------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
India and Pakistan Trade Barbs
A Summit Meeting of Old Foes: India and Pakistan
S. Korea Students Burn U.S. Flag
Test of Missile Shield Set for Tonight
Intercept test kicks off US race for missile defenses
U.S. to Launch Interceptor Missile
Powell: U.S. to Seek Missile Agreement with Russia
Missile Defense Developments
Powell Says U.S. Will Seek Arms Accord With Russia
Russia Now Courting China
U.S. to Launch Interceptor Missile
'Contradictory' U.S. Words on ABM Issue Puzzle Russia
Cold War's Human Costs Linger
Hanford to determine speed of radioactive plume transmission
Excerpts of Powell Interview
MILITARY
Mass Grave Holding Kosovars Found
AU Seeks $87 Million In Burial Of Weapons
RESERVIST JAILED FOR REFUSAL
Sen. Clinton Arrives in Puerto Rico
Review Fractures Pentagon
OTHER
Ethanol Lobby Hopes to Lock in New Market
U.S. Opposes Plan for Financing of Clean Energy Over Fossil Fuel
President, With a Variety of Steps, Addresses Climate Change
Bush boosts global-warming study
Scientists Puzzle Over New Climate Data
Unexpected Priority: Stem Cell Research's Rise as a Test for Bush
Va. Candidates Debate Stem Cells
Women Elders Arrested
Added Rights for Indians Are Ratified In Mexico
China's human rights record not a game
Police to Return to Streets in Ravaged Brazil City
Inmate Used Fake ID Card to Escape
Bush Welcomes China Scholar Release
China to Deport U.S. Scholar
ACTIVISTS
Gensuikyo protests against U.S. Missile Test
Oppose the "Missile Defense Program"
Homeless Rally in South Africa
Policy of Jailing Protesters on Minor Crimes Is Revoked
Egypt Unemployed Clash With Police
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- india / pakistan
India and Pakistan Trade Barbs
Hope for Progress on Kashmir Dims as Talks Near
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 14, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60735-2001Jul13?language=printer
NEW DELHI, July 13 -- Hopes for a breakthrough in this weekend's talks between the leaders of India and Pakistan have dimmed palpably in the past two days, with officials of both countries making tough pronouncements that reflect deep mistrust and hostility between the neighboring nuclear rivals.
The negative comments have come despite a flurry of welcoming gestures by India as it prepares to receive Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military leader and president. He is due to arrive Saturday for the first bilateral talks since early 1999, when an invasion by Pakistan-backed guerrillas scuttled the attempt at negotiations.
On Thursday, Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said he was "optimistic" about the talks but added that there was no chance that India would soften its stance on Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by both countries, and no possibility of allowing a referendum by Kashmiri voters.
Musharraf has said repeatedly he wants the talks to focus on Kashmir, but Singh and other officials insist it is only one among a panoply of bilateral issues that should figure in a "composite dialogue."
"Kashmir is not the core issue" between India and Pakistan, Singh said. "It is the core of Indian nationhood."
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who invited Musharraf for talks in late May, said today that talks cannot succeed unless Pakistan provides a "noncombative atmosphere" and is willing to go beyond a "single point agenda." He said India "is ready to steer the course, but one hand cannot clap."
In turn, Musharraf, who has called for renewed talks for a year, said in Pakistan today that he rejects the two major agreements, reached between Indian and Pakistani leaders in 1972 and 1999, which India says must be the starting point for any new negotiations.
"Any leadership in Pakistan that makes any deals where Kashmir is sidelined, I can say with full certainty, that treaty will never go forward," Musharraf said. He also rejected any move to convert the Line of Control, the militarized line between the Indian and Pakistani portions of Kashmir, into a permanent border -- a compromise proposal some have suggested for the summit.
To some extent, the negative signals suddenly emanating from Islamabad and New Delhi may be pre-summit posturing that will end once Musharraf and Vajpayee are alone. Both men have an enormous stake in the meeting's success -- Vajpayee because of India's claims to regional leadership and world stature as a peace-loving democracy, and Musharraf because his economically ailing and diplomatically isolated country can no longer afford the albatross of its costly Kashmir crusade.
Nevertheless, the sudden chill appears to have been precipitated by several statements and actions from Pakistan this week that annoyed and angered India. First, after Musharraf and Vajpayee agreed to tone down hostile rhetoric, Pakistan suddenly condemned Indian "oppression and repression" in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir.
Then Musharraf invited leaders of separatist political parties in Indian Kashmir to a diplomatic tea here on Saturday, despite India's strong objections. The Kashmiris had complained that their views were being left out of the summit and had requested a meeting with Musharraf during his visit.
Finally, Pakistan has responded coolly to recent Indian goodwill gestures that included offering scholarships to Pakistani students, releasing fishermen who were jailed after they strayed into Indian waters and announcing plans to ease local travel across the Line of Control. Indian and Pakistani Kashmir have been divided since 1947.
Some Pakistani officials and Kashmiri leaders in India have said they feared such gestures are intended to divert the summit from the Kashmir issue and reduce pressure on India to accept any meaningful compromise in the dispute.
As a result of the new antagonism, politicians and commentators in India said this week that there is virtually no chance for a breakthrough at the summit, reminding the public that Pakistan still backs the separatist insurgency in Kashmir and suggesting that the most the two leaders can achieve is an agreement to hold more talks in the future.
"Signals emanating from Islamabad over the last few days are not reassuring, and avoidable controversies have been allowed to cast a shadow over the summit," said Madhavrao Scindia, a leader of the opposition Congress party. "Pakistan has made no effort to tame the terrorist groups that continue to kill innocents," he added, warning that Musharraf may allow the peace talks to be "hijacked" by Islamic militant forces in Pakistan.
Several Pakistani analysts said it was unrealistic to expect the two leaders to reach a compromise on Kashmir but the talks themselves are a sign of significant progress.
"The process is as important as the outcome," said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of strategic studies at Quaid-I-Azam University in Islamabad. "People tend to forget that this is not a meeting between friends, but between adversaries who have recently spilled blood. If they can talk, build trust and start to move away from confrontation and towards peace, the exercise will be a success."
----
A Summit Meeting of Old Foes: India and Pakistan
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/international/14INDI.html?searchpv=nytToday
NEW DELHI, July 13 - In the more than two years since India and Pakistan fought a brutal little war in the frigid, lifeless reaches of the Himalayas, the leaders of the two nuclear-armed foes have not sat down to talk about how to live in peace.
But this morning, at India's invitation, Gen. Pervez Musharraf - the Pakistani military ruler identified by most Indians as the nefarious author of Pakistan's incursion into Indian territory in 1999 - arrived for a three-day summit meeting that will begin here in the capital with a ceremonial reception.
General Musharraf's flight landed at a military airport this morning, and he emerged from the plane wearing not an army uniform, but a long, cream colored jacket known as a sherwani and loose white pants that befit the new status he has given himself as president of Pakistan. He cordially shook hands with a collection of Indian officials. And later today, he and India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will meet for the first time.
The general and Mr. Vajpayee, have no set agenda and no scripted finale for their two days of talks, which will take place in Agra in a hotel near the Taj Mahal.
But they are certain to discuss Kashmir, the ravishingly beautiful territory that both countries claim and that some analysts fear could become a nuclear flash point.
The outcome is so uncertain that the two leaders have not scheduled a joint news conference for Monday, the last day of the summit meeting. As bargaining positions leading up to the talks have hardened in the last week, both sides have cautioned that no breakthroughs should be expected.
Their modest hope seems to be that they can pick up the threads of a conversation that were abruptly snipped two summers ago. It was then that India discovered Pakistani soldiers dug into craggy peaks in the Kargil sector of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
That occurred just months after Mr. Vajpayee had journeyed to Pakistan and the nations had promised to settle their differences at the bargaining table.
"It is always good to keep talking," Mr. Vajpayee told a Pakistani journalist on Thursday.
Progress in the negotiations will largely depend on whether the general and the prime minister can find a way to begin thinking about a compromise on India's and Pakistan's carefully nurtured, diametrically opposed positions on Kashmir, a territory they have been fighting and dying over since their independence from Britain in 1947.
It would be difficult to conjure two men whose styles are more different or who are better placed to lead their peoples away from violent conflict.
Both have bases in hawkish constituencies - Mr. Vajpayee in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and General Musharraf in the Pakistani Army - that would help them make a deal with less risk of being called soft-headed at home.
In India, many people think the country has a better chance negotiating something lasting with a military ruler than with the weak elected leaders Pakistan had during the last decade. Col. V. N. Thapar, whose son Vijyand, 22, was killed during an assault on Three Pimple Knoll in the Kargil war in June 1999, thinks it makes sense to talk to General Musharraf.
"He's in a good position to deliver peace," Colonel Thapar said. "All the authority and power is vested in his hands. He can take the decision. It is a very opportune moment."
The colonel's wife, Tripta, whose living room is a shrine to the memory of their son, agreed. "Our son can't come back," she said. "But I don't want other mothers to lose their sons. He's the man who has the authority to stop this terrorism."
In the fractured democratic politics of India, Mr. Vajpayee has a different kind of authority than the general, but his party has traditionally been seen as hard-line on India's dealings with Pakistan, an Islamic nation that is smaller and economically weaker than India, a secular, predominantly Hindu country.
Mr. Vajpayee is himself perhaps best known to the world for secretly deciding that India should conduct nuclear tests in 1998, but his reputation in India is that of a peacemaker.
His knees creaky with arthritis, Mr. Vajpayee, 76, is given to enigmatic nods and ponderous silences in conversation, but he is still widely revered here as an orator, poet and elder statesman whose half-century in public life and benevolent, grandfatherly appearance have endowed him with a credibility that transcends party.
In contrast, General Musharraf, 57, is a brisk, supremely self-confident former commando who loves to talk in long, free-form interviews. He has methodically consolidated his power since he took over as Pakistan's ruler in a bloodless coup in October 1999. He has exiled the prime minister he toppled and recently elevated himself to the presidency, a civilian post.
But his greatest authority still emanates from his as yet unchallenged leadership of the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan and the one with the deepest stake in continuing hostilities with India.
Generals have ruled Pakistan for 26 of its 53 years. And the army's identity, as well as its claim on a huge share of the impoverished nation's public resources, grew out of three full-fledged wars with India.
For months General Musharraf has seemed like a politician on the campaign trail, trying to convince the public in a barrage of interviews with Indian journalists that he is not the demon he has been made out to be for his role in the Kargil conflict.
