to amend it.

During his first hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee since his confirmation, Mr. Rumsfeld met a surprisingly unified skepticism from liberal and centrist Democrats regarding missile defense, signaling the difficulties President Bush is likely to face when he tries to sell a plan to Congress later this year.

In one exchange, Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, questioned Mr. Rumsfeld's suggestion that the Pentagon would consider deploying an antimissile system before it had finished testing if the threat of an attack seemed imminent.

Noting that the Pentagon had failed in several recent tests to shoot down ballistic missiles, Mr. Cleland said, "I have serious doubts and reservations that the issue of national missile defense has been given too great a priority in your calculations.

"National missile defense is an uncertain trumpet at this point," he continued, "and we ought not to blow it before we test it and fully make sure it is deployable. It doesn't make sense to deploy this system without that guarantee."

Later, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, repeatedly asked Mr. Rumsfeld to explain which upcoming tests on antimissile technology would violate the ABM treaty. President Bush has asserted that the treaty must be amended or abrogated to allow testing of promising technologies which allow antimissile weapons to be fired from ships, planes and possibly space vehicles.

But Mr. Rumsfeld said he was not sure which tests might violate the treaty. He added that he wanted to be able to tell the Russians, "Come on, we've got to test, and we don't want to have someone accuse us of breaking the treaty. Let's not get into a legal, lawyer's argument over the thing."

Clearly unmoved, Mr. Nelson replied: "We need, for the sake of the defense of the country, to proceed with robust research and development, but you can't deploy something that's not developed. And so all of the wringing of hands of the abrogation of the treaty seems to me to be a little premature before something has been developed."

Mr. Rumsfeld, who also appeared before the House Armed Services Committee later in the day, had come to Capitol Hill to discuss his efforts to redesign the national military strategy, the first step toward buying new high-tech weapons and restructuring the forces for post- cold-war threats.

The secretary said the United States faced greater threats than at any other time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also noted that since the signing of the ABM treaty, which prohibits the development and deployment of systems that could defend the United States against long-range ballistic missiles, the number of countries with nuclear weapons programs has more than doubled, to 12, and the number of countries with ballistic missiles has more than tripled, to 28.

"This presents a very different challenge from that of the cold war," Mr. Rumsfeld said in his testimony. "Even in the old Soviet Union, the secretary general of the Communist Party, dictator though he was, had a Politburo to provide some checks and balances that might have kept him from using those weapons at his whim.

"What checks and balances are there on Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il?" he asked, suggesting that the threat of retaliation would not deter unpredictable autocrats from using nuclear weapons. "None that we know of or can influence."

But his warnings did not appear to sway Democrats on the panel. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, "We are basing some significant policy judgments on behavioral perceptions of regimes, and I think we have to do a little bit more work on sharpening those behavioral perceptions."

Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, asked Mr. Rumsfeld whether the Pentagon had a formula for deciding when the effectiveness of a new weapons system justified its high cost.

Mr. Rumsfeld said no.

"Well," Mr. Nelson replied, "I'd be very concerned if it was about 10 percent successful and we were looking at spending hundreds of billions of dollars that would then be taken away from other priorities within the Defense Department.

"It's very difficult to argue against saving one city. But we can't save one city with something that then makes us more vulnerable in other areas that are more likely to be open to attack."

In another sharp exchange, Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan who is chairman of the committee, said he was concerned that withdrawing from the ABM treaty might cause the Russians to increase the size of their nuclear arsenal, including putting additional warheads on their missiles. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said this week that his country would make such an upgrade if the United States proceeded on its own to construct a missile shield.

"Would you agree it's possible, at least, that they could respond in a way to a unilateral withdrawal which would not be in our interest, that would make us less secure?" Mr. Levin asked.

Mr. Rumsfeld said it was possible. But he added, "We're not hostile states. They are going to be reducing their nuclear weapons regardless of what we do. We're going to be reducing our nuclear weapons to some level, regardless of what they do."

At the end of the hearing, Mr. Levin playfully warned Mr. Rumsfeld that the Democrats would try to shift money in President Bush's defense budget away from missile defense and toward better benefits for military personnel.

Some Republicans on the committee defended the administration's missile defense program. "We have made extraordinary progress," said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama.

A particularly heated moment came when Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, told Mr. Rumsfeld that the Pentagon was sending confusing signals about shipbuilding, an important industry for her state.

Sounding irritated by the question, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "`With respect to the chaos you characterize, there is none. Any time that anyone asks a question, it's going to make people nervous."

----

Senate Democrats discern softening on missile defense

June 22, 2001
By Dave Boyer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010622-395434.htm

Senate Democrats said Vice President Richard B. Cheney, in a private luncheon with them yesterday, qualified the administration's commitment to deploy a space-based missile-defense system.

"There was a change in emphasis," said Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "They're properly now focusing on the research and development, and focusing less on a commitment to deploy."

Senators who attended the luncheon said Mr. Cheney in general assured the group that the administration will not try to modify the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) to allow for new testing for at least one year. Mr. Cheney told them only if the testing is effective would the administration take steps to deploy a system.

In last year's campaign and since taking office, President Bush has said unequivocally that his administration will deploy a national missile-defense system and would pull out of the ABM Treaty if necessary.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld essentially echoed Mr. Cheney's comments yesterday in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"We need to be moving ahead with the research and development necessary to understand what we are going to be capable of doing to deploy a limited missile-defense system," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Cheney, in his first meeting with Senate Democrats as a group, discussed two issues almost exclusively - missile defense and the administration's energy plans. Among those in attendance was Sen. James M. Jeffords, Vermont independent, whose decision to quit the GOP threw control of the chamber to the Democrats earlier this month.

Some Democrats, such as Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, said Mr. Cheney sounded "a little more conciliatory" on both energy and missile defense. But others said the vice president seemed intent mainly on not offending his audience.

"This is mush," Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, said after the meeting. "It's grits without butter and salt and pepper - a lot of verbiage that sort of doesn't rankle anyone or unnecessarily upset anyone in the immediate audience. He answered questions but, you know, it wasn't anything."

Mr. Levin said the administration's softening on deployment of a missile-defense system began last week with testimony before Congress by Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

"General Kadish has said nothing that he is going to recommend to the administration for the research-and-development phase of a national missile defense this year, in [fiscal]´02, will bump up against the ABM Treaty," Mr. Levin said. "That's the most important, significant piece of information I believe that has emerged in the last week."

Mr. Levin told the vice president that he "welcomed" the administration's change in emphasis. He said Mr. Cheney neither agreed with nor challenged Mr. Levin's view that the administration had altered its stance.

"It's no longer an unconditional commitment, as I see it, because they do not know that they can get any one of these systems to work," Mr. Levin said. "It's no longer quite as unconditional that we're going to deploy. It's now a little more qualified."

Said Mr. Schumer, "The big urging [by Democrats] on missile defense was to not deploy until we were sure it worked and certainly not to violate the treaty until we were sure it worked. He didn't brush that off the table."

Mr. Cheney left the luncheon without answering reporters' questions. His spokesman did not return phone calls yesterday.

On energy, the vice president told Democrats that the administration would "entertain" raising emission standards for sport utility vehicles and minivans, according to Mr. Schumer.

But other Democrats said Mr. Cheney made no commitment on the subject.

"He said Americans seem to like to drive these big vehicles," Mr. Harkin said. "I thought was an interesting statement - 'Americans like driving these.´ So there's nothing much we can do about it."

-------

The real space cowboys

LYLE STEWART Freelance,
Friday 22 June 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/editorial/pages/010622/5081075.html

You likely didn't see the recent Hollywood dud Space Cowboys, with old cinematic warhorses Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland. I didn't see the film either, I admit. But its plot and title strangely parallel a real-life drama that all of us will have no choice but to watch over the coming years. According to the film's blurb, the four, slightly past-due, stars of the film are "old-school test pilots whose grasp of outdated technology makes them the only ones able to repair a primitive, de-orbiting Russian satellite that imperils Earth." And as the Wall Street Journal said of Space Cowboys, it's "some of the rightest stuff around."

U.S. President George W. Bush's National Missile Defence initiative is based on an equally unlikely scenario: that so-called rogue nations imperil Americans with ICBMs that can be shot out of the sky. Much of the debate has largely focused on the unilateral abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty it would entail. Insofar as NMD would be space-based, however, the scheme also threatens a less well- known international pact (less known, perhaps, for its bureaucratic wordiness), the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.

Outer Space Treaty

Better known as the Outer Space Treaty, it bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction from Earth orbit. Its intent is that space should be used "exclusively for peaceful purposes." Given the plethora of spy satellites keeping watch on the world 24-7, the spirit of the treaty has no doubt already been compromised. But should Bush's NMD come to full fruition, the space treaty would join ABM in the diplomatic trash can.

It's not that NMD would actually provide a impenetrable shield against an incoming missile. The bullet-hitting-a-bullet technology is nowhere near being perfected. Any system could also easily be overwhelmed with a missile buildup (and a renewed arms races is not an unwelcome scenario for the military contractors who will be the main benefactors of this corporate welfare).

What NMD represents in the long term is the militarization of space. Bush's casting of Donald Rumsfeld as U.S. defence secretary only confirms the plot line.

Before his cabinet nomination, Rumsfeld chaired a congressional commission on space-based military threats and options that concluded the U.S. should be free to deploy weapons in space to face threats to its "vulnerable" satellite system. The panel's report advocated "power projection in, from and through space in response to events anywhere in the world. Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces or ships, space missions initiated from Earth orbit or space could be carried out with little transit, information or weather delay." And in case that isn't clear enough, the Jan. 11 report put it in plain language: "In the coming period the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on the Earth and in space."

Plan in Motion

In his first policy announcement, the new defence secretary set about putting the plan in motion, saying he will create a position for what has already been dubbed the "space czar," a four-star general to oversee a special space-forces division. Already in December, shortly after Bush was confirmed as president-elect, the U.S. Defence Department had signed off on the development of the space-based laser, with a budget of up to $30 billion.

So the plot twist is getting a little clearer. NMD and its spinoffs have less to do with defence as with "power projection." It might be next to impossible to catch every - or any - missile launched at the United States. But surely it is well within the realm of possibility to strike any fixed, land-based targets. And that thought should give us pause. Star Wars is closer than we think.

No doubt reading the writing on the wall, the UN General Assembly voted last November to reaffirm the Outer Space Treaty. Some 163 countries supported a resolution stating that the "prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security." The U.S. abstained. Now, with George W. Bush leading an armed-to-the-teeth gang of space cowboys, the Outer Space Treaty is headed for an unhappy ending.

- Lyle Stewart is a Montreal writer. His E-mail is l.stewart4@sympatico.ca

-------- russia

One killed in Russian factory blast

Fri, 22 Jun 2001
Austraslian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-22jun2001-56.htm

One person has been killed and seven others have been injured in a blast in a factory in central Russia that processes minerals for the nuclear industry.

The RIA Novosti news agency says four of the injured suffered third-degree burns and remain in intensive care in hospital.

The explosion occurred in the city of Glazov in the central republic of Udmurt, when workers reportedly ignored safety procedures during the processing of calcium.

The factory is one of the biggest centres specialising in making alloys of enriched uranium and zirconium, a metal which can ignite spontaneously in contact with air when it is finely cut up.

The emergency situations ministry says there have been no radioactive leaks as a result of the accident.

----

Radioactive Russia?

Ximena Ortiz,
June 22, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010622-253167.htm

OSLO -- Norway feels remote. The fjord-surrounded, ethnically homogeneous country, with its Nordic climate, seems something like a lost Viking colony, though any inclination to rape and pillage has been replaced by flights of neighborliness and environmental consciousness. Indeed, a traveler may well feel they´ve arrived at the globe´s edge. Unfortunately for Norway, its remote locale won´t protect it from a potential crisis of radioactive proportions.

Small, but rich, Norway shares a border with large, nuclear and impoverished Russia. And what a neighbor to have. While Norway provides the Kremlin with funding to store its Soviet-era nuclear waste more safely, Russia´s Duma on June 6 gave final approval to President Vladimir Putin´s ambition to convert Russia into the world´s hub for fee-based nuclear waste disposal. (Mr. Putin always did have an eye for restoring Russian glory.) And while Norway (and the Russian people, for that matter) may feel the sting of this decision most sharply, it remains very much a global problem.

Once feared for its nuclear arsenal, Russia is now dreaded for the environmental havoc it could wreak, especially if its cash-for-nuclear waste designs hit stride. The Kremlin is angling to import up to 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors in Germany, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, Taiwan, South Korea and China in exchange for as much as $20 billion. More than 90 percent of Russians say they oppose the scheme.

Large-scale international transport of nuclear waste increases the risk of ecological disaster for a number of countries and much of the world´s supply of fish comes from waters in and off of Norway, in close proximity to Russia´s huge build-up of nuclear waste. But there are more ominous concerns regarding Russia´s plans. Since the Kremlin has said it would reprocess its imported nuclear waste and convert it to energy, it will thereby increase its supply of weapons-grade material. And in Mafia-infested, cash-strapped Russia, a dramatic proliferation of this material would be alarming, since the country is ill-equipped to store it properly and there are plenty of elements willing to peddle it to mischief-makers.

So in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new global challenge has emerged. Meeting this challenge will require diplomacy, resolve, firmness and money. Which is where Norway comes in. Norway has a unique relationship with Russia. Indeed, Norway helped Russia with food during the hard winters between 1910-1920, which may be part of the reason the Soviet Union withdrew from Norway after it liberated the country in 1944 after four years of Nazi occupation. And when the Russians´ Kursk submarine crisis hit in August, the Kremlin allowed only Norwegian divers to launch a rescue attempt, although Britain had sent ships to help.

Russians do appear to lend the Norwegians a special trust. At the same time, World War II also reminded the Norwegians that, despite their remoteness and tradition of neutrality, they are nonetheless vulnerable to aggressors. "If Russia and Norway were to end up in some sort of quarrel, Russia might be inclined to demonstrate its position of power in the area," said John Kristen Skogan, a researcher at the Institute of International Affairs in Norway. "That´s in the back of the Norwegian mind."

So Norway values its NATO membership, and Norway and the United States have many concerns in common regarding Russia. This is why the three nations entered a partnership in 1996 known as the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation (AMEC) Program, which is chiefly geared to helping Russia improve its nuclear waste storage. The economic program has made effective (if incremental) improvements in Russia´s nuclear waste disposal. By 2002, when funding for the program runs out, the United States will have spent $25 million on the program and Norway $9 million. "Our main concern is that the United States is planning to withdraw by 2002. The mood seems to be swinging that way," said Rear Adm. Ole-Gerhard Ron, commander of naval forces in northern Norway.

It would be a shame if the United States pulled out, since Russia has been demonstrating increasing glasnost on its nuclear waste problems. Although not part of the AMEC program, earlier this month Russia allowed Norwegian officials to inspect the Bay of Andrejev nuclear waste site near the border with Norway. Once a very secretive Soviet-era military base, Russia continues to keep nuclear submarines at the installation. However, the Kremlin built high walls around the installation for the Norwegian visit, in order to restrict officials´ view of non-waste-related equipment.

Norway had been trying for six years to gain access before the Russians approved the visit in June. "We actually knew quite a bit about this site, but to actually see it causes a big impression," said Norway´s State Secretary Espen Barth Eide. Mr. Eide said that one of the installations doesn´t even have a roof, and one of Norway´s goals is to develop robotics technology to get that waste to a more secure place, but the first step is to stabilize containers. "It´s first and foremost their problem and their rubbish. But on the other hand, it could affect us as much as them. So it´s become a shared legacy of the Cold War," he said. But if Russia becomes a large-scale importer of that rubbish, this already daunting problem could become worse. And what dangerous rubbish it is.

Ximena Ortiz is an editorial writer for The Washington Times.

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


Senate Panel OKs Uranium Mine Fund

Friday, June 22, 2001
Albuquerque Journal Wire Report
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/365747news06-22-01.htm

WASHINGTON - A Senate committee on Thursday approved a spending bill that earmarks $84 million to settle compensation claims from uranium miners who were made sick by their work during the Cold War.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Trust Fund went broke in May 2000. The spending measure approved Thursday, if approved by the full Congress and signed by the president, would return the fund to solvency. The government has been issuing IOUs to the sick workers and their families for the past year.

The spending measure, designed to alleviate current-year federal budget shortfalls, also includes money for New Mexico's national nuclear laboratories, veterans health-care programs and missile defense research at Kirtland Air Force Base.

-------- arkansas

ARKANSAS NUCLEAR PLANT LICENSE RENEWED FOR 20 MORE YEARS

June 22, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-22-09.html

RUSSELLVILLE, Arkansas, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has renewed the operating license for Unit 1 of the Arkansas Nuclear One nuclear power plant.

The NRC unanimously approved the license extension following a review of staff recommendations.

Entergy Operations, Inc., which operates the plant, submitted an application to the NRC on January 31, 2000, to renew the license for Arkansas Nuclear One, Unit 1, which expires on May 20, 2014. The NRC conducted an extensive review of the license renewal application, and concluded that their were no environmental or safety concerns that would preclude renewal of the license.

The NRC also conducted two inspections of the plant to verify information submitted by Entergy.

The NRC's environmental review is described in a site specific supplement to the NRC's "Generic Environmental Impact Statement for License Renewal of Nuclear Power Plants." In the "Safety Evaluation Report Related to the License Renewal of Arkansas Nuclear One, Unit1," issued in June, the staff concluded that Entergy had demonstrated the capability to manage the effects of plant aging.

On May 16, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards - an independent body of technical experts which advises the Commission - issued its recommendation that the operating license for Arkansas Nuclear One, Unit 1, be renewed. That recommendation is contained in the "Report on the Safety Aspects of the License Renewal Application for Arkansas Nuclear One, Unit 1."

All documents relating to the license renewal are available at: http://www.nrc.gov/OPA/reports/renewal.htm

NRC renewed the operating licenses for both units of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Maryland, for an additional 20 years on March 23, 2000, and renewed the operating licenses for the three units of the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina, for an additional 20 years on May 23, 2000.

The agency is now reviewing license renewal applications for Hatch Units 1 and 2, operated by the Southern Nuclear Operating Company in Georgia; Turkey Point Units 3 and 4, operated by Florida Power & Light Co.; Virginia Electric & Power Co.'s Surry Units 1 and 2 and North Anna Units 1 and 2 in Virginia; Duke Power Co.'s McGuire Units 1 and 2 in North Carolina and Catawba Units 1 and 2 in South Carolina.

-------- colorado

Colo. Workers' Case in Final Arguments

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sick-Workers-Lawsuit.html?searchpv=aponline

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010622/aponline081838_000.htm

GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) -- Ailing defense workers suing a company that provided beryllium for nuclear warhead triggers are aiming at the wrong target, the company's attorney said during closing arguments.

Four workers at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and their spouses are suing Cleveland-based Brush Wellman Inc., claiming they were sickened by exposure to beryllium that the company sold.

Jury deliberations were expected to begin Friday in Jefferson County District Court.

The case is the first of 76 lawsuits against Brush Wellman over beryllium exposure.

Allen Stewart, an attorney for the four workers, said Brush Wellman knew employees were being exposed to dangerous levels of beryllium. He said the company knew the federal exposure standard of 2 micrograms of beryllium per cubic meter of air was not safe but still promoted it to protect the company's bottom line.

``For Brush Wellman, it's a barrier to sales,'' Stewart said. ``For my clients, it's the difference between health and sickness.''

Brush Wellman attorney Sydney McDole said Thursday that the operators of Rocky Flats exposed the workers to levels of beryllium up to 1,500 times higher than the federal workplace standard and never warned them of the dangers.

Brush Wellman shipped beryllium with warning labels on the containers and Rocky Flats removed them, McDole said.

``These plaintiffs sued the wrong people,'' McDole said. ``Where is the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy?''

McDole said that the 2-microgram standard was based on the best knowledge at the time and that the plaintiffs had not proved they were sickened when exposed to beryllium levels below federal standards.

Chronic beryllium disease saps the ability to breathe. Of the four workers in court Thursday, two were breathing supplemental oxygen.

Beryllium also has been used in cars, cell phones, computers, bicycles, dental work and golf clubs. As many as 800,000 employees in a variety of industries could be working with it, the federal Occupation Safety and Health Administration said.

-------- kentucky

USEC role uncertain on new power plant during moratorium
The group including the company did not file its permit application before the beginning of the six-month suspension.

By Bill Bartleman bbartleman@paducahsun.com--270.575.8650,
Paducah Sun
Friday, June 22, 2001
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2001/nn11278.htm

Key officials aren't sure what effect Gov. Paul Patton's moratorium on applications for power plants will have on bids submitted to the Tennessee Valley Authority for building a 600-megawatt plant to meet future power demands.

While TVA would not divulge how many bids were received from Kentucky, the United States Enrichment Corp. confirmed it is part of a consortium that wants a huge gas-fired power plant near the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant in western McCracken County.

The USEC group did not file its permit application with the Kentucky Natural Resources Cabinet prior to imposition of the moratorium Tuesday. The moratorium is in effect for at least six months.

TVA is reviewing bids from Kentucky and other states, and by July 16 is expected to announce a list of finalists, with a decision on who gets the project expected Oct. 15, two months before the Kentucky moratorium is lifted.

If TVA is concerned about the moratorium, it could reject bids by USEC and any others proposed in Kentucky. A 600-megawatt plant would cost as much as $1 billion and provide hundreds of jobs during construction plus a number of good-paying permanent jobs after it is completed.

"We are continuing to assess the situation in an effort to determine if it will affect us," said USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle.

The comment from TVA was similar. "We are continuing to look into it," said spokesman Gil Francis. The initial reaction was that it would have little effect on any of the bids, but Francis wasn't aware that USEC did not submit its permit application to the state prior to the deadline. He said application reviewers would decide if that is a factor.

Patton issued an executive order Tuesday instructing state agencies to suspend acceptance of power plant applications while the new Kentucky State Energy Policy Advisory Board assesses environmental and energy issues related to power plants. He wants the group to complete its work by Dec. 7.

"It is important that we ensure a continued, reliable source of energy for our citizens, but it is also necessary that we study the potential effects that additional air emissions from new plants could bring to the state as well as their effect upon the electric supply grid," Patton said. "We must strive to strike a balance between our energy needs, our ability to generate energy for others and our commitment for a clean, safe environment."

The fact that no one from western Kentucky was appointed to the energy advisory board drew concern from state Rep. Buddy Buckingham, D-Murray, chairman of the 20-county western region New Economy task force.

Buckingham plans to encourage Patton to expand the board to include someone from western Kentucky.

Buckingham's point man is Don Bowles of Madisonville, a retired coal operator and president of the Kentucky Coal Council. "I've asked him to make contact to see if he couldn't influence a couple of spots on that commission," Buckingham said.

The Pennyrile area, strong in coal mining, should have a say in the moratorium because 51 percent of Kentucky's power plants are coal-fired, he said.

Patton said the advisory board will be attached to the Kentucky Public Service Commission. Standing members are secretaries of the natural resources, public protection and economic development cabinets; the chairman of the Public Service Commission; the director of the Division of Energy in the Natural Resources Cabinet; and the director of the Kentucky Center for Applied Energy and Research at the University of Kentucky.

Appointed board members are:

--Jack Conway of Louisville, who will serve as chairman and the governor's designee.

--Victoria I. Weber of Louisville, the consumer representative.

--George Siemens of Louisville, the utility industry representative.

--Haydon Timons of LaGrange, also a utility industry representative.

--Tom FitzGerald of Frankfort, representing environmental advocates.

--Robert Addington of Ashland, the coal industry representative.

--Donald B. Daily of Ghent, representing industrial consumers.

--Bill Daugherty of Berea, representing the oil and gas industry.

