------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Today in History - July 1
A - Bomb Researcher James Otto Dies
Rethinking Asia in India's Favor
NUCLEAR WASTE ROUTES

MILITARY
Mao's warriors at the gates
Small arms blamed for large death toll
Serbs Feared Army Would Aid Milosevic
Serbs Break Silence on Atrocities
Iran Police Kill 9 Drug Traffickers
Iran military alert for U.S. attack
Iraq's Neighbors Feel Pain of Sanctions
Iraq Protests US Airstrikes
Lebanese Are Left With a Wasteland
Bring Mother Russia Into the Fold
Taking Missile Technology to the Movies
U.S. role on Okinawa debated again

OTHER
African Dust Brings Germs Across Ocean
Koizumi Won't Pursue Kyoto Without U.S.
Morality and Medicine: Reconsidering Embryo Research
Brazilian Official Guilty in Massacre
Tampa installs high-tech security cameras

ACTIVISTS
We Bombed In Vieques
Protesters Confront Police at Salzburg Summit
Protesters Rally at Economic Summit
Protesters Want Sen. McCain Removed
Rainbows come from all over the spectrum


-------- NUCLEAR

Today in History - July 1

The Associated Press
Saturday, June 30, 2001; 8:00 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010630/aponline200032_000.htm

In 1968, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and 58 other nations signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

--------

A - Bomb Researcher James Otto Dies

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Obit-Otto.html

LYNN HAVEN, Fla. (AP) -- Atomic bomb researcher James Stewart ``Stew'' Otto, who advised President Harry Truman before the United States attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has died. He was 84.

Otto, a radiation biologist for the U.S. Navy who later worked for the space program, died Friday at a local hospital, said Lillian Schlentz, his sister.

During World War II, Otto studied the effect atomic tests had on animals. In the war's final weeks, Truman called Otto to Washington for advice before he decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

``He was so quiet about it all the time,'' Schlentz said. ``A lot of it was secret work and they weren't supposed to talk about it. He took an oath and he stuck to it.''

After the war, Otto continued his research and, from 1959 to 1973, headed the Navy's animal research center in Bethesda, Md.

While studying the effect of space travel on humans and animals, Otto worked with Sam, a rhesus monkey who rocketed into space and was recovered safely in the Atlantic Ocean in 1959.

After retiring in 1973, Otto was president of the National Association of Retired Federal Employees, Panama City Chapter, and received the Florida Sheriff's Association Distinguished Service Award.

-------- asia

Rethinking Asia in India's Favor

By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1985-2001Jun29?language=printer

Add the Bush push for missile defense to a long list of items separating India and China. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government likes it. Beijing hates it. Therein lies a tale of Asia's most dangerous long-term tensions and America's obligation to avoid making them more dangerous.

It is time for a bit of strategic heresy: The chances of serious conflict between India and China may now outrank the more obvious antagonisms between China and Taiwan as a threat to global stability. The balance of power across the Himalayas could be more tenuous than the confrontation across the Taiwan Strait.

The standoff in the Taiwan Strait is carefully studied and calculated by each side and by the United States. President Bush has made clear U.S. commitments to protect Taiwan in a way that adds to stability.

China's leaders are emotional about Taiwan. But I assume that they are also rational: They will presumably not launch an invasion that will surely fail. China's growing economic power should give Beijing increased confidence to wait for reunification to occur peacefully (and democratically).

But there are fewer established rules of the game between New Delhi and Beijing, which went to war in 1962 and which remain locked in bitter and fundamental disagreement on matters ranging from India's bid to have its status as a nuclear power internationally accepted to future membership for India on the U.N. Security Council.

Danger arises not from plans by either side to go to war but from the miscalculation and misunderstanding that could emerge as China seeks a sphere of influence in Asia commensurate with its new power. For all their hostility, Beijing and Taiwan know how to communicate with each other. That is yet to be established for India and China.

Their long-simmering differences escalated onto a new plateau when India stunned the world by testing nuclear weapons in May 1998. Pakistan, which has received significant nuclear help from China, immediately followed suit.

But Pakistan, now a borderline failed state, is largely a problem of the past for India. Vajpayee's nuclear strategy is centered wholly on China. As Vajpayee informed President Clinton immediately after the tests, India could no longer ignore China's growing nuclear missile force and the assistance Beijing was providing to Pakistan as part of an anti-India policy.

Vajpayee's plea for understanding and a rethinking of the global nuclear order fell on deaf ears. Clinton denounced the nuclear tests and imposed unilateral U.S. sanctions on both India and Pakistan.

The United States also joined China in threatening to keep India out of any future expansion of permanent Security Council membership as long as India did not renounce nuclear weapons. Keeping Japan or India from gaining a permanent seat is a constant feature of China's strategy to be the dominant Asian power.

There is new thinking about nuclear doctrine, and India, at the White House. Bush intends to end the sanctions in a matter of months, according to aides, and wants a new strategic relationship with India. The president has nominated as his ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, an experienced diplomat and broad strategic thinker who was one of the half-dozen advisers briefing Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign.

China noticed Bush's unusually warm welcome of Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh for an Oval Office chat about missile defense in April. Since then, India has been more supportive of Bush's plans than all but one or two of America's European allies.

Missile defense could reinforce India's declared strategy of minimal deterrence -- to deploy just enough warheads to ward off Chinese attack. On paper that resembles Bush's hope to cut U.S. offensive nuclear weapons.

China, however, sees the Bush strategic defense plan as aimed specifically at neutralizing its small but growing nuclear arsenal. A significant warming of U.S.-Indian ties, powered by conceptual agreement on missile defense, could cause the Chinese to expand and accelerate their nuclear upgrades, to poke at India through help to Pakistan and take risks that have not been well calculated.

A re-weighting of America's Asia strategy in India's favor is long overdue and is possible under Vajpayee and Bush. But the United States will need to develop a first-class diplomatic strategy to accompany the defense programs on which this administration lavishes so much attention.

The emerging emphasis of the administration's war planners on Asia as a major source of future global instability makes sense. But that is only the beginning of wisdom. Geography and muscle alone do not qualify as strategy.

-------- us nuc waste

NUCLEAR WASTE ROUTES

For the Record -
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page LZ18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1888-2001Jun29?language=printer

Here's how some major bills fared recently in Congress and how local congressional members voted, as provided by Thomas's Roll Call Report Syndicate. NV means Not Voting.

HOUSE VOTES - NUCLEAR WASTE ROUTES
For: 102 / Against: 3 21

The House refused to provide $500,000 to expedite publication of Department of Energy trucking routes for the possible shipment of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants throughout the United States to Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The department is moving toward what many lawmakers think will be final approval of the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas as a permanent underground repository for more than 70,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The vote occurred during debate on HR 2311 (above).

A yes vote backed DOE publication of nuclear waste shipment routes to Nevada.

MARYLAND

Bartlett (R) No
Cardin (D) No
Cummings (D) No
Ehrlich (R) No
Gilchrest (R) No
Hoyer (D) No
Morella (R) No
Wynn (D) No

VIRGINIA

J. Davis (R) No
T. Davis (R) No
Moran (D) No
Wolf (R) No
Cantor (R) No

-------- MILITARY

-------- asia

Mao's warriors at the gates

By Dermot Tatlow in Kathmandu
Sunday, 1st July 2001
Scotland on Sunday
http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/text_only.cfm?id=SS01024285

It took six weeks to plan but within minutes dozens of policemen were fleeing and 14 of their colleagues lay dead.

In addition to the lives of young policemen, the government lost an arsenal of rifles, pistols, ammunition and a walkie-talkie set. More significantly, control over another swathe of Nepal slipped into the hands of the Maoist guerrillas.

Comrade Muktee, 23, a squad leader in the Maoist guerrilla army, remembers that night last September well. He received word a full month and a half before to prepare for action. The target was given at the last minute when he, along with 250 seasoned Maoist fighters, crept up on the police station in the Dolpa district village of Dunai , and overran it.

The savage ferocity of their attack is the chilling calling card that Maoist revolutionaries are scattering across rural Nepal in a bitter war that has seen them take control of six of Nepal's 75 districts and given them a strong presence in 62 others.

"The government was not able to solve our problems. The gun I have was taken from the police. Only when we have guns do the capitalists and big landlords run away," said Muktee, surrounded by seven young barefoot Maoist militia fighters outside a village in Jajarkot district of mid-western Nepal.

The government of this Himalayan constitutional monarchy, already rocked by the massacre of King Birendra and much of the royal family, is facing its worst political crisis as it is locked in battle with a dedicated and well disciplined revolutionary movement for the hearts and minds of Nepal's rural population.

The revolt is rooted in abject poverty and a rejection of the corruption and political infighting in Nepal's fledgling multi-party democracy which has seen 10 different governments formed in 11 years.

The insurgency started in February 1996 when the Maoist faction of the Communist Party of Nepal abandoned electoral politics and started to fight a "People's War" targeting banks, businesses, large landowners and government organs.

Five years later, official figures show some 1,700 people have been killed as the revolt has spread from its heartland in the mid-western hills of Nepal, the poorest area of the kingdom.

The Maoist strategy, based on Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary teachings, is systematically to take over the countryside using the carrot of land and wealth redistribution and the stick of violence. Their ultimate goal is to encroach on the capital Kathmandu until it falls to the 'inevitability' of their revolution. Once that is done, the Nepalese Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai has promised to "hoist the hammer-and-sickle flag atop Mount Everest".

Instead of being pleased with the revolutionary fervour of their southern neighbours, Nepal's Maoist movement has caused acute embarrassment for Beijing, where the government is at pains to state that they provide them with no assistance whatsoever.

The Nepalese Maoists, for their part, sneer at the current Chinese communist party leadership for being "opportunists and revisionists" who led the revolution astray by dragging the Chinese people down the road of capitalism.

"The changes in China came after Mao's death. This is a small short-term setback in a long-term goal. We are not swimming against the tide. We want to bring the rest of the world that is against us to the right direction," said Comrade Jivan, 36, a pistol-packing former primary school teacher who runs the Maoists in Jajarkot district.

Four hours' hike away, the beleaguered police officer in charge of the Jajarkot district, Deputy Superintendent of Police Maya Kumar Shah, sits in his sandbagged hilltop headquarters, unsure which of the 450 policemen under his command are loyal to the crown and which are loyal to the comrades.

Sentries and snipers keep an eye on the valley, fearful of an imminent attack. Despite the monthly danger money equivalent to £35 paid on top of their £50 salary, they confide that morale is low and many are just counting the days until they are rotated out of the district.

"Before 1996 we had 16 police stations. Now we are down to four," Shah said, his bodyguard standing alert, an arm's reach away. "There is not enough arable land here. The youth of this district used to go to India for work, now they are being forced to join the Maoist army. We are not meant to fight a war. It is only four years since Nepalese police started to routinely carry guns. How can we fight guerrillas?" he demanded.

If there is any doubt as to who is in charge of the district, ask civil servant KB Rana, 43, the local development officer for the district. Of Jajarkot district's 2,123 sq km, Rana states that the government holds just the immediate land around the district capital; a mere 2 sq km.

Rana and his colleagues are deeply frustrated. The district, one of Nepal's poorest, has neither cars nor roads. The annual per capita income is half the national average, equivalent to just £150. "Frankly speaking, I should say the government has not done enough. Very little of the budget is allocated here,'' says Rana.

In the field, the Maoists rule the roost, and they know it. Their armed militia walk freely with weapons slung across their shoulders, a collection of antique muzzle-loaded flintlock muskets as well as .303 rifles and 12-bore shotguns captured from the police.

They have killed and chased away village officials and landlords who would not co-operate with them. In setting up a parallel government, they held their own elections and levied taxes on teachers, wage earners and shopkeepers to finance their own development projects. They banned polygamy and vices such as gambling and alcohol and claim to have the full support of the local villagers.