"We must not live in history," he told the Times of India last week. "I have been saying this all along because if we talk of Kargil, we will open a Pandora's box."
For General Musharraf, the bitterly intertwined histories of India and Pakistan have a profoundly personal meaning. He is arriving in New Delhi, not just as a the leader of India's most dangerous adversary, but as a native son who will venture to his birthplace today in the alleys of old Delhi on Saturday for the first time since he was 4. Days before India and Pakistan gained their independence in 1947 - severed from each other in a moment known as Partition - the general's Muslim family fled to Pakistan, narrowly escaping the cataclysm of religious hatred in which perhaps a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed.
And as the general has made clear day after day, in speech after speech, that he will insist at the talks in Agra that India deal with another piece of unfinished business from Partition: the fate of Kashmir, India's only predominantly Muslim state.
India's and Pakistan's claims on Kashmir, based on conflicting narratives of a complicated shared history, have been repeated so often that they have become a kind of mantra and reflect the two countries' divergent conceptions of nationhood.
Pakistan maintains that Kashmir should have been given the right to choose in a referendum whether to join India or Pakistan, while India maintains that Kashmir is an inalienable part of the nation and proof of its secular heritage.
India says it is willing to talk about Kashmir as one of many issues that the two nations should address, including trade, cultural exchanges, the easing of travel restrictions and measures to reduce the risks of nuclear war.
And since July 4, India has made a series of good-will gestures, promising to release Pakistani prisoners, make it less difficult for Pakistanis to get visas and give scholarships to Pakistani students. But Pakistan did not respond warmly to those initiatives, seeing them as an attempt by India to dilute the focus on Kashmir, analysts said.
-------- korea
S. Korea Students Burn U.S. Flag
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-US-Protest.html?searchpv=aponline
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Student activists in South Korea burned a U.S. flag and traded kicks and punches with police Saturday to protest Washington's missile program.
About 100 chanting demonstrators gathered in front of the main U.S. military base in the Yongsan district of central Seoul, yelling their opposition to the Bush administration's plan for a missile-shield system.
Shoving matches erupted when police tried to take away an American flag a student intended to burn. Students kicked and threw punches at police, who fought back with plastic shields. There were no serious injuries.
``Yankee go home!'' students chanted as the flag went up in flames.
The protesters carried dozens of anti-U.S. banners and signs, saying that Washington's plan to build a missile defense system is hurting stability on the divided Korean peninsula.
The Pentagon planned to conduct a missile flight test over the Pacific later Saturday. In the test, an intercontinental missile with a mock warhead will be launched and experts will try to destroy it with an interceptor missile.
The test will be the first since President Bush took office promising a more ambitious missile defense effort. It will be the fourth attempt to shoot down a long-range missile with a prototype interceptor. Two previous tests failed and one was successful.
Bush's administration plans to deploy a missile defense system capable of protecting the United States and its allies from nuclear attacks by countries like North Korea and Iraq.
The communist North, along with Russia and China, vehemently opposes the U.S. missile shield project. Many in Europe doubt its wisdom as well.
The United States keeps 37,000 troops in South Korea as a deterrent against a possible North Korean invasion.
-------- missile defense
Test of Missile Shield Set for Tonight
Pentagon Confident It Will Demonstrate Ability to Stop Incoming Warheads
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58750-2001Jul13?language=printer
The Pentagon's top missile defense official said yesterday he was "quietly confident" that tonight's test of a prototype missile shield over the Pacific Ocean would successfully demonstrate the military's ability to shoot down incoming warheads.
"We are going to try to do the basics first and then add complexity," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish. "And the basics for us in this test is to do 'hit-to-kill' reliably. We've done it once. We've missed twice."
While Kadish and other Bush administration officials have sought to play down the test's significance, missile defense experts inside and outside of government say the stakes are enormous.
The $100 million test -- in which a "kill vehicle" launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands will attempt to destroy a dummy warhead fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California -- comes just two days after the administration unveiled an ambitious missile defense program on Capitol Hill.
The plan goes far beyond the land-based interceptor system that will be tested today, calling for development of missiles launched from ships and lasers fired from airplanes to knock down enemy warheads.
It drew rave reviews from conservatives in Congress. But leading Senate Democrats expressed immediate opposition and said they did not want to vote on an $8 billion appropriation for the coming fiscal year without knowing whether it would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That could happen, administration officials conceded, within months.
"If tonight's test succeeds," said Tom Collina, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' global security program, "it could embolden those who want to move ahead very quickly. If it misses, the opposite is true -- the opponents will be emboldened to push more of a go-slow approach."
Collina said the administration's plan to base interceptor missiles in Alaska for possible "emergency deployment" in 2005 would most likely put the administration in violation of the treaty by next April, when construction of silos is scheduled to begin at Fort Greely, near Fairbanks.
Since the treaty requires six months' notice before withdrawing from it, Collina said, the administration could be required to make such formal notification as early as November. The ABM Treaty was negotiated by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 to prohibit nationwide defenses against long-range missiles -- and thereby to curb each side's efforts to build more and more missiles to overwhelm those defenses.
At Vandenberg Air Force Base, protesters from the environmental group Greenpeace gathered yesterday outside the main gate, where they planned to remain and conduct a vigil during tonight's test.
"We're opposed to this test because it's one big step in the direction of a Star Wars system, which is a recipe for a new nuclear arms race," said Gordon Clark, Greenpeace's coordinator for nuclear disarmament. "If our country tries to deploy a shield, even if it doesn't work, other countries wil be forced to respond."
Clark said another Greenpeace activist, whom he identified as Alex Leney, was arrested Thursday as he observed test preparations at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. "That is a signal of how concerned the Bush administration is even with non-violent protest and disagreement with this system," Clark said.
Before the last test a year ago, two Greenpeace activists piloted a fiberglass skiff to the small island from which the kill vehicle is launched. They waded ashore and started walking down a road toward the launchpad before they were arrested. As a result, security around tonight's launch is extremely tight.
Kadish said today's test essentially would duplicate the last one, which failed after the kill vehicle failed to separate from the booster rocket. A similar test, in January 2000, failed when the kill vehicle's cooling system malfunctioned.
"This is one test in a series of tests," Kadish said. "If it's successful, we'll gain confidence. And if it fails, we will learn a lot."
In the test's critical phase, the kill vehicle -- equipped with visible light and infrared sensors -- must discriminate between the dummy warhead and a mylar balloon decoy. Critics say the test hardly simulates a real attack, which could involve multiple warheads and dozens of decoys.
Kadish acknowledged that the test could be far more "operationally realistic" and said that four future tests of the system, scheduled through the fall of 2002, would become increasingly complex.
But he chided the system's critics. "I don't mean to be smart when I say this, but if we succeed, people will write . . . that it was a simple test and it's rigged," he said. "If we fail, [they'll say] it'll never work and we're wasting our money."
----
Intercept test kicks off US race for missile defenses
Saturday July 14, 11:52 PM
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010714/1/19a4a.html
WASHINGTON, The Pentagon began the countdown for its first attempt to intercept an intercontinental missile with a missile in more than a year Saturday, kicking off a race for missile defenses that promises to fundamentally alter Cold War strategies of nuclear deterrence.
"This is one test in a series of tests. And if it's successful we'll gain confidence. And if it fails, we will learn a lot," said Air Force Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
If all goes well, a modified Minuteman missile will be launched sometime after 7:00 pm (0200 GMT Sunday) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and tracked over the Pacific by a network of satellites and radars.
Minutes later, an interceptor missile will be fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, boosting into space a kill vehicle that is designed to seek out and destroy the incoming "warhead."
"What you'll see is a blinding flash of light indicating that we intercepted it," said Kadish.
That's if all goes according to plan. However, two of three previous attempted intercepts have failed, and something as minor as a faulty valve or a software glitch could throw off the whole intricate system.
The last test on July 8 was dashed when the kill vehicle failed to release from its booster rocket. In a test on January 19, 2000, it missed its target when a clogged cooling pipe blinded its infrared seekers seconds before impact.
For Saturday's test to succeed, the kill vehicle must distinguish the simulated warhead from a balloon decoy and steer itself into a collision at a closing speed of 24,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) per hour nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) over the Earth.
Kadish said the chances of an intercept were slightly better than even but told reporters Friday he was "quietly confident" of success. "The countdown is moving very, very well," he said.
Last summer's test failure, however, convinced then-president Bill Clinton not to proceed with the deployment of a limited national missile defense test.
President George W. Bush's Pentagon has taken a radically different approach, accelerating testing and development of a whole range of missile defense systems in defiance of the 1972 ABM treaty with Russia that kept the nuclear balance through the Cold War.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a press report Saturday Washington would seek a new, comprehensive nuclear weapons agreement with Russia to allow the United States to develop its missile defense program, which has drawn angry protests from Moscow.
"We need an understanding, an agreement, a treaty, something with the Russians that allows us to move forward with our missile defense programs," Powell told the Washington Post.
Under the new scheme, the ground-based system being tested Saturday will be only one component of a layered defense that also would include sea-based, airborne and space-based defenses capable of attack missiles along the entire arc of its trajectory.
While it has no schedule for deploying any of the systems, the Pentagon says the testing programs are designed to provide "interim" missile defense capabilities as early as 2004.
The Pentagon plans to begin pouring concrete for interceptor missile silos in Fort Greely, Alaska as early as next spring as part of a "test bed" that could used as a missile defense site in an emergency when its completed between 2004 and 2006, Kadish said.
He said the Alaska test bed will enable the Pentagon to conduct more realistic missile defense tests against multiple targets fired from different locations.
The pace of testing will also pick up after Saturday, according to Kadish, who said the Pentagon has scheduled a major missile defense test at a rate of every other month, said Kadish.
----
U.S. to Launch Interceptor Missile
JULY 14
The Washington Times
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=NATIONAL&PACKAGEID=defense&STORYID=APIS7D88KR00&SLUG=MISSILE%2dDEFENSE%2dTEST
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush came into office promising a more ambitious and costly effort to protect America and its allies from missile attacks.
Moving ahead on that front, the United States was trying late Saturday night to intercept a mock nuclear warhead in space for the first time in the Bush administration.
Less was riding on the outcome than a year ago, when a failed intercept sealed President Clinton's decision to put off initial steps toward deploying a national missile defense.