-------- tennessee

Review Of Oak Ridge Operations Office Contractor Nuclear Criticality Safety Self-Assessments

June 22, 2001
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/oversight/reports/reviews/0106or/0106or.html

Office of Independent Environment, Safety and Health Oversight U.S. Department of Energy Washington, DC 20585

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TABLE OF CONTENTS | Page

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2
1.0 INTRODUCTION 5
2.0 BACKGROUND 5
3.0 BRITISH NUCLEAR FUELS LIMITED 6
4.0 BECHTEL-JACOBS COMPANY 6
5.0 CONCLUSIONS 10
6.0 FOLLOW-UP VISIT RESULTS 10

--

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ANSI American National Standards Institute
BJC Bechtel Jacobs Company
BNFL British Nuclear Fuels Limited
D&D decontamination and decommissioning
DOE U.S. Department of Energy
EH Office of Environment, Safety and Health
EH-2 Office of Independent Environment, Safety, and Health Oversight
ETTP East Tennessee Technology Park
LMES Lockheed Martin Energy Systems
NCSA Nuclear Criticality Safety Approval
NCSE Nuclear Criticality Safety Evaluation
ORO Oak Ridge Operations Office
ORPS DOE Occurrence Reporting and Processing and System

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Background

On September 30, 1999, a criticality accident occurred in a uranium processing facility in Tokai-Mura, Japan. This accident was one of the factors cited by the Deputy Secretary in his November 11, 1999, memorandum that established the DOE Nuclear Criticality Safety Improvement Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Deputy Secretary directed all DOE sites to perform self-assessments of their criticality safety programs. The self-assessments were to evaluate the site nuclear criticality safety program against a set of specific criteria, that were derived from requirements delineated in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) 8.19 Standard and DOE Policy 450.5, Line Management Oversight of Environment, Safety and Health.

Also as part of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Improvement Initiative, the Deputy Secretary directed the Office of Environment, Safety and Health (EH) to review the site self-assessments and to conduct additional site reviews where warranted. The EH Office of Independent Environment, Safety, and Health Oversight (EH-2) was assigned to conduct the reviews. The Oak Ridge Operations Office, Bechtel Jacobs Company, and BNFL, Inc. programs were selected for additional review because their respective criticality safety self-assessments reported significant widespread deficiencies in their criticality safety programs relative to the assessment criteria provided by the Deputy Secretary. In addition, these self-assessments did not address all information specifically required by the Deputy Secretary's memorandum and did not specifically assess the risk of a criticality accident.

EH-2 conducted a field review from August 7-11, 2000 of the nuclear criticality safety self-assessments performed by two contractors under the purview of the Oak Ridge Operations Office (ORO). The EH-2 team focused on facilities and activities operated by BNFL, Inc. and Bechtel-Jacobs Company.

Results

BNFL, Inc. is responsible for decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) of three facilities at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP): K-33, K-31 and K-29. Although work remains to be accomplished in completing planned corrective actions BNFL has performed an adequate self-assessment, taken appropriate interim actions, and developed an adequate corrective action plan. The EH-2 team did not identify any safety issues at BNFL facilities.

Bechtel-Jacobs Company at Oak Ridge is responsible for waste management and D&D activities for the balance of facilities at ETTP, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment facility, portions of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, the Portsmouth and Paducah sites. The contractor's self-assessment indicates that there were systemic weaknesses in the Bechtel Jacobs Company nuclear criticality safety program and related management systems. A total of 74 findings and 40 observations were identified by the company's self-assessment. The corrective actions developed to address these self-identified findings and observations are responsive. During this review, the EH-2 team identified two Safety Issues in nuclear criticality safety activities managed by the Bechtel Jacobs Company. These Safety Issues are shown in Table ES-1.

Conclusions

Although deficiencies are evident in the Bechtel Jacobs Company and BNFL, Inc. criticality safety programs, the criticality accident risk remains low at the present time because few activities are being conducted that involve significant quantities of fissile material or that impact fissile storage areas. There is a potential that this reduced risk of a criticality is generating the incorrect perception, particularly in the Bechtel Jacobs Company facilities, that the likelihood of a criticality accident is so remote that deficiencies in controls can be tolerated.

Oak Ridge Operations Office management and their contractors need to resolve deficiencies in their line management oversight programs and criticality safety programs before proceeding with decommissioning activities of uranium processing facilities and equipment that historically contained higher enrichments of uranium (greater than five percent) in the gaseous diffusion process plants. These areas pose an increased risk for a criticality accident due to higher enrichment levels or potential for introduction of moderating materials.

Follow-up Review Results

The EH-2 team conducted a follow-up visit on April 24, 2001. The EH-2 team focused on the progress toward addressing deficiencies identified at Bechtel Jacobs Company facilities during the August 2000 review.

A number of corrective actions to criticality safety controls in the K-25 vault have been completed. The Bechtel Jacobs Company also commissioned two internal reviews of their criticality safety program that identified additional weaknesses and included recommendations. Bechtel Jacobs Company personnel are in the process of developing corrective action plans for these two internal reviews. Bechtel Jacobs Company management also committed to provide the Oak Ridge Operations Office with a Criticality Safety Improvement Plan. This plan is intended to provide for long-term resolution of identified issues and weaknesses and strengthen the overall criticality safety program prior to conducting decommissioning activities in former fissile material areas where higher enrichments might be encountered. Also, the Bechtel Jacobs Company added a significant number of nuclear criticality safety staff to support its five sites. However, the Bechtel Jacobs Company Criticality Safety Supervisor position remained unfilled at the time of the follow-up visit. A senior nuclear criticality safety engineer from the subcontractor providing nuclear criticality safety services is filling this position on an interim basis.

EH-2 will continue to monitor the effectiveness of corrective actions, the improvement program and the implementation of criticality safety controls.

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Table ES-1 - Safety Issues

DOE Order 414.1A, Quality Assurance, establishes a process for addressing and tracking Safety Issues identified by independent oversight evaluations. As used in that Order, the term "Safety Issue" refers to deficiencies in safety programs or weaknesses in safety management systems that require formal tracking and corrective action. The DOE Office of Environmental Management, as the responsible program secretarial office, is required to develop a corrective action plan to address the Safety Issues identified during this EH-2 review.

Safety Issue #1 addresses management's failure to correct longstanding criticality safety deficiencies in Bechtel Jacobs Company facilities. The EH-2 team identified problems in the nuclear criticality safety postings, controls, and evaluations at the East Tennessee Technology Park K-25 facility. Similar criticality safety deficiencies have been recognized for a least four years and were known to the Bechtel Jacobs Company when they took over the contract in 1998 but have not been corrected.

Safety Issue #2 addresses inadequacies in the Bechtel Jacobs Company self-assessment, which was not effective in identifying a number of problems in the nuclear criticality safety program. The self-assessment did not identify deficiencies in areas such as nuclear criticality staffing, field verification of criticality safety controls, fissile material accountability, occurrence reporting, and unreviewed safety question determinations.

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REVIEW OF OAK RIDGE OPERATIONS OFFICE CONTRACTOR NUCLEAR CRITICALITY SAFETY SELF-ASSESSMENTS

1.0 INTRODUCTION

As part of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Improvement Initiative, the Deputy Secretary directed the Office of Environment, Safety and Health (EH) to review the site self-assessments and to conduct additional field reviews where warranted. The EH Office of Environment, Safety, and Health Oversight (EH-2) performed a field review that examined nuclear criticality safety programs of the Bechtel-Jacobs Company (BJC) and British Nuclear Fuels, Limited (BNFL) during August 7-11, 2000. The purpose of the field review was to provide timely feedback to line management regarding criticality safety risks and the need for additional improvements. The EH-2 comments on the Oak Ridge Operations Office (ORO) Nuclear Criticality Safety Self-assessment Corrective Action Plan were communicated in a separate report.

Section 2 of this report provides the background that led up to conducting this review. Sections 3 and 4 discuss the results for the BNFL and BJC programs respectively. The EH-2 team identified two Safety Issues involving the BJC program that are summarized as (1) failure to promptly correct criticality safety deficiencies and (2) inadequacies in the criticality safety self-assessment. Section 5 provides the conclusions.

Section 6 presents the results of an EH-2 Team follow-up visit that was conducted on April 24, 2001. The follow-up visit focused on ORO and BJC efforts to resolve safety issues and weaknesses identified during the August 2000 visit and enhance the nuclear criticality safety program at BJC facilities.

2.0 BACKGROUND

On September 30, 1999 a criticality accident occurred in a uranium processing facility in Tokai-mura, Japan. This accident was one of the factors cited by the Deputy Secretary in his November 11, 1999 memorandum that established the DOE Nuclear Criticality Safety Improvement Initiative. As part of this initiative, the Deputy Secretary directed all DOE sites to perform self-assessments of their criticality safety programs. The self-assessments were to evaluate the site nuclear criticality safety program against a set of specified criteria, that were derived from requirements delineated in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) 8.19 Standard and DOE Policy 450.5, Line Management Oversight of Environment, Safety and Health.

Also as part of the Nuclear Criticality Safety Improvement Initiative, the Deputy Secretary directed EH-2 to review the site self-assessments and to conduct additional reviews where warranted. The ORO, BJC, and BNFL programs were selected because their respective criticality safety self-assessments reported significant widespread deficiencies in their criticality safety programs relative to the assessment criteria provided by the Deputy Secretary. In addition, these self-assessments did not include an analysis of nuclear criticality safety staffing needs through the next five years or an assessment of risks, although such information was specifically required by the Deputy Secretary's memorandum.

3.0 BRITISH NUCLEAR FUELS LIMITED

Although work remains to be accomplished in completing planned corrective actions, BNFL has performed an adequate self-assessment, taken appropriate interim actions, and developed an adequate Corrective Action Plan. BNFL's use of the outside experts was a proactive step that enhanced their self-assessment. The EH-2 team did not identify any additional Safety Issues.

The BNFL self-assessment identified a number of deficiencies with the nuclear criticality safety program. Specifically, the need for additional criticality safety staff and the identification of nuclear criticality safety controls and the flowdown of those controls into work planning documents. Corrective actions have been identified to hire additional criticality safety staff, revise work planning procedures, and evaluate the tracking and trending of nuclear criticality safety issues. A number of opportunities for improvement were identified in the areas of training, implementation of nuclear criticality safety analyses, and the integration of nuclear criticality safety with other safety management programs.

BNFL has made improvements as outlined in their Corrective Action Plan. Current and projected nuclear criticality safety staffing levels appear adequate. Currently, BNFL has four contracted nuclear criticality safety staff, one of whom is a trainee. BNFL plans to add one more experienced individual to the contracted nuclear criticality safety staff in anticipation of beginning operations in other facilities. Their goal is to have five fully qualified criticality safety engineers before commencing decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) operations in the K-29 Facility. BNFL also plans to conduct a follow up assessment, using outside experts, to gauge the effectiveness and pace of corrective actions.

BNFL has ensured that it seeks feedback from workers and their supervisors on the appropriateness of proposed controls and on options for eliminating difficulties with implementing existing controls. However, continued BNFL management attention will be needed to ensure that the planned corrective actions are fully and effectively implemented so that BNFL will be able to monitor future D&D activities in buildings that previously processed higher enriched uranium and pose inherently higher risks.

4.0 BECHTEL-JACOBS COMPANY

The BJC self-assessment and the results of this EH-2 review indicate that there were systemic weaknesses in BJC's nuclear criticality safety program and related management systems. A total of 74 findings and 40 observations were identified by the BJC self-assessment. The majority of the root causes for the findings were management related such as improper resource allocation; policies not adequately defined, disseminated, or enforced; inadequate administrative control; and defective or inadequate procedures.

The EH-2 team identified two Safety Issues that require formal corrective action plans according to DOE Order 414.1a, Quality Assurance.

SAFETY ISSUE #1: Bechtel-Jacobs Company management has not corrected longstanding criticality safety deficiencies at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP).

The EH-2 team identified problems in the nuclear criticality safety approval (NCSA)/nuclear criticality safety evaluation (NCSE) in Vault 1X at the ETTP K-25 facility during a tour on August 8, 2000. Subsequent analysis of the NCSA/NCSE indicated several significant problems with the posted criticality safety controls for the storage array and the evaluation of potential accident conditions as well as the BJC response to the identified problems. All of the problem areas discussed below are violations of specific provisions of the mandatory standards ANSI/ANS-8.1 and 8.19, which are required by DOE Order 420.1, Facility Safety.

BJC did not promptly take action to correct the criticality safety problems. The specific problems with the Vault 1X NCSE (i.e., inadequate analysis of accident conditions and controls in the NCSEs and inconsistencies between NCSE in Vault 1X) and similar problems in other NCSEs have been recognized for at least four years but not adequately corrected. The previous contractor, Lockheed Martin Energy Systems (LMES), identified deficiencies with this NCSE (NCSA/E-1326) during a 1996 assessment for ETTP. The 1996 LMES assessment concluded that there were many examples of NCSA/NCSEs not adequately demonstrating double contingency, including NCSA/E-1326. This information has been available to BJC since it took over the contract in 1998, and BJC acknowledged the need to review and revise NCSA/NCSEs in their self-assessment. However, BJC has not corrected the problems at ETTP. BJC approved NCSA-1459 in September 1999 to replace NCSA/E-1326 but it had not been implemented at the time of the field review. In addition, an active NCSA/NCSE (1316), identified as deficient in the 1996 LMES assessment, was not revised.

The posted controls derived from NCSA/E-1326 permitted a potentially critical array to be established. The posted criticality safety limits did not control enrichment or mass of individual containers. Spacing was maintained with administrative controls only. With the enriched uranium material potentially available at the K-25 Facility, it is possible to load the array according to the posted limits with highly enriched uranium and initiate a criticality accident with only a minor spacing violation (e.g. human error, fire fighting, seismic events).

The NCSE that provided the basis for the controls (i.e., NCSE-1326) did not analyze all credible normal and abnormal conditions. NCSE-1326 did not evaluate enrichments above 20 percent using nominal six-inch diameter bottles or spacing violations such as those caused by fire fighting, seismic events, or simple operator errors. Some of the as-found storage conditions were not addressed within the scope of the NCSE. For example, the EH-2 team found an array that contained 13 six-inch nalgene bottles without established controls on enrichment. Therefore, the as-found conditions had not been adequately analyzed by the active NCSE and thus the potential risk of a criticality accident is higher than that assumed by the evaluation.

The controls specified by NCSA-1326 were inconsistent with the basis criticality safety evaluation (NCSE-1326). The NCSA controls for the storage operations were inconsistent with the parameters analyzed in the NCSE and omitted controls that were assumed by the NCSE. For example, the NCSE stated that the maximum diameter of bottles was a nominal five inches, and that enrichment would not exceed 20 percent U-235. However, the NCSA permitted nominal six-inch diameter bottles containing uranium of any enrichment. These inconsistencies indicate that the flow down of the evaluation to the controls was not adequate and that verification and surveillance processes were not sufficient to detect discrepancies.

BJC management did not post the area or notify workers of the criticality safety problems so that they could perform their expected functions without undue risk. No actions were taken to alert workers of the criticality safety problems with the nuclear criticality safety controls or evaluation since the identification of the problems four years ago. The areas were not posted to warn workers, management controls were not in place to restrict operations until adequate criticality safety controls were established, and no occurrence notifications were made. Although some actions were taken after the EH-2 team discussed the specific problem with BJC staff, the area was not posted to warn operators of the deficient controls, even during the time before BJC completed its initial evaluation of the safety of the as-found condition.

SAFETY ISSUE #2: The criticality safety self-assessment performed by BJC did not identify the following program weaknesses:

Lack of qualified nuclear criticality safety staff Inadequate field verification of the NCSAs and NCSEs that govern current facility operations Inability to determine the amount of fissile material in specific areas Inadequate processes for identifying and reporting criticality safety deficiencies to DOE Lack of a process requiring Unreviewed Safety Question Determinations for criticality safety deficiencies

The EH-2 team identified weaknesses in the nuclear criticality safety program that were not identified in the BJC self-assessment. The Corrective Action Plan for this Safety Issue needs to address each of the following problem areas.

Lack of qualified nuclear criticality safety staff.

The self-assessment and the associated Corrective Action Plan did not address the need to formally qualify the BJC nuclear criticality safety staff to the equivalent of DOE Standard 1135-99. BJC currently has two nuclear criticality safety staff to direct and monitor the nuclear criticality safety activities of its subcontractors. One engineer has five years of experience in Nuclear Safety Analysis, two of which are directly related to nuclear criticality safety. The other has no nuclear criticality safety work experience. In addition, the self-assessment and Corrective Action Plan did not address the need to fill the nuclear criticality safety supervisor position on a permanent basis. At the time of the assessment, an individual who had significant collateral duties was filling the nuclear criticality safety supervisor position on an acting basis. The shortage of experienced and qualified nuclear criticality safety staff is a factor in the continuing weaknesses in NCSAs/NCSEs and the failure to identify and correct weaknesses in a timely manner.

Inadequate field verification of the NCSAs and NCSEs that govern current operations

The BJC self-assessment did not accurately evaluate the criticality risk because it was not based on a field validation of the adequacy on NCSAs/NCSEs. For example, the self-assessment includes statements such as "no violations of double contingency" and "no immediate safety concerns" that are not fully supportable in light of recognized problems. For instance, the assertion about "no double contingency violations" is not supportable since BJC had not completed walkdowns of many of the operations. In addition, previous assessments provided clear indicators that at least two active NCSA/NCSEs did not adequately demonstrate double contingency (see discussion under Safety Issue #1).

BJC had 42 active NCSA/NCSEs at two Oak Ridge projects (28 at ETTP and 14 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). Based on previous assessments, at least two of these (NCSA/NCSE 1326 and 1316) were inadequate with respect to application of the double contingency principle. Although the self-assessment identifies NCSA/NCSEs as a problem area, the Corrective Action Plan did not specifically identify the need to walk-down and field verify existing NCSA/NCSEs. Thus, the NCSAs/NCSEs did not provide full assurance that current facility conditions were adequately analyzed and that the facility was operating within established controls.

Inability to determine the amount of fissile material in specific areas

BJC took five days to locate fissile content data for three of the bottles stored in Vault 1X because of the lack of an effective fissile material inventory system. Such a system is needed to determine the amount of fissile material in the vault and to confirm that the total fissile content of all thirteen nalgene bottles in the array was low (less than 700 grams). Without information of the fissile material content, BJC was not able to quickly determine compliance with mass or enrichment limits (if established) and evaluate the significance of nonconforming/inconsistent NCSAs and NCSEs. Previous ORO assessments also identified the lack of a fissile material inventory system as a weakness. For example, the Facility Representative report covering the period from October 1999 through March 2000 indicated significant deficiencies in the Waste Information Management System database (findings FRP-00-001 and FRP-00-002). However, the self-assessment and the Corrective Action Plan did not contain information about the deficiencies in the fissile material inventory and associated tracking systems.

Inadequate processes for reporting criticality safety deficiencies to DOE

The BJC process was not timely in reporting criticality safety deficiencies to the DOE Occurrence Reporting and Processing and System (ORPS). Some BJC personnel indicated that the observed problems with Vault 1X NCSA/E were not a reportable event because the presence of the six-inch diameter bottles did not violate the posted criticality safety controls. However, DOE reporting requirements specify that a major discrepancy between the evaluation and the controls would be a significant event that warrants reporting via ORPS. On August 25, 2000, 14 days after the EH-2 team identified the problem to BJC, BJC filed a formal Occurrence Report, ORO-BJC-K25WASTMAN-2000-016, Violation of Nuclear Criticality Safety Procedure. The occurrence report focused solely on the failure to implement the new NCSA/E-1459 on schedule. It did not address deficiencies in the existing controls, surveillances, or quality control that resulted in the deficient NCSE and NCSA controls.

Lack of a process requiring Unreviewed Safety Question Determinations for criticality safety deficiencies

BJC initiated an Unreviewed Safety Question Determination for the criticality safety deficiencies associated with NCSA/NCSE-1326 only after prompting by the EH-2 team. The current process does not include NCSEs as part of the Facility Authorization Basis. However, the NCSE is the safety basis for the operation and the derivative NCSA is the implementing document for the criticality safety controls assumed to be present by the Authorization Basis. DOE Order 5480.21, Unreviewed Safety Questions, indicates that the discovery of an inadequate safety basis and inadequate controls would lead to a positive Unreviewed Safety Question Determination because the frequency of a criticality accident would be higher than that assumed by the Authorization Basis for normal operating conditions.

5.0 CONCLUSIONS

The overall conclusions for the two contractor programs are summarized as follows:

In general, the BNFL self-assessment is adequate and BNFL is making significant improvements in its program. Completion of these improvements is essential to facilitate safe D&D activities, particularly in areas where higher enriched materials are expected.

Significant weaknesses were evident in the BJC criticality safety program, including two Safety Issues. Safety Issue #1 addressed management's failure to take effective and timely corrective actions when problems were identified at BJC facilities. Safety Issue #2 addressed inadequacies in the BJC self-assessment.

Although significant deficiencies are evident, the overall risk is reduced at the present time because few activities are being conducted that involve significant quantities of fissile material or that affect fissile storage areas (e.g., structural modifications). However, the BJC and ORO programs need significant improvement to ensure adequate nuclear criticality safety controls are in place before D&D activities begin that remove or disturb equipment or facilities containing fissile material where higher enriched uranium (greater than five percent) is expected in the gaseous diffusion process buildings.

6.0 FOLLOW-UP VISIT RESULTS

The EH-2 team conducted a follow-up visit on April 24, 2001. The EH-2 team focused on the progress toward addressing deficiencies identified at Bechtel Jacobs Company facilities during the August 2000 review.

The EH-2 team's follow-up visit verified that BJC has completed a number of corrective actions to criticality safety controls in the K-25 vault. BJC also commissioned two internal reviews of their criticality safety program subsequent to the August 2000 EH review. One of these internal reviews assessed all active nuclear criticality safety evaluations and analyses, including field verification of the adequacy of criticality safety controls. The field verification found no violations of the double contingency principle in the field. The other internal review was a comprehensive review of the criticality safety program. Both internal reviews identified a number of additional weaknesses and made several recommendations. However, neither review found any unsafe conditions from a criticality safety perspective. BJC is in the process of developing corrective action plans for the two internal reviews. BJC is also scheduled to provide a Criticality Safety Improvement Plan to the DOE Oak Ridge Operations Office. This plan is intended to provide long-term resolution of the issues and weaknesses identified by the EH-2 and the internal reviews, and strengthen the overall criticality safety program in advance of decommissioning activities in former fissile material areas where higher enrichments might be encountered. Also, BJC added a significant number of nuclear criticality safety staff to support the five sites for which BJC is responsible. However, the Bechtel Jacobs Company Criticality Safety Supervisor position remained unfilled at the time of the follow-up visit. A senior criticality safety engineer from the subcontractor providing criticality safety services is filling this position on an interim basis.

EH-2 will continue to monitor the effectiveness of corrective actions, the improvement program and the implementation of criticality safety controls.

-------- us nuc politics

Senate Panel Cool To Defense Plans
Rumsfeld Says 'Trade-Offs' Likely In Implementing New Priorities

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 22, 2001; Page A23
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28845-2001Jun21?language=printer

The Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday gave Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a chilly reception at his first congressional hearing since being confirmed six months ago, with the panel's Democrats expressing skepticism about missile defense and its Republicans asking pointed questions about possible base closings and cuts to weapons programs.

GOP members of the panel also questioned the administration's surprise decision last week to order the Navy to stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as a bombing range.

At one point, Rumsfeld dismissed the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as "a Cold War construct."

The new chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) tartly responded, "I think it would be useful for you to at least attempt to understand" why some people fear that abrogating the treaty could weaken U.S. security by provoking Russia to boost its ballistic missile capabilities.

Later, Rumsfeld protested he had been "badly quoted" in news stories about his view that missile defenses could be deployed even if they have not been fully tested. His point, he said, was that "practically nothing works perfectly in life."