These claims are somewhat exaggerated. One 19-year-old villager said that "25% of the people support them but the rest have to support them because there is no local government control". Another farmer wearing threadbare clothes and looking far older than his 48 years said: "People change according to the situation, they say the government is good or the Maoists are good. People do not support this or that side. They are in the middle."

One significant source of Maoist support comes from young women. In Jajarkot district, according to the 1998 Human Development Report, adult female literacy is 9% while adult male literacy is 40% and life expectancies are a medieval 40 and 42 years respectively. Where women have no property rights, and feel suppressed, the simple Maoist revolutionary message falls on eager ears.

Comrade Naveena, 16, one of three women in a squad of 15, sweats as she is put through her rifle drill practice in Jajarkot district. "I became a Maoist and joined the war to liberate women from discrimination. I could not have been happy staying at home doing small things like cutting grass and feeding cattle and being beaten by the police," she said, cradling her rifle.

So far the Maoists have not targeted tourism, Nepal's main foreign exchange earner. Aid organisations have, however, been sporadically hit as the Maoists seem undecided as to whether aid work supports government rule.

While slow to act in the face of this insurgency, an attempt to kill the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the killing of 80 police in two attacks within one week last April, has helped spur the government into action.

So far the army has been kept out of the fight by the generals, and reportedly the late King Birendra was opposed to ordering Nepalese soldiers to fire on their own citizens.

Instead, the government has allocated funds for a 15,000 man Armed Police Force and new weapons. This force is expected to have an impact in the next six months as their training ends and they are dispatched into Maoist-held districts.

Meanwhile, attempts continue to find a negotiated settlement to the Maoist problem which 76% of Nepalis favour compared with 9% who support armed intervention, according to a Nepali Times poll conducted in April.

Until a solution is found, a steady escalation of the conflict is considered inevitable as each party tries to strengthen its hand for future negotiations.

In so doing, perversely, a lot more of Nepal's scarce resources will be spent on weapons rather than the impoverished countryside which has proved so fertile a field for the ideas sown by Maoist propaganda today, just as it was in China 60 years ago.

-------- arms sales

Small arms blamed for large death toll

World Scene
July 1, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010701-691451.htm

OSLO -- Nations should do more to restrict the availability of small arms, which kill 500,000 people a year, a new book argues.

"Small Arms Survey 2001," to be presented at a U.N. conference this month, was shown last week in Norway, whose government has strongly backed efforts to restrict trade in guns. "It is no exaggeration to say small arms and light weapons are the world's 'real weapons of mass destruction,'" the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies said of its survey.

-------- balkans

Serbs Feared Army Would Aid Milosevic

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/01/world/01BELG.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, June 30 - Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic of Serbia said today that he had feared that the army would try to stop the transfer of Slobodan Milosevic to an international tribunal this week and that he had set up an elaborate series of ruses and decoys to spirit the former president out of the country.

He also said the police who organized the transfer were ready, if necessary, for a confrontation with the army, which is controlled by his political rival, President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia, who was against the transfer.

"We were ready to take the responsibility for the consequences," he said in an interview.

Mr. Djindjic said he worried that any delay in the transfer would have allowed time for Mr. Milosevic's supporters to rally round the prison and obstruct the transfer.

"We did not know what would be the reactions of the army," the 48- year-old prime minister said. "We had tactics to confuse. We had three cars; one went to the airport, the second to the military airport, and the third to the helicopter airport. And no one knew which car had Milosevic."

The photograph of a police van that has been seen around the world was not the vehicle containing Mr. Milosevic, he said. "The world was watching one, and it was wrong," he said.

At the airport, they had another decoy. "We knew if they were going to intervene, they would intervene at the airport," he said. "And we had, of course, one airplane coming from Montenegro, a small airplane, and all at the airport thought this was for Milosevic. But he was transferred by helicopter."

Mr. Djindjic said he had learned from the mistakes made when the police forces bungled the arrest of Mr. Milosevic at the end of March; a precarious two-day standoff ensued at his home after the police encountered opposition from the army and armed supporters of the former president.

But he said that he spoke with the army chief of staff, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, a few hours after the transfer and that the general, who served under Mr. Milosevic and is close to his family, assured him that whatever had happened in the past and on Thursday, the army would not interfere in the future.

Mr. Djindjic, as prime minister of Serbia, the larger of the two republics that make up Yugoslavia, has control of the police forces in Serbia, but does not command the army, which is a Yugoslav institution and answers to President Kostunica.

Mr. Kostunica said today that he had not been informed of the decision to transfer Mr. Milosevic to the United Nations tribunal at The Hague and rebuked members of the government alliance who suggested that he had supported the transfer.

"I never said at any D.O.S. meeting that I supported the extradition of Milosevic or any other indictee to the Hague tribunal," Mr. Kostunica said in a statement carried by Tanjug state news agency, referring to the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, the 18-party alliance that he heads.

Mr. Kostunica has opposed transfer of Yugoslav nationals to The Hague, although he had committed himself to cooperating with the tribunal.

Mr. Djindjic has said Mr. Kostunica was aware of his determination to keep his word to the international community and above all to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. He said Mr. Powell had told him that the United States would take part in an important donor's conference for Yugoslavia on Friday, if he promised to carry out a decree issued last weekend that committed the government to sending Mr. Milosevic to The Hague.

"At this moment, I said to Kostunica, should I promise, and he said `yes,' " Mr. Djindjic said.

When the Constitutional Court moved to block the government decree on Thursday, declaring it unconstitutional, Mr. Djindjic said he was prepared to resign.

Putting off the transfer, which has provoked ambivalence among some Serbs who feel that the tribunal is biased against them, would have been a step backward, he said.

He said he was prepared to take any drop in his own popularity in the interests of securing international good will and aid - $1.28 billion of which was promised by Western donors the day after Mr. Milosevic was transferred.

"You cannot do anything with popularity," he said, "but you can with credits."

Mr. Djindjic acknowledged differences with Mr. Kostunica and members of his party, and said they had to decide whether they wanted to be part of the democratic world or whether to wait. "But the waiting room is outside," he said.

His priority in handing over Mr. Milosevic was to enhance Yugoslavia's reputation and credibility in the world, he said. But he also said he had changed his mind on the need to try Mr. Milosevic in Serbia, partly because the investigation into him at home on charges of corruption had faltered for lack of hard evidence.

He said he did not expect much political fallout from Mr. Milosevic's transfer. The opposition parties that still support Mr. Milosevic were much weakened and represented little threat, he said.

The collapse of the Yugoslav government, which came apart on Friday when some members withdrew in anger over the transfer, will be solved by some new arrangement, he said, and he also made light of the cracks that are showing in the democratic alliance that brought down Mr. Milosevic eight months ago.

"Even people who were against the decree feel more comfortable now," he said.

Still, he said he would not push ahead with the transfer of any of the 15 other people indicted for war crimes thought to be in Yugoslavia.

"Not immediately," he said. "I think we should discuss that with The Hague. They have enough for the moment to be going on with."

He suggested that the government could open some cases in Serbia or join forces with The Hague in some prosecutions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Djindjic said his government would continue with investigations that have recently begun to uncover several mass graves in Serbia, which are believed to contain the bodies of ethnic Albanian civilians killed in Kosovo in 1999.

"I expect we will have a lot to do on this past issue, and without Milosevic in the country it will be a lot easier," he said.

The transfer, he said, had finally ended eight months of his being in power while still being a hostage to the political obstacles the former president continued to present, even as he sat in a jail cell in central Belgrade.

"It is the end of one phase," he said. "What we did not do on Oct. 6, we did eight months later. Now we can start without Milosevic."

----

Serbs Break Silence on Atrocities
Many Ordered to Assist Burial of Kosovo Victims

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64635-2001Jun29?language=printer

BATAJNICA, Yugoslavia -- The trucks arrived from Kosovo at night, passing beneath a simple concrete arch marking the entrance to a World War II detention camp for German and Croatian soldiers. After threading their way around police barracks and a shooting range, the drivers stopped near the east bank of the Danube River and waited until dawn.

That is when a tractor driver began his work, digging pits roughly 15 feet deep and 30 feet long in the damp clay. The worst moments came next, as the backs of the trucks were opened and the stench of decaying bodies rolled out.

Slain ethnic Albanians from Kosovo were pulled from the trucks and tossed into the pits. Headless bodies. Bits of jewelry and broken watches. Bodies of little boys and girls. Bodies of young and middle-aged women. Identity cards. Cigarette lighters. German currency. A pass to a discotheque. Tennis shoes, socks, shirts and underwear. It all went into the pits, was doused with gasoline and set on fire. When the flames died, the tractor driver switched his engine on and eased a layer of dirt over the blackened sludge.

Those who conceived of the operation expected that these secret horrors would never surface, a reasonable view under the authoritarian government that ran Yugoslavia until last October. What they did not count on was the enduring anger and shame of those who were ordered to drive the trucks, hoist the bodies and operate the tractors.

Finally, two years later, after the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic and the advent of a government in Belgrade that is willing to listen, these Serbs caught up in wartime horror are beginning to talk. The nightmarish memories they are recounting for authorities form the backdrop for Milosevic's sudden extradition Thursday to a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague and may end up buttressing the charges against him.

The first to speak up was a 56-year-old professional diver, Zivadin Djordjevic, who in April 1999 became embroiled in a police investigation of a truck dumped into the Danube in a remote village east of here. When he opened the back door, he found dozens of bodies. The police initially said they were ethnic Albanian fighters, but women and children were among them.

The investigation was stopped cold by Belgrade that month, but early this year, an account of Djordjevic's experience appeared in an obscure local crime journal, whose editor is a friend of the Serbian interior minister. The government's prompt investigation of the report and its searing admission that the bodies came from Kosovo have opened what promises to be a floodgate of revelations about Serbian wartime atrocities.

In the past two months, according to Serbian police, truck drivers, tractor drivers, ditch diggers, soldiers and policemen have for the first time begun to tell authorities what they know.

Such accounts never circulated in Yugoslavia during the decade in which Milosevic ruled Serbia, but now the news of mass graves near Belgrade containing ethnic Albanians from Kosovo has appeared everywhere in the Yugoslav media. A graphic 15-minute video of forensic pathologists brushing earth from the bodies here at Batajnica, 12 miles northwest of Belgrade, was shown on national television Thursday night, provoking surprise and revulsion.

"Here it was just a whisper," said Petar Knezevic, 32, a Belgrade mechanical engineer, speaking about reports of Serbian war crimes that appeared in Western media during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and the 1998 and 1999 conflict in Kosovo. "They were hiding it because they were afraid they might be prosecuted. . . . Why else would someone go to the trouble of bringing the bodies all the way from Kosovo?"

Thursday evening was when the Serbian government sent Milosevic to The Hague to face charges of responsibility for war crimes in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. The revelations bear signs of an old-style government public relations campaign, aimed at discrediting Milosevic and building support for the Serbian leadership's decision to turn him over to the tribunal.

But the claims are supported by evidence: the exhumations so far of more than 100 bodies in mass graves at two sites, many showing signs of torture and violent death. Police officials say they have collected accounts from witnesses of more than 1,000 bodies being unloaded from trucks at these two sites and heard indirect accounts of additional bodies being buried in bomb craters from NATO airstrikes along the main highway linking the city of Nis with the Kosovo capital of Pristina.

"It's clear that Serbian authorities are publicizing the information . . . in connection with Milosevic. They needed very strong evidence" to help stoke public support for his extradition, said Natasa Kandic, director of the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center. But she said that no matter what the motive, the revelations constitute an important rebuttal of "10 years of denying war crimes were committed by Serbian forces."

At the center of the government's unfolding probe is Dusan Mihajlovic, a businessman and former member of the secret police who was appointed interior minister early this year. "We will try to find the ones who committed the crimes in Kosovo . . . and prove the responsibility of those who made these decisions," he said in an interview. "We are interested in the truth so the families can find out where their loved ones are buried and have them buried properly."