Bush has made clear he will proceed with an accelerated testing program regardless of the outcome Saturday.
A successful intercept would provide a political boost for a project that some congressional Democrats believe risks upsetting relations with Russia and China, and has the potential to create a new arms race.
Failure would not derail the effort. It is just the first in a series of tests the administration hopes will produce at least a rudimentary defense against long-range missiles by 2004.
``We expect successes and we expect failures in this high technology that we're using,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said Friday.
Saturday's test, he said, ``will either give us more confidence in our approach ... or we're going to learn more from it if we fail because it'll be an unexpected reason why we fail and we'll go try to fix it.''
Bush has asked Congress for $8.3 billion to finance missile defense research and testing in 2002, a $3 billion increase over this year. Saturday's test was to cost about $100 million, Kadish said.
The intercept was to occur shortly after 10 p.m. EDT, but could came as late as 2 a.m. EDT Sunday.
Kadish, whose office manages the missile defense work, said he was ``quietly confident'' the test would succeed.
A modified Minuteman II intercontinental-range missile was to be launched over the central Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. It was to carry a mock warhead and a balloon decoy meant to fool the interceptor's on-board sensors.
The test called for an early warning satellite to detect the launch and alert a missile defense command center at Colorado Springs, Colo., where ``battle managers'' were to cue a radar on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Those managers were to use information from the radar to formulate a plan and transmit it to the missile interceptor in an underground silo on Kwajalein. That would tell the interceptor's computers precisely when it should launch and track the target in space.
If all went as planned, the interceptor's weapon, known as a ``kill vehicle,'' would ram into the mock warhead 144 miles above the earth's surface about eight minutes after it launched from Kwajalein.
By sheer force of impact at a combined speed of 4.5 miles per second, the mock warhead would be destroyed.
The last such test, on July 8, 2000, was a stunning failure. The interceptor launched from Kwajalein Atoll but the kill vehicle failed to separate from its rocket booster. As a result, the kill vehicle never saw the target.
An October 1999 effort succeeded while a January 2000 test failed.
Kadish said the Pentagon has mapped out a more frequent schedule of tests, including four to six over the next 18 months.
The expanded testing program, described in detail to Congress by Pentagon officials for the first time last week, drew strong criticism from missile defense skeptics at home and abroad.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said that if the administration goes ahead with plans to build underground silos next year at Fort Greely, Alaska, for missile interceptors, it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bars national missile defenses. That, in turn, could spark a new arms race, he said.
``If those plans were realized in practice, they would seriously complicate negotiations and would signify the United States' exit from the ABM treaty,'' Ivanov said Friday in Moscow.
The administration wants Russia to agree to amend or replace the treaty with an arrangement permitting testing and deployment of defenses against long-range missiles.
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Powell: U.S. to Seek Missile Agreement with Russia
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-us.html?searchpv=reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - (Reuters) - The United States will pursue an agreement with Russia that will allow Washington to proceed with a missile defense plan without departing from the ABM treaty, Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a Washington Post published on Saturday.
``We need an understanding, an agreement, a treaty, something with the Russians that allows us to move forward with our missile defense programs,'' Powell told the newspaper.
``Sometime in the not-too-distant future we're going to need relief,'' he added, referring to the administration's desire to test and build missile defenses without violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
``I would like to see, and I think the president would like to see, an arrangement with the Russians, with President Putin, that deals with strategic offensive systems, strategic defensive systems, limited defensive systems, nonproliferation activities, and frankly, transparency activities and sharing activities,'' Powell told the Post.
Testing and building a missile defense system would violate the ABM treaty, which Moscow views as the cornerstone of strategic arms control. But Russian leaders have said recently they would consider amending the pact.
``Wouldn't it be better if we did it together and documented it some way that is not necessarily a treaty?'' Powell told the Post. ``My view is, let's not foreclose any means of getting to this end.''
The Bush administration this week outlined plans to begin building a new missile defense test site in Alaska next month.
Powell was due to meet Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Rome next week for talks due to focus on missile defense. President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin were scheduled to meet at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa on July 20-22.
European diplomats said they were not told of the Alaskan test site plans and it seemed this could complicate U.S. consultations with the allies at both meetings in Italy.
Some European allies have expressed concern that the Bush administration's missile defense plans could fuel a new arms race.
On a another subject in the wide-ranging Post interview, Powell said awarding the 2008 Olympics to Beijing ``provides an opportunity for China ... to move in the direction that will create a positive environment where people will go and see ... more openness in China, more willingness to tolerate dissent.'' Commenting on the continuing violence in the Middle East, the Post said Powell repeated the U.S. call for a period of calm to be followed by a return to peace negotiations. He also took Israel to task for demolishing Palestinian homes.
``We have been speaking now to both sides, getting the violence down and avoiding the provocations,'' Powell said.
``When you start knocking down buildings with bulldozers, don't expect people not to respond to this kind of activity. When you start announcing more settlement activity, this does not create conditions that would cause the other side to be less responsive or less violent,'' he added.
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Missile Defense Developments
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Missile-Defense-Chronology.html
Developments since 1983 in U.S. missile defense efforts:
--March 23, 1983: President Ronald Reagan announces plans for an extensive program to examine the feasibility of a missile defense program. The concept -- derided as ``Star Wars'' by opponents in Congress -- revises the nation's 35-year-old nuclear strategy by focusing on missile defense rather than the ability to retaliate against nuclear attack.
--June 10, 1984: An Army interceptor destroys a target missile over the Pacific Ocean.
--Sept. 6, 1985: A Titan rocket is destroyed by an infrared advanced chemical laser.
--January 1991: The first operational engagement between ballistic missiles and ballistic missile defenses occurs during the Gulf War.
--April 1, 1997: The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization establishes the Joint Program office to design and develop a system by 2003.
--April 30, 1998: Boeing gets a $1.6 billion contract to be the lead systems integrator for the program.
--July 23, 1999: President Clinton signs the National Missile Defense Act. He says threat, cost, technological status and adherence to a renegotiated Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty are the four criteria in making his decision to deploy such a system.
--Aug. 17, 1999: The United States and Russia resume strategic arms talks that include modification of the ABM Treaty.
--Oct. 2, 1999: The first integrated flight test successfully intercepts its target.
--Jan. 18, 2000: The second integrated flight test fails, due to moisture inside the ``kill vehicle'' -- the weapon section of the interceptor -- which prevented it from using heat-seeking devices to detect its target.
--July 7, 2000: The third integrated flight test fails when the kill vehicle fails to separate from its booster rocket.
--Sept. 1, 2000: Clinton decides not to authorize work to begin on deploying national missile defense, on grounds that the reliability of the technology had not been proven.
--Dec. 28, 2000: Boeing is awarded a new, six-year, $6 billion contract for national missile defense.
--April 10, 2001: Russia, China and North Korea tell the U.N. Disarmament Commission that a U.S. missile defense system would threaten international security, trigger a new arms race and undermine the ABM Treaty.
--May 1, 2001: President Bush declares, ``We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world.''
--June 27, 2001: The proposed 2002 defense budget is submitted to Congress, allotting $7 billion -- later amended to $8.3 billion -- for missile defense.
--July 14, 2001: The scheduled fourth integrated flight test was to be the first since Bush took office. Each test costs around $100 million.
Sources: Center for Defense Information, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and Facts on File.
-------- russia
Powell Says U.S. Will Seek Arms Accord With Russia
By Steven Mufson and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 14, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59407-2001Jul13?language=printer
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday the United States will seek a broad new understanding with Russia on nuclear weapons and proliferation that would clear the way for the Bush administration to move ahead with missile defense plans.
"We need an understanding, an agreement, a treaty, something with the Russians that allows us to move forward with our missile defense programs," he said in a wide-ranging interview at the State Department. "Sometime in the not too distant future we're going to need relief," he added, for the administration to test and build missile defenses without breaking the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
President Bush has labeled the ABM Treaty obsolete, advocated deep cuts in nuclear arsenals and called for a new "framework" for U.S.-Russian relations while leaving unclear what form it would take. Powell suggested a written "understanding" or "joint statement," even if it fell short of a formal treaty.
"Wouldn't it be better if we did it together and documented it some way that is not necessarily a treaty?" Powell said. "My view is, let's not foreclose any means of getting to this end."
Russian officials have indicated a willingness to consider a new strategic framework, but have insisted that it include U.S. commitments for specific cuts in nuclear weapons. Though Bush has promised reductions, he has not said how deeply he would be willing to slash the U.S. arsenal, which already is slated to drop below 3,500 warheads under START II, the second strategic arms reduction treaty. The Russians have suggested cutting to about 1,500 warheads on each side.
Surveying the Bush administration's foreign policy performance during its first six months, Powell said the administration had gotten over "hiccups" in relations with South Korea, China and Russia, and he called yesterday's selection of Beijing as host of the 2008 Olympics an opportunity for China to show progress on human rights.
"The big overhang, the problem that is causing everybody a lot of late nights and hard work and has proven very, very difficult -- most difficult -- that's on my portfolio is what's happening in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he said.
Powell, a popular figure in the Republican Party who served earlier stints as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the elder President George Bush and President Bill Clinton as well as national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, faces new challenges as secretary of state.
One is how to deal with the diplomatic fallout of U.S. missile defense plans. The subject will come up in talks between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at next week's meeting of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations that includes Russia.
"I would like to see, and I think the president would like to see, an arrangement with the Russians, with President Putin, that deals with strategic offensive systems, strategic defensive systems, limited defensive systems, nonproliferation activities, and frankly, transparency activities and sharing activities," Powell said.
He said that the administration's plan to cut U.S. nuclear forces should reassure Moscow.
"Both of us have a deterrent force in place, but we're not threatening each other's deterrent force with our defensive action," Powell said. "And we can make this deterrent force a lot smaller, which should give you more comfort, confidence in your own deterrent force."
Though Putin has said that Russia might put multiple warheads back on its intercontinental ballistic missiles as a response to U.S. missile defense plans, Powell belittled that possibility.
"When I look at what they have and when I know what we're doing," he said, "they're going to sit around with a limited budget. . . . and if they see us going down on offensive weapons and they see that our missile defense is as limited as we say it's going to be, I think they will have a hard time persuading themselves that this is something that is useful."
Powell added that even if Russia followed through on its threat, the United States would not necessarily respond in kind.