But the committee's Democrats were not persuaded.

"National missile defense is an uncertain trumpet at this point, and we ought not to blow it before we test it and fully make sure it is deployable," said Sen. Max Cleland, a generally hawkish Georgia Democrat. He said he worried the administration would "commit huge sums of money for some kind of crash program to field a system of questionable effectiveness."

Rumsfeld also used the hearing to lay out his priorities in defense reform. Conventional military forces -- the armored vehicles, warships and fighter aircraft that make up the backbone of today's armed forces -- were almost absent from his list.

In addition to missile defenses, Rumsfeld said he was contemplating increased spending on unmanned and robotic vehicles, precision munitions and surveillance from space.

The non-hardware areas he listed as priorities included military personnel, intelligence and research and development.

Rumsfeld hinted he was considering cuts in conventional forces to allow higher spending on personnel and future capabilities: "We're going to have to make trade-offs between current capabilities, investing in people and investing in the future."

The services have worried for months that Rumsfeld's review would result in cutting troops. The Army worried Rumsfeld would do away with two of its 10 active-duty divisions.

The panel's Republicans lodged several complaints with Rumsfeld.

Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) said she was bothered by "confusing and conflicting signals from the Pentagon" about its shipbuilding plans. Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.) said, "We were not consulted" before the decision to terminate Navy practice bombing on Vieques.

Rumsfeld also edged further away from the idea that the United States must be prepared to fight "two major wars" at once in places such as Iraq and the Korean peninsula, the yardstick that has been used for a decade to determine the size of the armed forces.

"The current strategy isn't working," he said at both the morning Senate hearing and an afternoon session of the House Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Floyd Spence (S.C.), the second-ranking Republican on the House panel, expressed concern about the signal that might be sent to allies by jettisoning the two-war approach.

In a brief interview, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed with Spence's concern.

"We have to be careful that our strategy reassures our allies," said Shelton, who appeared before both committees but said little.

At the end of the Senate hearing, Levin warned Rumsfeld that "you may find some of your priorities . . . for little things like missile defense changed."

Then Levin gaveled the hearing to a close.

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Rove cancels meeting with Pentagon officials

June 22, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough and Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010622-84230174.htm

Karl Rove, President Bush´s senior political adviser, planned to meet today with top Pentagon officials concerned about the Vieques bombing range issue, but he abruptly canceled his attendance at the session after The Washington Times questioned him about the upcoming meeting.

Mr. Rove has been under intense criticism from some Republicans for involving himself in the national security issue of whether the Navy should continue using Puerto Rico´s Vieques island as a training range. Mr. Bush last week announced the Navy would leave the site by 2003.

A source close to the White House said yesterday that Mr. Rove planned to go to the Pentagon this morning. The agenda, the source said, included a discussion of having the Navy move its range from the Puerto Rican island to a site in southern Texas near Kingsville.

The source said the participants are to include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Navy Secretary Gordon England and Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations. Later, Adm. Robert Natter, who commands the Atlantic Fleet, which trains at Vieques, is to present alternatives to using the island, including the possibility of moving to the Texas site.

Mr. Rove, in an interview yesterday with The Washington Times, initially confirmed his attendance at the planned meeting. But he said his purpose in attending was to brief Mr. England on the views of Puerto Rican Gov. Sila Calderon, not to discuss Vieques.

"So my understanding is that it´s to talk about -- to give England whatever insights about Calderon before he goes to Puerto Rico," Mr. Rove said.

Mr. Rove called The Times last night to say he had discussed the matter with Mr. England over the phone and that he would not attend today´s scheduled meeting.

The Vieques matter has emerged as a front-burner issue for the president. After pledging as a candidate to back a referendum on Vieques, Mr. Bush last week stunned pro-defense Republicans by saying he wants the Navy to abandon Vieques by 2003. A section of the island is prime training ground for Navy pilots, seamen and Marines before they deploy to dangerous spots overseas.

The White House also wants Congress to repeal a law setting up the referendum in November in which Vieques residents will decide whether the Navy stays or goes. Mr. England says a panel of experts will examine new sites for the Atlantic Fleet.

Mr. Rove planned to go to the Pentagon at a time when some Republicans are complaining he is already too involved in a national security issue. Angry Republicans have accused Mr. Rove of engineering the president´s Vieques decision to garner favor with Hispanic voters.

The Vieques issue has inflamed many activists in Puerto Rico. Left-wing Puerto Rican officials have organized a series of demonstrations outside and on the range during the past two years. The issue has gained some resonance with Hispanics in the United States.

Mr. Rove denied critics´ claims that Mr. Bush made the decision based on Hispanic votes. Mr. Rove said Mexican-Americans and Cuban-Americans, for example, have different priorities than Puerto Ricans.

"If you´re a Mexican-American living in Boston or Kansas City, you don´t care about this [Vieques]," he said.

Mr. Rove was also asked if he is trying to persuade the Navy to urge Congress to rescind the referendum bill.

"Well, let me put this in context," Mr. Rove replied. "England came to see me to inform the White House what his decision was about this. And part of the decision was to appoint a group to spend 90 days looking into the alternatives that have been identified for him, and then also to ask Congress to rescind ... its legislation from last year that committed us to this binding referendum."

"The Navy Department and the White House both believe that it is a bad precedent to have important national security decisions made by local referenda," Mr. Rove said.

If the White House were to sell the Navy and Marine Corps on the Texas site, it can avoid having to go through with the referendum. The law states that if the chief of naval operations and the Marine Corps commandant certify to Congress that they have found an acceptable alternative, then the referendum is canceled -- something the Bush White House wants.

Before Mr. Bush announced the decision to abandon Vieques, Mr. Rove met last week at the White House with New York Gov. George E. Pataki, who is up for re-election next year and has pressed Mr. Bush to evict the Navy from Vieques. The next day, Mr. Rove hosted a meeting with Mr. Wolfowitz and Mr. England. Mr. England later that day went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers on the president´s decision.

The source said Adm. Natter, who helped negotiate the original agreement with Puerto Rico to hold the referendum, is not opposed to the Texas site, but believes it would take beyond 2003 to have it ready for use. But Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee member, said the Texas site is not a valid alternative.

He said in an interview that an existing commercial and general aviation route in the area would prevent Navy ships from firing their guns. And an intercoastal waterway would prevent Marines from conducting amphibious landings. That would leave only the possibility of the Navy practicing aerial bombing. The advantage of Vieques, he said, is that all three war-fighting skills can be executed at the same time.

"There is no possible way it could be used for integrated training," said Mr. Inhofe, who has visited the site and talked to local promoters. "It could only be used as a bombing range."

Mr. Inhofe has vowed to wage an all-out battle to keep the White House from repealing the referendum law, which is contained in this year´s defense authorization bill.

"I´ll do what´s necessary," he said. "One thing about the Senate: One guy can stop it if they try to repeal the law."

In explaining Mr. Bush´s rationale, Mr. Rove said, "The previous administration and last year´s Congress bound the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps to a decision to be held in Precinct 91 of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, on whether or not the Navy should train on the island of Vieques -- one precinct, Precinct 91."

In November of last year, 67 percent of the people in Precinct 91 voted for Mrs. Calderon, who took the view that the U.S. military should quit the training exercises immediately.

"We think ... [the referendum on Vieques] is a very bad policy and would be a terrible precedent to establish," Mr. Rove added.

----

Kissinger Offers a Realist's Reflections on Foreign Policy

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
New York Times
June 22, 2001
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/arts/22BOOK.html?searchpv=nytToday

Henry A. Kissinger's new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?," illustrates why Mr. Kissinger, almost alone among living secretaries of state, has retained prestige and influence as a commentator on international affairs.

His book is several things. It is a description of the present moment, a period of extraordinary American global ascendancy that will be challenged by new forces. It is a tour of the horizon of international situations, from China to Colombia, Berlin to Buenos Aires. It is also a statement of a credo, an incisive defense of Mr. Kissinger's version of realism in diplomatic matters.

Those who have read Mr. Kissinger's earlier books, essays and opinion articles will find the basic themes of his latest book and some of its cautionary words and predictions familiar. Mr. Kissinger argues, as he has before, that the United States must accommodate a rising China, until or unless it poses a direct and unmistakable threat to the United States. He worries that in the post-cold war world the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will lose its sense of purpose and dissolve "into a multilateral mishmash."

Mr. Kissinger argues vigorously for a missile defense system. "With all respect for the views of allies and other important countries, the United States cannot condemn its population to permanent vulnerability," he writes. And he predicts physical and moral exhaustion if the United States follows the impulse, strong in recent years, to intervene, either to stop atrocities or to spread its own values and ways of life. "The United States will drain its psychological and material resources if it does not learn to distinguish between what it must do, what it would like to do, and what is beyond its capacities," he says.

The world, in Mr. Kissinger's view, is teetering on the edge of something new. The cold war is over, but a clear new global configuration has not emerged. The newness of things gives an old tension new meaning, the tension between globalist and missionary impulses, on one hand, and hardheaded realism on the other. Mr. Kissinger traces the first back to Woodrow Wilson and the second to what he calls Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, our first backwoods president and a man inclined to turn to the American interior rather than to meddle in global politics. Mr. Kissinger clearly tends to the Jacksonian side of the spectrum, though not to isolationism, and this book spells out many of his reasons.

Realism, especially to its opponents, has always had a coldhearted, Bismarckian aura, a sense that national interests take priority over the more warmhearted concern for the welfare of individuals within the nation, or within other nations. Mr. Kissinger argues that policies stemming primarily from moral purpose, disconnected from the national interest, would probably fail and would exhaust the country. A realistic attachment to the national interest, guided not just by the desirable but also by the possible, has greater potential to realize moral purposes, he says.

Mr. Kissinger offers as examples the crises in Iraq and Kosovo to make his point about what he considers the dangers of latter-day Wilsonianism triumphing over the realistic impulse. When Iraq expelled United Nations inspectors at the end of 1998, squelching efforts to monitor its development of weapons of mass destruction, the American response was a series of air attacks, carried out only at night (to avoid civilian casualties) for four nights running. After the bombing, the world basically acquiesced in Iraq's rejection of United Nations supervision, with attendant risks to the Western oil supply and to the safety of Iraq's neighbors.

By contrast, when Serbian human rights violations in Kosovo caught the media's attention a few months later, the former Yugoslavia was bombed by NATO, under American prodding, for 78 days around the clock, even though, as Mr. Kissinger puts it, "Kosovo represented no threat to American security in any traditional sense." For Mr. Kissinger, this difference in response - weak when the national interest was at stake, overbearing when the motive was essentially humanitarian - marks the possible drift of American policy.

Concluding a biting and tough- minded review of the last several years of American policy in the morass of the former Yugoslavia, Mr. Kissinger concludes: "On one level, the growing concern with human rights is one of the achievements of our age and is certainly a testament to progress toward a more humane international order. But its advocates do their cause no favor by pretending that it can be separated from all traditional notions of foreign policy, and that American self-restraint in the pursuit of its historic values was thoughtless or immoral."

There is a partisan flavor to much of this argument, and in places, too much abstraction as well. Mr. Kissinger makes specific and clear arguments about the Balkans - for example, that the United States had essentially no business making unified multiethnic states its goal, rather than allowing for ethnic separatism - but he does not make clear what, in the face of the slaughter in Bosnia, for example, he would have done differently had he been in power.

Or, on China, he claims that the Clinton administration lacked "a definition of the national interest that gives the relationship some geopolitical content." Maybe, but, after its initial human-rights approach to China, didn't the Clinton administration essentially pursue the goals of a Kissingerian policy by treating China as a rising power that should be encouraged to play by the rules of the international game? Wasn't "geopolitical content" implicit in virtually everything it did toward China? Again, Mr. Kissinger remains somewhat general here, not saying concretely how the policy pursued might have been different.

Still, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" is cogent because it is informed by a consistent vision, one in which morality is measured not by purity of intentions but by the nature of results. President George W. Bush and his advisers would do well to read this book.

-------- us nuc waste

Nuclear waste shipments to pass through KC this summer

By MICHAEL MANSUR -
The Kansas City Star
06/22/01 22:15
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/home.pat,local/3accc597.622,.html

A load of spent reactor fuel from Europe -- the first in a decade of nuclear waste shipments planned to cross the nation's heartland bound for Idaho -- should pass through Kansas City this summer via Interstate 70.

But its arrival will be confidential.

State officials will be notified seven days in advance of the shipments, but the authorities will be prohibited from saying anything about them, said Dru Buntin of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

"We're opposed to it, but that doesn't mean we can block it," Buntin said. "The state has no statutory authority to block these shipments."

Gov. Bob Holden, following the lead of the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, has opposed federal nuclear waste shipments through Missouri.

Last year Carnahan managed to stop the first shipment -- carrying waste from England -- by having it rerouted onto Interstate 80 in Iowa. Carnahan cited concerns about the safety of shipping the wastes on Interstate 70, as federal officials had planned.

But then the U.S. Department of Energy blocked any state shipments from the University of Missouri-Columbia's nuclear reactor, saying roads in Missouri must not be safe for state shipments if they are not safe for federal ones.

The blockage of Missouri's waste shipments raised concerns among state officials, who say it threatened to halt production of radioactive drugs used to treat cancer.

Buntin said the federal action probably was in retaliation for Missouri's opposition to the federal shipments.

Joe Davis, the Energy Department's deputy director of public affairs, said Friday the shipments from the university were halted because of state officials' warnings that I-70 was not a safe route.

"Both shipments would use Interstate 70," Davis said. "After the governor's office raised these safety issues, it was not appropriate to ship any nuclear waste on that route until we could get the safety concerns resolved."

Now that state and federal officials have agreed to safety precautions, the state's nuclear waste is flowing again to a disposal site in South Carolina. Buntin said Missouri had no choice but to negotiate with the federal agency to resolve the impasse.

Precautions planned for federal shipments of nuclear waste include:

A Missouri Highway Patrol escort.

A safety inspection of the truck carrying waste, as well as a check for radioactivity.

The designation of special parking areas in the event of bad weather or congestion.

Coordination with state officials to ensure no construction or weather delays.

Staying away from St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City during peak traffic periods.

The shipment scheduled to travel through Missouri this summer comes from nuclear reactors in Germany. The United States accepts foreign waste since it promoted the building of research reactors in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kay Drey, a nuclear activist who resides in St. Louis, said the United States is concerned about storing the wastes -- which contain highly radioactive plutonium and uranium -- in places where it might be stolen by terrorists.

But shipping the wastes over the ocean, then across highways as notoriously dangerous and bumpy as I-70, doesn't make sense, Drey said.

"The more (wastes) are moved around, the greater the risks are," she added.

Drey contends that terrorism is as much a threat in the United States as overseas, citing the Oklahoma City bombing, and that even a small radioactive leak during transport could endanger neighborhoods.

The Energy Department, however, maintains that specially designed metal casks decrease the risks of radioactive leaks. The department says it has been shipping such wastes around the nation for 30 years without serious incident.

State and federal officials overseeing nuclear waste shipments are still wrangling over how shipment routes are chosen. Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on the route selection process.

Davis said federal regulations require the Energy Department to ship nuclear waste in a timely, efficient manner using the interstate highway system. The route selection process is reviewed by the Department of Transportation and nuclear regulators to ensure that it is unbiased and treats all states fairly, he said.

Buntin said state officials are concerned that the federal agency may be underestimating the risks of various accidents that might cause delays along I-70 that could affect a shipment. But so far, he said the state hasn't received any information.

The safety precautions that the Energy Department and Missouri officials are taking should alleviate any remaining concerns, Davis said.

"We do this a lot," Davis said. "We take extraordinary steps to ensure that shipments are made safely. If it wasn't safe, we wouldn't do it."

A shipment of nuclear waste from a U.S. site also is

expected to travel through Missouri sometime this summer. But it is expected to go by rail.

Nationwide, 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel awaits disposal at more than 70 nuclear plants. Federal officials have said much of that waste could come through Missouri, once a final depository is identified.

The Star's Kit Wagar contributed to this report.

To reach Michael Mansur, environment writer, call (816) 234-4433 or send e-mail to mmansur@kcstar.com

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Ukraine's Arms Deals

Friday, June 22, 2001; Page A24
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31284-2001Jun21?language=printer

The Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations says his government has not supplied weapons in violation of U.N. arms embargoes in Africa and that U.N. investigators have validated that claim [letters, June 11]. He is being disingenuous. A U.N. panel looking at sanctions-busting in Sierra Leone deplored the fact that Ukraine had shown neither restraint nor due care and diligence in its arms dealing, making Ukraine a point of origin for illegally trafficked weapons.

For example, a shipment of 68 tons of weapons legally sold by Ukraine to Burkina Faso in March 1999 almost immediately was forwarded to Liberia and on to rebels in Sierra Leone, countries that are both under mandatory U.N. embargoes.

Moreover, Ukrainian nationals and private firms repeatedly have been linked to illicit arms trading. The U.N. panel on embargo violations in Angola found that Ukrainian nationals are involved in ferrying arms to Angolan rebels and brokering arms deals, and that Ukrainian air transport companies are suspected of involvement in the illegal trade. Kiev's efforts to distance itself from such deals only point to the need to emphasize government responsibility for controlling the arms trade: its own and that of private brokers and shipping agents under its jurisdiction.

LISA MISOL
New York

--

[Here's the June 11th letter:]

Ukraine and the Arms Embargo

Monday, June 11, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48854-2001Jun10?language=printer

On May 18 The Post published a correction that rightly pointed out that the Ukrainian government had nothing to do with an alleged attempt to break a U.N. arms embargo against Ethiopia and Eritrea -- in contrast to a distorted picture that had appeared in the May 14 news story "U.N. Seeks Weapons Shipment Probe."

That article relied on anonymous sources and failed to reflect the views of Ukrainian diplomats. It also presented an erroneous impression of my country's stance in the U.N. Security Council concerning a recent detention of an aircraft belonging to a private Ukrainian company at an airport in Burgas, Bulgaria.

The case involved a Georgia-bound shipment originating in the Czech Republic through a contract with an Israeli company. Even before the council's sanctions committee looked into that incident, Ukraine's foreign ministry issued a statement on the matter and provided all available information to the Security Council. Tellingly, the council's sanctions committee has commended Ukraine for the open and timely fashion in which it handled the Burgas case.

As for other allegations reported in the article, I would like to reiterate that neither the Ukrainian government nor its firms and individuals have ever supplied arms to rebels in Angola or Sierra Leone. Nowhere in the reports by the relevant sanctions monitoring panels can one find such accusations. Moreover, Ukraine has repeatedly denied access to the country for individuals suspected of such activities.

VALERIY KUCHINSKY, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, Acting Permanent Representative, New York

-------- balkans

U.S. won't commit troops to mission

June 22, 2001
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010622-58701664.htm

The United States is not ready to commit troops to a Macedonian disarmament mission, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday, even as several NATO allies announced they were willing to contribute.

"It has not got to the point where we need to discuss actual U.S. participation," Mr. Powell said, emerging from a meeting yesterday with NATO Secretary-General George Robertson at the State Department.

Ethnic Albanian armed groups, operating as the "National Liberation Army," have waged a tenacious guerrilla war with government security forces since seizing towns in predominantly Albanian regions in the country´s mountainous north in early February.

Talks on a power-sharing deal between Macedonia´s leading Slav and ethnic Albanian parties nearly collapsed on Wednesday, but they have resumed under heavy pressure from Western governments fearful that failure could spark a new round of violence in the Balkans.

Mr. Robertson and Mr. Powell have made it clear that a political deal and a disarmament agreement had to be in place before the NATO force would be deployed.

The governments of France, Greece, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic yesterday indicated they were prepared to contribute forces to the proposed Macedonia mission.

In an about-face, Russia said yesterday it also would be ready to participate, having previously criticized the NATO-led Kfor mission´s inability to control ethnic Albanian rebel activity across Macedonia´s border in Kosovo and southern Serbia.

"If we are invited, and invited as equal partners, I very much think it is possible," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told the Interfax news agency.

But he added that any disarmament of the rebels in Macedonia should be done in tandem with dealing forcefully with ethnic Albanian armed groups in Kosovo.

While continuing to support the overall mission, Mr. Powell yesterday hinted that the United States may stop short of contributing troops to the force. Reports have said the U.S. role could be limited to supplying communications and logistics support for the NATO brigade.

"There are many ways to make a contribution," Mr. Powell told reporters yesterday.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana arrived in Skopje yesterday to urge a political deal between the leading Macedonian Slav and ethnic Albanian parties. The parties have resumed stalled talks after a late-night meeting on Wednesday with ambassadors from NATO countries, including Britain and the United States.

Both Mr. Robertson and Mr. Powell have stressed that the alliance is not prepared to engage in offensive military actions in Macedonia, despite widespread fears that a civil war there could lead to wider conflict and instability in the Balkans.

A truce agreed upon 10 days ago is due to expire early next week and is unlikely to be renewed unless politicians strike a deal.

Mr. Robertson told reporters on Wednesday that a NATO force of between 3,000 and 5,000 armed troops, perhaps supplemented by non-NATO forces, would go into Macedonia only under "benign conditions": to oversee a disarmament of ethnic Albanian guerrillas after a long-term power-sharing deal had been reached and ratified by all sides.

Once seen as a model of interethnic cooperation in a bitterly divided region, Macedonia´s governing coalition of leading Slav and Albanian parties has been strained badly by the five months of fighting. Ethnic Albanians make up between one-quarter and one-third of the population, and they have been pressing for more rights - including an Albanian vice president and official recognition of their language - in heated talks with the larger Macedonian Slav parties.

With political talks dragging on, the rhetoric from Western leaders has grown more urgent.

Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana, the current head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told an OSCE gathering in Vienna, Austria, yesterday, "This weekend is decisive."

"The news that the political process has collapsed is deeply worrying," Mr. Geoana said.

----

Yugoslavia Expected to Pass Decree on War Crimes

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/world/22CND-YUGO.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, June 23 - The Yugoslav government has agreed on a decree that it is expected to pass today that will lead to cooperation with the international war crimes tribunal and could hasten the extradition of former President Slobodan Milosevic.

The decree will be issued after the government was forced to withdraw a bill from Parliament regulating cooperation with the tribunal in The Hague after opposition from its Montenegrin alliance partners on Thursday. The decree will have the same legal effect as a law.

``I expect the government session to be held today at which the decree will be adopted,'' Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic said today. ``We have agreed about the decree and about its implementation, but we did not speak about deadlines.''

The government has a majority of ministers who favor the decree so it should be able to push it through. In Parliament, however, it needs the votes of Montenegro's Socialist People's Party in order to pass a law.

Mr. Zivkovic said it would have been better to have had a law, but added, ``The decree will be applicable to everyone, there is no one who will exempt from it.''

The decree will not be very palatable to President Vojislav Kostunica, a constitutional lawyer who had insisted on the need for a law regulating cooperation. The law had taken months to prepare and some had seen it as a delaying tactic by Mr. Kostunica who has always opposed extradition of Yugoslav citizens to The Hague, and often criticized the tribunal as biased against Serbs. Yet he has publicly accepted that Yugoslavia must cooperate with the tribunal.

Mr. Milosevic and four of his allies were indicted by the tribunal in The Hague in May 1999 on charges related to crimes committed by Serbian security forces during the war over Kosovo.

Belgrade's new leaders, who came to power after a popular revolt ousted Mr. Milosevic in October, are under pressure to send him or another prominent indicted war criminal to The Hague to obtain badly needed foreign aid when major donors meet next week.

The United States conditioned its participation in the donors' conference in Brussels on June 29 on Yugoslavia's cooperation with The Hague, and Mr. Kostunica promised Washington last month that the law would pass. The authorities are facing growing discontent at home as economic pressures increase, and they had hoped to raise $1 billion at the conference - a target that seems impossible without American participation.