A successful search could help heal an open wound in Kosovo, where more than 10,000 people were killed. International organizations and ethnic Albanian leaders say more than 3,000 ethnic Albanian residents of the Serbian province are missing two years after NATO soldiers occupied the province and Yugoslav forces withdrew. Yugoslav authorities say that more than 1,000 Serbian residents are also still missing.

But the search for mass graves also threatens to touch sensitive power centers in Belgrade, causing Kandic to worry that the government's enthusiasm will flag now that Milosevic is in a jail cell under the tribunal's jurisdiction. Finger-pointing has already begun between the Yugoslav army and the Serbian police, both of which dispatched troops to Kosovo and often conducted joint operations.

The 38 bodies exhumed by police here and the 74 bodies exhumed in a national forest near the town of Petrovo Selo are clearly linked to wartime operations of special police units. Included were at least nine children under age 7 and many women. Identity cards recovered here, for example, list the names of several of the more than 50 residents of the Kosovo town of Suva Reka machine-gunned on March 26, 1999. War crimes investigators say the killings were carried out by policemen angered by the slayings of several colleagues by ethnic Albanian rebels.

Those shot in the attack were tossed by police into a truck covered by a blue tarp; two ethnic Albanian women who had feigned death pulled themselves from the pile of bodies and escaped while the truck was driving away. The driver, an army reservist, later told a Newsday journalist he delivered the bodies to a military parade ground, then picked them up again several days later.

He said he shuttled other bodies between various locations, including several industrial plants where they were evidently burned.

The precise path the bodies took to reach central Serbia is still being stitched together. But many appeared to have been buried at least once before and then dug up, possibly to hide them from war crimes investigators. The base here -- just down the road from a Coca-Cola bottling plant -- was used by special anti-terrorist forces as a training camp. Stanko Grujic, a 75-year-old farmer herding sheep at the edge of the base last week, said that "during the [NATO] bombing, you could not approach it."

Mihajlovic has suggested that army forces also played a role in such atrocities, and he has pointed out that police units were subordinated during the war to army chief of staff Nebojsa Pavkovic, a longtime Milosevic associate who kept the job under the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica.

Pavkovic responded last week that "someone is trying . . . to draw the [army] into something it is not involved in."

Since the sniping began, documents that shed light on wartime command responsibilities -- a matter of enormous interest to the U.N. tribunal -- have started to leak from government archives. A classified April 20, 1999, order signed by Pavkovic, for example, put police at the disposal of the general who still commands the 3rd Army; he in turn signed an April 30, 1999, order calling for special units "to clear the field following anti-terrorist operations."

The general, Vladimir Lazarevic, said this referred only to the clearing of "bodies of victims, dead animals, mines and shells." But Mihajlovic and others say it refers to hiding bodies of civilian victims from the war crimes tribunal, an action that one or more witnesses have told them was ordered by Milosevic at a March 1999 meeting at his home.

For now, those who participated at lower levels seem more eager to relieve the burden of the terrible secrets.

A local newspaper printed army psychiatric reports this week, for example, on two young soldiers who told superior officers that they developed sleeping disorders after serving in the Kosovo town of Djakovica. One said he carried "bodies out of a helicopter, bodies of mostly Albanians, massacred bodies," while the other said he repeatedly unloaded bodies from trucks.

More exhumations are slated to be carried out here in coming days under the supervision of a local judge and the deputy head of the Serbian police criminal investigations unit, Dragan Karleusa.

Karleusa said he knows it was wartime and that people were under stress. But he added: "I am ashamed that something like this could happen in Serbia. I condemn this. . . . Only someone with a criminal mind could do this."

He said the system was obviously well organized and that "direct orders were given by high officers." He is still wrestling, he said, with how much responsibility should be born by policemen, drivers and those who loaded trucks.

"What could they do?" Karleusa said. "What is one soldier? Their guilt is incomparable to the ones who organized this."

Special Correspondent Zoran Radjen in Belgrade contributed to this report.

-------- drug war

Iran Police Kill 9 Drug Traffickers

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iran-Drugs.html

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Police have carried out a major crackdown on drug trafficking and abuse during the past week, arresting 11,892 addicts and traders, and killing nine traffickers in shootouts, Iran's official news agency said Sunday.

Police confiscated 1,949 pounds of drugs in the four-day sweep conducted across the nation, the Islamic Republic News Agency said. Seven trafficking rings were destroyed.

The secretary general of Iran's anti-drug department, Mohammad Fallah, said Iran has 1.2 million drug addicts and another 800,000 occasional drug users.

Fallah said that 3,111 Iranian police officers and soldiers have been killed in clashes with drug traffickers since 1979.

Iran is a major route for smuggling drugs from Afghanistan and Pakistan to markets in the Gulf, Europe and beyond. Opium, heroin, hashish and morphine are taken across the country. Single busts involving a ton or more of drugs are not uncommon.

Last year, Iran erected outposts and an electronically monitored fence along the 587-mile border with Afghanistan in an attempt to cut down on banditry and drug trafficking.

-------- iran

Iran military alert for U.S. attack

July 1, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010701-61440807.htm

Iran's military is on alert for a punitive U.S. military attack following the indictment of terrorists in Saudi Arabia with links to Tehran.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials said Iranian military leaders warned naval units to watch for some type of U.S. attack.

A U.S. official said there are signs that "some in the Iranian regime are bracing for an attack."

"They were warning their forces to be on the alert," said one U.S. official familiar with reports of the warnings.

The warnings also included directions to Iranian naval forces to be careful not to be lured into a possible provocation by the U.S. military through an encounter with U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. Tehran apparently believes the U.S. military might trigger an attack by provoking the Iranians into taking some kind of military action.

The indications that Iran was preparing for conflict followed the federal indictment June 22 of 13 Saudi nationals and a Lebanese man for bombing a U.S. military residence in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996. The blast killed 19 American service members.

Officials also said the Iranians may have warned their naval units after U.S. military forces were placed on heightened alert because of fears of terrorist attacks. Last week the forces of fugitive Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden were reported to be planning an attack on U.S. or Israeli interests.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said in announcing the indictment that the Dhahran bombing was linked to the Iranian government. Mr. Ashcroft said: "Elements of the Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hezbollah."

The attorney general also said that "the defendants reported their surveillance activities to Iranian government officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials."

U.S. intelligence officials have identified Iranian government officials involved in the bombing preparations. However, the indictment made no mention of Iran or Iranian officials.

"The Iranians should have seen from the indictment that we are not planning to attack," said a defense official.

The U.S. military has conducted bombing strikes in response to terrorist activities on at least three occasions.

Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched against suspected terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998. The strike followed the terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa by Muslim fundamentalists associated with bin Laden.

In 1993, Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad were hit after the Iraqi government was linked to a terrorist plot to assassinate then-President George Bush.

The U.S. military also carried out bombing raids against Libya in 1986 after intelligence reports linked Libyan agents to the terrorist bombing of a discotheque in Berlin used by American military personnel.

Iran is designated as a state sponsor of international terrorism. The State Department's annual report on terrorism, made public in April, said that despite political gains for "moderates" in Iran's political system, "hard-line conservatives have blocked most reform efforts."

"Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2000," the report said. "Its Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) continued to be involved in the planning and the execution of terrorist acts and continued to support a variety of groups that use terrorism to pursue their goals."

-------- iraq

Iraq's Neighbors Feel Pain of Sanctions
Illegal Oil Trade, One Truckload at a Time, Forms Backbone of Local Economy

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A14
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4740-2001Jun30?language=printer

HABUR GATE, Turkey -- To truck drivers standing in a sliver of shade cast by an aging tanker truck waiting to enter Turkey with a load of embargo-breaking diesel fuel, the U.N. sanctions against Iraq are not a vital foreign policy matter loaded with global strategic significance, but an intensely personal issue.

"This is Turkey and there is Iraq with three kilometers between us, and America is on the other side of the world stopping us from doing our trade," said Seyfettin Inan, 42, a Turkish truck driver who has hauled oil from Iraq to Turkey for 15 years. These days, he supports his family of eight by making about one trip a month, which earns him perhaps $100.

"I could make 10 trips a day, but we have to respect all these concepts," he complained, as other truckers nodded. "The big states should come and see how we live and see if they could bear this type of poverty. But they just keep asking Turkey to do more and more."

Trade has been conducted for decades between the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. But the diesel fuel trade violates international sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Those sanctions require that all proceeds from Iraqi petroleum exports go to a U.N.-controlled escrow account to pay for humanitarian assistance for Iraq's 22.6 million people and to compensate victims from the Persian Gulf War.

Oil analysts say the illegal trade here -- and similar sanctions-evading trade between Iraq and its neighbors Jordan and Syria -- puts as much as $1 billion a year directly into Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's pockets to buy and develop weapons and to build ornate palaces. The neighbors are enticed into the transactions, experts said, because they receive the oil and fuel at deep discounts -- perhaps 40 percent below market value -- and the trade has become a critical part of their economies.

Trying to control this black market is a key goal of a U.S.-British plan to revamp the U.N. sanctions, which have become hugely unpopular because of their devastating effect on Iraqis, particularly children. The U.N. Security Council must vote on the matter by Tuesday.

The joint proposal for "smart sanctions" aims to revitalize the sanctions by lifting restrictions on civilian goods and tightening controls on weapons-related materials. The idea is to alleviate the widespread suffering and malnutrition of Iraqis by giving them greater access to food, medicines and other consumer goods, while preventing Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction and rebuilding an army that could threaten his neighbors and destabilize the region.

Iraq, protesting the new sanctions proposal, stopped selling oil under the existing U.N. program on June 1, withdrawing about 2.3 million barrels a day from the world market. It continues to sell outside the sanctions regime to Turkey, Jordan and Syria.

The U.S.-British proposal has run into intense criticism -- particularly from Russia, which has been awarded billions of dollars in future contracts to develop Iraq's oil fields. Russia has threatened to veto the proposal -- and analysts say it now looks unlikely to be approved by the Tuesday deadline, which would be a serious political setback for the United States. Many critics say that even if the new sanctions were adopted, they would not stem Hussein's weapons programs or raise Iraqi living standards.

Furthermore, Hussein has threatened to cut off the oil trade to Jordan, Syria and Turkey if they implement the "smart sanctions," leading to a groundswell of opposition in frontline countries whose support is critical to the success of any sanctions program.

There are no official figures for the amount or price of unregulated oil seeping across Iraq's border. There are also no figures on how much money goes to Hussein. But oil industry analysts say that Turkey, Jordan and Syria import about 100,000 barrels a day from Iraq. Oil experts are skeptical of Turkey's claim that it imports only 12,500 barrels a day, although they acknowledge that the illegal trade with Turkey has recently declined.

Stopping this trade would be particularly devastating to Jordan, which has urged the Security Council to defeat the new sanctions proposal, even though the oil it imports from Iraq is permitted by the United Nations outside the oil-for-food program.

In a memo to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan two weeks ago, Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb said that his country imports $750 million worth of oil a year from Iraq, its largest trading partner, and that 37 percent of Jordanian industries are dependent on trade with their neighbor. If trade were cut off, he warned, Jordan's economy might collapse.

Turkey faces a similar, but less severe dilemma. Officials say that the diesel fuel trade through Habur Gate -- the only border crossing between Iraq and Turkey -- has become the economic lifeline for southeastern Turkey, a region that is still emerging from 16 years of civil war that left it economically ravaged.

The diesel fuel trade here is a mom-and-pop business. Caravans of colorful, decrepit tankers -- as well as trucks with homemade tanks wedged and tied in their beds -- line up in the brutal desert heat and wait for days to cross into Iraq. They then spend days coming back through Turkish customs and waiting to unload their fuel at a central government depot, where the product is marked up, taxed and resold to distributors who haul it to market.

"When there's a 10-day holiday here, it's like a dead city, so imagine what would happen if the trade is stopped completely. It would kill people all across the southeast," said Ahmet Uzen, who operates an oil distribution franchise near the depot.