"It is not clear that just because they decided to increase their numbers [that] as the night follows day we would have to do likewise," he said. "If we didn't feel threatened, and as long as we felt our retaliatory capability was adequate, then it doesn't necessarily mean we have to link to what they were doing."
On China, Powell said that the 2008 Olympics "provides an opportunity for China . . . to move in the direction that will create a positive environment where people will go and see . . . more openness in China, more willingness to tolerate dissent." He added that such progress "would be consistent with the Olympic spirit."
Though many Republicans, even within the administration, have raised alarms about China's military modernization, Powell said the United States should pursue good relations with Beijing, which he will visit at the end of the month.
"We're not working on converting China to an enemy. We do not need another Soviet Union for an enemy in order to give us a sense of purpose," Powell said. "We want more friends, people we can work with. . . ."
He said China and the United States were trying to put behind them the incident with the U.S. surveillance plane that made an emergency landing in southern China and whose 24 crew members were detained for 11 days.
"Are they also trying to modernize their military? Yes. Does it look like it's being modernized to go on the march? Not to me so far," he said.
Speaking on the most violent day in the Middle East since a U.S.-brokered cease-fire a month ago, Powell repeated the American call for a period of calm to precede negotiations and faulted Israel for its recent demolition of Palestinian homes.
"We have been speaking now to both sides, getting the violence down and avoiding the provocations," he said. "When you start knocking down buildings with bulldozers, don't expect people not to respond to this kind of activity. When you start announcing more settlement activity, this does not create conditions that would cause the other side to be less responsive or less violent."
Powell also repeated the administration's opposition to the Israeli practice of assassinating Palestinian militants. But he said the United States had limited ability to influence Israel on this issue.
"There's a limit to leverage we actually have, other than condemning it," Powell said. "But it is seen as an act of provocation and a threat to the existence of the authorities of the other side. So it seems to me we will continue to speak out against targeted killings."
To help restore calm, Powell echoed Israeli demands that Palestinian officials end incitement of violence. At the same time, he criticized statements by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli leaders that repudiate the role of Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat as a potential partner in reaching a peace agreement.
"Get the rhetoric down. Watch what you're calling each other. How can you get a partnership going when you use rhetoric that suggests you'll never accept the other side as a partner?" Powell said.
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Russia Now Courting China
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Courting-China.html?searchpv=aponline
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia has a huge advantage over China in nuclear missiles and territory, but it is in many ways the poorer nation as the two countries cement a ``strategic partnership'' during Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's visit this week.
Jiang will sign a new friendship treaty with Russia -- their first major treaty since the Soviet collapse 10 years ago -- during his four-day visit, which begins Sunday.
Both countries want good relations to counter what they consider American hegemonism and plans for a national missile defense system, as well as to strengthen their economies and mount successful bids to join the World Trade Organization.
But the Kremlin's traditional ability to lead the relationship has been weakened by Russia's economic decline and its loss of superpower status.
``Russia needs very good economic and political relations with China,'' said Sergei Rogov, the head of the USA and Canada Institute and a leading Russian arms expert. ``Russia cannot antagonize China.''
China's gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced within a state's borders, is about three times that of Russia. While China's GDP has tripled over the last decade, Russia's has fallen nearly fivefold. Life expectancy in China is 70 years, six more than in Russia, where it has plummeted. China's population is eight times that of Russia.
About the only issue in which Russia holds the upper hand is in responding to U.S. plans for national missile defense system which both countries claim would violate the 1972 ABM treaty.
China is even more alarmed by the plan than the Kremlin, Russian diplomats say, because China's nuclear arsenal is tiny by comparison to Russia's. Even a limited U.S. missile defense could erode its deterrent value.
The ABM treaty ``remains the cornerstone of global strategic stability. If this is destroyed, strategic stability is destroyed and could lead to a new arms race,'' said Yu Zhenqi, a political adviser at the Chinese Embassy in Moscow.
Just what kind of language Jiang and Russian President Vladimir Putin use concerning missile defense bears close watching, said Rogov.
``If Russia and China conclude it is a common threat and they can decide on a common response, in practical terms Russia could provide China with sophisticated weaponry and a Chinese military buildup could happen much earlier,'' Rogov said.
China bought some $1 billion in military equipment from Russia in 2000 -- about 39 percent of Russian exports to China -- making it Russia's biggest military customer. Most of the purchases were for jets, including the Sukhoi-27 and Sukhoi-30 planes, as well as air defense systems.
Ever since Boris Yeltsin began talking about a ``strategic partnership'' during a visit to China in 1996, both countries have been interpreting that idea in broad terms of political and economic cooperation rather than military ties.
The treaty to be signed this week, said Yu Zhenqi, ``is not the concluding of an alliance, not an act against a third country.''
Still, there is concern in Russia that China may start to try to match its growing power with increased military might at a time when Russia is struggling economically and the strength of its armed forces continues to decline.
Both countries want better trade relations. Trade between them, which totaled $8 billion last year, is up 43 percent in the first five months of this year. Russia is China's 9th largest trading partner, while China is Russia's 6th biggest.
China is interested in purchasing nuclear power plant technology, gas, oil and airplanes, and both countries are interested in developing the high tech sector.
What worries many Russians in the Far East is the Chinese themselves. With Russians leaving Siberia in droves for points west, some border areas have become severely depopulated and many Russians still in the region fear that someday they may simply be overrun.
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U.S. to Launch Interceptor Missile
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Missile-Defense-Test.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush came into office promising a more ambitious and costly effort to protect America and its allies from missile attacks.
Moving ahead on that front, the United States was trying late Saturday night to intercept a mock nuclear warhead in space for the first time in the Bush administration.
Less was riding on the outcome than a year ago, when a failed intercept sealed President Clinton's decision to put off initial steps toward deploying a national missile defense.
Bush has made clear he will proceed with an accelerated testing program regardless of the outcome Saturday.
A successful intercept would provide a political boost for a project that some congressional Democrats believe risks upsetting relations with Russia and China, and has the potential to create a new arms race.
Failure would not derail the effort. It is just the first in a series of tests the administration hopes will produce at least a rudimentary defense against long-range missiles by 2004.
``We expect successes and we expect failures in this high technology that we're using,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said Friday.
Saturday's test, he said, ``will either give us more confidence in our approach ... or we're going to learn more from it if we fail because it'll be an unexpected reason why we fail and we'll go try to fix it.''
Bush has asked Congress for $8.3 billion to finance missile defense research and testing in 2002, a $3 billion increase over this year. Saturday's test was to cost about $100 million, Kadish said.
The intercept was to occur shortly after 10 p.m. EDT, but could came as late as 2 a.m. EDT Sunday.
Kadish, whose office manages the missile defense work, said he was ``quietly confident'' the test would succeed.
A modified Minuteman II intercontinental-range missile was to be launched over the central Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. It was to carry a mock warhead and a balloon decoy meant to fool the interceptor's on-board sensors.
The test called for an early warning satellite to detect the launch and alert a missile defense command center at Colorado Springs, Colo., where ``battle managers'' were to cue a radar on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Those managers were to use information from the radar to formulate a plan and transmit it to the missile interceptor in an underground silo on Kwajalein. That would tell the interceptor's computers precisely when it should launch and track the target in space.
If all went as planned, the interceptor's weapon, known as a ``kill vehicle,'' would ram into the mock warhead 144 miles above the earth's surface about eight minutes after it launched from Kwajalein.
By sheer force of impact at a combined speed of 4.5 miles per second, the mock warhead would be destroyed.
The last such test, on July 8, 2000, was a stunning failure. The interceptor launched from Kwajalein Atoll but the kill vehicle failed to separate from its rocket booster. As a result, the kill vehicle never saw the target.
An October 1999 effort succeeded while a January 2000 test failed.
Kadish said the Pentagon has mapped out a more frequent schedule of tests, including four to six over the next 18 months.
The expanded testing program, described in detail to Congress by Pentagon officials for the first time last week, drew strong criticism from missile defense skeptics at home and abroad.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said that if the administration goes ahead with plans to build underground silos next year at Fort Greely, Alaska, for missile interceptors, it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bars national missile defenses. That, in turn, could spark a new arms race, he said.
``If those plans were realized in practice, they would seriously complicate negotiations and would signify the United States' exit from the ABM treaty,'' Ivanov said Friday in Moscow.
The administration wants Russia to agree to amend or replace the treaty with an arrangement permitting testing and deployment of defenses against long-range missiles.
-------- treaties
'Contradictory' U.S. Words on ABM Issue Puzzle Russia
July 14, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
MOSCOW - Russia stated officially today that it is confused.
Confused, strategically speaking, on whether the Bush administration is planning to withdraw from, negotiate changes to, or simply "bump up against" the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
Responding to a series of high-level statements made in Washington on Thursday that described an accelerated testing program for American missile defenses, Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov rhetorically threw up his hands today. He said Moscow was unable to "say anything definite" about where things stood in the American-Russian dialogue on missile defense.
"We are still oriented towards patient consultations and will conduct them," Mr. Ivanov told reporters. After reading press reports on what was said in Washington by senior Bush aides, he said: "Some say they are withdrawing from the treaty. Others say they are not withdrawing. Still others say the ABM treaty will not be violated. Therefore, there is no point in reacting to such very contradictory statements."
Moscow regards the 1972 accord as the cornerstone of nuclear arms control, and President Vladimir V. Putin has said that if the United States unilaterally abandons the treaty, Russia will consider three decades of arms control treaties nullified and will build a new generation of multiple-warhead nuclear missiles. China has taken a similar stand, and its president, Jiang Zemin, is due here this weekend to sign the first friendship and cooperation treaty between Beijing and Moscow since 1950.
Mr. Ivanov pointed out that Mr. Putin would meet President Bush for the second time at the Genoa, Italy, summit meeting of the leading industrial nations next week, and he expressed the hope that afterward, "there will be more certainty on this matter."
Meanwhile, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed "dismay" that the United States, in a dispatch to its overseas embassies, had issued instructions to justify to foreign leaders American plans to test antimissile systems that would violate the ABM treaty "within months, rather than years."
A ministry statement given to the Interfax news agency pointed out that the Pentagon is pushing forward to erect missile defenses, including a new launching facility in Alaska, while "the American side is simultaneously making public pledges" that it will "abstain from unilateral actions in the sphere of strategic stability."
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, along with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, all made public comments on the administration's plans to step up its dialogue with Moscow - particularly on how the ABM treaty might be modified to allow for accelerated tests of a defense system that Mr. Wolfowitz described in testimony before Congress.