Belgrade is rife with rumors about an impending extradition of Mr. Milosevic, and reports in the news media in recent weeks have seemed intended to prime Serbs, who once supported the former president and tolerated or endured his rule for 13 years, to accept that he is an accused war criminal.

The Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, has insisted on decisive action. ``We cannot stall any longer,'' he said. ``We have to take decisive measures within the next week.''

Bratislav Grubacic, editor of the VIP news agency in Belgrade, said: ``The nervousness in the government is unbelievable. The budget is quite empty.''

Mr. Djindjic's government has in recent weeks revealed to the media powerful evidence of war crimes committed in Kosovo and of a cover-up orchestrated by Mr. Milosevic. The campaign has provided the public with its first irrefutable evidence that war crimes were committed in Kosovo. Mr. Grubacic said these reports had swayed Serbs who previously opposed extradition.

This week Serbia's interior minister, Dusan Mihajlovic, said that the police had now found three mass graves containing bodies thought to be civilians from Kosovo. The graves are thought to contain up to 1,000 bodies, Serbia's justice minister, Vladan Batic, said today.

Mr. Djindjic and others are also insisting that Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic be removed as head of the Yugoslav Army. They accuse the general, a former ally of Mr. Milosevic, who was in command during the war in Kosovo, of obstructing cooperation with the international community.

Dragoljub Micunovic, chairman of the lower house of the Yugoslav Parliament, said Thursday, ``This country is going to cooperate with the international community or it will go bankrupt.''

``We have lost so much precious time,'' Mr. Batic said Thursday, ``and we have lost credibility with the international community.''

----

Robertson on Balkans: 'Not a Hopeless Case'
NATO Secretary General Says Allied Successes Overlooked

Friday, June 22, 2001; Page A25
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31283-2001Jun21?language=printer

NATO Secretary General George Robertson spoke with reporters and editors at The Post yesterday about, among other topics, NATO's continuing operation in Kosovo and its recent disarming of ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the region. A few excerpts from Lord Robertson's discussion:

How do you think things are going in Kosovo?

Fair to middling. . . . The progress is greater than some people give credit for. The elections in November are going to be a big test. Whatever the result, whoever wins, they will have to take responsibility in a way that they don't take responsibility at the moment.

You know, they're going to fight this campaign on the basis of independence, but that will be a moot question. To me it's not about independence -- indeed, all of the parties will be campaigning for independence anyway, so it won't make any difference. But whoever wins is going to have to carry the responsibility for law and order, to carry the responsibility for dealing with the economy, dealing with organized crime, ethnic violence, for whether the refugees and displaced people come back. And that will be a heavy responsibility.

But if they actually do want to aspire to independence, if that is what they want to convince the international community is possible, then it will actually force them to take much greater responsibility than they do at present. So the elections are of critical importance.

In the short term, we had a big success with this Ground Safety Zone operation [in Serbia]. We didn't get anything like the credit that we should because Macedonia [was flaring up at the same time]. . . . The good story in the Presevo valley got lost. . . . It actually was a remarkable operation. This was a sizable, highly motivated, guerrilla army . . . fortified, trenches, huge amounts of weapons . . . and they left.

Through a process of negotiation, with NATO and EU working hand in hand in southern Serbia, a very smart deputy prime minister thought the whole thing through, while the congress voted measures to get the Albanian population on their side, genuinely moving to reverse the 10 years of apartheid, and pretty cool military judgment, and one shot was fired, one shot, an accidental shot on the last day.

And that guerrilla army gave up all its arms, drove out truckloads of equipment and armor, handed over uniforms, demobilized and went away. And there are now multi-ethnic police patrols in the Ground Safety Zone in southern Serbia, which a year ago would have been fantasy. And everybody said, including the North Atlantic Council, you know, this is going to be a bloodbath, these guys will not give up without a fight, even if it's only to fire shots to say, you know, we fought for Kosovo, we fought for our motherland -- that they would have a fight and then go away. But they didn't. It was actually brilliantly executed, so much so that nobody noticed it. . . . So that's a good sign. . . .

How about organized crime inside Kosovo?

It's a very serious problem. Not just in Kosovo but across the whole of southeastern Europe. One of the things that I've been trying to punch home is that you've got all this patchwork of small states and quasi-states in the region, so you've no single commercial market, but you've got a single black market. They've very cleverly made this a complete economic space, and they're not bothered by borders or police forces or by laws or by regulations. . . . It is a huge problem and it's feeding out from there to the rest of Europe and beyond. That's why the stabilization of Yugoslavia, the stabilization of Croatia, the growing central institutions in Bosnia, the elections in Kosovo, if we can sort out Macedonia -- all of these contribute to a more stable area. So it's not as though it's a hopeless case.

Things are beginning to move. Albania is training a border guard force, with our help. The border service in Bosnia-Herzegovina is getting off the ground. . . . The Kosovo police school in Kosovo is about to turn out its 4,000th police officer. It's run by a pretty hyperactive ex-U.S. Marine under the [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's] auspices. A multi-ethnic police force is being created from scratch. . . .

In the 18 months that this college has been running, turning these people out, ex-KLA fighters alongside ex-Serbian policemen, there hasn't been a single ethnic incident in the college. . . . And these people are now coming out and taking more responsibility.

-------- business

Censorship at the National Press Club

By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Fri, 22 Jun 2001
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/

Henry Kissinger came to the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C. last night to give a talk, sell his latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? and take questions from an audience of about 300 people.

We weren't as interested in the talk or the book as much as the question period. We figured, correctly as it turned out, that Henry hadn't change over the years -- his unspoken theory of foreign policy was still the same: the corporate state -- including his client corporations -- should dictate the country's foreign policy. As usual, his words barely masked that reality.

But scattered throughout the ballroom at the Press Club were little white note cards for questions, and it appeared that perhaps 100 questions were scribbled and sent up to the moderator, Richard Koonce, a member of the Press Club's book and author committee.

It was Koonce's job to sift through the questions, pick out some interesting ones, and ask Henry some probing questions. This system seemed to work well at luncheon talks, where the past three presidents of the Press Club -- Doug Harbrecht of Business Week, John Cushman of the New York Times and Dick Ryan of the Detroit News -- would ask speakers some pretty tough and newsworthy questions. We never got the sense that Press Club moderators were pulling punches.

Last night, things changed.

Earlier this year, Harper's magazine published a two-part series of articles by British journalist Christopher Hitchens, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger that has since been published as a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso).

Hitchens has drawn up an indictment, charged Kissinger with war crimes, and is begging some government to go after the former Secretary of State under Richard Nixon for the killings of innocents in Laos, Cambodia, South America, East Timor and elsewhere.

Magistrates in three countries -- Chile, Argentina, and France -- have responded and summoned Kissinger to answer questions.

Le Monde reported earlier this month that when French Judge Roger Le Loire had a summons served on Kissinger on May 31 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger promptly left the hotel, and then left town. The judge wanted to ask Kissinger about his knowledge of Operation Condor, an effort by the dictators of South America to kill or "disappear" dissidents.

The fact that Kissinger was being sought for questioning didn't make the mainstream media here in the United States, until yesterday's New York Times reported that the Chilean judge wanted Kissinger to "testify about the disappearance of an American in Chile when the dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power in the 1970s."

Kissinger began lashing back at Hitchens last week, not by answering the substance of Hitchen's argument, but by smearing the journalist.

Kissinger told Detroit radio talk show host Mitch Albom that Hitchens had "denied the Holocaust ever took place."

In response, Hitchens, who says both and he his wife are Jewish, told the New York Post: "Mr. Kissinger will be hearing from my attorney, who will tell him two things he already knows -- what he said is false, malicious and defamatory, and if he says it again, we will proceed against him in court."

So, you can imagine that the Press Club audience had questions. And so did we.

We wrote down six questions -- about the report in the Times, Kissinger's interview with Albom, the incident at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Hitchen's articles in Harper's, about the three magistrates and simply this one: "If you are indicted for war crimes, will you defend yourself in court?"

We met a friend there who told us that in the 1970s, when Kissinger was asked about the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, he responded this way: "sometimes we have to operate outside the law."

Her question to Kissinger: "How do you square that with our Constitutional values?"

Koonce had other ideas. He lofted six or seven puff balls about Kissinger in China, about Kissinger on Nixon, about his generic views of foreign policy. Nothing about war crimes, nothing about operating outside the law, nothing about Hitchens.

After the event, we sought out Koonce.

"Was there an agreement with Dr. Kissinger not to ask questions related to Christopher Hitchens and allegations of war crimes?"

To our surprise, Koonce did not deny it.

"There was a definite sensitivity to that," Koonce said. "He [Kissinger] was afraid that if we got into a discussion of that, for the vast majority of people that, it would take so much time to explain all of the context, that you know, he preferred to avoid that, and so . . ."

And so Kissinger's wishes were accommodated and the questions were avoided.

We asked Koonce how many written questions dealt with Hitchens or war crimes? Two or three, Koonce said.

We knew this not to be true. We handed up six ourselves. And we suspect that there were many more. (Only Kissinger knows for sure, since it's Press Club policy to deliver the written questions to the guest after the event.)

According to Press Club standards, these book events must be held in accordance with the Club's "Code of Ethics."

So, we want to know -- how can it be ethical to agree secretly with an author before hand not to ask a certain set of questions?

We're tracking down the Code of Ethics. Stay tuned.

--

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

-------- colombia

Six Students Found Guilty of Telling the Truth

From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>
June 22, 2001

Six students stood trial from June 20 to June 22, 2001 in Washington DC for a nonviolent demonstration against the Sikorsky Corporation, manufacturer of the Black Hawk helicopter. The six students, all from Oberlin College, locked themselves around a pillar inside the Sikorsky Corporation's conference at the National Guard Memorial Museum on April 2, 2001 to protest the $221 million profit Sikorsky is making off the "War on Drugs" in Colombia.

The six students are Jackie Downing, 21, Sarah Bania-Dobyns, 22, Kate Berrigan, 19, Rebecca Johnson, 21, Laurel Paget-Seekins, 21, and Sarah Saunders, 20. They defended themselves, arguing that they acted out of an international tradition of a nonviolent civil disobedience to raise public awareness and change policy. The students argued that they had a right and an obligation to speak the truth to the officials of the Sikorsky Corporation.

In the trial, two of the students, Sarah Saunders of Lake Orion, MI and Jackie Downing of Topsfield, MA, testified about the violence and poisoning of food crops in Colombia, both consequences of the U.S.-funded "War or Drugs" that they witnessed while visiting Colombia in January 2001.

The Sikorsky Corporation is supplying 30 Black Hawk helicopters to the Colombian military as part of Plan Colombia. In addition to accompanying fumigation planes, the helicopters are used to fly American and Colombian soldiers into direct combat. "These helicopters are not being used for peaceful purposes, as Sikorsky claims," said Kate Berrigan in the opening statement for the group. "We believe that helicopters and military aid will not bring an end to the 40-year civil war or the drug trade in Colombia."

After an hour and a half of deliberations, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty. Judge Mitchell-Rankin subsequently dismissed the jury before proceeding to sentencing. The District Attorney asked the judge for a sentence of three days, insisting that the six women would clearly not comply with probation. Instead the judge sentenced them to a $75 fine.

"Although an acquittal would have been a great victory for us and for the movement, we win on either count," states Sarah Bania-Dobyns of Denver, CO. "The courtroom was filled with supporters and several major newspapers covered the trial. We raised a lot of awareness today about what the U.S. government and corporations are doing in Colombia and we will continue to do so."

For more information, see: June 15, 2001 article in San Francisco Chronicle, "Americans blamed in Colombia raid" - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/06/15 /MN219178.DTL

Sikorky's page on Black Hawks: http://www.sikorsky.com/programs/blackhawk/index.html Colombia Support Network: www.colombiasupport.net School of the Americas Watch/NE: www.soaw-ne.org/Pccrops.html

-------- israel

Gaza's Kids, Israeli Troops Battle

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Palestinians-Lethal-Games.html?searchpv=aponline

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Like front-line soldiers taking a break from battle, they gathered at a shady spot out of harm's way, showing off scars, remembering fallen friends and arguing about whether it was worth it.

Screams that someone was hit disrupted the conversation, and then a tear gas bomb landed nearby, prompting several of the Palestinian youths to rush over and bury it in the sand. Shouts of ``Allahu akbar!'' -- ``God is great!'' -- followed.

The cat-and-mouse game with Israeli troops on the outskirts of this impoverished Gaza Strip town, with sand dunes as the battlefield and the fence of a Jewish settlement the front line, can turn deadly fast. There are sandbags for cover and ambulances waiting nearby to ferry casualties to the hospital.

Young Palestinians, aged 10 to 18 and armed with rock slings and firebombs, are the combatants on one side. Israeli soldiers who respond with tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition are on the other.

Such scenes defined the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s, as well as the early days of the current 9-month-old conflict -- but in recent weeks, center stage has been held by mortar and shooting attacks against Jewish settlers and suicide bombings inside Israel.

In their own mind, the Khan Younis youngsters are keeping a tradition alive. The activity attracts perhaps 200 youths each day -- and some pay a heavy price. Two youngsters, ages 12 and 16, were shot dead by Israeli troops in the past week.

``We are very sorry that the Palestinians do not prevent children from seeking conflict with (Israeli) soldiers,'' said Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, a spokesman for the Israeli army. ``We try to make every effort so these incited children don't get hurt.''

The boys say they usually sneak out to get there, and it is not uncommon to see angry parents searching the sand dunes to take their children home.

``Our family doesn't know that we come here; it's our secret,'' said Mohammed Abu el-Kheir, 16.

The hopelessness of life in Khan Younis provides ample motivation. About 200,000 people live in and around the squalid town near a cluster of Jewish settlements whose continued presence many consider an insufferable provocation.

The Israeli army maintains a heavy presence in this part of the theoretically autonomous strip, frequently blocking roads to Palestinian traffic to protect settlers.

``Of course I want to die,'' said Abu el-Kheir. ``I am fed up with life and with living constantly under siege. You cannot go anywhere and there is nothing to do. It's disgusting. But coming here is no hobby and, God willing, I'll be martyred.''

One of seven brothers, Abu el-Kheir was injured in the left thigh in November when shrapnel from an Israeli sea-to-shore missile hit him. His brothers Osama, 14, and Iyad, 18, were injured in other incidents.

The stone-throwers have a set of loose rules and code. Because it's summer and the mornings are very hot, they only do battle in the late afternoon and until sundown. A hierarchy of sorts exists among them, determined by age, proof of injury and how closely one is related to a ``martyr.''

Most are barefoot or wear cheap plastic sandals, and their clothes vary from scruffy jeans or shorts to tattered pajamas and track suits.

There are few entertainment options in Khan Younis -- the one obvious exception being a dirt soccer field right next to the sandy battlefield. Games are played there each day, without heed to the more lethal games nearby.

Some show astonishing bravado, taunting the Israeli soldiers with insults and obscene hand gestures or standing directly in front of them and wriggling, belly-dancing style. Others say they don't throw stones at the Israelis but come just to hang out with friends who do.

Osama Abu el-Kheir, Mohammed's younger brother, had with him what passes for a firebomb -- a bottle half full with gasoline and sealed with cloth and twigs.

``I just threw one at them but it landed two yards short of their jeep,'' he said. ``They fired tear gas in my direction, but I stayed behind the sandbags before I made a run for it.''

Some of the youths shout the Islamic declaration of faith -- ``There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet'' -- upon hearing gunfire, in line with a practice common among Muslims at times of grave danger or imminent death.

``Everyone knows that he can die here,'' said 17-year-old Mohammed al-Najar, a friend of Abu el-Kheir's trio. ``But we still come every day to seek martyrdom.''

-------- nato

NATO set for third mission to Balkans

By Simon Mann,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in London,
June 22, 2001
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/22/world/world3.html

As NATO officials ordered preparations for the alliance's third mission in the Balkans, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Mr Javier Solana, was due to arrive in Macedonia today to try to revive last-ditch peace talks.

NATO has agreed to send troops to Macedonia in an attempt to stave off civil war, but only if ethnic Albanian rebels can be persuaded to sign a peace pact.

The alliance said it was willing to send up to 3,000 peacekeepers in what would amount to the first military action to be condoned by the Bush Administration, but it attached strict conditions.

These would limit NATO's involvement to organising disarmament points at which the rebels could hand over their weapons.

The secretary-general of NATO, Lord Robertson, insisted on Wednesday: "It is not an armed intervention."

He added: "It will happen when, and only when, there is a durable ceasefire and an agreement between all of the parties in the coalition, and indeed an agreement by the armed extremists that they will proceed towards disarmament."

With the coalition Government battling to craft a political solution to the four-month-old conflict, increased Western involvement appeared inevitable.

But officials insist that mounting a third major peacekeeping effort in the region along the lines of Bosnia and Kosovo is not on NATO's agenda.

The troops pledge came as the Macedonian President, Mr Boris Trajkovski, announced that peace talks had again faltered. He blamed ethnic Albanian leaders for the stalemate, claiming they were determined to carve up the country.

"They have dramatically changed their standpoint, practically asking for federalisation offering a two-nation state," he said.

Western diplomats in Skopje are backing the Macedonians. Reuters reported that at a dinner on Wednesday night ambassadors told Albanian leaders to drop demands that their one-third minority population be given a veto on all key government decisions.

"The Albanian demands amount to a Macedonia of two nations," one Western envoy was reported as saying. "That's not what we had in mind."

With a 10-day ceasefire coming under increasing pressure - it was reported that two civilians in a rebel-held village had died in army shelling - Albanian leaders again called for foreign mediation to settle the issues.

But Macedonia and the West have ruled out such intervention.

The cross-party talks were established by Mr Trajkovski as part of a package of measures aimed at restoring peace. The plan, backed by NATO and EU leaders including Mr Solana, allows for a partial amnesty for Macedonian-born guerillas and their disarmament by NATO troops.

But Mr Trajkovski accused ethnic Albanian negotiators of deliberately stalling the talks in the hope they would win international support for "their unreal political demands".

"I can only conclude that they don't honestly intend to go with this process," he said.

The EU has set Monday as a deadline for "substantial progress" in the negotiations, including approval of a reworded preamble to Macedonia's Constitution to better incorporate the rights of ethnic minorities.

The NATO mission, which could be ready to move within 10 days, was being portrayed in Washington as the clearest signal yet that the US had no plans to disengage from the Balkans.

"We're involved militarily. We are involved politically. We're involved diplomatically," the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said after meeting the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

--------
Deceiving your allies

Friday, 22 June, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/audiovideo/programmes/correspondent/newsid_1390000/1390536.stm

The Bosnian Muslim army was covertly supplied with arms by the US during the 1990s In an investigation across six countries, Correspondent has uncovered a series of incidents which have tested the Western Alliance to breaking point. Dan Hebditch, associate producer on the programme, reports.

The Bosnian war was the first major test of the West's resolve in the post-Cold War era, and one that it unambiguously failed.

Prevarication, competing national agendas and lack of moral courage on the part of politicians and diplomats worsened an already horrific situation, while on the ground UN peacekeepers with inadequate support and confusing orders wrestled with a situation for which they were ill-trained.

Into this already complicated situation came the ultimate "wild card", the United States of America, the world's only superpower. A small group at the head of America's foreign policy elite intervened covertly in what it had previously called "Europe's problem".

It was driven by a mixture of media-fuelled public opinion, simplistic moral outrage and personal ambition to make a name in the "only game in town". Its easy answer for Bosnia's ills was "lift and strike" - re-arm the Bosniaks (mostly Bosnian Muslims) and Croats and bomb the Serbs.

At first arms were sent to Bosnia via Croatia, but the Croats were reluctant to arm the Bosnian army with sophisticated weapons, so America took it upon itself to deliver arms directly to the Bosnian Muslim Army - the ABiH.

Covert drops by the US

These covert air drops began at the start of 1995.

The most well documented were the drops at Tuzla in the north of Bosnia, where they were observed by members of the UN Nordic Battalion stationed close to the dropping zone.

The drops contained vital, high value supplies: Anti-tank guided weapons to counter Bosnian Serb armour, Stinger surface-to-air missiles to ward off helicopters, night vision goggles and most importantly Motorola radio sets to allow the ABiH to operate more efficiently in large scale offensive operations.

However these air drops took place in the face of Operation Deny Flight, the UN-imposed and Nato-policed no-fly zone over Bosnia. Faced with sighting reports from the UN on the ground Nato denied that any such activity had taken place and launched an investigation whose conclusions rubber-stamped this.

However, it is now known that the incident was not as simple as Nato tried to make out. On the nights of the drops US Navy Awaca surveillance planes rather than Nato aircraft with their multi-national crews were monitoring the skies over Bosnia. In addition, the Nato investigation teams were manned only by Americans and didn't bother to interview anyone who actually witnessed the drops.

Nato had been manipulated to allow the US to conduct its own unilateral policy in the Balkans.

The air drops were only the tip of the iceberg. A team of retired US officers planned the bloody Croatian "liberation" of the Kraijina and the subsequent invasion of western Bosnia by the Croatian Army in the summer of 1995.

The US also provided intelligence to the Croats, flying unmanned reconnaissance drones off the Adriatic island of Brac. More significantly the US launched a huge signals and electronic intelligence gathering operation in Croatia to provide targeting information not for Nato or the UN, but for Croatia alone.

UN negotiator and former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg felt betrayed:

"I'd never criticise the Americans for saying this was a European issue and must be solved by the Europeans," he says.

"My criticism is that they did not then go outside the field and sit down and watch - they were standing on the sideline shouting into the players."

American intelligence-gathering in the region was conducted on a huge scale. At any one time over 100 operators from across the spectrum of US intelligence agencies were on the ground in Bosnia.

They were deployed not only in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) but in UN civilian and military agencies as well. This intelligence-gathering was aimed as much at the UN as the Serbs, and intelligence was passed directly on to the Bosnian Government.

This information was often used to ratchet up the pressure on UN commanders to launch punitive air strikes on the Serbs.

Bugging the UN

The scope of these activities included bugging UN Commanders and diplomats.

Former UN Commander in Bosnia General Sir Michael Rose was aware that the Americans were secretly bugging his office:

"We were always very careful in what we said in that office. And if we did say something, it was with deliberate intent."

All of this intelligence-gathering activity was supposed to be concealed from America's allies in the UN and NATO.

Britain especially has a very close link with American intelligence, but in late 1994, this supply of intelligence to the British was temporarily cut off, causing panic in Whitehall.

In the end the US lift and strike policy succeeded - but at a cost. The Croatian Army broke the Serbs in the west, Nato aircraft destroyed Bosnian Serb logistics and command facilities whilst UN artillery on Mount Igman dominated the Serb guns that had held Sarajevo under siege for so long.

The warring parties were then bullied into the Dayton Agreement that underpins the shaky peace in Bosnia today.

Was the US policy a success?

Senior European negotiators believe that with US backing the war could have ended two years earlier, but US desire to see the Serbs punished meant that they instead encouraged the Bosnian Government to continue fighting. The price in human terms? Over 15,000 dead and nearly 600,000 refugees.

American unilateralism in Bosnia has led to a diplomatic backlash.

Europe feels it can no longer rely on the US in times of crisis. Instead, it has begun to hedge its bets, first with the Anglo-French St Malo Agreement and now with the so-called "Euro army".

There is a great reluctance on the part of western politicians to talk about the significance and the future of the Euro army. Indeed normally loquacious political and military figures beat a hasty retreat when approached by Correspondent.

However there can be no doubt that its origins can be traced back to the results of American mendacity and covert operations during the conflict in Bosnia. And no one yet knows quite what will replace the old alliances in the future.

Allies and lies: Correspondent, Sunday 24th June at 1915 on BBC 2.