"The U.S. wants to close the border, and it looks like they're only doing it for their own interests. But they should also take into account the people living in this region," Uzen said. "We are all suffering from the embargo. Doesn't America know that? Particularly the people in Iraq. For 100,000 lira [about 8 cents] they are ready to die for you, those people are so desperate."

"If this border is closed, we'll all go hungry," said Gaffur Dagdelen, 31, who with three other family members owns a tanker that is their sole source of income. He was one of several truckers on the 12th day of a trip to the Iraqi diesel fuel loading station and back to the unloading depot in Turkey -- about 30 miles round-trip. He said that after expenses, he expected to make a $12 profit. "I'm very angry because these sanctions are not against Iraq but Turkey," he said.

Last Monday, there was a two-mile backup of 228 trucks and tankers waiting to unload their fuel at the Turkish depot outside Silopi, the first town inside Turkey on the road from Habur Gate. Officials said the backup was caused by a lack of capacity at the depot. They also said they are trying to ease the problem by allowing only about 250 trucks a day to enter Iraq.

"Everything we earn is from this gate," said Huseyin Akyuz, 24, a driver who said he had been waiting in the line for five days. "This is the economy for the whole southeast, and if anything blocks this gate, we'll all be very poor and hungry."

Government officials said that the diesel fuel trade and related businesses -- truck repair shops, tire dealers, restaurants -- are the region's main employers.

"This is the only source of income for people -- there are no factories here," said Abdullah Erin, the top Turkish official at the border crossing. He said that because of sanctions, Turkey has lost about $40 billion in trade with Iraq in the past 11 years. Independent observers said the figure is substantially less -- perhaps $15 billion.

Erin said the diesel fuel trade would be impossible to stop, even with tougher sanctions. "It would still go on. Nobody can tell a country to stop its border trade, and this is not even trade between Iraq and Turkey. It's one region to another."

That creates an additional problem, analysts said, because a key beneficiary of the illegal diesel fuel trade here is the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, which has been declared a "no-fly" zone and is protected by U.S. and British air patrols to ensure that it is not attacked by Hussein.

Oil officials and drivers said Hussein sells diesel fuel to the Kurdish-administered area of northern Iraq for 4 cents a liter -- about 15 cents per gallon. Kurdish middlemen mark up the price and sell it to Turkish truck drivers for 14 cents a liter. That 10-cent profit, according to Safeen Dizayee, the representative to Ankara for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the main political parties running northern Iraq, helps pay for the local Kurdish government to administer the region -- from paying police to building new schools.

"The bulk of the local [northern Iraq] government's annual budget of about $170 million a year comes from border trade with Turkey, and the diesel fuel is a huge part of that," he said. "The question is, can the free world allow this to collapse overnight?"

The United States has said that a main focus of the new sanctions is to ensure that Iraq's neighbors are not harmed. U.S. and British officials have mentioned compensating them for any losses they might suffer from enforcing the proposed smart sanctions and losing the Iraqi trade. But for some, that promise rings hollow.

"I don't think anybody gives a damn if we are compensated or not," Ugur Ziyal, a top official in Turkey's Foreign Ministry, said in an interview in Ankara. Besides, he said, "The guys who are there are simple rural peasants. You can't compensate for that. To keep the activity going is very important. I don't see any alternative."

--------

Iraq Protests US Airstrikes

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-UN.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. and British airstrikes on Iraq amount to an undeclared war against the country, the Iraqi government said in a protest to the United Nations on Sunday.

In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, acting Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz asked him to take measures ``to put a stop to these illegal aggressions and to hold the countries responsible for their violations'' of Iraqi airspace, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.

U.S. and British warplanes patrol no-flight zones over northern and southern Iraq. The Baghdad government doesn't recognize the zones and its artillery and radar have been challenging the planes since late 1998, resulting in numerous airstrikes that have damaged military and civil structures and killed civilians.

The zones were set up in 1991-92 to protect Kurdish rebels in the north and Shiite Muslim rebels in the south from government forces.

In his letter, Aziz said the allied planes carry out daily attacks ``against residential areas and civil service installations'' in Iraq and that these raids ``amount to an undeclared war against Iraq.''

He also complained that the U.N. observers on the Iraq-Kuwait border had failed to report the allied flight incursions to the U.N. Security Council.

The U.S. and British air forces have denied targeting nonmilitary buildings and civilians in Iraq. They say they strike Iraqi air defense systems to protect their pilots.

-------- israel

Lebanese Are Left With a Wasteland
Region Has Withered Since Israeli Pullout

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A14
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4656-2001Jun30?language=printer

QLAIA, Lebanon -- The Israeli departure from southern Lebanon 13 months ago was a profoundly patriotic moment, ending a 20-year occupation that had turned the border hills into a semi-autonomous zone ruled by a local militia whose commanders were in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv rather than Beirut.

But it was a dismal moment for the pastry shop that Majed Makhoul had opened two months earlier in Qlaia. Virtually overnight, as the Israelis withdrew and the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army disintegrated, Qlaia went from a bustling military center to a ghost town. As many as half of the 5,000 residents left, including an estimated 1,000 who fled to Israel for fear of being prosecuted for involvement with the SLA and 400 who were arrested and are now serving prison sentences.

The money that flowed from Israel -- the salaries paid to SLA members and an affiliated civil administration, the jobs that southern Lebanese were allowed to hold in Israel proper -- stopped without notice. The black market that passed goods from ports in southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, skirting customs and taxes and turning a hefty profit, collapsed.

There is, Makhoul noted, little market for festive sweets in a town where most of the houses are empty, most of the people are gone, and many of the residents who remain are living on savings or charity.

"The border closed, all the money stopped . . . I don't see a future here," said Makhoul, who spent six months in jail awaiting trial before being acquitted of collaborating with the Israelis.

Although Makhoul was a member of the SLA in the early 1980s, he spent most of his time since then working as a chauffeur for SLA officers and selling jewelry before opening his pastry store.

A year after the Israeli pullout, Lebanon still seems uncertain of what to do with its newly liberated land -- a region without an economy, littered with 130,000 land mines and still subject to instability as the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement's militia presses Israel to abandon a parcel of unoccupied but disputed property known as Shebaa Farms.

Hezbollah guerrillas wounded an Israeli soldier Friday in the latest missile attack on Shebaa Farms. Witnesses said Israeli planes responded by firing missiles at three positions near the Lebanese border town of Kfar Shouba. They also said Israeli artillery shelled the fringes of Kfar Shouba, hitting at least 14 houses.

Those who left the area -- perhaps as many as 200,000 since the first days of the Israeli occupation two decades ago -- are not returning. The estimated 75,000 people who remain are questioning their decision to stay. While the withdrawal did not provoke the chaos or retaliation against SLA members that many had predicted, a series of recent bombings and arsons has renewed that concern. Ostensibly directed against the 2,000 collaborators who are beginning to trickle out of Lebanese prisons as their sentences end, the attacks have caused only minor casualties. But the effect on the mood has been severe.

"It is getting worse, and people are thinking about leaving after staying throughout all this time," said Mohammed Mokalled, coordinator for the U.N. Development Program's efforts in southern Lebanon.

The problems are partly a product of Israel's success in assuming control of the area. In an effort to stop attacks against its northern towns by Palestinian guerrillas, Israel set up a "buffer zone" that was 65 miles wide and in some places as much as 15 miles deep.

Israeli forces established a network of fortified positions throughout the region and built the SLA into a force of 2,500. The SLA was originally based in this village as a Christian militia to protect against Palestinian militants, but it came to include a number of Muslim members attracted by money or pressured to serve. Its top officers effectively acted as the area's government.

Many residents fled to Beirut after the Israelis arrived. Of those who remained, about 6,000 families made their living from the occupation economy, working for the SLA, for a civil administration it established or in Israel. The border is now sealed between the two countries, which are technically at war, but during the occupation about 3,000 people crossed from Lebanon into Israel each day.

Local agriculture virtually ceased. A better living could be made working or managing Israeli farms. As a result, investment in basic items like irrigation was ignored, leaving the region not only short of water but also unable to use what it has efficiently. Israeli and SLA forces burned olive groves and other trees to deprive Hezbollah guerrillas of cover, diminishing another local resource.

The wartime economy, if prosperous in its way, wiped out the few local industries, said Mokalled. The town of Rashaye Fukkar, known for its handicrafts, once had 50 local potters, but only two remain, including the village's aging mayor. Bint Jbeil had a shoemaking trade, which withered as foreign imports came through Israel or black market ports like Naqurah.

Gradually, the commerce and relationship with Israel became the norm, and no one planned for what would happen after the occupation.

Since the Israeli withdrawal in May 2000, Lebanese authorities have announced a $260 million emergency effort to stabilize electricity, water and other basic services. But only about a fourth of that has been spent, and there is no overall restoration plan.

Nor is there agreement about the role of Hezbollah. In the year since the Israeli pullout, the group has staged several attacks against Israeli troops in the disputed Shebaa area, including the kidnapping last fall of three soldiers who remain in captivity. After Hezbollah's last strike, in April, Israel retaliated by bombing a radar post manned by Syrian troops, making good on a pledge to hold Damascus responsible for Hezbollah actions. There have been no Hezbollah attacks since.

Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was embarrassed when Hezbollah launched strikes while he was in Europe and Washington trying to build support for economic measures. He now speaks of regaining Shebaa Farms through methods "recognized by the international community," meaning eventual negotiations with Israel.

-------- nato

Bring Mother Russia Into the Fold

Sunday, July 1, 2001
By JAMES CHACE, CHARLES A. KUPCHAN
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20010701/t000054449.html

Now that they have taken a measure of each other, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin should work toward this goal: Russia's entry into NATO.

Not only would this bold step blunt the growing rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, but it also would achieve three strategic objectives:

- It would elevate to a top U.S. priority the ultimate prize of the end of the Cold War: the inclusion of Russia in a democratic, peaceful Europe.

Rather than array their formidable power against Russia, America and its allies should reach out to their defeated adversary to ensure that a pacified and democratized Russia is integrated into Europe. NATO bound Germany to the West after World War II. It should now do the same for Russia.

- Working toward Russian membership would make it easier for the alliance to admit all aspirants, including the Baltic countries and Ukraine.

They would be joining with rather than against a Russia that has come to see NATO not as a threat but as key to its own security.

In contrast, if NATO excludes Russia while opening its doors to the countries of Central Europe, it would be signaling Russians that they are not welcome in the West.

The security of Central Europe will be better served by pulling Russia westward than by risking Russia's isolation and alienation.

- A strategic partnership with Moscow would facilitate Bush's efforts to sharply reduce nuclear arsenals--the United States still has a total of 7,000 warheads and Russia about 6,000--and to build a limited missile defense against rogue states.

A few days after his meeting with Bush in Slovenia, Putin warned that if the United States were to deploy missile defenses unilaterally, "the nuclear arsenal of Russia will be augmented multifold," potentially resulting "in a hectic, uncontrolled arms race."

If Bush is to persuade Moscow to modify the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and join the United States in building a missile defense system, he first will have to persuade Putin that he is serious about making Russia an ally.

In light of the fragile state of Russia's democratic reforms and economy, it is too soon to admit Russia to NATO in the second wave of enlargement, scheduled to begin next year.

But even as the alliance proceeds with a small second round, perhaps restricted to Slovenia and Slovakia, NATO should invite Russia to enter into formal negotiations for membership.

Russian reform may well fail in the interim, foreclosing the option of joining NATO. But at least the West will have made a sincere effort to expose Russia to the pacifying effects of military and political integration.

The risks are low; Russia will have a say in NATO only as its reforms substantially advance.

But the payoffs of success, Russia's integration into an undivided Europe, would be huge.

Should Russia ultimately join NATO, the alliance would function quite differently.

With a host of new members from Central and Eastern Europe, it would serve as a more informal and flexible vehicle for coordinating military activities and preserving peace rather than on territorial defense.