Instead of dealing with those issues in sequence, it now appears that the administration seeks to build the infrastructure for missile defenses regardless of how its dialogue with NATO allies, Russia and China proceeds.
Mr. Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon was planning to build a command center near Fairbanks, Alaska, new radar stations and 10 silos for antimissile interceptors at Fort Greely and on Kodiak Island. He added that this activity would "bump up against" the prohibitions of the treaty in a matter of months.
"So we are on a collision course," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "No one is pretending that what we are doing is consistent with that treaty. We have either got to withdraw from it or replace it."
In remarks in Washington, Mr. Rumsfeld said there was no question of the United States' violating the treaty as it moves forward.
"I think the United States of America ought not to be running around being seen as breaking treaties and violating treaty provisions and being legitimately or illegitimately accused of doing that," Mr. Rumsfeld told a forum at The Frontiers of Freedom Institute. "It's not what's good for our country, which is why the president has said, starting in his campaign and practically every month since, that we've got to move beyond the ABM treaty."
But he added, "If you get to the point where we need to go beyond the treaty and we haven't been able to negotiate something, obviously there's a provision we can withdraw in six months, and that's what you'd have to do."
Secretary Powell, in remarks to Reuters on Thursday, said the Bush administration was "looking forward to a broad series of discussions with the Russians," including on the ABM treaty. "I think in the very near future, within the next few weeks, you will start to see these conversations pick up speed," he said.
In fact, a White House official said today that Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, would visit Moscow on July 25 to discuss "the full range of bilateral issues," including missile defense.
But in his comments today, Mr. Ivanov, who is Mr. Putin's closest adviser on strategic affairs, seemed at pains not to overreact, though Russian officials were clearly surprised by the American timetable. He seemed intent on containing any sense of contention until Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush have had a chance to meet.
And in a blow to the hawkish generals in Mr. Ivanov's Defense Ministry, who often pre- empt the Kremlin in criticizing Washington, Mr. Putin today dismissed Gen. Leonid Ivashov, head of the military's international relations department, as part of a shake-up of top officials in the ministry.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Cold War's Human Costs Linger
U.S. Owes Millions to Those Exposed to Radiation in Atomic Program
By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60479-2001Jul13?language=printer
Thomas Morrison never talked much about what he did during his months in the Bikini Atoll, in South Pacific waters that were azure in color but red hot in radioactivity. He was a smooth-cheeked, dark-haired ensign of 21, with a gentle, toothy grin, one of the legions of sailors who witnessed the world's fourth and fifth atomic blasts and then dove deep to see what damage had been wrought.
For the last several years, though, his wife has talked a lot about the past. Natalie Morrison has called government officials, written members of Congress and tenaciously pushed anyone possible for what is due her under the law. Her husband was only 44 when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was only 49 when he died. And his cancer, like so many other sailors' cancers, seemed the tragic epilogue of those radioactive blasts a quarter-century earlier.
At last the government agreed. But the letter that came recently for the Silver Spring widow hardly read like a victory.
"Unfortunately, the money available to pay claims has been exhausted," wrote Gerard W. Fischer, of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Program, through which Morrison is owed $75,000. "Thank you for your patience during this difficult situation."
"I just think it's an insult," Morrison retorted this week, surveying again the files of correspondence that document her claim -- which twice was rejected in error. "Why bother to have a law when they're not going to follow through? It's dishonest, it's not right, and I think the public should know."
The program's funding shortfall, nearly $84 million this fiscal year, is the latest blow to thousands of veterans, workers and families who became part of the nation's atomic testing program from 1945 to 1962. Out West, the program's legacy remains a bitter issue for the miners who helped dig the uranium that went into the bombs and the "downwinders" whose homes and farms were contaminated.
For decades, the government denied that anyone had been put in danger. Now it's out of money to compensate them. "These people who are sick and dying are getting IOUs," said Sarah Echols, a spokeswoman for Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.).
Over the next 10 years, by some estimates, valid claims could total more than $700 million, and Domenici and others are pushing to make the fund a mandatory annual appropriation. For the moment, however, the only thing moving forward is an attempt to cover the $84 million due since May 2000. The Senate agreed Tuesday to insert that in an emergency supplemental spending bill. The House version includes nothing.
"Another 10 years, and it's not going to matter. We're all going to be dead," said Charles McKay, the Maryland commander for the National Association of Atomic Veterans and, like Tom Morrison, a Navy diver during Operation Crossroads. According to the association's survey of 1,572 men present for the 1946 Bikini Atoll detonations, 59 percent have died of cancer, at an average age of 57.
Operation Crossroads essentially ushered in the Cold War with two explosions code-named Able Day and Baker Day. Dozens of captured or surplus ships were assembled near ground zero so the Navy could gauge how well vessels and ammunition could withstand a nuclear attack.
Tens of thousands of men were involved. Ensign T.D. Morrison of the Naval Reserve was stationed on the USS Preserver. Years later, he would tell his wife about the massive column of water and stupefyingly huge mushroom cloud that followed the underwater blast on Baker Day, July 25. Dive teams spent hundreds of hours in the water afterward, checking instrumentation and retrieving equipment on the target ships. Others boarded to take photographs or to clean surfaces.
"We were constantly exposed," McKay said.
Following his time in the reserve, Morrison chose a career with the Navy as a civilian physicist. He and Natalie married and started a family. Two daughters were born, then a son. The boy was 1 when, in 1968, his father first discovered the lump.
Doctors told him the malignancy was unrelated to his military service. "It's been 20 years," his widow remembers a physician saying. "It couldn't be."
He died in 1973. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was not signed into law until 1990. But not until four years ago did Natalie Morrison learn of it -- from another atomic veteran's widow -- and realize her husband should be covered.
She filled out the requisite forms and prayed that 24-year-old hospital records hadn't been destroyed. And then she waited as her claim was twiced refused. She finally hired a lawyer but kept up her own drumbeat of phone calls and faxes. Her letters to federal officials would begin, "I was so in hopes that I would receive, before I die, the reparation for my husband's on-site exposure. . . ."
In a letter in May to Domenici, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant noted that new cases had increased sharply since Congress broadened eligibility last year. As of Friday, 453 approved claims awaited funding, with more than 3,100 under consideration.
Since the program's inception, nearly 3,600 claims have been denied and 3,900 others approved, for $286.4 million. Veterans account for less than 7 percent of the latter.
"Their widows are dying," said Morrison's attorney Stevan Lieberman, who calls his effort on her behalf a "hollow victory." The lack of congressional action on the radiation fund makes lawmakers' speedy endorsement of a World War II memorial appear hypocritical in his eyes. "Congress has to appropriate the money for this. That's the only hope."
Principle continues to motivateMorrison. She is a trim, spirited woman, now 71, who still lives in the house she and her husband bought so long ago. Their son has few memories of his father and yet turned out so much like him.
"Seventy-five thousand dollars doesn't add up to much as far as a life," she said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
Hanford to determine speed of radioactive plume transmission
Sat, Jul 14, 2001
By John Stang
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/0714.html
Hanford officials are trying to determine how fast a small highly radioactive underground plume from Hanford's northernmost waste tanks might reach a nearby faster-moving plume that's headed toward the Columbia River.
CH2M Hill Hanford Group recently drilled a 260-foot borehole into the aquifer beneath Tank B-110 and plans to soon drill a similar hole at the BX-BY Tank Farms area, said Rick Raymond, CH2M Hill Hanford Group's vice president for projects.
The holes will be used to sample ground water to determine how fast and far the one highly radioactive waste plume has spread.
The B, BX, and BY Tanks Farms are bunched on the north side of the 200 East Area and include 40 single-shell tanks. Twenty of those tanks, including B-110, are suspected of leaking radioactive wastes.
In 1998, Hanford confirmed that liquid wastes from those three tank farms had reached the underground aquifer.
There also is a large fast-moving underground plume near that 40-tank cluster from "cribs" where huge volumes of mildly contaminated water were dumped into septic-tank-like fields.
The small highly radioactive plume beneath the tank farms is believed to be only a few hundred yards from the huge, faster-moving plume that is headed toward the river.
Once the plumes meet, Hanford officials believe, the slow-moving highly radioactive substances likely will speed up with the faster plume.
Central Hanford has 53 million gallons of radioactive wastes in 149 single-shell and 28 safer double-shell tanks. Sixty-seven single-shell tanks are suspected of leaking.
Subterranean Hanford is a patchwork of several dozen plumes from various sources that include more than 100 radioactive and hazardous substances. The plumes are moving at different speeds toward the aquifer, then to the Columbia River.
Studies indicate the plumes contain at least 1 million gallons of highly radioactive wastes and 440 billiongallons of mildly contaminated fluids.
Tank B-110 leaked at least 10,000 gallons of radioactive liquids into the ground before it was pumped out in 1984. Two leaking tanks, BY-105 and BY-106, remain in those three tank farms, and they are supposed to be pumped out by the end of this year, Raymond said.
The liquids leaked from Tank B-110 include technetium 99, a highly radioactive substance with a half life of 212,000 years. That means it will take 2.12 million years to decay to a negligible level. Also, technetium 99 moves through ground water faster than most radioactive substances, which highlights concerns about it linking with a speedier plume.
Drilling boreholes to sample and track underground waste is a slow, expensive undertaking. When the proposed hole is completed at the BY-BX Tank Farms area, Hanford will have drilled five boreholes in fiscal 2001. Five more -- at $500,000 to $1 million each -- are scheduled to be drilled in the 200 East and 200 West Areas in fiscal 2002.
-------- us nuc politics
Excerpts of Powell Interview
Saturday, July 14, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59451-2001Jul13?language=printer
Following are excerpts from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's interview yesterday:
On the Arab-Israeli Conflict:
The last 24 or 48 hours have not been terribly helpful. We have been speaking out to both sides, getting the violence down and avoiding the provocations. When you start knocking down buildings with bulldozers, don't expect people not to respond to this kind of activity. When you start announcing more settlement activity, this does not create conditions that would cause the other side to be less responsive or less violent. So this is a time for both sides to avoid all provocations that would keep us from getting into a period of quiet, that will allow us to move forward. . . .
You know what you ought not to be doing in addition to not conducting acts of violence. But there are other things. Get the rhetoric down. Watch what you're calling each other. How can you get a partnership going when you use rhetoric that suggests you'll never accept the other side as a partner? . . .