Reporter: Sheena McDonald Producer: David Hebditch Editor: Fiona Murch

-------- puerto rico

U.N. Approves Vieques Resolution

New York Times
June 21, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-UN-Puerto-Rico.html

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- A U.N. committee adopted a Cuban-backed resolution Thursday calling on the United States to expedite independence for Puerto Rico and order an immediate end to U.S. military exercises on the tiny island of Vieques.

The resolution, which is not legally binding, was approved without a vote by the 24-member special committee on decolonization issues. Chile expressed reservations about its scope and Papua New Guinea questioned whether the committee had authority to deal with the question of Puerto Rico.

Cuba's U.N. Ambassador Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla said the world could not wait for another bomb in Vieques, the site of the U.S. Navy's prized Atlantic Fleet training ground. Two off-target bombs there killed a civilian security guard in 1999, sparking protests laced with anti-American sentiment.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. commonwealth with limited local government. The 4 million residents of the Spanish-speaking island are U.S. citizens who serve in the armed forces, but they do not pay federal taxes, cannot vote for president, and have no vote in Congress.

In 1998, a bill offering U.S. statehood or independence to Puerto Rico stalled in the U.S. Senate. Later that year, Puerto Ricans narrowly voted to keep the current commonwealth status in a nonbinding referendum, edging out U.S. statehood, with only a small percentage favoring independence.

The resolution adopted Thursday calls on the U.S. government ``to assume its responsibility of expediting a process that will allow the Puerto Rican people to fully exercise their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.''

Last year, the committee adopted a Cuban-drafted resolution with similar language.

This year's resolution also urged the U.S. government ``to order the immediate halt of its armed forces' military drills and maneuvers on Vieques Island.''

It calls for the United States to ``return the occupied land to the people of Puerto Rico, halt the persecution, incarcerations, arrests and harassment of peaceful demonstrators, immediately release all persons incarcerated in this connection ... and decontaminate the impact areas'' in the Vieques bombing range.

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

UN to pay $243 mln for Gulf War environment studies

Friday, June 22, 2001
By Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/06/06222001/ap_gulf_44078.asp

GENEVA, - The United Nations Gulf War reparations body is set to pay $243.3 million on Thursday to five Middle Eastern countries to fund studies on environmental damage caused by Iraq, diplomatic sources said.

The funds would also help Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria to monitor public health and screen people who might have been harmed by pollution blamed on Iraq, they added.

It is the first compensation related to $46 billion in claims filed against Iraq for environmental damage caused by its August 1990 invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait. Iraqi troops fleeing a U.S.-led military coalition set fire to oil wells which spewed pollution and took months to extinguish.

The U.N. Compensation Commission (UNCC), which is handling a total of $300 billion in claims against Iraq, has already awarded nearly $17 billion to Kuwait for damaged oil wells.

The latest payments, to be formally approved later on Thursday, were agreed by the UNCC Governing Council at a three-day meeting.

The body, made up of the same 15 member states as the U.N. Security Council, also agreed to pay $5 million to Iraq to help prepare its defence against the environmental claims by hiring technical experts, sources said.

The award is less than a quarter of that sought by six countries, including Turkey, whose claim was rejected.

"The Governing Council will approve $243.3 million for monitoring and assessment studies," a diplomatic source told Reuters on the sidelines of the closed-door talks in Geneva.

He added that the studies were to determine what would be reasonable claims to put forward for damage.

The amounts to be approved are: Saudi Arabia $109.6 million; Kuwait $108.9 million; Iran $17 million; Jordan $7.1 million and Syria $700,000.

KUWAIT SOUGHT MORE

Kuwait, which had sought $460.4 million to carry out the environmental impact studies, called for speedy payment.

Khaled Ahmad Al-Mudaf, chairman of Kuwait's Public Authority for Assessment of Compensation, said the funds would help "the remediation and rehabilitation of the fragile environments severely damaged by Iraq's pre-planned actions."

The Geneva-based fund currently receives 25 percent of the revenue generated by the U.N. oil-for food deal with Iraq. Iraq terminated its oil exports under the programme on June 4 in protest at the Security Council extending the pact for only one month instead of the usual six so as to ponder new sanctions.

Iraq's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Samir Al-Nima, urged the Governing Council to reject funding the studies and said his country required $20 million to prepare its defence.

The Gulf region had a very fragile ecosystem, where soil and air are continuously exposed to dust and oil industry emissions, according to Baghdad's envoy. "Thus it cannot be taken for granted that any case of pollution in the region is caused by Iraq's action," he said in a speech to the closed-door talks.

Kuwait last September won approval of a $15.9 billion claim against Iraq for destruction of its oil fields and loss of revenues. In December 1996 it was awarded $610 million for the cost of extinguishing the oil wellhead fires themselves.

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

Losing battle

June 22, 2001
Inside the Ring
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
Notes from the Pentagon.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010622-319858.htm

Defense sources say Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is losing his battle with the White House budget office on increased spending in the fiscal 2002 budget.

"We´re going to get an awful lot less than many of us expected," said a Pentagon official. He blames the White House´s stinginess on less federal revenues owing to the slowed economy and President Bush´s 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut.

The sources say Mr. Rumsfeld had asked for more than $30 billion to augment the pending $310-billion plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. A large chunk of those funds would be earmarked for health care and improved infrastructure.

But the White House is holding firm at no more than an $18 billion increase. Sources said the services were cutting programs and amending budgets. The plan is due to Congress late next week.

Senior military leaders are not happy. They were viewing the 2002 budget as a mechanism to bring combat readiness to "get well" levels before embarking on a Bush plan to transform the armed forces for the 21st century.

Republicans worry that such a relatively paltry increase will create an open hunting season on Mr. Bush. Democrats will say his tax cut left no room for him to make good on a campaign promise that "help is on the way" for the military. Pro-defense conservatives will likely join the chorus.

N. Korea masses forces

U.S. intelligence agencies are closely watching the east and west coast of North Korea. Last week, large numbers of amphibious assault vehicles and craft were spotted getting into formation. Officials said the forces were probably preparing for military exercises.

The amphibious-warfare equipment was photographed by a U.S. spy satellite and included air-cushioned landing craft and troop- and tank-transport ships.

The massing of forces coincided with the incursion of a North Korean merchant ship into South Korean waters on June 13.

Asymmetric threats

Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the U.S. Central Command, is warning that the United States must prepare itself for a future "asymmetric" Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack.

"The asymmetric threat is serious and deserves our focused thought and preparation," Gen. Franks said in a recent speech to the Operations Security Professionals Society.

"The point is to avoid another Pearl Harbor-like event by recognizing the threat and preparing to meet this growing challenge."

How to deal with asymmetric threats will be addressed in the ongoing defense-transformation efforts by the military, he said.

Asymmetric warfare threats include efforts by weaker powers to defeat stronger ones using attacks that can include weapons of mass destruction, the use of computer-based information warfare, and terrorism.

Vieques

As a candidate last year, President Bush pledged on several occasions not to intervene in a referendum in which residents of Puerto Rico´s Vieques Island would decide whether to keep or close a Navy bombing range.

The commander in chief went back on that promise last week, saying in rather blunt terms that the Navy has to get out by May 2003. Pro-defense Republicans view the decision as sellout of the military in favor of potential Hispanic voters, among whom Vieques has become a seminal issue. Longtime Bush adviser Charles Black, a paid lobbyist for Puerto Rico, told us the president wants to defuse a volatile situation and that only the Navy believes it can win a referendum among Vieques´ 6,400 registered voters.

The Navy has a real dilemma on its hands. The only way it can win the referendum is by campaigning on the island from now until Election Day this November. But Mr. Bush wants Congress to repeal the law setting up the vote. If the Navy holds off campaigning and then Congress refuses to cancel the referendum, there will not be enough time to try to garner the needed majority vote.

"The one thing the Navy needed to do to win, they can´t do," said a Republican congressional aide. The staffer said the big question is whether the White House lets the Navy spend $40 million in the current budget to improve living conditions on Vieques.

Like father, like son

President Bush´s decision to get the Navy off Vieques Island by May 2003 is eerily similar to a decision President George Bush made as president in 1990.

For years, Hawaii residents complained of live-fire exercises on the island of Kahoolawe. There were protests, demonstrations, civil unrest and Navy statements that the site was essential to training -- the same dynamics framing the debate over Puerto Rico´s Vieques bombing range.

Then-President Bush solved the problem by ordering the range closed. There were suspicions in the Navy at the time that the action was calculated to help a Republican Senate candidate, who eventually lost the election. This time around, there is suspicion in the Navy that the son opted to close Vieques to help him with the Hispanic vote in 2004.

Laser-incident update

The Canadian helicopter pilot who suffered eye injuries during an encounter with a Russian merchant ship four years ago is being forced out of the military.

Capt. Pat Barnes will leave the Air Force Oct. 1 because injuries to his right eye -- damage believed to have been caused by a laser fired from the ship Kapitan Man in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in April 1997.

"I think I´m being wrongfully dismissed," Capt. Barnes, 44, told reporter Dean Beeby of the Canadian Press/Broadcast News service in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "They seem to be able to get away with throwing people out without compensating them."

Capt. Barnes was one of two casualties from the laser incident. The other was U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jack Daly. Lt. Cmdr. Daly announced last week that he is suing the Russian owner of the Kapitan Man over the incident.

Since the April 4, 1997, laser incident, the Canadian military has issued laser-protective eyewear to its pilots and soldiers.

Intercepts

•The Pentagon has let the Army´s U.S. supplier of berets off the hook.

The hubbub over foreign-made black berets prompted the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to check to make sure Arkansas´ Bancroft Cap Co. was making military headgear from 100 percent American components, as a federal law requires.

Last month, Bancroft acknowledged to DLA that its wool comes from South Africa and its leather from Pakistan. At stake were nearly 575,000 berets, costing the military over $4 million.

But on Monday, the Pentagon came to the rescue. A senior acquisition official signed a waiver called a "determination of domestic non-availability."

"We finally can breathe a sigh of relief," said Rep. Marion Berry, Arkansas Democrat, whose district includes the Bancroft plant. "Bancroft will remain in business and its employees will keep their jobs."

• Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee criticized the Bush administration yesterday for cutting $100 million from the questionable Cooperative Threat Reduction program -- the Pentagon´s program to help Moscow dismantle nuclear weapons.

Administration sources tell us the cut was ordered by White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is said to view the program as only marginally contributing to U.S. national security.

Critics say the U.S. aid is freeing up money for Moscow to continue its strategic nuclear buildup, which includes two new long-range missile systems and a new class of missile submarines.

• Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at bgertz@WashingtonTimes.com. Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@WashingtonTimes.com.

----

2-war plan outdated, Rumsfeld tells panel

June 22, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010622-81813578.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asserted yesterday that the armed forces´ overriding requirement to fight two wars at once "can´t be said to be working," and said his staff is now developing a new strategy to counter 21st-century threats.

In testimony before the Senate and House Armed Services committees, Mr. Rumsfeld gave the strongest suggestion to date he plans to dump a requirement that guided the military´s size and direction in the post-Cold War 1990s. His final decision will be included in the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) due to be released to Congress in September.

He testified that an "overused" military was so underfunded the past 10 years that he will likely have to change the two-war capability to free up money to modernize units, build better housing and bolster morale.

"The current strategy can´t be said to be working, because of the shortfalls which I have described, so it seems to me we owe it to ourselves to ask the question 'What might be better?´" the defense chief said.

"Too much of today´s military planning is dominated by what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called 'a poverty of expectations, a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely,´" he added. "A new construct may be appropriate to help us plan for the unfamiliar and increasingly likely threats that we believe we´ll face in the decades ahead."

Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also added: "We´ve got too much strategy, too little force structure."

Mr. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs are now planning to transform the military to meet futuristic threats such as ballistic-missile attacks from "rogue nations," terrorism and attacks on satellites and computer networks.

The military is now sized at 1.36 million active-duty troops based on the 1997 QDR. It has continued a mandate that the military be able to fight two major regional wars nearly simultaneously, most likely on the Korean Peninsula and in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Pentagon officials told The Washington Times this week that Mr. Rumsfeld´s staff has come to the conclusion that two-war capability will be replaced with broader language. The officials said that today the military is not funded adequately to maintain a force structure for a current scenario that is viewed as less and less likely to happen.

Changing to a more realistic strategy may allow the Pentagon to cut force structure and close bases, and then use the savings for badly needed weapons and equipment, they said.

Options include a "one war-plus" capability. That would mean the armed forces would be prepared to fight and win a major regional war, while containing another aggressor in place until the conflict ended. The force would also be required to handle a number of smaller conflicts and provide for homeland defense.

Mr. Rumsfeld seems to be favoring this approach. He told the committees any new force-shape requirement must ensure the military can defend this country and maintain troops overseas to deter aggressors. The force, he said, must also "be capable of defeating the efforts of any adversary to achieve its objective by force or coercion" and to repel "attacks in a number of critical areas, and also be capable of conducting a limited number of smaller-scale contingencies."

The defense secretary listed a number of reasons for why the two-war mandate is not working.

"When one examines [the two-war approach] today, several things stand out," he testified. "First, because we´re underfunded and overused our forces, we find that to meet acceptable levels of risk, we´re short [an Army] division. We´re short of airlift. We have been underfunding aging infrastructure and facilities. ... The aircraft fleet is aging. ... [T]he Navy is declining in numbers."

Since the Cold War ended, the United States has fought one major regional conflict, the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It has also executed scores of smaller missions, or contingencies, such as periodic bombings of Iraq and air campaigns in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Yugoslavia. These types of contingencies are the ones most likely to occur in the future, Pentagon officials say, not two simultaneous wars.

"We´re built for two wars," one official said. "Trouble is, it never happened."

The concept behind maintaining a two-war capability was that a second foe could not take advantage of a preoccupied U.S. military by committing an act of aggression against an American ally or in any region of the world vital to U.S. interests.

Mr. Rumsfeld yesterday received support for changing the strategy from one important senator, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat.

"For some time, I have felt that the so-called two-major-theater-war requirement was outdated," Mr. Levin told Mr. Rumsfeld.

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Pentagon Asks for $18.4B Increase

June 22, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Defense-Budget.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration will ask Congress to boost next year's military budget by an additional $18.4 billion, capping a review of Pentagon needs by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The figure, provided by a senior administration official and a congressional aide, would be 5.7 percent more than the $325.1 billion that President Bush proposed in the fiscal 2002 budget he released in April.

At the time, the administration said its initial request was a preliminary one pending Rumsfeld's look at the sprawling agency he inherited after Bush took office in January.

The request would bring Bush's overall defense proposal for 2002 to $343.5 billion. That would be a 10.3 percent increase over the $311.3 billion the military has received so far for this fiscal year, which runs through Sept. 30.

Most members of both parties in Congress seem willing to provide extra money for defense.

But Democrats have complained that because of Bush's recently enacted 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut it will be difficult to find enough money to pay for added spending for defense, schools and other needs without dipping into Medicare and Social Security surpluses. Democrats and Republicans alike are reluctant to do that.

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Pentagon Paid $409 Each for Sinks

MARCH 22, 13:53
By MATT KELLEY
Associated Press Writer http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&PACKAGEID=pentagon&STORYID=APIS7AT4K800

WASHINGTON (AP) - A Pentagon computer system designed to prevent embarrassments like a $640 toilet seat purchased in the past instead made automated blunders like spending $409 on a sink worth just $39.

Besides buying six of the high-priced sinks, the system bought screws for $2 that should have cost less than 50 cents and ``dust protection plugs'' for 25 cents that actually cost just pennies, according to a Pentagon inspector general report.

The Defense Department installed the system to automate purchases and eliminate possible fraud by human buyers. But the computer never checked more than one vendor to get the best price.

The report said contractors probably know how to cheat the system without getting caught. Auditors estimated that overpayments accounted for $1.2 million of the $14 million in automated purchases they reviewed from April 1999 through March 2000.

``It is now time to change the process,'' the auditors wrote last week.

The Defense Logistics Agency - the Pentagon's purchasing manager - is upgrading the computer system so it can check prices from several suppliers to find the lowest one. Still, agency officials criticized the $1.2 million overpayment estimate, saying auditors should have deducted more than $45,000 in vendors' refunds.

``We've already gone back to get a refund'' of $2,142 for the overpriced sinks, DLA spokeswoman Gerda Parr said Wednesday.

The Pentagon was the target of ridicule - from members of Congress to comedians - in the 1980s for wasteful spending like a $640 airplane toilet cover and a $435 hammer. The overcharging problem remains despite more than a decade of attempts to stamp it out: Examples from the past few years include a $350 ball bearing and a $76 screw.

Critics say some changes meant to streamline the Pentagon's purchasing system have made it more difficult to root out price gouging.

``I can't blame the businesses when you have a customer who's asking to be duped,'' said Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a frequent critic of Pentagon waste.

The latest problem involved a computer system that handles purchases of less than $2,500 at the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia.

When the supply center needs something, the system picks the supplier whose name is at the top of a rotating list of vendors. The system alerts human buyers only when a price is more than 25 percent higher than the last price paid for the same item.

Even then, overpriced purchases often were approved, the inspector general's report said.

``Probably every vendor knows they can mark up a purchase by 25 percent over the highest previous price paid before DLA does a theoretical manual review,'' the auditors said.

Auditors also criticized the agency's method of determining when a supplier had charged more than the 30 percent markup allowed in their contracts.

Under the current ``E-Z Quant'' tracking system, the agency looks at all of a company's contracts together to see if the overall markup is more than 30 percent. Inspector general auditors say the agency should look at each sale individually to catch scattered incidents of price gouging.

``The vendors are probably aware that if their overall markups average less than 30 percent they will never be questioned,'' the auditors wrote.

Defense Logistics Agency officials responded that they had been using E-Z Quant since 1992 and saw no reason to change it.

``While we are sometimes overcharged on individual low dollar value awards, E-Z Quant provides a fair and effective means of protecting the government's interests,'' DLA Deputy Director Frank Lotts wrote to the auditors.

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-------- energy

Judge Halts Calif. Coastal Drilling

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Calif-Offshore-Drilling.html

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal judge halted oil and natural gas exploration off central California's coast Friday, saying the area can't be drilled or explored until the federal government studies environmental impacts and the California Coastal Commission approves the plan.

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken is a blow to petroleum companies that have left their leases dormant while natural gas and oil prices have neared all-time highs. Environmentalists hailed the decision.

``We think it's a bad idea to have additional oil and gas drilling off the coast,'' said Drew Caputo, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

For now, the decision blocks any attempt to build the first new oil platforms off California's coast since 1994. No drilling to explore for oil deposits has been conducted since 1989.

Oil exploration in the region has been an explosive issue since 1969, when a massive oil spill soiled the coast off Santa Barbara. Offshore rigs account for roughly 20 percent of the state's petroleum production, and offshore gas could prove to be a key resource as California seeks to solve its energy crisis.

On Thursday, the U.S. House voted to delay a Bush administration effort to open part of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has urged the administration not to proceed with plans to extend offshore drilling to a tract that comes as close as 17 miles to Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle.

Proponents of leases, led by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, say the nation needs the area's oil and gas reserves to help ease the energy crunch. The department estimates there are 2.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in the area, with industry projecting as much as 7.8 trillion cubic feet.

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House Vote Stalls Gulf Drilling Plan

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/politics/22OIL.html

WASHINGTON, June 21 - The House voted today to temporarily bar the Interior Department from leasing the waters off the Florida Panhandle for oil and gas exploration, a setback to the Bush administration's energy strategy.

In a 247-to-164 vote, with 70 Republicans ignoring appeals from the White House and their own leadership, the House approved the measure to postpone for six months new leasing arrangements for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Supporters of the restriction, including Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the president's brother, said they would push to make it a lasting one.

"The Congress sent a very powerful message to the president today that he needs a more balanced approach toward energy in Florida and throughout the country," said Representative Jim Davis, a Florida Democrat who sponsored the measure with a Republican colleague, Joe Scarborough, also from Florida.

In a second vote, House lawmakers passed a measure to prevent the administration from developing sites to extract oil, gas or coal in lands designated as national monuments.

Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton has argued that there are significant reserves, including low-sulfur coal, in several of the 19 national monuments designated by President Bill Clinton.

In addition, lawmakers struck down an Interior Department measure to suspend new rules requiring mining companies to pay for environmental cleanups. It also turned back a move to weaken standards for ground and surface water.

The measures were amendments to an $18.9 billion spending bill for the Interior Department, which passed the House and now goes to the Senate.

The department had intended to decide on the leases this fall, and it could still follow that schedule, putting them up for sale at year's end, after the ban expires.

But environmental groups rejoiced at the actions, which they said demonstrated growing unease across party lines with Mr. Bush's goal of stepping up energy production in areas that are ecologically sensitive or favored for recreation.

William H. Meadows, the president of the Wilderness Society, said the House had delivered conservationists a "tremendous victory" and had issued a warning to President Bush.

"The House said, loud and clear, that Capitol Hill does not agree with his environmental views," Mr. Meadows said.

Congress has already stymied Mr. Bush's plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration, which the president contended was necessary to reduce American dependence on foreign energy suppliers.

The Republican defections were all the more striking because the White House had lobbied hard to open the gulf to oil and gas exploration.

Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the Republican whip, fought vigorously on behalf of more drilling.

Mr. DeLay denounced as "radical" the measure to curtail drilling in the gulf.

He said it would undermine efforts to address the growing needs of Americans who are already experiencing an energy shortage in California and elsewhere.

"This amendment makes about as much sense as shutting down all exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and weakens our energy security," Mr. DeLay said.

President Bush, promoting his energy plan in St. Paul, advocated more drilling, saying, "As long as cars and trucks run on gasoline, we will need oil, and we should produce more of it at home."

A White House spokeswoman, Nicolle Devenish, suggested that the administration would seek to overturn the House action, but she did not elaborate.

"These are matters we are continuing to review," Ms. Devenish said, "and we will continue to work with Congress to make sure that the president's priorities are reflected in the final appropriations bill."

The battle over the gulf waters stirred the fierce opposition of most Florida politicians.

Contending that an oil spill could cause lasting damage to the state's popular white sand beaches, the entire Florida delegation voted to keep drilling away from the coast, with the exception of Representative John Mica, a Republican.

"Few other issues so completely unite Floridians," Governor Bush wrote in a letter earlier this year to the administration.

Florida's senators have introduced legislation to establish a permanent moratorium on offshore drilling and to buy back current leases off Florida's coast.

The Senate, under Democrats' control, is expected to adopt a strategy even more to conservationists' liking than the House.

The gulf lease site, known as Section 181, stretches within 30 miles of Pensacola, and about 200 miles from Tampa Bay, Florida officials said. The Interior Department has predicted that the site contains 396 million barrels of oil, about a three-week supply for the country.

Unlike the western and central gulf, where drilling supplies about 30 percent of the country's natural gas and 20 percent of its oil, the eastern gulf has remained effectively shielded from offshore drilling even though it has never been permanently closed to exploration.

The energy industry had relied on Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney - both of whom have been oil company executives - to open new sites for development. They warned that the nation must find new sources to meet its energy appetite.

Industry officials noted that their operations elsewhere in the gulf had been carried out for over half a century without a disastrous spill.

"We are obviously disappointed," said Juan R. Palomo, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute. "We have worked very hard to get out the story of how we can explore the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and have done so with no harm to the environment. We hoped that if we did our jobs, the result would have been different."

-------- environment

House Acts to Bar Drilling Off Fla.
Bush Also Dealt Setback on Mining Rules

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 22, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30529-2001Jun21?language=printer

The Republican-controlled House voted by comfortable margins yesterday to block oil and gas exploration off the coast of Florida and to bar new oil, gas and coal exploration in millions of acres of national monuments, dealing a blow to President Bush's efforts to increase domestic energy supplies.

In a separate vote, the House also approved a proposal to prevent the administration from reviewing or altering new restrictions on hardrock mining on government land.

Although the measures now go to the Senate, where their fates are uncertain, the votes were the strongest indication yet of congressional unease with Bush's energy and environmental policies. They suggested that even among Republicans there are serious doubts about the general direction of the president's proposals.