But this broader NATO is a must if Bush is to follow through on his promises "to put talk of East and West behind us" and construct a Europe "whole and free." - - -

James Chace, a Professor of Government at Bard College, Is the Author of "Acheson: the Secretary of State Who Created the American World" (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Charles A. Kupchan Is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

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

Taking Missile Technology to the Movies
Boeing, TRW Put Space Skills to Work in Making, Distributing Films

By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page H01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2417-2001Jun30?language=printer

Defense contractors routinely cart their wares to faraway hot spots such as Kosovo or Somalia, but two Boeing Co. executives recently wound up in a different type of foreign theater:

The Cannes International Film Festival.

In May, Fred Medina and David Baker of Boeing braved the collagen and swizzle sticks of the French Riviera to promote the company's gaudiest new effort to commercialize its aerospace technology -- digital cinema.

Boeing is hoping its experience as a maker of satellites for science and spy craft can translate into success as a Hollywood film distributor. It wants to zap digital movies straight from studios to theaters via satellites and fiber optics, eliminating the slow, expensive process of shipping reels of celluloid film.

As odd as it may seem for the contractor building the National Missile Defense system to also host the world premiere of the movie "Spy Kids" at a Disney theme park, which Boeing did in March, the company is not alone among defense contractors in courting Tinseltown. TRW Inc., Boeing's partner in missile defense, has joined with Warner Bros. in a joint venture called Picture PipeLine.

The TRW venture uses the Internet -- as well as the company's experience processing top-secret images for nameless government agencies -- to enable directors, producers and editors to work together from remote sites on daily footage shot for movies or television shows.

"It really, really changes things," said Brooke Kennedy, who uses Picture PipeLine as co-executive producer of the NBC television series "Third Watch." She shoots in New York and a day later can be online reviewing footage with an editor in Los Angeles. "I get calls constantly from colleagues who have heard I have it and want to see it," Kennedy said.

It makes a certain sense for companies with experience serving the Pentagon to turn to Hollywood for new profits -- after all, both industries spread U.S. influence around the globe and spend millions of dollars blowing up stuff. If a product works in one field, defense analyst Paul Nisbet said, why not use it in the other?

"I mean, if they are already involved in the making of satellites and the technology involved with that and any other satellite services, this is . . . just another way of making money," said Nisbet, of JSA Research in Newport, R.I.

In Boeing's case, the company views distributing movies as the first step in a larger plan to create a "space-based communications strategy [of] global media distribution," said Medina, who along with Baker is co-director of Boeing's digital cinema operation in Los Angeles.

Because movies are costly, high-visibility products, he said, any system good enough for them has an advantage in winning other types of media business, such as delivering pay-per-view entertainment services directly to customers' homes.

Boeing picked up the satellite services business last year when it acquired Hughes Space and Communications, which is where Medina and Baker worked. The company premiered its system last fall in New York with a showing of the movie "Bounce" attended by star Ben Affleck, whom Boeing touted as a "renowned technology enthusiast."

The company estimates that distributing a movie digitally -- bouncing an encoded signal off a satellite and relaying it to thousands of theaters simultaneously -- would cut about three-quarters off the $1 billion that studios spend each year to mail out hard copies of their films.

Of course, each theater would have to convert to digital projection, at a cost of up to $150,000 per screen. Currently, only 34 screens in the world are equipped for digital cinema, out of a total of more than 100,000.

The National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) is skeptical of the digital cinema movement, which is being advocated by studios such as Walt Disney Co. and other potential providers such as a partnership of Qualcomm Inc. and Technicolor.

"Our members in my association are very split on whether or not we can make any money on this stuff," said John Fithian, president of NATO. "The studios stand to save a lot of money, so that would suggest they're the first ones that need to step up to the plate in paying for these systems."

While digital film distribution may be a few years away, TRW's Picture PipeLine service is already gaining acceptance. It was used in the making of the movie "The Perfect Storm," the company said, is being tested for the upcoming "Matrix 2" and was used in an upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer and Castle Rock Entertainment film called "Down and Under."

Filmmakers shooting "Down and Under" on location in Australia used the system to collaborate with colleagues back in Los Angeles, a Castle Rock spokeswoman said.

For Kennedy, at "Third Watch," the system has speeded up the creative process and made it more flexible, she said. It works like this: The show shoots on location in New York and ships the film overnight to Los Angeles for processing.

Ordinarily, it would be two days before Kennedy saw the shots back in New York. With Picture PipeLine, the footage is loaded into the computer system and she can see it the next morning. Linked on a Web site and using a standard modem to watch streaming images, the show's producers, director and editor can confer on opposite ends of the continent.

"You can literally get on with the editor and see exactly what he's doing coming to you from his machine," Kennedy said. "You can speak to him about, 'That's not what I really intended' or 'Let's trim this,' and you can watch your ideas being executed in real time."

The technology grew out of work TRW has done for military and intelligence customers, said Gerard Roccanova, chief executive of Picture PipeLine.

"The connection between Hollywood and government is not as strange as you might imagine," Roccanova said. "They're both paranoid about security because both have valuable information that cost a lot to create."

As an engineer with 21 years of experience at TRW, Roccanova said he has little personal interaction with Hollywood types, preferring the role of the technical whiz who can get things done behind the scenes. He envisions a wide range of possibilities for the technology; the National Football League, he said, is evaluating the use of Picture PipeLine for sending in-house game films to coaches each week as they prepare for their next opponent.

And the company is looking ahead to joining Boeing in the film distribution market, but with a different approach. Instead of transmitting a movie to theaters, Roccanova said, Picture PipeLine could send it out on encrypted DVDs that could only be played if the theater logged onto a secure Internet site.

"You don't have to install broadband to do that, you can do it with a cheap phone line," he said. And because of TRW's work on classified government programs, he added, "we can guarantee that no one can decrypt it. . . . That's what we're about."

----

U.S. role on Okinawa debated again

July 1, 2001
By Eric Talmadge
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010701-16104680.htm

KADENA AIR BASE, Japan -- Mika Tamanaha and her friend came because it's the biggest event of the year on Okinawa, a chance to enter the gates of this sprawling U.S. base, munch on hot dogs, explore the inside of a surveillance plane.

But while tens of thousands of Okinawans swarmed to this normally off-limits corner of their island for an annual goodwill festival yesterday, detectives off the base were investigating a reported rape that has created outrage.

For a second day yesterday, police questioned a U.S. Air Force sergeant over allegations that he raped an Okinawan woman in a parking lot outside a nightclub early Friday.

"It's really frightening," said Miss Tamanaha, an 18-year-old college student. "It made me think twice about coming here. But we try not to think about it too much."

No charges have been filed against the sergeant, said Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. The serviceman, who has denied the charge, was allowed to return to base last night, said Okinawa Prefectural Police spokesman Akira Namihira.

The story was front-page news in both newspapers on Okinawa, where crimes over the years by American servicemen -- including the gang-rape of a 13-year-old schoolgirl by American servicemen in 1995 -- have fanned opposition to the large U.S. military presence.

Because of its strategic location, Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of World War II, remains a key U.S. outpost. Nearly two-thirds of the 47,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Japan are based on the island, including the largest contingent of Marines outside the United States. Kadena Air Base is America's largest in the region.

Feelings toward the troops are complex.

Okinawans often say they are resigned to their presence and welcome the economic boost the American presence provides in Japan's poorest province.

As yesterday's Amerifest demonstrated, many welcome the opportunity to mix with the Americans. No incidents were reported at the Kadena festival, and officials said they expected 250,000 visitors before it ends today.

"It's a festival, it's fun," said Akemi Ikehara. "My 3-year-old son likes to see the planes."

But tensions between the troops and 1.2 million Okinawans are endemic, and the latest accusations come at a delicate time. President Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met yesterday at Camp David.

"We are not going to stand for this violence," said Akira Nakane, 69, who served in the Okinawa provincial assembly from 1972 to 1995. "As long as American bases occupy 10 percent of our land, there will be problems."

There were conflicting accounts about what happened.

The rape reportedly took place shortly after 2 a.m. Friday at a parking lot in the town of Chatan -- in an area of restaurants and bars known as "American Village," not far from several U.S. military bases, Lt. Cmdr. Davis said.

A technical sergeant assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Group at Kadena Air Base was suspected in the assault, said lt. Cmdr. Davis, who said the sergeant had been drinking with the woman that night. Lt. Cmdr. Davis and Okinawan police declined to identify the sergeant.

The woman, however, told investigators she was drinking with a friend and was approached by a group of foreign men, including the suspect, when she went out to the parking lot, a police spokesman said on condition of anonymity.

The woman, who is in her 20s, said the men surrounded her and one of them raped her, the police spokesman said.

He said a passer-by told police that several men -- apparently U.S. servicemen -- participated in the attack and fled in a vehicle.

In Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz disputed that account, saying several servicemen "came to the rescue of the individual involved and may have helped to calm this incident down, which speaks well of those people."

Okinawa police have questioned as many as seven other U.S. servicemen, most as possible witnesses, the Pentagon spokesman said. They planned to summon an unspecified number of servicemen for questioning today, said Mr. Namihira, the prefectural police spokesman.


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

African Dust Brings Germs Across Ocean

By Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2001; 6:31 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010701/aponline183112_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- Dust from the African deserts is bringing germs and fungi across the Atlantic.

Researchers who tested samples of the dust collected last summer warn that "pathogenic microbes associated with dust clouds may pose a risk to ecosystem and human health."

While windborne transport of African dust to North and South America long has been known, scientists thought that few microbes would survive the trip because of exposure to ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere.

Researchers now believe the dust clouds themselves block enough of the light to protect bacteria and other microbes during the 5- to 7-day journey.

The findings of the group, led by Dale W. Griffin of the U.S. Geological Survey, are reported in the June issue of the journal Aerobiologia.

About 10 percent of the microbes identified were "opportunistic pathogens," Griffin said in a telephone interview.

They are organisms that do not cause disease in healthy humans, but could affect someone with a compromised immune system such as AIDS patients, the very old or young and transplant or cancer patients with suppressed immune systems, he said.

"For most healthy individuals, I don't think it's a problem," said Griffin, a public health and environmental microbiologist.

In addition, he said, some 25 percent of the microbes were known plant pathogens that affect elm trees or such crops as peaches, cotton and rice, he said.

Joseph M. Prospero, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami said his research in Barbados also has seen fungi and bacteria associated with African dust.

He said there has been a "very clear association" of sharply increased incidence of viable fungi and bacteria in African dust arrivals.

"There's no question you can transport a lot of stuff through the atmosphere," Prospero said in a telephone interview.

When the trajectories of the dust are traced backward, the dust clouds with the bacteria come only from Africa, while dust arriving from Europe or North America does not include bacteria, said Prospero, who was not associated with Griffin's team.

The movement of African dust across the ocean has been increasing in recent years with the growing drought in Africa. It peaks in June through October. Large dust arrivals have been measured over roughly 30 percent of the United States, with about half the volume settling on Florida.

"The high concentration of dust impacting the Caribbean may pose a significant public health threat, particularly as it pertains to respiratory disease," the researchers wrote.

They noted that once a person is sensitized to fungi, exposure to even small amounts can trigger an allergic reaction.

They cited a 17-fold increase in asthma prevalence in Barbados between 1973 and 1996. "This increase corresponds to the observed increase in African dust flux impacting Barbados."

The dust also has been implicated in coral reef damage in the Caribbean.

Griffin collected dust samples in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, and sent them to Virginia Harrison at the agency's laboratory in St. Petersburg, Fla., for testing.

Using NASA satellites to track the African dust clouds, they were able to take air samples both on clear days and days with dust plumes affecting the region.

On the dusty days there averaged 158 bacteria, 213 viruses and 201 fluorescent bacteria in about a quart of air. By comparison, the same volume of air on a clear day averaged 18 bacteria, 18 viruses and none of the fluorescent bacteria.

Other members of the research team included Jay R. Herman of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Eugene A. Shinn of the Geological Survey.