When my next trip will be? I don't know. I haven't thought that far ahead. We'll just watch the situation. I'll go when I think it serves a useful purpose to go. I'm not shrinking away staying back. I'm also not going over every week.
On the United Nations Security Council's failure to adopt "smart sanctions" on Iraq:
We could not persuade the Russians that this was in the best interest of all concerned. And it's fascinating that the whole purpose of smart sanctions was to make it easier for the [Iraqi] regime to get goods that would benefit their people. But they saw it as a way of continuing to keep the sanctions in place and they objected to it and they got the Russians to object to it. And we asked what is it they're objecting to? They're objecting to the fact that we're insisting that they not have weapons of mass destruction programs and we are trying to make life easier for the Iraqi people. . . . I still think this was a good idea. It is right to move in this direction. We now have five months [before the next scheduled Security Council vote] to see if we can persuade the Russians.
On Russia and the expulsion of suspected Russian spies:
We also weathered the first few months of the U.S.-Russia relationship, which was knocked slightly off stride by the spy caper. My first meeting with the Russian ambassador . . . he was on his way back to Moscow, and he walked in to say, "How are you? Nice to see you, general, thank you for welcoming me." He sat down and I said, "I've got some bad news for you." His face dropped. His mouth dropped open. . . . But we got that behind us. We did not let that contaminate the whole relationship, understanding that we had bigger things to work on, bigger things to talk about: our economic relationship, trade relationship, regional interests, helping Russia move down the correct path to democracy and economic reform. . . .
They're going through this remarkable change, and Mr. Putin's fate and history have put him in charge of this country at this time, and I think what he's trying to do is restore pride among the Russian people, trying to embed democracy in the Russian system. I think he is interested in economic reform because he realizes that even though it is a large country with enormous potential and an educated population, natural resources, they're not putting it all together. . . .
He's a guy grappling with very, very big problems, but I think he is somebody who looks for the West for help and realizes his future is to the West.
On missile defense and the ABM Treaty:
We need an understanding, an agreement, a treaty, something with the Russians that allow us to move forward with our missile defense programs. . . .
I would like to see and I think the president would like to see an arrangement with the Russians -- with President Putin -- that deals with strategic offensive systems, strategic defense systems, limited defensive systems, nonproliferation activities and, frankly, transparency activities and sharing activities. . . .
The ABM Treaty change may or may not take the form of a treaty. These other things more than likely would not need a treaty to take form. Maybe it is just an understanding, an agreement, a joint statement. . . .
But wouldn't it be better if we did it together and documented it some way that is not necessarily a treaty? My view is let's not foreclose any means of getting to this end.
On China:
We're looking forward to having a good and productive relationship with China. We had a major hiccup with the EP-3 [reconnaissance plane] incident. . . . It's clear we wanted to get this behind us so we could get on to the real issues of trade and economics. We'll continue to press on human rights. We'll continue to press on proliferation activities. But we're not working on converting China to an enemy. We do not need another Soviet Union for an enemy in order to give us a sense of purpose. We want more friends, people we can work with. . . .
Are they also trying to modernize their military? Yes. Does it look like it's being modernized to go on the march? Not to me so far.
On the Korean peninsula:
With South Korea, it was a bit of a hiccup in the beginning as to how we would work with [President] Kim Dae Jung and his work with North Korea. And after studying it, as the president said he would, we're going to review our policies. We did that and now we have reached out to North Korea and we expect to get an answer back from our first conversation with them in the very near future, within the next couple of days. And that will give us an opportunity to move forward and also will kind of set it up that I might have a conversation with, perhaps a good conversation with my North Korean colleague week after next in . . . Hanoi.
On the Kyoto protocol on global warming:
Were there irritations [in relations with Europe], and are there still some tricky issues? Yeah. Kyoto was one. The president had thought through Kyoto very carefully, came to a conclusion that it did not serve America's issues and frankly he didn't think it served the interest of trying to solve the problem of global warming. And rather than pretend it did, he took a principled stand and said there's a better way to do this. There's got to be a better way to do this and we're going to go look for it with technology improvements, with using the power of our technology and finding other perhaps market-based ways of dealing with this problem.
On the administration's performance in foreign policy:
I think we're doing pretty well, but we do have some serious issues and problems that we're dealing with. But I don't think this is unusual for any administration or any period of history. There will always be serious challenges. I've told people, 90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world. Ninety percent of my time is spent on like one-tenth of 1 percent of the world's population. And 10 percent of your time tends to just see things that are going reasonably well.
-------- MILITARY
-------- balkans
Mass Grave Holding Kosovars Found
JULY 14, 14:43 EST
The Washington Times
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC
Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Authorities have discovered another mass grave with some 50 to 60 bodies from Kosovo in a cover-up of war crimes linked to former President Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian government announced Saturday.
The government's Internet site quoted a ranking police official, Capt. Dragan Karleusa, as saying that the bodies, apparently Kosovo Albanians, surfaced in April 1999 from a hydropower lake at Perucac, about 90 miles southwest of Belgrade, and were later buried in a nearby mass grave in Serbia proper.
Authorities later discovered the mass grave, he said, without saying when.
``First, seven bodies surfaced,'' Karleusa was quoted a saying. ``Later, a freezer truck with more than 50 bodies surfaced as well.''
``Witnessed by numerous people, and with unbearable stench, the bodies were transferred to a new location where they were buried in a mass grave,'' Karleusa said, adding that the crime remained secret for more than two years.
Another case of a freezer truck containing some 80 bodies dumped into the Danube River near the Romanian border in April 1999, hundreds of miles outside Kosovo, was revealed by police earlier this year.
Police, now controlled by pro-democracy authorities who unseated Milosevic in October, have accused the former Yugoslav president of ordering top police and military commanders in a March 1999 meeting to remove all evidence of civilian casualties from his Kosovo crackdown that could be subject to investigation by the U.N. war crimes tribunal.
Several mass graves, believed to contain some 800 bodies, have recently been discovered in Serbia proper, far from the province of Kosovo where Milosevic's security troops are believed to have killed up to 8,000 ethnic Albanians in a 1998-99 crackdown. The crackdown ended with the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
Milosevic was extradited to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 28. He is charged by the court with responsibility for the murder of more than 600 people and the displacement of 740,000 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999.
Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic said Saturday that local Serbian courts will start bringing war crimes suspects to trial as early as next week.
He did not identify those facing trial or say if any of them are also sought by the U.N. court.
He said the Serbian government - after extraditing Milosevic - will demand that other Yugoslav war crimes suspects be tried at home.
Milosevic's extradition was believed to be the result of intense U.S. and other Western pressure on Belgrade's new, pro-democracy authorities, increasingly dependent on Western aid to master the economic crisis left by more than a decade of Milosevic's ruinous rule.
There are other high-ranking indicted suspects who remain at large and live freely in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. Those include Serbian President Milan Milutinovic; former army chief of staff Col. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic; former Serbian Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic; and former Yugoslav deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic.
All were close aides of Milosevic and were indicted along with him by the tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity in Kosovo.
Batic said that 58 people in Serbia will be questioned by The Hague court investigators in early August as part of investigations of war crimes against Serbs in Kosovo.
-------- chemical weapons
AU Seeks $87 Million In Burial Of Weapons
Claim Alleges Army Mishandled Cleanup
By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2001; Page B01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60722-2001Jul13?language=printer
American University filed an $86.6 million claim against the Army yesterday for damages arising from its use of the campus as a chemical testing ground more than 80 years ago and alleged mishandling of cleanup efforts.
The university in Northwest Washington has been confronted this year with findings of arsenic contamination in some soil on campus, developments that have forced the school to relocate a child-care center and test some students and workers for toxic exposure.
The claim alleges that the Army's burial of chemical munitions on the campus and its "failure to properly investigate and remediate the contamination" have seriously damaged the university. "The full nature and extent of the chemical contamination still has not been fully identified and remediated," the claim says.
The claim, made under the Federal Tort Claims Act, was filed late yesterday afternoon with the Army's Military District of Washington headquarters at Fort Myer. The university seeks $58 million for disruption of its operations and potential damage to its reputation, $20 million for construction delays and $8.6 million for cleanup.
"Obviously, we've felt an impact for a while," said David Taylor, a university spokesman. "We've had to relocate certain activities and sponsor medical tests. Even now, we've got athletic fields off-limits."
The university also said it faces a potential loss of donations.
The action comes as the Army is preparing to remove arsenic-contaminated soil from the playground of the child-development center.
Athletic fields where elevated levels of arsenic were also detected have been closed since winter, and officials say it is unlikely that soil there will be removed before the fall semester.
"It's the Army's responsibility to clean up everything they did here in World War I," Taylor said.
Maj. Michael Peloquin, site commander for the Army Corps of Engineers' remediation operations at American University and the surrounding Spring Valley neighborhood, said he could not comment on the claim but did not expect it to affect the cleanup.
The Army and the Environmental Protection Agency are being sharply criticized for failing to fully investigate evidence of possible chemical burials in 1986. Recent findings of arsenic contamination correspond with locations flagged as possible burial spots by federal analysts in 1986.
The university has also faced angry criticism for its conduct from students and alumni concerned about whether they were exposed to contamination. Some prospective students and their parents are reconsidering decisions to attend the school.
"We've had phone calls and expressions of concern," Taylor said.
Tests on students, workers and children at the day-care center have not shown evidence of arsenic poisoning.
Lewis D. Walker, a former Army official who oversaw the 1986 inquiry, said in a recent interview that university and EPA officials concurred with the Army's decision to keep the 1986 study quiet. Sandra Grosso, a university staff attorney who died in 1994, argued in 1986 that the Army and university should go public, but she was overruled, her sister Debbie Klauser has said.
Taylor said any actions the university took were based on Army assurances that there were no buried chemical weapons. "They cleared us . . . and said we shouldn't have a problem," he said.
The university's claim is not the first the Army has faced regarding the chemical burials.
After the unearthing of chemical shells in Spring Valley in 1993, home builder W.C. & A.N. Miller filed a $14 million lawsuit against the Army. Since the 1920s, Miller had built 764 homes in Spring Valley without knowing about the chemical tests, let alone about buried munitions, company officials said.
After the government filed a counter-claim against Miller, the suit was settled in 1998, with the Army paying the company $2.1 million.
-------- israel
RESERVIST JAILED FOR REFUSAL
From: "Veterans for Peace"
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 2:29 AM
Captain (res.) Edan Landau has been jailed for refusing to escort operatives of the Shabak (security police) in the occupied territories.