The votes coincide with a decline in public approval of the president's energy and global warming policies, which critics say place greater emphasis on production and exploration than conservation and environmental protection.

"This clearly demonstrates that the majority of Congress, by a sizable margin, is environmentally sensitive and wants [the administration's] policy to recognize that," said Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert, a moderate New York Republican and leader among environmentalists on Capitol Hill.

The White House sought to minimize the importance of the votes, suggesting they were an early skirmish in what is likely to be a protracted debate. "These are all matters we are continuing to review, and we are going to continue working with Congress to make sure the president's priorities are reflected in the final legislation," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

White House lobbyists and Republican leaders worked to try to stave off the action but were surprised by the overwhelming support for the measures. House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) gave an impassioned floor speech in which he called the proposals "radical" environmental notions that rejected promising domestic oil and gas reserves and threatened to leave the country vulnerable to foreign oil producers.

In the most hotly contested vote, the House passed by 247 to 164 a measure to postpone any final lease agreement between the Interior Department and energy companies wishing to drill in an offshore tract in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Efforts to drill in the area have been opposed by Florida officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush (R), who has been pitted against the president, his brother, on the issue.

Seventy Republicans joined Democrats in approving the measure, which came as part of an $18.9 billion fiscal 2002 Interior Department spending bill.

Reps. Jim Davis (D-Fla.) and Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.), the chief sponsors of the Florida oil lease ban, declared that the administration was risking oil spills along the Florida coastline for the sake of modest increases in energy production.

"We are against quick fixes to solve our energy problems," Davis said. "We don't want to see oil drilling off the coast."

Gov. Bush has repeatedly urged his brother's administration not to proceed with plans to extend offshore oil and gas drilling to a tract that comes as close as 17 miles to Pensacola, Fla., and 200 miles from the Tampa Bay region. The tract, called Lease 181, covers about 6 million acres and may contain 400 million barrels of oil.

During last year's campaign, President Bush expressed sympathy with Florida's opposition to offshore oil and gas production, including Lease 181. Yet, the White House opposed any delay in leases and lobbied some of Florida's Republican lawmakers on the issue.

By 242 to 173, the House approved an amendment to the spending bill by Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.) that would prohibit new energy exploration in national monuments beyond that already allowed. Forty-seven Republicans voted in favor of the proposal.

"Some of the oil and gas companies have been hankering to get into these lands for years," Rahall said. "Our national heritage must not be sacrificed on the altar of greed and profits."

The Interior Department recently determined there are significant energy reserves within the boundaries of five monuments designated by President Bill Clinton, including large, low-sulfur coal deposits in the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The agency has also looked at monument land in California, Colorado, Washington and Idaho.

The House also voted 216 to 194 to prevent further administration review of Clinton administration regulations that would require mining companies to pay for the full cost of environmental cleanups on federal land. The regulations also impose strong environmental standards to protect ground and surface water from mining pollution and give federal agencies wide discretion in deciding whether to grant operating permits to mines that may pose a serious environmental threat.

Staff writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

----

China pulls plug on baths and saunas to save water

CHINA: June 21, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11266

BEIJING - Faced with the worst drought in decades, authorities in northern China have cut off water supplies to bath houses, saunas and car washes, and slashed domestic water rations, officials said yesterday.

Tianjin, just east of Beijing, is desperate as its water supplies are set to run out within days and a canal that started channelling water into the city from the Yellow River last October has proven mostly ineffective, said one official.

"To tell the truth, we don't know what to do after what's left in our poor reservoirs is used up," the official at the city's Water Conservation Office told Reuters.

Tianjin had banned car washers from using running water and stopped issuing licences to new bath houses, officials said.

Dalian, a coastal city in the northeastern province of Liaoning, cut off water supplies to its 300-odd saunas and bath houses after it was hit by drought for the third consecutive year, local water officials said.

"They have been left completely on their own since we cut their running-water supplies," said an official at the city's Water Administration Office.

A few large saunas were using expensive de-salinised sea water, while others were shipping spring water from hundreds of kilometres (miles) away, he said.

"But most are out of business by now," he added.

PUNITIVE PRICES

The municipal government has forced many of the city's industries to cut water consumption or turn to non-drinkable recycled water and imposed strict limits on domestic water use.

Any family using more than six tonnes of water per month must pay 10 times the usual price of 1.8 yuan (22 cents) per tonne, the official said.

Should there be no rainfall before August, a one-billion-yuan ($120 million) back-up project would start channelling water to the city from a nearby river, he said.

The Liaoshen Evening News, a newspaper based in the Liaoning provincial capital of Shenyang, said a survey showed 70 per cent of its readers supported an immediate ban on saunas and bath houses.

In Weihai, on the coast of the eastern province of Shandong, fresh water ran for only four hours each in the morning and evening, state broadcaster China Central Television reported on Tuesday.

The city government had cut the per capita water allowance to one tonne per month and raised the price of an extra tonne to 40 yuan ($4.8), more than 20 times the usual price, it said.

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E.P.A. to Issue Air Rules to Protect Park Vistas

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/politics/22PARK.html

WASHINGTON, June 21 - The Bush administration is preparing to issue rules on Friday to clamp down on old coal-fired power plants that are the chief culprits in the haze that has spoiled the vistas in many national parks and wilderness areas, leaving the worst blight in Acadia National Park in Maine and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.

A spokesman said today that on Friday, Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, would issue the proposed rules written almost exactly as the Clinton administration wrote but did not enact before President Bill Clinton left office in January. The rules will be published in the Federal Register, beginning a 60- day period for public comment before they are adopted in the fall.

Mrs. Whitman said three weeks ago that she would not oppose the Clinton rules. "Part of the president's commitment to protecting national parks includes protecting the views that draw us to these parks year after year," she said then. "But over the years, haze and pollution have eroded these vistas."

But the White House wanted to review how the rules would affect the nation's energy supplies, and many environmental groups worried that this would give the administration a chance to weaken them.

An administration official said today that the Environmental Protection Agency had determined that the effect of the rules on the nation's energy supply, energy prices and reliance on foreign supplies would be insignificant, a conclusion that the utilities are almost certain to challenge as they face hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses to cut their emissions.

Environmental groups hailed the proposed rules today as a major step toward helping to improve visibility in the national parks, although they reserved final judgment until the rules are adopted.

"If they want to do the right thing, they still can," said John Stanton, an air-quality specialist in the Clinton administration and now vice president for air programs at the National Environmental Trust. "But if they want to gut the rule, they still can."

The rules come at a time when national polls show the public is increasingly concerned over Mr. Bush's commitment to the environment because of what the public sees as his ties to the oil and gas industries and his rejection of the Kyoto agreement, an international treaty on global warming. The most recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 46 percent of people disapprove of President Bush's handling of the environment, while 39 percent approve.

Environmentalists argue that Mr. Bush essentially had no choice but to adopt the Clinton rules, in part because the national parks are too popular with the public to risk neglecting. They also note that while air quality in some parts of the country has been improving, parks including Shenandoah in Virginia, the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee, and Acadia in Maine have had deteriorating air quality. Acadia has recorded worse smog than Boston or Philadelphia.

Congress determined in an amendment to the Clean Air Act in 1977 that the national parks deserved special protection. The rules call for improving visibility in the parks by 15 percent per decade for the next six decades and achieving a "pristine" level of air quality by 2064.

The rules cover 26 sources of pollution, including power plants, municipal waste incinerators, copper smelters and pulp mills, but the agency has identified power plants as the biggest source of the problem.

The rules cover power plants that were built from 1962 to 1977 and emit more than 250 tons of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide every year. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents the utilities, estimates that 580 units (there may be more than one unit at a power plant) will have to be upgraded.

Any plant that meets the other criteria and can be identified as contributing to any pollution that limits visibility in any national park is covered by the rules.

Because of meteorologic patterns, the offending plants are all over the country, not just near national parks. Pollution particles can travel as far as 1,000 miles. For example, at Acadia National Park, the view of Penobscot Bay is often obscured by smog that includes particles emitted by Midwestern power plants. "There is no state that is clearly out of this program," said John Kinsman, director of air quality programs for the institute.

The Tennessee Valley Authority faces one of the biggest clean-up tasks. One of the smoggiest parks is the Great Smokies, the most-visited national park and one with such bad air quality that it has issued more than 100 alerts of unhealthy air in the last three years.

On a bad day, visibility there is only about 15 miles. On the park's best days, such as after a big storm has temporarily blown the pollution out, visibility can be as far as 55 miles.

The National Environmental Trust recently commissioned a Republican polling firm, American Viewpoint, to conduct a survey of attitudes in three states, including Tennessee, toward clean air in the parks.

The results, which were shared with the administration, showed overwhelming support for cleaning air in the parks, even if it meant higher utility bills.

The importance of the parks to the public and politicians was reflected in a recent letter from Senator Fred Thompson, Republican of Tennessee, to President Bush encouraging the administration to support the agency's clean-up rules.

"While I do not want T.V.A. to be competitively disadvantaged, I am very concerned about what is happening to the park," Senator Thompson wrote.

Describing the threat of foul air to the Smokies, he added, "Most shocking to me is that, according to park officials, air quality in the Smokies is so poor during the summer months that hiking on back-country trails is more hazardous to your health than walking along the streets of Manhattan."

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Bush Plans to Shift Some EPA Enforcement to States

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32200-2001Jul21?language=printer

The Bush administration is advancing a plan to cut federal environmental enforcement operations and to shift resources to the states despite mounting evidence that many states are unable or unwilling to vigorously enforce federal environmental laws.

President Bush has proposed reducing the Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement staff in Washington and regional offices by 8 percent, or 270 positions, while providing $25 million in new grants to the states for enforcement activities.

Bush took office vowing to provide states and local government with an enhanced role in managing and regulating natural resources. Rather than seeking to perpetuate the EPA's aggressive enforcement policies under the Clinton administration, Bush and his EPA director, Christine Todd Whitman, have called for reduced federal oversight and intervention, and expanded cooperation between state environmental protection agencies and industry.

In a speech last month to the National Association of Manufacturers, Whitman said that states are better equipped than the EPA to deal with the problems of environmental degradation -- in "partnership" with industry.

"Threats to our water no longer comes from one big pipe pumping out thousands of gallons of waste every day into a local river [but from] numerous much smaller practices, such as oil runoff from parking lots and fertilizer runoff from our lawns," she said. "Threats like these will not be solved through massive [federal] efforts at regulation and enforcement."

Some states, including Arizona, Delaware and Missouri, have aggressive -- and successful -- environmental enforcement programs. But the EPA's inspector general and analyses of EPA data by the Environmental Working Group have documented widespread lapses by many other states' enforcement of federal clean water and clean air laws.

Environmentalists, Democrats in Congress and federal regulators are citing the conclusions to question the administration's plans to shift responsibilities to the states.

The EPA's inspector general said in a September 1998 audit that six states had failed to report numerous serious violations of the Clean Air Act, as they are required to do. While performing more than 3,300 inspections, Arkansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington state reported only 18 significant violations. While reviewing a small portion of those 3,300 inspections, the EPA turned up an additional 103 serious violations.

Other states have failed to report serious violations of federal pollution laws, allowed major industrial polluters to operate without proper permits and failed to conduct basic emissions tests of industry smokestacks, according to the studies.

The EPA and the Justice Department can step in if they conclude a state isn't doing an adequate job. But with only 3,537 lawyers, investigators and staff involved in enforcement and oversight activities nationwide, the EPA is stretched thin.

"The president's cuts take the environmental cop off the beat, and it creates a devastating blow to EPA's ability to enforce clean air, clean water and hazardous waste laws," said Rep. Robert Menendez (N.J.), one of several dozen House Democrats who are battling the cuts as Congress considers the EPA's budget for the coming year.

The House Appropriations Committee last week approved funding for the EPA next year that includes the administration's proposed cuts in enforcement. The Senate Appropriations Committee subsequently voted to restore the funding, and the dispute will have to be worked out this year by Senate and House negotiators. The Justice Department's budget for prosecuting industrial polluters would not be affected by the proposed cuts.

Nowhere are the problems cited by the EPA studies of state enforcement performance more in evidence than in Ohio. The Republican administrations of Gov. Bob Taft and former governor George V. Voinovich have promoted an industry-friendly policy of voluntary environmental compliance.

After widespread complaints from four environmental groups, the EPA last year launched an unprecedented review of virtually every aspect of the state's enforcement operations, involving more than 30 EPA lawyers and staff.

The environmental groups -- Ohio Citizen Action, the Ohio Public Interest Research Group, Rivers Unlimited and the Sierra Club -- have asked the EPA to revoke Ohio's authority to enforce federal laws governing air, water and hazardous waste and to bring in federal regulators. EPA officials say they hope to issue a preliminary report late this year.

During the past two years, 72 percent of Ohio plants and refineries surveyed had violations of the Clean Water Act and 33 percent were in violation of the Clean Air Act. Over one-third of major factories were found to be operating with expired permits required under the Clean Water Act.

According to the 1998 EPA inspector general audit, Ohio, with more than 1,700 major industrial plants, reported four serious violations of environmental law during a recent two-year period -- a figure that state officials acknowledged was unusually low. As for cleaning up toxic waste sites under its purview, Ohio has averaged only one site a year for the past decade with 1,200 to go.

The EPA and the Justice Department stepped in this month and filed suit against AK Steel of Middletown, Ohio, for violations of air and water pollution dating to 1993. Over the years, the state received more than 100 complaints from residents about excessive dust from the plant and pollution in a nearby creek.

Ohio environmental activists say they are dismayed that Donald R. Schregardus, who headed the Ohio EPA during the Voinovich administration, was recently tapped by Bush to be assistant EPA administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance.

Christopher Jones, the Ohio EPA director for the past two years, said the state has made important strides recently in cleaning up the environment and eliminating a large backlog of inspections and expired permits.

Jones dismissed many of the complaints by environmentalists as unfounded and said the Environmental Working Group and other environmental groups have distorted EPA data. The Ohio EPA has assessed $67 million in penalties against industrial polluters during the past 10 years, he noted, a tougher record than that of Kentucky, Indiana and other neighboring states.

"When you get beyond the rhetoric of the critics, we have a strong record over 10 years," Jones said. "The notion that it's somehow wrong if you're helping a business comply with regulations -- I can't agree with that."

But environmentalists and many residents have complained for years that the state government has altered the environmental enforcement process by shifting the burden to residents to prove there is a problem.

Many cite the case of one Cincinnati neighborhood to make their point.

For nearly three years, Karen Arnett complained to state environmental protection authorities about noxious fumes from a foundry in her northern Cincinnati community that left her eyes burning and her throat sore.

The company, Willard Industries Inc., had been operating without a proper permit since 1990 and was secretly emitting styrene -- a hazardous gas that is harmful to the respiratory and nervous systems.

An agent for the state environmental protection agency responded to Arnett's complaints and eventually ordered Willard to conduct two tests of its smokestack. But Arnett said she had to prod officials to do their work, and that she was the one who first discovered that styrene gas was coming out of the stack.

When Arnett grew impatient and threatened to sue last fall under a federal statute, Willard and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency quickly worked out a settlement that allowed the company to continue polluting -- by increasing the height of its smokestack to disperse the gas over a larger area of the city and paying $82,000 in fines.

An Ohio official proclaimed the outcome of the Willard case "a success story," but Arnett called it a sweetheart deal that did little to reduce the odor or the pollution threat.

"Why is it they didn't know about the emissions before the complaints?" she said. "I don't find that very heartening."

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COMPUTER DISPOSAL COULD COST CALIFORNIANS $1 BILLION

June 22, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-22-09.html

SAN JOSE, California, A new report by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Californians Against Waste and Materials for the Future that details the growing piles of electronic waste in the U.S., the toxics contained in the computers and monitors, and hazards of improper disposal was released.

The report, "Poison PCs and Toxic TVs: The Biggest Environmental Crisis You Never Heard Of," also estimates a cost to California tax payers of almost $1 billion for handling e-wastes that consumers and businesses will throw away. The report is available at: http://www.svtc.org/

"We're sitting on top of a gigantic e-wasteberg , and in order to find solutions, the manufacturers of computers must take life-cycle responsibility for their products," said Ted Smith, executive director of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, and one of the lead authors of the new report. "They need to re-design their products to phase out the toxic materials and make computers and monitors recyclable. They should take the lead on recycling programs, not the taxpayer."

"Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the high-tech revolution," added Smith. "Our communities have borne the environmental costs and toxic legacy of high-tech production. Taxpayers must not now be burdened with the costs of disposing of e-waste."

On Tuesday, San Jose City Council member Cindy Chavez introduced a resolution before the San Jose City Council calling for immediate state action to regulate computer wastes.

"Local taxpayers are not in a position to shoulder the staggering costs of cleaning up hazardous wastes found in personal computers and monitors. We need a collaborative effort involving local and state government, high-tech, and other stakeholders," said Chavez.

A recent announcement by the California Department of Toxics and Substance Control clarified that it is illegal to dispose of televisions and computer monitors in municipal landfills. That announcement has sent cities throughout the state scrambling to find alternative methods of collecting and recycling computer and electronic waste.

"The high-tech industry, environmentalists and government must work together to find solutions to the imminent environmental crisis caused by e-waste. Failing to do so threatens our natural resources and our local economy," warned Chavez.

-------- genetics

Bush Leans Against Support for Stem-Cell Research, Aides Say

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/health/22BUSH.html

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., June 21 - Under pressure from anti-abortion groups and Roman Catholic leaders, the White House is leaning toward revoking regulations issued by the Clinton administration that allow federally sponsored biomedical research using cells from human embryos, administration officials say.

But the decision has been delayed by several weeks, the officials say, giving Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services and the leading advocate within the administration for using federal money to underwrite the research, more time to buttress his case.

Mr. Thompson is now armed with a new report from the National Institutes of Health that concludes that stem cells extracted from embryos, mostly from fertility clinics that would otherwise dispose of them, are even more promising for developing cures for a range of debilitating diseases than stem cells from the bones and organs of adults.

As the administration debated the issue in Washington today, President Bush came here to argue for a passage of a $450 million budget request for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that is more than three decades old but has never been fully financed by Congress.

Much of the money is supposed to be paid to states to conserve natural resources and protect parkland, but environmentalists have argued that Mr. Bush is simply shuffling budget lines around, cutting some more specific conservation programs to pay for this one.

Mr. Bush said at the state park here that "federal money is most useful when it comes without strings." Under his proposal, he said, "you could use the money to buy parkland, you can use it to protect endangered species."

Later this evening, Mr. Bush appeared at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser that raised about $1.6 million for Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama.

The debate over stem-cell research has divided the administration quite publicly quite and sharply. Mr. Thompson's sparring partner has been Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, who fears alienating conservative voters who make up Mr. Bush's base, as well as the Roman Catholic Church.

If Mr. Bush makes his decision by mid-July, it will be just before he visits the Vatican on a trip to Italy for the annual economic summit of major industrialized nations.

"The debate has taken place right in front of the president," one administration official said today, "but he is not ready to make a decision yet. He may not be ready for a number of weeks."

Today Mr. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said that "the president has not made up his mind."

One indication of how the White House is leaning came earlier this week then the administration addressed a related issue: how to deal with a variety of bills now in Congress that would make human cloning a federal crime.

There is virtually unanimous agreement on Capitol Hill that the government should prevent the creation of cloned babies. But Mr. Bush this week endorsed a bill that would go much further, preventing the creation of cloned human embryos that are used for research, rather than reproduction.

Embryonic stem cells are believed to hold enormous promise as an all- purpose material for patching up the body and replacing failing tissues and organs. The cells can morph into any given type of body cell, just as they do as an individual develops in the womb from a fertilized egg.

Researchers hope that the cells could create new treatments for illnesses ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's disease to some cancers.

Various compromise proposals are circulating in the White House that would allow research to proceed, but only with the handful of embryonic cell lines already established, chiefly from embryos that are only a few days old. Many scientists firmly oppose the idea because a number of lines must be studied, they say, in order to find the few that have the most therapeutic promise.

"A finite number would be sufficient," said Dr. Irving Weissman, a leading stem cell expert at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "If we had 10 to 15 cell lines, no one would complain."

Mr. Bush's position came under attack today from several fellow Republicans.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said any effort to ban the use of embryos for research would be "very disquieting." Mr. Specter also noted that many Republicans who fiercely oppose abortion, including Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, supported the research.

In a letter to the White House recently, Senator Hatch called the research "consistent with bedrock pro-life, pro-family values" and said the ethical issues it raises were "fundamentally different" from those surrounding abortion.

Senator Specter said "it may well be that we have more than 70 votes in the United States Senate" to remove any ban on such research. He spoke at a hearing on Capitol Hill on the need for more research money for blood cancers like leukemia.

"It's different having an embryo in a dish than having one in a woman's womb," Senator Specter said. "Having an embryo in a woman's womb is having a life. In a dish, it's just going to be discarded."

As Senator Specter's comments suggest, the Bush administration has found itself caught between two powerful groups: abortion opponents and the powerful advocates of biomedical research.

Having rejected the compromise fashioned by the Clinton administration, that federally supported researchers could use but not themselves derive cell lines drawn from embryos, Mr. Bush has been groping to come up with a workable position. He has rarely spoken on the subject. But in a letter to an anti-abortion group recently, he wrote, "I oppose federal funding for stem cell research that involves destroying living human embryos."

He added, "I support innovative medical research on life-threatening and debilitating diseases, including promising research on stem cells from adult tissue."

--------

Genetic Study Dates Malaria to the Advent of Farming

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/health/22MALA.html

Malaria, a leading cause of death in the world, is not the ancient affliction it might seem but a relatively recent scourge that dates only to the era when human societies first practiced agriculture.

That is the conclusion of Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff, a population geneticist at the University of Maryland, and a team of others in the field after analyzing DNA changes in a human gene that confers resistance to the malarial parasite.

The changes can be dated to roughly 8,000 years ago in the case of a gene variant widespread in Africa and to roughly 4,000 years ago in the case of a second version of the gene common among peoples of the Mediterranean, India and North Africa.

The finding is of interest to biologists trying to understand the pace of human evolution because it shows how quickly a variant gene that promotes its owner's survival can spread through a population.

Dr. Tishkoff reported her finding in today's issue of the journal Science. Her work fits with several other pieces of evidence pointing to a recent origin for malaria. Last year two biologists noted from study of the malarial parasite that certain of its genes were very uniform in their DNA code, suggesting that the parasite's population had undergone a sudden expansion, maybe as recently as 5,000 years ago.

That conclusion was controversial because malaria was assumed to be an ancient disease. One of the authors of the study, Dr. Francisco Ayala of the University of California at Irvine, said Dr. Tishkoff's finding was "music to my ears" because it pointed to a similar conclusion from the human side of the equation.

One of the first scholars to propose that malaria had a more recent origin was a University of Michigan anthropologist, Dr. Frank B. Livingstone, who suggested in 1958 that the introduction of slash-and-burn agriculture in West Africa 3,000 years ago provided the first impetus for malaria to become common. The sunlit pools in the clearings would have been ideal breeding sites for the mosquitoes that carry the parasite, and the swelling human populations would have provided convenient hosts, Dr. Livingstone surmised.

Some 300 million to 500 million cases of malaria occur each year, the World Health Organization calculates, and about two million people die of the disease. The human genome has adapted to the disease in various ways, notably by favoring changes in the genes that control the red blood cells, which the parasite invades, and the immune system. These adaptations include a variant hemoglobin gene that is protective when only one copy is inherited but causes sickle cell anemia in the relatively few people unlucky enough to receive the gene from both parents.

The gene associated with sickle cell has been widely studied but not in the way necessary to date the origin of its variants. Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues chose to examine a gene that conferred malarial resistance, one known as the G6PD gene (G6PD stands for glucose-6- phosphate dehydrogenase).