-------

Koizumi Won't Pursue Kyoto Without U.S.
Bush, Japanese Leader Pledge Cooperation on Alternative Global Warming Solutions

By Mike Allen and Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3345-2001Jun30?language=printer

SMITHSBURG, Md., June 30 -- Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told President Bush at a summit at Camp David today that he will not implement the Kyoto global warming treaty without U.S. participation, effectively killing the accord.

Some advocates of the Kyoto protocol had hoped Japan would join with European powers to abide by the treaty's emissions restrictions despite opposition from the United States. That could have given the treaty a sufficient level of participation to activate its provisions, but Koizumi seemed to rule that out.

"The president is enthusiastic about environmental issues, and there is still time to discuss this issue," Koizumi said at a brief photo session after their meeting. "Presently, I do not have the intention of proceeding without the cooperation of the United States."

The two leaders agreed to cooperate on alternative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions now that Bush has rejected the treaty. Administration officials said they hoped to cooperate on science and technology related to climate change.

The leaders of the world's two largest economies, both of whom took office this year, brought different concerns to their session, as Japan teeters back into recession and the United States faces international criticism over Bush's rejection of the Kyoto accord. Each came away with something.

Koizumi moderated his criticism of Bush's stance on Kyoto, which a week ago he had called deplorable. The president returned the favor by saying he had "no reservations" about the prime minister's economic reform agenda. Koizumi also refrained from questioning Bush's plans for missile defense, and the president expressed regret for incidents of sexual violence by U.S. troops in Okinawa.

Koizumi's economic revitalization plan departs from Japan's previous efforts by putting priority on deregulation and inducing banks to dispose of bad loans, rather than increasing government spending on public works. Although Japanese officials have warned that Koizumi's approach could keep the economy in the doldrums for two or three years -- and might cause the yen to weaken, hurting U.S. manufacturers by making Japanese imports cheaper -- Bush gave the prime minister his endorsement.

"He talks about tackling some difficult issues that some leaders in the past refused to address," Bush said after tossing a baseball with the prime minister. "I admire a person who recognizes that his duty is not to avoid, but to lead."

On another touchy subject, Koizumi maintained his ambiguous stance on Bush's plan to build a shield against ballistic missiles, which has drawn strong objections from Russia and China. At a post-summit briefing for reporters in Smithsburg, near Camp David, a senior administration official paraphrased Koizumi as having said: "We are a people in Japan who really believe in defense, and these are defensive systems, not offensive systems, so we ought to be exploring them."

Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense who is a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that was just a polite way of saying the prime minister wanted to avoid a conflict over the issue. He added that Koizumi's nod to Bush's concern about the environment could be very helpful to Bush going into the G-8 meeting of industrial powers in Italy in late July.

"Europeans are livid at the cavalier way we handled Kyoto," Korb said. "But now the prime minister is saying, 'This guy is not some Neanderthal.' "

Edward J. Lincoln, a Japan specialist at the Brookings Institution, said he found it surprising that Koizumi agreed not to implement Kyoto without trying to get something else in return. "Maybe he was overcome by the friendly embrace of Bush," Lincoln said.

The global-warming treaty -- which was signed by 168 nations in the Japanese city of Kyoto in 1997 but has not been ratified by any industrialized country -- set limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases believed by many scientists to disrupt the planet's climate.

Koizumi said at a news conference in Washington tonight that it would be "better for the world if the United States sides with the spirit of the protocol."

Koizumi, who at 59 is five years older than Bush, said after a lunch of crab cakes and Kobe beef that the leaders had agreed in "heart-to-heart" discussions that the United States and Japan "will be able to create means which will be more effective in dealing with the global warming issue and also in reducing our gas emissions."

In their private session, Koizumi raised the issue of the U.S. troop presence in Okinawa, a Japanese official said. The size of American military bases on the Japanese island has long been a point of tension. It was exacerbated Friday when U.S. troops were questioned in connection with the rape of a Japanese woman near the base, the latest of several similar incidents.

The senior administration official said Bush and Koizumi had "reaffirmed the importance of that presence in Japan for Japanese security, for allies' security and for the security of the region." But the official also said Bush "expressed regret about some of the incidents that have happened, and said that he had told the Pentagon in no uncertain terms that we had to do whatever we could to make certain that these kinds of things did not happen." The official said Friday's incident was not discussed.

In a joint statement prepared before the meeting, the leaders announced the formation of the U.S.-Japan Economic Partnership for Growth to provide a forum for the two governments to discuss economic policy and to include input from the private sector.

Koizumi is the third Japanese prime minister to visit the presidential retreat in western Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. He and Bush sped off on golf carts to a meeting with just a few aides. It had been scheduled to last 45 minutes and was to be followed by a larger meeting. U.S. officials said the two had such a "fantastic meeting" that they stayed in the private session for an hour and 50 minutes and never got to the big meeting.

In keeping with the casual spirit of the camp, neither man wore a jacket or tie, and Koizumi proudly told reporters he was wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt. Bush gave Koizumi a baseball and a Camp David jacket, and the prime minister reciprocated with a picture frame and digital camera.

"I believe strongly that we will have a good relationship," Bush said. "After all, he's the only world leader I've ever played catch with."

Blustein reported from Washington.

-------- genetics

Morality and Medicine: Reconsidering Embryo Research

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/01/weekinreview/01STOL.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON - IN his more than two decades as a United States senator, Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, has been firmly, fervently, against abortion. But about a year ago, Mr. Hatch said, he began wrestling with a question that challenged his beliefs: should the government pay for research on stem cells derived from human embryos, which are destroyed by the experiments?

A former medical liability lawyer, Mr. Hatch studied the science. A Mormon, he studied his faith. In quiet moments, he prayed. "I have searched my conscience," the senator said last week, explaining why he has broken with abortion opponents to support the research. "I just cannot equate a child living in the womb, with moving toes and fingers and a beating heart, with an embryo in a freezer."

Religion and science often collide, but politics is the arena in which, however painfully, they must coexist. Rare is the medical advance that has not forced politicians to grapple with matters better suited to theologians. Organ transplants raised questions about the precise moment of death. In vitro fertilization forced an examination of what makes a mother a mother. Cloning, a technology that might save lives, challenges the sanctity, and uniqueness, of human life.

This collision is especially brutal in the debate over embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to grow into any tissue or organ in the body, and therefore hold promise for treating disease. The issue was merely an abstraction until three years ago, when Dr. James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin became the first to isolate the cells, from excess embryos kept in cold storage at fertility clinics. Now moral convictions about when life begins are running smack into the real-world problems of relatives and constituents who are sick and desperate for cures.

As Mr. Hatch's soul-searching suggests, the debate is forcing many conservatives to reconsider the mantra of the anti-abortion movement: that life begins at conception. Just as liberals who favor a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy have discovered that they hold nuanced views about the morality of abortion, so too, it turns out, are there nuances among conservative abortion opponents.

"What we are finding is that it is not such a clear and bright line, even within the pro-life camp, because so many people are in that muddled middle, with complex views about what is the moral status of an embryo," said Dr. Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics institute. "The prospect of embryonic stem cells eventually leading to important new therapies is tipping the balance for a lot of people who think that embryos are not just bits of meaningless tissue."

In the Senate alone, those for whom the balance has tipped include Connie Mack, Strom Thurmond, Gordon Smith and John McCain, as well as Mr. Hatch. In addition, 30 House Republicans signed a letter last week supporting federal financing for embryonic stem cell research.

NOW the question is whether George W. Bush will add his name to that list. Last week, the National Institutes of Health sent the president a review of the scientific literature, which concluded the research promises a "a dazzling array" of treatments for a range of ills, from heart disease to diabetes. The report landed at a White House that is deeply divided, with the secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, arguing for funding, and the president's senior adviser, Karl Rove, arguing against.

For Mr. Bush, who believes, according to his spokesman, that "life should not be destroyed to save or make another life," the stakes are high. The White House is still recovering from Senator James Jeffords' departure from the Republican Party, which gave the Democrats control of the Senate and raised questions about whether Mr. Bush should do more to appeal to moderates. At the same time, in debates over global warming and missile defense, Mr. Bush has been stung by accusations that his policies ignore science in favor of politics.

"It is a difficult issue on an emotional and personal level, and it has very volatile politics," said Ralph Reed, the conservative political strategist who advised President Bush during last year's campaign. "Any time you are dealing with a policy issue that combines real human beings that are hurting with deeply held moral beliefs, it is always a very tough final call."

The White House is trying to come up with a compromise. Among the plans being considered, according to people familiar with the debate, is one that would prohibit embryonic stem cell studies but increase support for experiments involving adult stem cells, which are extracted from blood and bone marrow and therefore pose no moral questions. However the N.I.H. report concluded that, for some purposes, the embryonic cells are clearly superior.

Any compromise, of course, will alienate some voters. The question is who, and how many.

"The political mathematics for the Bush White House here is really a question of quantity versus quantity," said David J. Garrow, an historian at Emory University who has written about abortion politics. Some polls, including a recent one by ABC News, find most Americans favor the research. But, Dr. Garrow said, the White House must still worry about the extremely vocal "minority of antis" who do not.

As the debate continues, thousands of Americans with incurable illnesses are hanging in the balance. "Patients and the organizations that represent their interests are in a state of high anxiety," said Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research, a nonprofit group in Washington. "We are waiting on tenterhooks."

For the research to go forward, the Bush administration would have to adopt a rule, issued by the Clinton administration, designed to get around a Congressional ban on embryo research. The rule would permit federally financed experiments on cell lines derived from embryos, but not on the embryos themselves. Opponents say this is splitting hairs.

"It is a mistaken notion, or disingenuous, to say you can separate use of the cells from the act of having to destroy the embryos," said Dr. David A. Prentice, a professor of life sciences at Indiana State University, who opposes the research. For Dr. Prentice, life begins when sperm and egg are joined, and a new genome is created. "What makes us a human being?" he asks. "It's the genome."

OTHERS have been asking themselves that same question, however, and coming up with answers that are not always clear, even to themselves. "I do believe that life begins at conception," said Senator McCain, the Arizona Republican. But he said he was persuaded to support the research because the embryos may be lawfully discarded anyway.

That argument also helped convince Mr. Hatch, who says he believes human beings are created in the womb, not test tubes. "People who are pro-life," the senator said, "are also pro-life for existing life."

By coming out strongly in support of the research, Mr. Hatch added, he hopes he can provide President Bush "the leeway" to do the same. Clearly, that is what patient advocates are hoping as well. "It's the conservatives that are going to save the day for us," said Mr. Perry, of the Alliance for Aging Research. "God bless them."

-------- police / prisoners

Brazilian Official Guilty in Massacre

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A17
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4730-2001Jun30?language=printer

RIO DE JANEIRO, June 30 -- A former police commander was found guilty today of presiding over the worst prison massacre in Brazilian history, receiving a symbolic sentence of 638 years in a verdict heralded by human rights groups as a major step toward curbing police brutality in Latin America's largest country.

A jury found Col. Ubiratan Guimaraes responsible for the actions of troops who stormed Sao Paulo's Carandiru prison with machine guns, rifles and pistols during a riot on Oct. 2, 1992. The assault at Latin America's largest prison complex -- a deteriorated structure housing more than 7,000 inmates -- resulted in the deaths of 102 prisoners.

Guimaraes was sentenced to six years for each death. He also received 20 years for five attempted murders, though he will spend no more than 30 years in jail -- the maximum penalty under Brazilian law.

The 10-day trial gripped Brazilians who recalled pictures of the bloody corpses that became front-page news, shocked the nation and sparked international criticism at the time. Many of the mutilated corpses were naked, which human rights groups consider to be a sign of an inmate's surrender. Human rights groups maintain the death toll was much higher than the official figure.

The trial was viewed as a test for national tolerance of police brutality. In Sao Paulo, the world's third-largest city, police kill one person on average every nine hours.

Human rights officials said they hoped the verdict would give the police pause when dealing with the current explosion of riots by prison inmates protesting inadequate conditions. In February, police killed seven prisoners, and fellow inmates killed 13, in Brazil's biggest prison riot, involving 29,000 inmates in 27 jails.