At his trial, Landau made the following declaration: "In progress in the occupied territories is a war of repression entirely subservient to the ideology of the settlement drive. The Palestinian population is being subjected to starvation, denial of medical treatment, demolition of homes and economic strangulation. I will take no part in these war crimes, nor will I serve as a fig leaf for them."
Landau (34, single) is a lecturer in linguistics at the Ben Gurion University, Beersheba. He is the eigth reservist jailed for refusal during the current intifada (5 conscripts have also been sentenced for the same "offence"). Yesh Gvul lists show that over 200 soldiers, reservists and conscripts, have refused to take part in the campaign of repression - in most cases, the military authorities have evaded prosecution of the "refuseniks" with the evident intention of playing down the growing reluctance to take a part in the dirty war.
Landau is jailed at Military Prison 6 at Athlit, and Yesh Gvul plans to hold its customary support vigil on the hillside overlooking the jail.
We appeal to our friends and sympathisers to help us take up Landau's case, with the following steps:
1. Messages of support (send them to us, we'll make sure Landau gets them);
2. Alerting your local media to his protest, to highlight the efforts of the Israeli peace movement to halt the repression;
3. Fundraising to help us in our campaign.
"Some call them radicals. Others call them the Opposition. President Clinton referred to them on various occasions as the "enemies of peace". Yet, for many Palestinians, they represent the non-compromising segment of the living conscience of Palestine. So before we rush to judge and to condemn, before we describe them as radicals and enemies of peace, we must listen to their story. The story of suffering through Black September, South Lebanon and the Intifadah. Once we listen, I believe, all that we can do is to stand for them and salute, salute them for a heavy price they have paid, rather than those who took the easy way out." - Ramzy Baroud
-------- puerto rico
Sen. Clinton Arrives in Puerto Rico
New York Time
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Vieques-Clinton.html
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Puerto Rico on Saturday to visit environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy and a New York labor leader jailed for protests against Navy bombing on Vieques island.
Clinton has said her one-day visit is a ``gesture of solidarity'' with protesters. Kennedy, nephew of former President Kennedy, and labor leader Dennis Rivera are serving 30-day sentences for trespassing connected to an April 28 protest.
Her visit comes as the Navy has notified local government it will begin a new round of exercises on Vieques Aug. 1.
Acting Gov. Ferdinand Mercado, who made the announcement Friday, said the timing is ``insensitive and lacking prudence'' because it would follow a July 29 nonbinding referendum the local government is holding to gauge if and when Vieques' 9,100 residents want the Navy to leave. One option will be an immediate end to bombing.
Clinton, a Democrat who supports an immediate halt to the exercises, arrived in the capital, San Juan, Saturday morning. She did not speak to media at the airport before leaving in a motorcade for the federal detention center in suburban Guaynabo.
Clinton also planned to meet with Archbishop San Juan Roberto Gonzalez Nieves after leaving the prison on Saturday afternoon.
The former first lady will not travel to Vieques -- an outlying Puerto Rican island.
President Bush plans to have the Navy out of Vieques by 2003. But that promise has not appeased many Puerto Ricans, who claim six decades of bombing has harmed the health of islanders. The Navy denies those claims.
Many New York politicians have traveled to Puerto Rico to lend support to the Vieques cause -- some say to win votes among New York's estimated 1 million Puerto Ricans.
On Friday, New York legislator Adam Clayton Powell IV was released after being sentenced to time served in a San Juan federal court. He was arrested June 28 for trespassing on Navy land.
In April, Clinton met with New York civil rights leader Al Sharpton at a Brooklyn detention center. Sharpton is still serving a 90-day sentence for trespassing.
-------- u.s.
Review Fractures Pentagon
Officials Predict Major Military Changes Far Off
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58735-2001Jul13?language=printer
The Pentagon is deadlocked over Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's ambitious efforts to overhaul the U.S. military, and several top Defense Department officials predicted yesterday there would be little immediate change in the size and structure of the armed forces.
Civilian Pentagon officials and military brass have clashed so seriously in recent days that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Henry H. Shelton expressed concern Wednesday to Rumsfeld about the defense secretary's review of the military. Shelton said in an interview last night that he told Rumsfeld there was not enough information to justify some of the decisions being contemplated.
But Shelton also said he is generally satisfied with the Pentagon review. "I think there's a lot of anxiety associated with the process," he said. But, he concluded: "The process is working. It's not always pretty."
Still, the tension does not bode well for the future of Rumsfeld's controversial drive to change the military to address new threats from Asia, terrorists and adversaries waging computer warfare. Rumsfeld's effort has moved in recent weeks from strategic theorizing to concrete, and politically volatile, decisions on "force structure" -- that is, the number of people in each service, the way they are organized, and the weapons they are given.
President Bush came into office vowing that his new defense secretary would "review America's armed forces and prepare to transform them to meet emerging threats." To carry out that promise, Rumsfeld assembled panels to study overarching military strategy, personnel policy, nuclear weapons and many other topics. The review process drew criticism from Congress and many uniformed officers as overly secretive, especially as it became clear that Rumsfeld was contemplating major change.
As the review progressed, Rumsfeld decided to discard the "two major war" yardstick that for almost a decade has been used to determine the size and needed capabilities of the military. Using that requirement, the Pentagon has maintained an active-duty military of 1.4 million people equipped with the weaponry to simultaneously fight two medium-sized wars.
Rumsfeld and his allies have worried that this focus has distracted the military from paying attention to new and different threats. As an alternative, Rumsfeld has focused on developing a fast-deploying, agile military that relies on radar-evading "stealth" technologies and unmanned vehicles. The future military, his planners envision, would wield more precision and long-range weaponry, mount layers of missile defenses and focus more on new threats such as computer warfare.
But many senior generals and admirals began to balk when the Pentagon discussions turned to how to translate those recommendations into decisions about the future shape and size of the military, several officials said. The key point of contention is how much change is prudent in the military right now, and how rapid that change should be, they added.
The services are deeply worried that to come up with funds for new initiatives, Rumsfeld might cut existing troops, ships and planes. The Army, for instance, fears losing two of its 10 active divisions, while the Navy fears the loss of aircraft carriers. But one of the civilians involved in the review said that Rumsfeld has not proposed any cuts at this point.
"The [services'] proposals are for no change, and the system is just deadlocked," this source said. This person, an advocate of radical reform, said that the armed services are stiff-arming the Pentagon's civilian leadership. "They are just not responsive. They just don't want to play. What's [angering] them is the basic threat of big change."
But another defense official said the military leadership has a very different perspective from Rumsfeld and his allies. The civilians around Rumsfeld, he said, "are saying, 'Take on a ton of risk so we can get where we want to be 20 years from now.' " But, he continued, "Everybody on the uniformed side is saying, 'No, you've got enough risk right now.' " To deal with current threats, he said, the Joint Chiefs of Staff essentially have told Rumsfeld that they don't believe any major changes should be made in the size and shape of the military.
Meetings of top civilian and military officials at the Pentagon have grown tense in recent days, this person added. He said, for example, that at a session earlier this week, Steven Cambone, the Rumsfeld aide coordinating staff meetings on how to change the military, angrily asked the generals present, "Can't you come up with anything new?"
After Monday's meeting, the Joint Staff's representative, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, went to his superior, Shelton, and told him that the review process was deeply troubled, officials said. Shelton then raised some of those concerns at his meeting with Rumsfeld.
Victoria Clarke, the top Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on what was said at that meeting. Overall, she said: "I'm sure there is some grumbling. This is very hard stuff. When people care deeply, they express opinions."
One general involved in the review said: "We are beyond being upset. We are into giggle factor." He added that of several post-Cold War defense reviews, "This is by far the most disorganized effort I've ever seen."
"The problem is that there is an element of trust that is missing," said another general working on the review. He attributed that largely to the brusque manner Rumsfeld used when he first came to the Pentagon six months ago. "I think that goes back to Rumsfeld coming in and acting like he was conducting a hostile takeover. He didn't ask for input up front."
The only way out, this general added, would be for Rumsfeld to simply terminate discussions and unilaterally impose changes. But he and several other officials predicted that Rumsfeld won't do that, in part because the administration already has a fight on its hands with Congress over its ambitious missile defense plans, and doesn't need to wage a two-front political war.
-------- OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Ethanol Lobby Hopes to Lock in New Market
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-energy-ethan.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mention ethanol in Washington these days and political power brokers take notice.
President Bush praises the renewable fuel made from corn as helping to wean America from foreign oil imports. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota supports ethanol, as do House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri.
Fresh from winning a huge new market for ethanol in California, supporters of the fuel believe the next step should be for Congress to require that all motor fuel sold in the United States include ethanol.
But forcing the use of ethanol is making some determined enemies, which could complicate the task of promoting it as a clean, environmentally friendly fuel that funnels money to hard-pressed American farmers instead of Arab sheiks.
CALIFORNIA OUTRAGED
A decision last month to force California to use ethanol as an additive in its motor fuel has outraged some environmentalists and influential politicians, who say that ethanol is not the clean fuel it is cracked up to be.
The Bush administration wants ``to force the use of ethanol on California ... even when it is shown to worsen California's air,'' California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein told Reuters. ''We are going to fight this fight one way or another.''
Federal law requires states with the worst pollution to include oxygen-rich fuel additives like ethanol, or its more popular counterpart, MTBE, in their reformulated gasoline.
With many states phasing out MTBE use in the next few years because it may contaminate groundwater, ethanol demand is expected to boom. But environmentalists say ethanol can actually increase smog in some cases.
The ethanol industry forecasts it will blend a record 1.8 billion gallons of ethanol this year in about 15 percent of the nation's fuel supply, up from 1.6 billion gallons last year. About 25 percent of the nation's gasoline is mixed with MTBE.
LOCKING IN A MARKET
With about a dozen pro-ethanol bills currently pending in Congress, Bob Dinneen, vice president of the pro-ethanol Renewable Fuels Association, said the industry was lobbying hardest for the passage of a renewable fuels requirement.
If approved, the bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota would require all gasoline sold in the United States to contain at least 0.8 percent of renewable fuels starting next year. The renewable fuels requirement would gradually increase every year, reaching 5 percent in 2016.
Passenger vehicles in the United States used 121 billion gallons of gasoline in 2000, so if just 0.8 percent of this market went to ethanol, demand for the alternative fuel would increase substantially.