Besides interest in malaria, a reason for Dr. Tishkoff's work was to study a human gene under intense selective pressure. Population geneticists usually prefer to study what are called neutral genes, because they accumulate regular random changes in their DNA, which serve as a useful genetic clock. But genes that have changed under the pressure of natural selection are in many respects more interesting, because they determine the track of human evolution and are likely to specify the differences between humans and their close cousin the chimpanzee.

The dating of the G6PD gene's variants, done by a method worked out by a colleague of Dr. Tishkoff's, Dr. Andrew G. Clark of Pennsylvania State University, showed how rapidly a life-protecting variant of a gene can become widespread.

The speed of genetic change may help explain several puzzles in human evolution. Kennewick Man, for example, the 10,000-year-old skeleton found in Washington State, is quite different from modern American Indians. Though some have speculated that the skeleton is a relic of an otherwise unknown arrival of Europeans, a simpler explanation is that American Indians evolved very rapidly, Dr. Ayala said.

"We are morphologically so different in the different continents of the world," Dr. Ayala said.

Dr. Tishkoff's work showing how rapidly the G6PD gene variants have spread may help explain how these differences could have occurred so quickly after humans began their expansion from Africa, as recently as 50,000 years ago, he said.

-------- health

AIDS Group Demands Treatments for Developing World

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-hiv-aids.html

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - With the first United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) to take place here next week, an international gathering of public health advocates and physicians are demanding that treatment join the ranks of prevention as a key weapon in the effort to combat AIDS.

``We can say to patients, 'Well, sorry, you will die because treating you is not cost-effective,''' said Dr. Anne-Valerie Kaninda, medical advisor for Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF). ``But we do not agree to simply write-off 34 million lives when we know there is treatment,'' she said, referring to those infected with HIV in the developing world.

Kaninda spoke at a panel discussion held here on Thursday. She set the tone of the meeting by noting that although 95% of those infected with HIV globally live in the developing world, effective medicines--particularly expensive antiretroviral therapies--are primarily the privilege of a small minority of patients living in a handful of rich countries.

Sponsored by MSF--a nonprofit organization founded in 1971--the speakers focused on impediments to delivering adequate HIV care in a wide swath of countries, including the Ukraine, Thailand, Kenya, and Cameroon. MSF provides healthcare assistance in 18 countries over-burdened with infectious disease, war, and disasters--natural and man-made--by relying on a volunteer network of over 2,000 medical professionals and 15,000 locally hired staff.

One by one, the speakers painted bleak portraits of people living with AIDS in an almost total vacuum of affordable treatment: over 2 million in Kenya, 1 million in Thailand, 1.5 million in the Ukraine, and almost 1 million in Cameroon. They noted that abject poverty, government indifference and corruption, lack of public education, and cultural taboos and stigmas all contribute to spiraling infection rates and healthcare systems crippled by fear and lack of resources.

But all suggested that the main culprit has been the relatively astronomical prices of cutting-edge antiretroviral medications that are the mainstay of so-called ``triple cocktail'' therapies in the US and Europe.

Onanong Bunjumnong, the head of MSF's Access to Essential Medicines Campaign in Thailand, pointed out that in a country where the monthly minimum wage amounts to $80, less than 300 patients in her country can afford the $450 cost of a 4-week prescription of AIDS drugs.

``It's really tragic because we know the treatment exists, but we know people can't get them because they're so expensive,'' Bunjumnong said. She stressed that local political will to improve the situation has been insufficient, and that--despite recent success in forcing multinational drug companies to drop prices and patents and allow generic drug production--costs are still too high.

Dr. Chris Ouma of the AIDS treatment organization Action Aid Kenya outlined a story of one man with AIDS in Nairobi who was diagnosed with an opportunistic infection for which only one drug was suitable. However, instead of prescribing 2 weeks of treatment at the unaffordable price of $10 per day, he could only advise the patient to begin the 200-mile journey home so that his daughters and wife wouldn't have to pay to transport his corpse long distance.

``Our people have families, homes, feelings, aspirations and jobs,'' Ouma told Reuters Health. ``But unfortunately, their income is such that they are not able to afford the drugs they need. So I really don't think respecting the monopoly of a drug company in the face of AIDS is a good argument. AIDS is unique and I think we have to draw a line.''

--------

Delegates Still Deadlocked on UN AIDS Declaration

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-aids-un-decla.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Only days before a major U.N. AIDS conference, Islamic nations and the Vatican are still trying to block language on homosexuals, prostitutes and drugs users in a plan of action 180 nations must approve.

Sue Markham, spokeswoman for the U.N. General Assembly, said on Friday envoys would meet through the weekend in an effort to break the deadlock that has stopped agreement on the declaration for weeks.

Some 3,000 people government officials, activists and business leaders gather to back a global agenda for tackling the killer disease and galvanizing support for a new fund to pay for the effort. The AIDS conference, the first U.N. high-level meeting of its kind, opens on Monday and closes on Wednesday.

One section of the document refers to homosexuals, prostitutes and intravenous drug uses as especially vulnerable groups in getting and spreading the AIDS virus. It calls for special attention, including ``peer group'' education.

Egypt, Syria, Iran, Libya, Pakistan and other Islamic countries as well as the Vatican are fighting Canada, Australia, the European Union, southern African and 19 Latin American nations. The conservatives argue that sex outside of the traditional nuclear family cannot be tolerated.

The Bush administration also is uneasy about appearing to confer special rights on gays as with other parts of the text on pushing AIDS ``treatment'' rather than care.

The document will serve as a guideline for U.N. agencies and a blueprint for what each country is expected to do in setting up targets for prevention and care.

Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Bagher Asadi, said the West was trying ``to push the envelope in areas where there is cultural sensitivity, ideological sensitivity, ethical sensitivity.''

Agreeing with the drafters of the original paragraphs, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said ignoring the groups would exacerbate problems caused by the disease.

``Pretending these groups don't exist, or reinforcing discrimination against them, will only accelerate the spread of the epidemic by pushing them further underground and out of reach of the services they desperately need to contain the disease,'' the rights group said.

Regardless of the outcome, U.N. officials are optimistic the hardest hit countries are doing something about AIDS and that the drug companies are under pressure to continue lowering prices.

``Who would have thought all of this would have come together and to top it off -- the clear political engagement of African leaders at a level and with an intensity that wasn't there even a year ago,'' said Stephen Lewis, the special U.N. envoy for AIDS in Africa.

Some 36 million people are infected with AIDS or HIV worldwide, with the virus spreading rapidly in Asia and Eastern Europe, where drug users are the main victims. Of the affected population, an estimated 25 million live in Africa.

Few Africans have access to treatment, meaning most of the productive young people now infected will die.

But Lewis maintained at a news conference ``there has been a fascinating constellation of developments,'' starting with a belated but now vigorous campaign against the killer disease at the United Nations and the recognition that sophisticated treatment was a possibility.

``What you need is a kind of massive worldwide response. It is a matter of never giving up and never allowing these obstacles to imperil what you do,'' Lewis said.

-------- human rights

Monitors Say China Pushes Tibet Monks From Study Site

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/world/22TIBE.html

BEIJING, June 21 - Thousands of Tibetan monks and nuns have been forced to leave a thriving religious study center in the remote mountains of Sichuan Province, along the eastern edge of ethnic Tibetan territory, according to international rights monitors and local officials.

The religious academy of Larung Gar, near Serthar in western Sichuan, became famous as a center of Tibetan learning and attracted 8,000 monks and nuns, who lived in crude log cabins and often stayed for months or longer before returning to monasteries in other regions.

Students were attracted by a charismatic teacher, Khenpo Jigme Phutsok, a "living Buddha" who founded the settlement in 1980 with a few students, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington.

The mountain academy, which does not include a monastery, is 500 miles by dirt road from the nearest city. It grew spontaneously as word spread of the traditional teachings and ethics of the leader, who is 68 and also known as Khenpo Jikphun.

Although China has allowed the controlled revival of monasteries that were destroyed in the early decades of Communist rule, the Serthar center had no official history or authorization.

Former students said Khenpo Jigme Phutsok had managed to avoid provoking the authorities because he concentrated on religious texts and did not endorse open political activities in support of the exiled Dalai Lama, who is reviled by Beijing leaders as an advocate of Tibetan independence.

But Chinese authorities are skittish about any organization or movement outside party control. In recent years, they have repeatedly tried, without success up to now, to scale back the Serthar settlement and limit study there to nearby residents.

This time, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, officials from Beijing as well as the provincial capital, Chengdu, have gone to the site to expel most of the students. The officials have burned down abandoned cabins to limit visitors and declared that the total number of residents should be held to 1,400, according to accounts received by the international campaign.

An official of the Sichuan Religious Affairs Bureau confirmed to Reuters today that students were being required to leave the academy, saying it was "because of concerns about social stability and at the order of central authorities."

Before the expulsions, the academy was one of the largest communities of Tibetan study anywhere. Unusually, it attracted more nuns than monks. Up to 1,000 students were ethnic Chinese attracted by Tibetan Buddhism and were allowed to study in Mandarin Chinese rather than the Tibetan language.

--------

Turkish Court Bans Islamic Opposition

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Turkey-Islamic-Party.html

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkey's top court banned the pro-Islamic Virtue Party, the main opposition party, in a verdict Friday that could send shock waves through a political system already shaken by a deep economic crisis.

The Constitutional Court ordered Virtue closed on the grounds that it was a focal point of anti-secular activities. Virtue becomes the latest in a series of pro-Islamic parties to be closed down under Turkey's strictly secular system.

``A shadow has fallen over Turkey's democracy once again ... a party that neither committed nor encouraged crimes has been closed down,'' said Virtue lawmaker Abdullah Gul.

The court also expelled two deputies from parliament and banned them from politics for five years. Three other party members who are not in parliament were banned from politics for five years. The court is the highest in the country and no appeal in Turkey is possible.

The banning of the party, however, will not force new elections, which would have been held if 20 deputies were removed. The ruling was likely to draw criticism from the European Union, which is pushing Turkey for democratic reforms before it can join the union.

Most of Virtue's 100 deputies will now have the option of joining other parties or remaining independent, which could threaten the balances within Turkey's ruling three-party coalition at a time when the government is seeking to restore economic stability.

A crisis that broke out in February has seen the currency plunge some 50 percent against the dollar. Thousands of firms have folded, and some half-million Turks have lost their jobs.

The government's recovery plan, backed with $15.7 billion in loans pledged by the International Monetary Fund, has already strained relations between the coalition partners. The government's nationalist wing is unhappy with program measures that will slash subsidies for farmers and end political influence over key sectors of the economy.

The Democratic Left Party of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit is currently the senior coalition partner with 132 seats in the 550-member parliament.

Turkey's Islamic movement reached its high water mark in 1996, when Welfare Party leader Necmettin Erbakan became prime minister in a coalition government.

That coalition fell after just a year in office, under heavy pressure from Turkey's powerful army, which considers itself the guardian of the secular system. Opposition parties and the military accused Erbakan's government of filling key state positions with supporters of Islamic law.

Most Welfare deputies joined into the newly created Virtue, but such a smooth transition looks unlikely this time.

A former Virtue member and Istanbul mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has already hinted he plans to form a new party with a less overt emphasis on Islamic values. Many Virtue deputies may be tempted to join the popular Erdogan.

Members of the party's more traditional wing are expected to form a separate party.

Virtue was widely seen as more moderate than some of its pro-Islamic predecessors. The party did not call for an Islamic state but pressed for a relaxation of secular laws that, for example, forbid women working in government offices or students from wearing Islamic-style head scarves.

The European Court of Human Rights is expected to rule later this month on a case brought against Turkey by Welfare leaders, who say their party's closure violated democratic freedoms. Virtue is also likely to apply to the court.

-------- population

Relying on Hard and Soft Sells, India Pushes Sterilization

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/world/22INDI.html?pagewanted=all

BOLLARUM, India - Like a preacher at a tent revival, Chandrababu Naidu, one of India's most powerful politicians, summoned parents with big families to the front of the crowd so he could publicly scold them and urge them along the road to sterilization.

Nara Singh, a father of four with a fifth on the way, picked his way through the thousands of villagers sitting in a parched field. He took the microphone and stoutly insisted he needed more children eventually to help him work his small farm.

But Mr. Naidu sternly told him he would never be able to care properly for so many offspring - and then turned to the throng, tittering uneasily on a recent, sweaty afternoon, and demanded in a booming voice, "Is this man on the right path?" Only a few raised their hands.

"Nobody is supporting you," proclaimed Mr. Naidu, who governs the state of Andhra Pradesh, "Immediately go for the operation."

Mr. Naidu's population policies, held up by state officials as a model for developing countries and condemned by critics as coercive, have dramatically increased the number of sterilizations in the state over the past five years to 814,061 a year from 513,726. More than half of married women have had their tubes tied, the highest rate in India, and one of the highest in the world.

Population remains a pivotal issue for the world's largest democracy, which has added 181 million people over the past decade and passed the one billion mark. India expects to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by the middle of the century.

But India and Andhra Pradesh, its fifth largest state, have taken profoundly divergent paths to control population.

Following the consensus on population adopted at a United Nations conference in Cairo in 1994, India's Parliament last year abandoned numerical targets for sterilizations. Instead, it set an agenda for improving health and education for women and children, while offering couples a range of purely voluntary contraceptive choices.

But the central government - struggling to provide for more than 250 million desperately poor citizens - has let the states go their own way.

Andhra Pradesh, with financial support from the World Bank, is actively trying to better conditions for women. But its population strategy is relentlessly driven by specific targets for the sterilization of couples with two or more children, backed by the entire machinery of the government. Poor people in the state who are sterilized after one or two children receive priority for anti-poverty benefits: houses, plots of land, wells and loans, among many other things.

"If you get operated quickly, you get goodies quickly," said Debabrata Kantha, who carried out the policy in the state's Karimnagar district over the past three years. "That quickened the pace of sterilizations. It was a gold rush."

These clashing approaches to controlling population mirror a larger debate that is especially persistent in South Asia: Is social progress for women the best way to reduce the number of children they will bear? Or should governments aggressively seek to reduce fertility with incentives and targets even before social progress is achieved?

In Andhra Pradesh, declines in fertility clearly started before Mr. Naidu's four-year-old population program. The question is whether his approach has accelerated the reductions.

India's 2001 census found that Andhra Pradesh had the sharpest slowdown in the rate of population growth among India's large states, while Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the hugely populous states in the north, registered a slight rise in the growth rate.

In those two northern states - home to a quarter of India's population - women are still bearing four or more children each, while demographers believe Andhra Pradesh has neared or hit the point where population stabilizes and women are having an average of 2.1 children each.

That would make it the third southern state to achieve that milestone, after Kerala in the late 1980's and Tamil Nadu in the mid-1990's. And the success of these different states indicates that there are different ways of reaching the same goal. Kerala, for example, is often cited as a model of what high rates of female literacy and good health care can accomplish in lowering fertility.

But the explanation is necessarily different for Andhra Pradesh, where half the women are still illiterate and married before the age of 15.

In the 1990's, fertility rates have declined across India, largely because the poor and illiterate are themselves choosing smaller families, said Mari Bhat, a demographer at the government-supported Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi. The number of children an Indian woman bears has fallen to around 3.0 now, down from 3.78 in 1990 and around 6.0 in 1950.

The declines in family size that began among the educated in India have now spread to people with no education at all, a common pattern in many societies, demographers say.

Experts in India offer various explanations: That the growing reach of radio, television and movies in rural areas where most Indians live has helped popularize the idea that small families are better; that higher survival rates for children have reduced the pressure to have more children as insurance; and that government propaganda and services have also played a role.

What's clear is that many poor couples want fewer children.

Govinda Rao, an illiterate farm worker who earns about 50 cents a day, had a sterilization operation a year ago when she was just 21. At the time, the state paid her 500 rupees, or about $11 - as it does to all poor people who are sterilized - to cover her lost wages. She and her husband, G. Ramanamma, who live in the village of Puriti Penta in northern Andhra Pradesh, had decided two children were enough.

"If we have more children, our problems will also multiply," he said. "We cannot afford to educate more than two. I do not want my children to grow up to be farm laborers like us. I want them to get jobs."

Andhra Pradesh's program to convince other couples to make the same choice is built on a high-pressure huckstering that would be the envy of any door-to-door salesman.

In Karimnagar, where every arm of the government had its own target, the animal husbandry staff recruited 3,000 people for sterilization camps over the past three years and transported them to the camps in departmental jeeps. Every time a milkman brought in a sick cow or a herder got his sheep vaccinated, veterinarians talked up vasectomy.

Likewise, the wardens and matrons of state boarding schools for poor children in the district lobbied parents. "If the person in charge tells the parents, `You should get operated,' they are more likely to listen," explained Mr. Kantha, the district collector.

In the Vizianagaram district, Mr. Naidu, who monitors sterilization numbers on his laptop, noticed the district was lagging as the fiscal year neared its end this spring - and pointedly asked why. District officials then scrambled to get Lions and Rotary clubs to donate wall clocks and steel pots, gifts for those who agree to be sterilized. The district's target for the year was 25,000 sterilizations. It just made it, with 25,019. "These extra incentives came to our rescue," said S. Perumal, the district medical officer.

At the state level, there is a lottery for sterilized couples. Three winners from each of the state's 23 districts are rewarded with 10,000 rupees (about $220) and a free trip to the state capital, Hyderabad, where Mr. Naidu, who himself had a vasectomy after fathering one son, personally congratulates them.

Some nonprofit groups, feminists and academics regard the state's policies as appallingly intrusive and coercive to women and the poor. Mohan Rao, a public health expert at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, called the drawing "a macabre metaphor of the lottery that is the life of the poor."

And Saroj Pachauri, regional director of the Population Council's South Asia office in New Delhi, said the pressure to be sterilized is overwhelmingly directed at women, for whom sterilization is serious abdominal surgery.

"I've met people who work in villages there who tell me women were offered gold chains to get their tubes tied," she said. "If that isn't coercion, what is?"

Critics also raise the troubling history of sterilization camps in the mid-1970's, when Indira Gandhi, who was then prime minister, suspended democracy. Many Indians believe local officials, under pressure to achieve sterilization targets in those years, forced men to have vasectomies - and that these abuses led to Mrs. Gandhi's resounding electoral defeat when democracy was restored.

But Mr. Naidu, who won a second term as the state's chief minister two years ago, makes no apologies for his approach. As he hopped from mass meeting to mass meeting in a six-seater helicopter, he explained over the drone of the engine that he believes having lots of children impoverishes families - and that rapidly growing populations make it hard for government to provide enough schools, hospitals and roads.

He said his program uses no force and has won wide acceptance. And he defended the policy of giving scarce anti-poverty benefits to sterilized couples as an effort "to help those who are disciplined and have some social commitment."

At the end of a huge public meeting here, Mr. Naidu asked the people what they needed. Mr. Singh - the same farmer Mr. Naidu had earlier chastised - rose up to demand that the state build his growing family a house.

"I will only give you a house if you have the operation," the chief minister bluntly told him. And the farmer quickly promised, "I will definitely have it done."

Mr. Naidu has frequently used his bully pulpit to argue for small families as he has traveled to each of the state's 23 districts dozens of times over the past few years. His policies are now playing out in thousands of villages.

The story of Muhammad Anwar, an illiterate fruit peddler and father of two, is a case in point.

Two years ago, he was the last holdout in his village of Rangampalli in the Karimnagar district. Soon, four village women he had known since childhood came knocking at his door over several months, pressing him to get a vasectomy. The four were among the millions of women who have joined microcredit groups that receive some state support and that the state has sought to mobilize to push for the two-child family.

They told him he was a poor man and his children would have a better chance at a good education and life if he had a vasectomy. They told him the operation was a simple procedure. They told him they would use their influence with district officials to see he got a loan if he was sterilized.

At first, Mr. Anwar refused. His mother still wanted another grandson. Once at his home, the old woman ran them off, shouting, "He won't go!"

But Mr. Anwar found that he was having a conversation with himself. "Sometimes, I would think my mother was right," he said. "But then I would think, `I have a small business. I am a man of little means. These women are advising what is best for me and my children.' "

Twice he agreed to go to sterilization camps. Twice he was a no-show. "I gave them the slip," he confessed.

But soon, the women went to his house looking for him again. He was not there. They strode purposefully to fields where they thought he was laboring. No Mr. Anwar. They found him in the market selling fruit from his pushcart. And finally, he went with them to the camp. The operation was over in a couple of minutes.

The village target was achieved. The last holdout had come into the fold.

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CIA: Russia, China working on information warfare

June 22, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010622-95748128.htm

Russia and China are developing military capabilities to attack U.S. computer-based infrastructures through information-warfare strikes, a senior CIA official told Congress yesterday.

Lawrence K. Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for science and technology, told the Joint Economic Committee that some nations have stated publicly that cyber-warfare will be a key form of future military operations.

"We´ve certainly seen that from countries such as China and Russia," Mr. Gershwin said, noting that several other nations have "active" information-warfare development programs. He declined to provide further details, noting that the information was classified.

U.S. intelligence officials said Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba are among the nations that have active information-warfare development programs. Military officials have identified Iran, Iraq and India as nations working on information warfare.

"We watch them very intensely," Mr. Gershwin said. "Some of them are aimed at the United States and some of the others are probably aimed at others."

China´s official military newspaper, Liberation Army Daily, stated in a 1999 article that the Chinese military intended to make forces for computer attacks a separate service on par with its air, land and naval forces. The military newspaper said China was working on "paralyzing," "blocking" and "deception" software.

U.S. vulnerability to computer attack was demonstrated in a Joint Staff war game called Eligible Receiver conducted several years ago. During the game, computer specialists posing as North Korean agents were able to shut down military communications for the U.S. Pacific Command, which would be in charge of U.S. forces in a conflict in Korea.

The computer specialists also demonstrated the capability of shutting down the electrical power grid in the western United States during the war game, say officials familiar with the exercise.

The Pentagon is focusing on information warfare -- offense and defense -- as part of the strategy reviews under way and as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review.

Mr. Gershwin said individual hackers do not have the capability of mounting a major attack against computer networks that control critical U.S. infrastructures -- such as finance, telecommunications, electrical power, transportation and other vital functions.

"For the next five to 10 years or so, only nation-states appear to have the discipline, commitment and resources to fully develop capabilities to attack critical infrastructures," he said.

"National cyber-warfare programs are unique in posing a threat along the entire spectrum of objectives that might harm U.S. interests," Mr. Gershwin said.

The CIA official said computer viruses -- malicious codes designed to disable or damage computers -- probably will become more sophisticated and "more suitable for weaponization."

Mr. Gershwin said the miltiary´s reliance on private telecommunications networks means a foreign power could break into government computer systems.

"While we may be working with American companies on issues at some point, there are contracts and subcontracts," Mr. Gershwin said. "It gets hard to tell who´s doing the work for you."

"When a commander at the Pentagon tries to call a commander in the field," said Sen. Robert F. Bennett, Utah Republican and ranking member of the committee, "he´s connecting with Verizon."

• This article is based in part on wire service reports

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Florida retiree denies spying for Soviets

06/22/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/june01/2001-06-22-spy.htm

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A Florida retiree adamantly denied charges he was a spy for the Soviets, testifying Friday that he never met with the KGB or handed over secret military documents.

"I don't want to insult this court by using some vile language when I think of such accusations," George Trofimoff said as he returned to the witness stand in his federal espionage trial.

Trofimoff, 74, is accused of copying thousands of pages of secret military documents and selling them to the Soviets over a 25-year period.

The retired Army Reserve colonel is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer to be arrested on spy charges. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Trofimoff denied prosecutors' claims that a Russian Orthodox priest he considered a brother recruited Trofimoff as a KGB agent. The priest, Igor Susemihl, never asked about Trofimoff's job as head of an Army Interrogation Center in Nuremberg, Germany, he said.