"This verdict breaks the rule of impunity in the judicial system in regards to crimes permitted by the police," said Maria Luisa Mendonca, director of Global Justice in Sao Paulo.

Guimaraes, 58, will remain free during his appeal, said defense attorney Vicente Cascione. Guimaraes is the first person convicted in the case. but 83 others have been charged.

--------

Tampa installs high-tech security cameras

USA Today
07/01/2001 - Updated 05:53 PM ET
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/07/01/big-brother.htm

TAMPA (AP) - Tampa is using high-tech security cameras to scan the city's streets for people wanted for crimes, a law enforcement tactic that some liken to Big Brother.

A computer software program linked to 36 cameras began scanning crowds Friday in Tampa's nightlife district, Ybor City, matching results against a database of mug shots of people with outstanding arrest warrants.

European cities and U.S government offices, casinos and banks are already using the so-called face-printing system, but Tampa is the first American city to install a permanent system along public streets, The Tampa Tribune reported Sunday.

A similar system was used at Super Bowl XXXV, which was held in Tampa last January.

"Tampa is really leading the pack here," said Frances Zelazny, a spokeswoman for Visionics Corp., which produces the "FaceIt" software.

The software has raised concerns over privacy, ethics and government intrusion.

"This is Big Brother actually implemented," said Jack Walters of the Tampa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "I think this just opens the door to it being everywhere."

But Tampa Detective Bill Todd says FaceIt is no different than having a police officer standing on a street holding a mug shot.

At the Super Bowl, a Visionics competitor, Graphco Technologies, wired cameras around Raymond James Stadium and in Ybor City.

The computer spotted 19 people at the crowded stadium with outstanding warrants, all for minor offenses. But no arrests were made.

"During the Super Bowl, we got overwhelmed," Todd said. "That's the other thing: When you get a match, how quickly can you get to these people?"

Business owners have mixed emotions about the new technology.

"I don't know if I like it," said Vicki Doble, who owns The Brew Pub. "It may be a bit too much."

Don Barco, owner of King Corona Cigars Bar & Cafe, approves of the cameras but says they may not be as effective as the city hopes.

"Sometimes these high-tech toys, they tend to give a little too much credence to what they do," he said.

-------- activists

We Bombed In Vieques

By Mary McGrory,
Washington Post
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2067-2001Jun29?language=printer

Not so long ago, Vieques was a dot in the Caribbean, a small, pretty island that the U.S. Navy has been quietly bombing for 60 years. Now, thanks to an indecisive decision by President Bush, a pigheaded performance by Navy brass, and brutish, not to mention jackbooted behavior by Navy police -- many of them strip-search specialists -- Vieques has become world famous.

It is a rallying point for advocates of civil rights, human rights and the environment. It has become a flashpoint between right and left. It has activated members of two prominent political dynasties, the Cuomos and the Kennedys, and it could be an issue in the New York governor's race.

Next Friday, in San Juan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined thousands of Puerto Ricans in protest of the naval exercises, will be tried in federal court. He will be represented by none other than former New York governor Mario Cuomo, the lately silent golden voice of the Democrats. Cuomo's son Andrew is married to Kennedy's sister Kerry. Andrew is a candidate for governor, and New York's Republican governor, George Pataki, is heavily in sympathy with the Vieques protest. Kennedy is charged with trespassing. He will be tried with two confederates, Dennis Rivera, president of the largest health care union in the country, and actor Edward James Olmos. All three say they were treated like dogs by Navy police and actually put in dog kennels overnight and deprived of counsel on the grounds that they were not arrested, only "detained."

None of the hullabaloo can be helping the Bush administration with its all-out overtures to the Hispanic vote. The House Hispanic Caucus, after publication of New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's vivid account of the manhandling and abuse inflicted on peaceful protesters, met recently on the Hill. One victim was Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who was literally kicked around by Navy policemen even though a video shows him following all orders. One uniformed zealot put a foot on the congressman's neck and told him to put his face in the dirt. When some protesters told the guard that Gutierrez was a congressman, the guard laughed.

Karl Rove, the crafty strategist who helped steer Bush into the Oval Office, is particularly proprietary of the Hispanic vote, but he was plainly torn between new friends and old: The right can't stand uppity little commonwealths that have the nerve to tell the military they don't want the racket of bombs and shells -- or the ensuing contamination. Bush's inconclusive conclusion about Vieques was issued during his stop in Goteborg, Sweden, on June 14. What the president said, in effect, was that using the island for target practice was a rotten thing to do to friends and neighbors -- and that we're going to keep doing it for only two more years. Those who were getting arrested to stop the bombing now were no more infuriated than those who never want it to stop at all.

The tone of the public debate was set by the far-right senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe. He called Puerto Rican protesters "ungrateful, myopic and misinformed." He later characterized the protesters as "Hollywood publicity-seekers or frustrated New York City political activists." He exhorted the people of Vieques to be like the people of Fort Sill, who welcome military installations in their midst. Fort Sill contributes greatly to the local economy. The Navy firing range in Vieques does nothing in the way of providing jobs.

Rep. James V. Hansen (R-Utah) chimed in with another jarring quote: He said on NPR that he didn't think that Puerto Ricans should get any special treatment. "They sit down there on welfare and very few of them paying taxes, got a sweetheart deal."

Perhaps the most unseemly and surely the most untimely display of all came at a House Armed Services Committee hearing, where members pounded on the new secretary of the Navy, Gordon England, the way the Navy planes pound on the landscape of Vieques. It was England's task to defend the witless Bush edict. He was accused of practically everything but treason for letting Puerto Ricans believe they are entitled to the citizens' right to petition the government, which is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and at the heart of the holiday we celebrate this week.

No one defended Bush's decision. Nor did anyone mention that Navy authorities could easily find substitute sites, or that the amphibious landings it wants to practice there are obsolete. There's no storming ashore any more, because the increased range of missile batteries makes it impossible to decant troops on the beach. Retired Adm. Eugene Carroll, who is, lamentably, leaving the Center for Defense Information, knows all about it. It doesn't seem too much to expect Armed Services Committee members to check such basic information out.

Rep. Gutierrez says that what he did on the beautiful island of Vieques was totally in the American tradition, going back to the Boston Tea Party. "That was civil disobedience," he says defiantly. Congress should read the Constitution over the holiday.

--------

Protesters Confront Police at Salzburg Summit

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-forum-d.html

SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - Austrian riot police baton-charged several hundred anti-globalization demonstrators protesting against a European economic summit in Salzburg on Sunday and several arrests were made, eyewitnesses said.

After a standoff lasting several hours during which there had been sporadic violence, police with dogs waded into the crowd, striking demonstrators with batons and making several arrests, Reuters correspondent David Chance reported.

``Police charged and made a big push and the response from the demonstrators was to use flagpoles to start beating on police shields,'' he said.

At least one policeman was injured and carried away by colleagues. Police, who had earlier completely hemmed in the demonstrators, said at least four arrests had been made.

The start of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) sixth annual European Economic summit, attended by some 15 heads of state and government as well as ministers and hundreds of business executives, was not disrupted by the clashes.

Demonstrators had been kept well away from the conference center, where the summit was due to continue until Tuesday.

The main issues were likely to be enlargement of the European Union and the mounting crisis in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, where ethnic Albanian rebels are battling government forces.

The future of Yugoslavia and Russia were also on the agenda.

Salzburg police chief Karl Schweiger said earlier that police had been trying to persuade the demonstrators, who were kept well away from the conference center, to disperse.

``I am informed that four people have been arrested,'' he said. Reporters later saw other demonstrators being carried away.

Security was the tightest ever seen in Austria's fourth largest city, best known as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and for the 1960s film ``The Sound of Music,'' filmed here and in Salzburg's spectacular Alpine surroundings.

Anti-capitalist protesters have disrupted numerous international gatherings in recent years and Salzburg police were determined to prevent a recurrence of the serious violence seen at an EU summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, last month.

Most of the left-wing demonstrators, who carried placards with slogans such as ``Smash the power of the banks and corporations,'' had dispersed after a rally, which began in the square near Salzburg railway station.

Austria last week temporarily reimposed border controls on its frontiers with Germany and Italy, suspending the Schengen accord under which most EU countries allow travel without passport checks.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said he was deeply saddened by the fact that such tight security measures were necessary in Salzburg.

``I wouldn't have anything against speaking to people who hold views different from mine right here in front of the congress center,'' Verheugen told reporters.

``But you can't do that when there's the danger violence will be used, which is both terrible and deplorable.''

---------

Protesters Rally at Economic Summit

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Austria-Summit.html

SALZBURG, Austria (AP) -- Holed up in a fortified convention center, the continent's political and business leaders pledged to continue European enlargement Sunday as hooded anti-globalization protesters showered riot police with bottles on the streets outside.

With helicopters circling overhead, hundreds of activists tried to break through walls of police clad in black, full-body armor as they marched on the meeting hall, where convention organizers opened the European Economic Summit.

At one point, they pelted police with bottles and sticks causing officers to charge the crowd, batons swinging.

Authorities had earlier sealed off the convention hall with rings of barricades that turned this ancient alpine tourist destination into a fortified maze of checkpoints.

Waving communist hammer-and-sickle flags, the activists were repeatedly turned back. They continued chanting, ``Our world is not for sale, put the bankers into jail!''

Despite the scuffles, it was business as usual inside the gleaming convention hall built especially for the summit. The event, hosted by the World Economic Forum and chaired by billionaire financier George Soros, runs through Tuesday.

Topping the agenda Sunday was the issue of European Union enlargement.

Nearly all panelists, mostly from central and eastern Europe, applauded the breakthrough agreement last month in Goteborg, Sweden, when the European Union agreed to admit new members from the formerly communist east by 2004.

``Nobody questioned the idea of enlargement,'' said Guenter Verheugen, the European commissioner overseeing the complex entry negotiations. ``For the 15 member states, it's strategic objective Number One. For candidate countries, it's a light at the end of the tunnel.''

Representatives from candidate countries remained upbeat that their membership bids would not be delayed by a June 7 Irish vote rejecting the treaty that prepares the way for expansion.

But they also warned that leaders in EU and candidates countries need to try harder to sell enlargement to their citizens.

``We shouldn't exaggerate this referendum,'' Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said. ``We have to show them that their interests are protected and that enlargement is good for all of Europe. He added that Poland was still pushing to wrap up negotiations in 2002 and be among the first group of entrants.

Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Cyprus and Estonia are expected to be the first to join the European Union. Slovakia, Malta, Latvia and Lithuania -- which started talks later -- are also making good progress.

Verheugen said Sunday that all candidates except Romania and Bulgaria have a shot at joining the European Union as early as 2004.

Even countries not in the running championed European expansion Sunday.

``The enlargement process is of special interest and importance in the Balkan countries,'' said Zoran Djindjic, prime minister of Serbia, the larger of the two remaining Yugoslav republics.

``We are the region that is under the highest danger of disintegration,'' Djindjic said, adding that EU enlargement would allow the Balkans region to ``focus on integration instead of disintegration.''

Anti-globalization protesters and self-stylized anarchists were less convinced of the summit's agenda. Sunday's clashes injured at least two protesters and one police officer.

The unrest came after street fighting left 70 people injured at the Goteborg summit and similar rioting injured 32 people at an anti-World Bank rally last weekend in Barcelona, Spain.

Local press reports estimated nearly 5,000 police were on duty to try and prevent similar mayhem from erupting in the hometown of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

After boxing in about 300 protesters late Sunday evening, police chief Karl Schweiger offered to let free any activist willing to be searched and provide identification.

Minutes later, a hail of bottles and sticks rained down on his officers, who then charged the crowd. Police spokeswoman Sonja Fiegel said 11 activists were arrested for disorderly conduct.

The standoff ended peacefully late in the evening after police said they struck a deal to escort the crowd to the main rail station. A special train was waiting there to return the estimated hundreds who came from Vienna.