"If my brother, if he would have ever mentioned to me ... that he was in any way connected to the KGB, I would have told him, 'Igor, you have just lost your little brother,"' Trofimoff said.

He told jurors he would have promptly reported Susemihl to U.S. authorities had he known Susemihl was working for the KGB, as prosecutors allege.

Trofimoff was living in a military retirement community in Melbourne when he was arrested last year.

Last week, a former KGB general testified that he personally met Trofimoff twice and that Trofimoff was one of the KGB's top spies.

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The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Audiotapes

National Security Archive Update,
June 22, 2001
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48

Thirty years ago, the Pentagon Papers saga began on the front page of the New York Times on June 13, 1971, and culminated in the landmark June 30 Supreme Court decision.

Today, the National Security Archive has posted new audio and transcripts of President Nixon's most important phone conversations and Oval Office meetings relating to the Pentagon Papers in the days immediately after publication began. With a total of ten Nixon tapes now online, the Archive's site answers definitively some of the major historical puzzles about the Pentagon Papers. For example, what was the initial reaction of President Nixon to the publication, and did that change over time? If the Papers endangered national security so gravely as to justify an injunction, why did the government not ask for such an injunction on the first or second day of publication? Were there mixed feelings about the Papers within the Nixon White House? How was the decision made to take the unprecedented action of enjoining the Times's publication?

Among the recordings released today is this priceless quote from President Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, talking to Nixon on June 14, 1971:

"But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear] you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the ­ the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

The site also includes an expanded analysis of the Supreme Court argument and decisions in the case. In coming days, this Electronic Briefing Book will add copies of the specific documents in the Pentagon Papers that were cited by the government in various public and secret legal papers as creating immediate harm to U.S. national security. Archive senior fellow John Prados has carried out an exhaustive cross-referencing project using the recently-declassified secret briefs submitted by the government to the courts, together with each of the various editions of the Papers, including the New York Times paperback version (highly condensed and selective), the multivolume Government Printing Office version (officially declassified), Senator Mike Gravel's edition read into a Senate subcommittee record and subsequently published by Beacon, and the four negotiating volumes (which Daniel Ellsberg did not leak) declassified in 1977. Stay tuned for an illuminating documented discussion of secrecy and lies.

The documents are available at the following URL:
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.

PRIVACY NOTICE The National Security Archive does not and will never share the names or e-mail addresses of its subscribers with any other organization.

-------- terrorism

14 Indicted by U.S. in '96 Saudi Blast

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/22/world/22TERR.html

WASHINGTON, June 21 - A federal grand jury returned a 46-count indictment today charging 13 Saudis and a Lebanese man, who officials said were supported by Iran, with a truck bombing at the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American airmen and wounded nearly 400 others in 1996.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference that while the attack was carried out by the Saudis and the Lebanese national, all members of the anti-American militant group Hezbollah, he blamed unnamed officials in Iran for the attack. Mr. Ashcroft said they "inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hezbollah."

But no Iranians were charged with specific crimes related to the bombing nor did the indictment directly accuse the Iranian government of legal responsibility for the attack, in which a tanker truck packed with 5,000 pounds of explosives was detonated outside the dormitory complex. Iran has denied any involvement in the bombing.

At the news conference, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Louis J. Freeh, who is stepping down on Friday after eight years on the job, said the inquiry would remain open. Mr. Freeh, for whom the investigation had become a personal priority, said additional people could be accused of complicity in the case.

None of those charged were in the United States, and it was not clear if any of them would ever be brought here for trial. Nine of the 14 men were charged with 46 separate felony counts, including murder, use of a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to kill Americans. Five others charged in the indictment were accused of conspiracy which, the indictment said, was motivated by a desire to drive Americans out of Saudi Arabia. The most serious charges in the indictment are punishable by the death penalty.

In a statement, President Bush thanked Saudi Arabia for its assistance in the investigation of what he called a "deplorable act of terrorism." Addressing the bombing victims' families and survivors, Mr. Bush said, "Your government will not forget your loss, and will continue working, based on the evidence, to make sure that justice is done."

In a telephone conversation with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Bush also thanked the Saudis for their help, said Mary Ellen Countryman, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

Mr. Freeh said some of the Saudis indicted today were in jail in Saudi Arabia. But he said others remain at large, and he did not say whether their whereabouts were known.

The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia, but Mr. Freeh said efforts were under way to return the defendants to the United States. He expressed the belief that at least some of the accused would eventually stand trial. When asked if the Saudis had agreed to extradite the suspects, Mr. Freeh did not answer directly. "I am very confident that they will be brought to justice," he said, "and hopefully in the United States, some of them, at some point."

Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, obtained the indictment just as time to bring some of the charges was running out. The five-year statute of limitations was to expire on Monday on attempted murder and conspiracy counts in the indictment.

With dozens of references to Iran, the indictment demonstrated that American investigators were convinced that Iran was behind the attack. But the indictment also seemed carefully worded to avoid a direct accusation against Iranian officials or the government in Tehran - an allegation that could have provoked demands in Congress for military retaliation. The White House has not considered such a step, a senior administration official said.

Still, the language in the indictment did appear to reflect the shifting sensitivity within the government about the effect of the investigation on the relationship between the United States and Iran. The hostility has decreased somewhat in recent years with the election of the moderate government of President Mohammad Khatami, even as counterterrorism officials have repeatedly said that Iran had a significant role in the Khobar Towers attack.

The trend has continued under the Bush administration, which has adopted a somewhat tougher tone toward Iran as officials said they were reviewing American policy toward Tehran. The uncertain state of the relationship has been evident in recent steps by the administration, which has sought to renew economic sanctions against Iran for another two years. But the proposal brought criticism from lawmakers in both parties who overwhelmingly support a five-year extension.

Today, Mr. Freeh said that diplomatic considerations played no role in the indictment or the decision not to accuse any Iranians of wrongdoing. Other law enforcement officials, however, said the Bush administration had been more receptive to the indictment than the Clinton administration.

But Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, said law enforcement officials had never brought a proposed indictment to the White House. "The Clinton administration was never presented with an indictment," Mr. Berger said. "If so, I'm sure that the administration would have been very forward leaning and willing to go forward."

Mr. Freeh had a turbulent relationship with the Clinton White House, and law enforcement officials had complained that the Clinton administration demanded "smoking gun" evidence of Iranian involvement before it was willing to accuse Iran of any responsibility. The officials said that the Bush administration seemed less concerned about offending Iran and that its attitude was reflected in the indictment.

The charges culminated a five- year inquiry that at times seemed to falter and once seemed on the brink of shutting down because of the lack of Saudi cooperation in the case.

Three years ago, Mr. Freeh, angry over the unwillingness of the Saudis to allow the F.B.I. greater access, temporarily pulled out dozens of investigators sent to the scene of the bombing. But Mr. Freeh, who met with victims' families, said he would never drop the case.

Some American business executives and others close to the Saudi government said the Saudis were equally frustrated by the F.B.I. They said the Saudis complained that the bureau was reluctant to accept the validity of their evidence.

The Khobar Towers conspiracy began in 1993, the indictment said. The government alleged that one of the defendants, Ahmed al-Mughassil, identified as the Saudi Hezbollah leader in charge of attacks against Americans in Saudi Arabia, ordered three other defendants to search for possible terrorism targets in Saudi Arabia.

According to the indictment, reports from the operation were sent to Mr. Mughassil and officials in Iran, which described possible attacks sites like the American Embassy in Riyadh, a nearby fish market and finally locations in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, which includes the site of the Khobar Towers apartment complex.

In 1995, the indictment said, an Iranian military officer directed other defendants to search for other potential terrorism sites along the coast of the Red Sea. At the time, Mr. Mughassil told another defendant that he maintained close ties with Iranian officials who provided financial support for Hezbollah.

The indictment said that by the late fall of 1995 Mr. Mughassil had decided that Khobar Towers would be the site of the attack, which would serve Iran by driving Americans from the Persian Gulf region.

In early 1996, according to the indictment, Mr. Mughassil instructed another defendant to transport explosives by car from Beirut to hiding places in eastern Saudi Arabia in the vicinity of Khobar Towers. The conspirators bought a tanker truck and spent two weeks converting it into a bomb-carrying vehicle.

The bomb itself was estimated to be larger than the one that destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and more than twice as powerful as the one used at the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.

One of the accused, Hani al- Sayegh, was identified as the driver of the vehicle used to scout the bombing site. He had been in the United States as part of plea bargain deal under which he would plead guilty to participating in an unrelated plot against Americans for an attack in Saudi Arabia that was never carried out. But he reneged and was deported. Mr. Freeh said the investigation had not unearthed enough evidence to charge him at the time.

--------

US: No Proof Iran Behind Khobar Blast

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Khobar-Bombing.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran often endorses and directs acts of terrorism but there is no proof as yet that Iranian authorities sponsored the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen, U.S. officials say.

Attorney General John Ashcroft came close to accusing Iran on Thursday of complicity in the incident as he announced a 46-count indictment against 13 Saudis and one Lebanese in the June 25, 1996, bombing.

He said ``elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised'' members of Saudi Hezbollah, the group thought to be primarily responsible for the tragedy.

The Iranian government has denied any involvement.

Some of the 14 suspects are believed to be in custody in Saudi Arabia and others to be in different locations. Still others are at large. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan criticized the indictments, accusing the United States of meddling in his country's internal affairs.

``This issue concerns Saudi Arabia alone,'' Sultan said during a visit to Yemen. ``The American side should send all the documents, complete proof and a list of the names of the accused to us, because Saudi authorities alone are concerned with this case.''

The indictment, coming just days before the statute of limitations on some of the charges was to expire, accuses the suspects of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction. About 40 of the charges are punishable by death.

President Bush promised to continue searching for those responsible for the bombing of the high-rise dormitory. He said more people might be charged.

In a statement to victims' families and survivors, Bush said, ``Your government will not forget your loss, and will continue working, based on the evidence, to make sure that justice is done.''

Even though Thursday's indictments didn't name Iranians, U.S. officials said there was no reason to absolve the government in Tehran, citing the findings of the latest State Department report on international terrorism, released in April.

It said Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security ``continued to be involved in the planning and execution of terrorist acts and continued to support a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals.''

An indictment of Iranian officials would raise the possibility of demands for military action or some other form of retaliation against the Islamic-led government.

``The administration is happy they don't have to go after the Iranian government,'' says Rachael Bronson, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. The indictment means the administration can focus on the Saudi suspects, and not the Iranians, she said.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said there may be links between Iran's Shiite-led Islamic government and its co-religionist allies in Sunni-led Saudi Arabia. But, he said, it may be harder to make the connection between Iran and the actual bombing.

Cordesman said there are questions about the level of Iranian control of its Saudi allies.

The Bush administration, he said, ``has to be very careful about the chain of evidence and cause and effect.''

Cordesman also noted that relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia were poor in the mid-1990s. To the extent that Iran was supporting the Saudi Hezbollah at the time, its efforts may have been directed at the Saudi monarchy and not the United States.

If there is evidence that Iranian agents were casing American installations in Saudi Arabia, that may merely have been a defensive measure, an attempt to keep tabs on the military activities of powerful and bitter enemy, he said.

Cordesman added that the experience in the aftermath of the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 offers an additional reason for caution.

``For the first year and a half, the government was virtually certain that it was sponsored by the Syrians,'' he said, noting that officials eventually decided that Libya was the culprit.

Congressional sentiment against Iran is strong. A majority appears to support a five-year extension of a law designed to punish foreign companies that invest in Iran's energy sector, and Libya's as well.

The law expires in August. The administration is backing a two-year extension.

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Iran Denies Bombing Involvement

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iran-Khobar-Bombing.html

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran on Friday rejected U.S. suggestions that its government was involved in the 1996 Khobar bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia.

``The U.S. judiciary has leveled charges against Iran which have no legal and judicial basis,'' the Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi as saying Friday.

Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday announced a 46-count indictment against 13 Saudis and one Lebanese in the bombing. He said that ``elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised'' members of Saudi Hezbollah, the Shiite group blamed for the bombing.

U.S. officials, however, said there is no proof as yet that Iranian authorities sponsored the Khobar Towers attack, which killed 19 American servicemen and injured hundreds of people.

Assefi said Iran is entitled to take every legal action in defense of its national interests. He did not elaborate, according to the news agency.

Government officials could not be reached by The Associated Press for comment Friday, the Islamic holy day.

Saudi Hezbollah was founded by members of the desert kingdom's Shiite Muslim minority who fled into exile in the 1980s to escape what they said was persecution by the Sunni majority. Most were from Eastern Province, which lies along the Persian Gulf, opposite Iran. Many of the exiles wound up in Iran.

Iranians on Friday shrugged off the suggestion their country was involved and warned that trying to implicate Iran is likely to further strain relations between Tehran and Washington.

``We've always been accused of terrorist activities, but there's never proof,'' said Abolqasem Golabi, a 43-year-old civil servant. ``This will have no impact on Iran and the hostile policy on Iran from the U.S. continues.''

Hamid Mozaffari, 39, a shop owner in downtown Tehran, said: ``This news does not merit comment. Even the Saudis refused to accuse Iran. This accusation is meaningless. They don't want Iran-Saudi relations to improve further.''

In the past, the Iranian government has denied any involvement in the bombing. Iran and Saudi Hezbollah also have denied any direct ties to one another.

Ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two Gulf heavyweights, have been improving in recent years, and Saudi Arabia has said it does not believe the Iranian government was involved in the Khobar bombing.

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Another Arrest in India Bombing Case

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-India-Bin-Laden.html?searchpv=aponline

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- A fourth man was arrested Friday on charges he was working for suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in India, police said.

Mohammed Arshad was taken into custody in the eastern city of Patna, the capital of Bihar state, said Ravi Pawar, a police spokesman. He is being brought to New Delhi for questioning.

The U.S. Embassy would not comment on the arrest of Arshad or three other people, including a Sudanese citizen, in the last week.

The Press Trust of India news agency reported Arshad was to drive a car rigged with explosives to the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, but Pawar said he had no such details.

Abdil Rauf Hawas, of Sudan, was arrested in a residential neighborhood in New Delhi on June 15, where authorities said they recovered 13 pounds of the explosive RDX, two pounds of which can blow up an airplane, and some improvised bombs.

Interrogation of Hawas and his suspected accomplice, Shamim Sarvar, who was arrested the same day, revealed their plans to blow up the Embassy in July, Deputy Commissioner of Police Ashok Chand told the United News of India news agency.

The plan was hatched two years ago on the instructions of bin Laden, who, through his contacts, asked Hawas to set up base in India and recruit others to help in the operation, Chand told the news agency. Hawas, through Sarvar, hired a retired mechanical engineer and a retired nuclear scientist.

Sarvar then made several reconnaissance trips to the American Embassy, posing as a student.

The group planned to park a car bomb close to the visa section of the Embassy, which was considered the most vulnerable part of the high security building, Chand told the news agency.

Hawas and his accomplices had been assured by bin Laden's group that they would be moved to a safe country after the attack, Chand said.

Chand was not available for comment after the arrest of Arshad.

Bin Laden has been accused of masterminding the Aug. 7, 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people. He has been provided refuge by the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, where his operations are now based.

-------- activists

Protesters jeer tankers in Bosphorus straits

TURKEY: June 22, 2001
Story by Steve Bryant
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11287

ISTANBUL - A flotilla of small boats assembled in the narrowest section of one of the world's narrowest waterways yesterday to draw attention to the environmental threat posed by growing oil traffic in Istanbul's Bosphorus Straits.

"It takes just three minutes for a crash to happen here that could burn for hours," Bulen Topaoglu, chairman of the Turkish Environmental Caucus told Reuters under the shadow of one of two bridges linking Istanbul's Asian and European sides.

Ottoman mansions and palaces line the waterway that links the Black Sea with the world's oceans via the Mediterranean. Around 40 fishing boats, speed boats and launches jostled as people on board let off flares and jeered passing tankers.

A Kazakh-Russian oil pipeline opened this year is expected to carry an average 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) which will have to pass through the Bosphorus by sea to be exported beyond the Black Sea.

The Turkish government warned in April waiting times for ships passing through could be radically increased by the new shipments of Kazakh oil. Turkey is promoting an alternative route to Europe for Caspian oil, via a pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, bypassing the Bosphorus.

Police earlier detained 13 environmentalists after protests against petrol companies taking part in an Istanbul energy conference, environmental group Greenpeace said.

Three activists unfurled a banner from a hotel reading: "Oil industry fuels disaster here."

Executives from oil companies BP , Shell and Chevron were at the conference on oil resources in the Caspian, eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea.

The Bosphorus boat protests echoed the Turkish government line, which has become increasingly concerned with the prospect of oil shipments through the narrow straits.

Turkey plans a new radar system for the straits but says it resents the risks and responsibilities of managing the waterway.

RISKS FOR TURKEY

"While Turkey and the people of Istanbul take on all the risks, they gain nothing. Petrol firms profit from this cheap transit route," Foreign Ministry official Mithat Balkan told the energy conference.

Navigating the Bosphorus requires at least 15 changes of course. At its narrowest, the straits are 672 metres (yards) wide at a point where there is also a 45 degree bend. Currents and winds can be treacherous.

Scores of passenger ferries ply back and forth between Asia and Europe across the path of large vessels.

Major oil companies say they recognise the danger.

"BP is of the opinion that we and the industry cannot rely solely on the Turkish straits for oil exports. We cannot rely on the Turkish straits due to the risks of disruption from accidents and spills," Linda Adamany, BP chief executive for shipping, told the conference.

BP said it recommended all tankers take on Turkish pilots for the Bosphorus, something not compulsory under the 1936 Montreux Treaty and other regulations governing the straits.

According to BP statistics, for every million transit miles on the Bosphorus there are six accidents, compared to three on the Suez Canal and 0.2 on the Mississippi River.

More than 50,000 vessels navigate the Bosphorus every year. Of the 150 ships passing through each day, around 15 to 17 are tankers carrying oil, gas or other hazardous cargo.

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U.S. Receives Threat in the Middle East

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Mideast-Threat.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In response to a threat against Americans in the Middle East, a Marine Corps training exercise in Jordan is being cut short and Navy ships have been ordered out of port in Bahrain, Pentagon officials said Friday.

The threat was described by the officials as ``non-specific,'' meaning it was aimed at Americans but not necessarily against members of the military.

The threat was taken to be credible, one of the officials said.

The official said it was possible the threat was related to Thursday's announcement by the Justice Department of indictments against 13 Saudis and one Lebanese in connection with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Saudi Arabia. Nineteen members of the U.S. Air Force were killed in that attack.

It was not immediately clear whether the source of the new threat was known to U.S. officials.

In response to the threat, several Navy minesweeping ships were ordered out of port in Bahrain, which is headquarters for the U.S. 5th Fleet that patrols the Persian Gulf area. The aircraft carrier USS Constellation and her battle group already were at sea, officials said.

Other additional security measures also were taken, but the officials would not disclose details.

The level of security for U.S. forces in the Middle East -- known as the ``threatcon'' -- was raised a notch, the officials said. They would not be more specific.

A contingent of 2,200 Marines operating as an Amphibious Ready Group cut short their training in Jordan, the officials said. The Marines were being taken back aboard their three ships, led by the USS Boxer.

Extra security precautions for U.S. forces in the Middle East have been ordered several times since the bombing last October of the USS Cole in Yemen.

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American Forces in Gulf on Highest Alert

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-us.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military forces in the Gulf region have been put on their highest state of alert based on a credible threat of possible attack by anti-American guerrillas, a U.S. official said on Friday.

The official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters that forces in the region, including headquarters of the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain, had been put on Threat Condition Delta on Thursday.

The official said in response to questions that the move, latest in a series of alerts in the region over the past year, was in response to a credible report that an attack might be made against American military or civilian personnel.

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Support for Embassy Security Waning

New York Times
June 22, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Embassy-Security.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When truck bombs laid waste to two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, Congress clamored for more guards, more walls, more armored vehicles and, above all, more money to protect U.S. outposts.

Three years later, there are signs that support for expensive security improvement is waning. And the State Department has yet to complete key improvements recommended by the Pentagon after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people.

``It seems to come in waves,'' said Harvard professor and foreign terrorism expert Juliette Kayyem. ``When terrorists strike, there is a lot of support for more money for embassies, but it slowly fades until we have another mean reminder.''

There is fresh evidence that threats remain.

This week, authorities in Yemen arrested 15 people, eight of whom were believed connected to a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in San'a, Yemen. Suspicious activity by people who appeared to be gathering information about security prompted authorities to close the embassy to the public.

And on Friday, in response to a threat against Americans in the Middle East, the government cut short a Marine Corps training exercise in Jordan and pulled Navy ships out of port in Bahrain.

As officials debate how to strengthen security at embassies around the world, some in Congress are arguing that threats can be met without exorbitant spending.

With security in mind, the State Department proposed building four embassies for $100 million each last year -- the most expensive ever. The cost to build each of the embassies -- in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Sofia, Bulgaria, and Yerevan, Armenia -- has since been trimmed to under $100 million.

``There has to be a sense of proportion,'' said Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C. ``We don't have that kind of money and the people who send us to Washington don't support that kind of expenditure. If we have to build a fortress, maybe we should consider whether the country is a place we really have to have a presence.''

Devin Lewin, a Washington-based embassy construction consultant, says ``knee-jerk spending'' won't make embassies safer.

``If you decide it takes a 100-foot wall to keep an embassy safe, why build a 200-foot wall?'' Lewin said. ``It doesn't send a positive message about relations if the United States builds a fortress in the center of every capital, especially if it is not necessary.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell has signaled that he wants to rethink embassy security.

In testimony to the House International Relations Committee earlier this year, Powell said that in some cases, there will be no need to abide by a regulation that embassies be situated at least 100 feet from the nearest street. The 100-foot setback is expensive because it forces the government to buy large amounts of urban property.

``The 100-foot setback can sometimes be overcome by better and smarter construction,'' Powell said. ``If we can provide the same degree of security through a better-built wall that has only, say, a 50-foot setback, then that's what we are going to do.''

Powell acknowledged that many embassies have not been outfitted with improvements recommended by a panel of investigators following an analysis of the two attacks in East Africa. For instance, the State Department has yet to anchor windows in its embassies into the infrastructure, still choosing to cover the windows with mylar -- a thick, durable plastic.

Most of the 12 Americans killed in the Kenya bombing were struck by shards of glass. The panel, headed by retired Adm. William Crowe, found that the windows had not been anchored into the building.

The State Department says it is continuing to respond to recommendations made by the Crowe panel.

``I think it's important to note that some of the findings were to occur over a 10-year period, so not all have occurred,'' said Charles Hunter, a spokesman for the agency.

For the budget year that begins Oct. 1, the agency has requested $1.3 billion for worldwide security. That's up from $1.07 million in the current budget year and $568 million for the year before. This money is spent on both operational and construction needs ranging from building new embassies to paying for security equipment.

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Police use tear gas, rubber bullets on protesters

USA Today
06/21/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/june01/2001-06-21-indonesia.htm

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse rock-throwing students who demonstrated Thursday against hikes in gasoline and other fuel prices, police and witnesses said.

Students burned tires and threw rocks near the Indonesian Christian University in east Jakarta. Two students were injured by rubber bullets, hospital officials said. Others were overcome by tear gas.

Police also beat a news photographer at the scene, witnesses said.

Police also used tear gas outside the nearby privately run Jayabaya University, police spokesman Maj. Alex Mandalika said.

There were no arrests, he said, although witnesses said officers briefly detained and beat three students.

In a third demonstration, 100 students held a peaceful rally outside the Social and Political Science College in south Jakarta.

Police stepped up patrols around campuses across the capital after a series of demonstrations this week. On Tuesday, officers fired warning shots and used tear gas when students protested cuts in state subsidies that have pushed up fuel prices.


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