---------

Protesters Want Sen. McCain Removed

New York Times
July 1, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-McCain-Protest.html

PHOENIX (AP) -- Four demonstrations were held across Arizona, rallying for Republican Sen. John McCain's removal from office because of what protesters called his Democratic leanings.

About 100 people, some with guns strapped to their belts, protested McCain's support for gun control legislation in front of his Tempe office on Saturday.

``He's still trying to maintain the Republican side, but he should leave,'' said Marion Griffin, a Republican. ``Right now, he's trying to play both sides.''

In May, the Arizona senator sponsored a bill with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., that would mandate criminal background checks for buyers at gun shows with at least 75 weapons on sale.

Protesters also criticized McCain's cosponsorship of the patients' bill of rights introduced by Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Edwards. The measure would allow patients to sue health maintenance organizations for denied, delayed or bad care. It has been strongly opposed by President Bush.

Rallies were also held in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma on Saturday.

Protesters circulated petitions for McCain's recall, hoping to collect the required 349,269 signatures of registered voters by Oct. 16.

Federal elected officials are not subject to Arizona's recall laws but McCain is among officeholders who have agreed to resign if they lose a recall election.

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Rainbows come from all over the spectrum

By Mark Heinz,
Times-News writer,
07/01/2001
http://www.magicvalley.com/archives/sevenday/index.asp?archiveDate=07.01.2001&fileView=topstory.inc

STANLEY -- Who are these people, and why are they here?

There could be as many answers to those questions as there are members of the Rainbow Family gathered around an expansive meadow about an hour northwest of Stanley.

A small, scraggly, middle-aged man calling himself "Chink Bob Lee" came to the gathering for some respite from the horrible memories he said still haunt him more than 30 years after he saw combat in Vietnam.

Duane, a burly man with close-cropped hair and several hoop earrings, was there to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.

A young man called "Free Spirit" -- who bounded naked around the camp on Wednesday with flowers in his hair -- said he wanted to drop all pretense and purify himself.

A slender, graceful, college-age woman who went by "Marybeth" hoped to help heal battered bodies and bruised egos at one of the camp's medical stations.

And "Felipe," a weather-worn member of the Yakia tribe -- indigenous to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States -- said he was trying to share his grandmother's wisdom of peace and respect with children at the gathering.

The Rainbows seemed as welcoming to strangers as they were apparently fearful of the U.S. Forest Service, the media and other entities of the outside world -- which they call "Babylon."

Rainbows constantly reminded media photographers not to take pictures without asking permission, and only a very few were willing to identify themselves other than by their first names or Rainbow Family monikers.

Clean-cut, well spoken and claiming to be a medical doctor from Southern California, "Mike" -- who worked at the camp's information center -- said the Rainbows are rightfully skittish about giving out too much information. That's because the Forest Service wants to profile the "leaders" of the organization, which claims to have no leaders, and target those people for tickets or possibly even arrests, he said.

"Welcome home, family"

A journey into Rainbow land began in a clearing the group had turned into its parking lot for the duration of the gathering -- which is expected to climax on the Fourth of July.

Even there, eclectic images were easy to come by.

Under the threat of rain Wednesday afternoon, a young couple cursed their dilapidated '80s-vintage Dodge van, which sputtered out over and over as they tried to make their way into the lot. As soon as they cleared the road, a spanking-new Chysler convertible came bouncing along the other way.

Occasional whoops and yowls could be heard from the nearby "A-camp" -- the area set aside for chemically dependent Rainbows.

Along a narrow trail leading to the main meadow, Rainbows met each other with the group's standard greeting: "Welcome home, family."

Authorities said about 3,600 Rainbows were at the site Wednesday afternoon. And the camp had grown noticeably by sunset Thursday.

It would be impossible for any single set of eyes to asses the makeup of the camp. But the Rainbows there Wednesday and Thursday seemed to be overwhelmingly Caucasian. Older teen-agers and twenty-somethings were apparently the most strongly represented age demographic -- although families with babies, toddlers or school-aged children weren't hard to spot. Dogs by the dozen roamed the camp site, and a few Rainbows also packed along cats, birds and other pets.

Small knots of Rainbows here and there passed around marijuana pipes or joints, and a few in the bustling "trade circle" area were visibly impaired by drugs. But during daylight hours at least, the vast majority appeared to be lucid and sober.

The rules of everyday casual fashion were turned upside-down in Rainbow world. Here and there were people dressed in neat clothing from Patagonia or other top-self companies. But most were clothed in just about every type of offbeat fashion imaginable. Hare Krishnas in colorful robes rubbed elbows with heavy-metal freaks sporting leather and multiple body and facial piercings. Aging hippies in rags and scantily clad youngsters with tattoos haggled over deals in the trade circle area. And more than a few Rainbows went about barefoot.

The sound of tribal drums was constant in and around the camp -- which stretched for miles near a gigantic open meadow and back into the trees and nearby slopes. Many people played acoustic guitars with various degrees of proficiency. And late Thursday, a youth with a portable amplifier tucked into his backpack strolled around and proudly blasted out a few chords from an electric guitar.

Throughout the day and into the night Thursday, a tall, gangly man in colorful garb stomped about yelling, "free Rainbow hugs!" A few took him up on his offer and shared brief, warm embraces.

"A fully-functional city"

Though the Rainbows claim to be not so much a group as they are a gathering of leaderless, like-minded individuals, they seemed to pride themselves on the infrastructure of their camp.

"Within a few days to a week, we can establish a fully functional city with all the services except electricity," Chink Bob Lee said.

That includes setting up kitchens, stocking and manning medical stations and arming a few begrudging Rainbows with shovels and sending them out on "canine Claymore patrol," he said.

Chink Bob Lee was part of the "Shanti Sena" camp.

The Rainbows claim the Shanti Sena -- named for a Sanskrit phrase meaning peace keepers -- can solve almost all the group's social squabbles and criminal problems by acting as an internal police force.

Shanti Sena member "Michael" said he'd been staying awake most nights on fire patrol. Rainbows are discouraged from building fires at their own campsites, he said, because that would increase the chances of a wildfire breaking out.

The gathering's social centers are makeshift kitchens set up by groups of anywhere from a few to a few dozen Rainbows. They offer free food around the clock, and all pitch in for a mass supper served in the "main circle" area in the big meadow just before sundown.

Each kitchen is given a title -- such as "Lovin' Ovens," "Jesus Kitchen" or "Tea Time." And members try to churn out enough food and coffee to keep up with the demands of passers-by.

Ingenuity plays a big part in getting the cooking gear, utensils and other needs of a kitchen into the remote gathering area, said "Tim Bear," who was helping tend the "Musical Veggie" kitchen.

"That table over there, you can flip it over, put the wheels on it, and it's a cart," he said.

Marybeth said clinics such as the one out of which she was working are called "calm centers."

Rainbows are able to handle just about any medical situation, up to an including some life-threatening emergencies at the calm centers or the camp's central clinic, she said. The centers offer free condoms and hygiene products, Marybeth said. And they serve as counseling centers for Rainbows who are having an emotional crisis or are simply in need of a friendly ear, she said.

Near the far end of the meadow, Felipe and several other adults -- most of them young mothers -- watched over a busy gob of small children at the "kiddie camp." The camp included a small kitchen, art and craft supplies and dozens of plastic toys.

Far down the trail from kiddie camp and miles away from the front parking lot, a Rainbow calling himself "Gray Ogre" was in charge of the main supply depot.

A tall, jolly man with a linebacker's build, Gray Ogre said he drew upon organizational skills gained from 11 years of service in the U.S. Navy to keep the supply depot running smoothly. The process began with the passing of "the magic hat" for donations around the Rainbow camp, he said.

"We'll take your pennies, we'll take your nickels, we'll take your $100 bills," he said.

That money is used to buy groceries in nearby towns, he said. And Rainbows making supply runs are also encouraged to check in Dumpsters at stores and warehouses for supplies.

"You would be amazed by how much bread gets thrown out just because it's a day or two past the expiration date," Gray Ogre said.

Once supply runners return to the depot, Gray Ogre said it was his job to make sure goods get distributed to the kitchens in a fair manner.

A stout pole he called the "ogre stick" helped ensure nobody got more than their fair share, he said.

"One, two, three -- circle!"

As Thursday waned into evening, Rainbows began filtering into the main circle area, which had been marked out in the big meadow by long poles laid down end-to-end in the grass.

"Main circle," held every night just before sunset, gives Rainbows a chance to share supper, air gripes and visit, members said.

When it became apparent that many members of the camp were dragging their feet Thursday, the hundreds who were already there began occasionally yelling in unison.

"One, two, three -- circle!"

Once the Rainbows had arrived en masse, supper organizers did their best to get the crowd to form two circles, one inside the other. Groups of servers packed massive containers of food along the lane between the circles and served the crowd. People also trotted up and down the lane making announcements or requests.

"We need a pickup or a good, stout van to make supply runs," one man shouted as he walked along. "Anybody got one?"

After supper, Rainbows began trickling back to their individual camps to sleep, socialize or entertain one another.

At one California-based camp, "Pat" from San Diego made preparations for a fire-breathing demonstration.

Two fire extinguishers held a prominent spot among the supplies he had laid out in a Radio Flyer wagon.

"I've been on fire enough times to know it's not good to be on fire for very long," Pat said as he and others from his camp prepared to put on a fire show.

As two men and a woman tried to work out elaborate rhythms on tribal drums, Pat was joined by "Deanna" and "Jetta Moonraven" a few yards out into the meadow.

In the deepening darkness, Jetta and Deanna used tiny torches attached to chains to whirl in elaborate patterns over their heads and about their bodies. Pat sucked mouthfuls of Coleman camp fuel out of a plastic beverage bottle and blew bursts of flame by spitting the gas toward a torch he held.

Flames hissed in the thin high-country air as the curious stopped to watch the show, yammer and cheer.

Times-News reporter Mark Heinz can be reached at 735-3238 or by e-mail at mheinz@magicvalley.com

What's it all about?

STANLEY -- Members of the Rainbow Family claim their annual gathering revolves around a "meditation for world peace" held on the Fourth of July.

Here's what some of the people at the gathering site northwest of Stanley this week had to say about what else brought them there:

"Chink Bob Lee"

A middle-aged Oklahoman who said he saw combat in the mid '60s in Vietnam, Chink Bob Lee said the gathering helps him fight his personal monsters.

"I haven't slept through the night in over 30 years. I don't trust anybody because of what happened over there," he said. "The only times I can be around a large number of people and be relaxed is at the gathering and -- believe it or not -- in a bingo hall."

"Free Sprit"

He's a tall twenty-something who had a taste for running around naked -- at least until other Rainbows encouraged him to keep his nudity to his own camp site. For him, the gathering was about finding purity.

"When I am naked, I am not hiding from anything, I have no fear."

"Duane"

A stocky, earnest man, Duane claims he and his camp mates were called to start attending the gatherings for a spiritual mission.

"We heard a lot of Christians would not come here because it's a bad place," he said. "So we thought, 'We need to go there, because that's just the sort of place Jesus would go to minister.'"

"Marybeth"

A college-aged woman who wore modest clothing but sported some of the heavy peircings that are apparently gaining popularity with her generation, she said the gathering gives her a chance to help heal. She took up a post at one of the gathering's impromptu clinics, called "calm centers."

"I hope to help people with their bumps, bruises and bruised egos."

Rory Ridley

A 30-ish computer tech from Austin, Ridley said the gathering gives him a chance to escape the daily grind of the outside world and expand his horizons.

"I wanted to see some of the different way people do things, and get some good ideas."

"Gray Ogre"

Big, gruff and imposing, but still quite friendly, Gray Ogre said he finds a deep sense of satisfaction by being in charge of the gathering's main food supply depot. He said a messy divorce and trouble with creditors drove him out of mainstream society and into the Rainbow Family.

"I'm a dedicated Family man," he said. "My war cry is, 'feed the Family.' My Rainbow motto is, 'turn the TV off.'"



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