``I think it is fair to say this (bill) is not a slam dunk,'' said Monte Shaw, spokesman for ethanol's trade group. ``Some (lawmakers) currently like using their petroleum and are not jumping up and down for this stuff (ethanol).''
The ethanol lobby is focusing on trying to get the provision attached to a broader package of measures now before Congress to deal with the nation's energy problems.
The Senate Energy Committee is expected to begin hearings on Tuesday on the energy plan, including whether renewable fuels such as ethanol should be included.
``In terms of ethanol, everything is on the table and we haven't ruled anything out,'' said Bill Wicker, the committee's spokesman. ``Renewables definitely are in the mix.''
The U.S. government already subsidizes ethanol through a generous excise tax exemption, established in 1979, currently worth 5.3 cents a gallon at the pump. Bush recently indicated his approval for continuing the federal tax credits.
Mindful of its dependence on Washington, the ethanol industry has been generous with political contributions.
ADM POLITICAL DONATIONS
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM.N), the largest U.S. producer of ethanol, contributed a total of $935,400 in last year's elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
ADM, the biggest political contributor among farm service companies, strategically split the money between the Republican and Democratic parties.
The Decatur, Illinois-based company, with a long history of currying favor in Washington, contributed directly to 42 candidates for the House of Representatives and 34 candidates for Senate in 2000, the nonprofit group said. ADM gave Bush $4,000 in political action committee money, but did not contribute to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore.
In addition to the ethanol subsidies, ADM also benefits from government protection of the domestic sugar industry because the company produces high-fructose corn syrup, and it gets subsidies from Washington for some exports of U.S. grain. The company was one of the most prominent corporate recipients of federal aid in the 1980s and 1990s, according to political experts.
POLITICAL STAKES HIGH
Last month, Bush, who owes much of his election success to the Midwest states, rewarded ADM and the ethanol industry by rejecting California's request to exempt it from federal clean gasoline rules. This should pave the way for a substantial rise in ethanol demand there by 2003.
Ethanol's support originates in the farming region of the Midwest, where the industry uses large amounts of corn every year to help produce the fuel.
Of the top 10 corn-growing states, half voted for Bush and half for Gore in the closely fought presidential race last year. Bush lost the top corn producing state, Iowa, and the No. 10 state Wisconsin by a few thousand votes each, and he seems determined to do better next time.
``We won't and can't win without the support of the Midwest states,'' said Ann Wagner, co-chairman of the Republican National Committee.
But some experts said that when push comes to shove Bush may side with the oil and gas industries, where he got his business start in Texas, rather than ethanol.
``I don't think (the California decision) was as much of a statement of Bush's support for ethanol, but the political realities of the moment,'' said Neil Harl, agriculture economist at Iowa State University.
-------- energy
U.S. Opposes Plan for Financing of Clean Energy Over Fossil Fuel
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/international/14SUMM.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - The Bush administration plans to oppose an international drive to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and increase financing for nonpolluting energy sources worldwide, administration officials said today.
The proposals are contained in a report commissioned by the Group of 8 industrial nations, which will hold its annual summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, next week. The proposals would commit rich nations to help one billion people around the world get their power from renewable energy sources, like wind, water and the sun.
The White House says its opposition to the proposals is based on a desire to let the marketplace, rather than government, decide how quickly renewable energy sources are adopted worldwide. But critics say it is yet another instance of the Bush administration's placing the interest of oil and gas companies ahead of the drive to reduce global warming.
That debate notwithstanding, the administration's decision - along with objections today by Canadian officials, who also oppose elements of the report - could prevent the G-8 from endorsing the proposals. The group usually works by consensus, and proposals are generally not adopted if any members object.
European leaders had hoped to use the summit meeting to jump-start talks on global warming and to salvage what they could of the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty to fight global warming, which the Bush administration also opposes. Some European officials and environmental groups viewed the report by the G-8 "task force" as a major rallying point.
A final draft copy of the report calls on rich nations to "remove incentives and other supports for environmentally harmful energy technologies." It also encourages them to shift the priorities of international lending agencies, like the World Bank, to support more clean energy projects in poor countries.
People who helped prepare the report said one important goal was to persuade wealthy nations to stop promoting fossil fuel projects in the developing world, a step that could reduce sales of power plants, pipelines, drilling equipment and other goods used in producing energy from oil and coal. The effort is directly related to fighting global warming.
The task force recommended that the G-8 nations use their public financing leverage with national and international lending institutions to support more clean energy projects.
A Bush administration official said the United States did not support the report even though the high-profile task force rewrote it to reflect some American objections.
The task force included a number of government officials as well as leaders of multinational businesses and environmental groups. Co-chairmen of the group were Corado Clini, Italy's top environmental official, and Mark Moody Stuart, chairman of the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell.
A draft copy of the report was provided to The New York Times by people who support its goals and who want to call attention to the administration's opposition.
While the administration supports the idea of expanding use of renewable energy sources, it does not favor the task force's emphasis on government-to-government financing, the administration official said. He said the goal of having one billion people rely on clean energy sources within a decade was a target that had "no analytical basis."
"While we are committed to expanding the use of renewables, there was a sense that this task force was more focused on government funding - throwing money at the problem," the official said. "We are more interested in looking at how to leverage private sector efforts."
He said the final communiqué of the summit meeting next week was likely to include language that supports the spread of clean energy even if the report is not endorsed.
President Bush announced in the spring that the United States had no intention of meeting targets set in the Kyoto treaty.
"By rejecting the task force's recommendations, President Bush is once again undermining any attempt to take serious action on global warming," said Daphne Wysham, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.
The institute and Friends of the Earth, an environmental organization, did a study that found that the export promotion agencies of rich nations, like the Export-Import Bank of the United States, are the world's largest public backers of fossil fuels, the main causes of global warming. The credit agencies supported $115 billion in such projects in the five years through 1999, the study said.
"About two billion people on this planet are not served by electricity, and the most cost effective approach for them is often solar or biomass, not fossil fuels," said Dan Reicher, who served on the G-8 task force as a Clinton administration official. "But it takes real targets - numerical goals - if we are going to make a difference."
The Bush administration official said he considered the task force's emphasis on nonpolluting energy for the developing world as lopsided. He said that as poor nations grow, they will need traditional energy sources as well as renewables.
"There is not just one solution to the energy demands of growing and developing economies," he said.
Among the goals embraced in the final report are several targets for improving or expanding the use of renewable energy. It says the G-8 should aim to help 200 million poor people worldwide use biomass energy sources, like natural and human waste products, to fuel fires for cooking. It also suggests that clean energy sources could eventually provide electricity to 300 million people who do not have electricity today and 500 million more who are connected to an existing grid.
The executive summary of the report did not say how many people are now served by renewable energy sources, which includes hydropower. But it called its goals "ambitious."
Bush administration officials decided early on that they could not support key elements of the task force's work, according to people who took part in the task force efforts. At a key meeting to discuss an early draft of the report, held in Japan in March, an administration official rejected an early draft of the report and submitted a new executive summary prepared in Washington, the people involved said.
The task force incorporated some of the administration's views and watered down language concerning numerical goals, the participants said. But it did not accept all of the changes proposed by Washington, and the administration declined to support the final draft.
-------- environment
President, With a Variety of Steps, Addresses Climate Change
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/politics/14WARM.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - President Bush today promoted a number of studies and other measures intended to address the impact of greenhouse gases, including a $120 million NASA research project to examine more thoroughly the relationship between them and climate changes.
In a statement, Mr. Bush called the initiatives "important steps" that were "designed to increase our scientific understanding of climate change, to tap the enormous promise of technology in addressing greenhouse gas emissions and to promote further cooperation on climate change with our partners in the Western Hemisphere and beyond."
The statement came less than a week before Mr. Bush's second presidential trip to Europe, where some of the nation's leading allies remain bitterly disappointed over his decision to abandon a treaty on global warming.
That decision also infuriated many environmental groups and contributed to a public perception of the Bush administration's energy plan as an approach that favored energy production and business over conservation and the environment. Ever since, the administration has taken pains to portray the president as environmentally sensitive.
The latest such effort, the announcement today, reflected the work of a cabinet-level advisory panel that Mr. Bush had convened.
In addition to the three-year NASA study, Mr. Bush said, the Treasury Department has reached an agreement to spend $14 million to help El Salvador conserve its forests, and the Energy Department will work with the Nature Conservancy to look into forestry practices in Brazil and Belize, which have expansive rain forests. The preservation of rain forests is one way to fight a buildup of greenhouse gases.
In addition, Mr. Bush announced that the Energy Department had obtained a promise of cooperation from energy companies in developing new technologies that would help prevent carbon dioxide emissions.
Environmentalists said the measures were paltry contributions to the fight against global warming. Some of the measures were already planned under the Clinton administration or were fulfillments of campaign promises that Mr. Bush's initial federal budget did not reflect.
--------
Bush boosts global-warming study
July 14, 2001
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010714-61242180.htm
President Bush yesterday pledged to spend an additional $120 million to study global warming, a move that Republicans hope will buy him some political cover as he prepares for his second visit to Europe next week.
But some environmentalists say the administration is still not doing enough to reduce greenhouse gases that they insist are causing the Earth's temperature to rise. They believe Mr. Bush is merely throwing research dollars at the problem instead of taking steps to reduce emissions.
Senior administration officials said the president is genuinely committed to fight global warming, although he remains adamantly opposed to the Kyoto Protocol as a burden on U.S. businesses and consumers. They insisted he is not stalling by taking more time to study global warming.
"If we were trying to punt this problem down the field, I don't think you'd have the Cabinet working day in and day out on this issue," a senior administration official told The Washington Times. "We do take it very seriously."
The official added: "We already are taking concrete steps that we think are important steps. But it would make little sense not to advance the research."
Another senior administration official said global warming is so complex that the White House is wary of forming too many conclusions without further research.
"It's a very complicated issue and the Cabinet wanted to dig in, the president wanted to dig in, and fully understand the science and the technology," the official said. "Frankly, I think that's the responsible thing to do."
The $120 million will be spent over the next three years by NASA. The largest amount, $50 million, will be used to study how the oceans and Earth's biosphere function as "sinks" that sequester carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas.
Another $22 million will be spent studying whether aerosols warm or cool the atmosphere. And $20 million is earmarked for analyzing the role that clouds may play in climate change.
NASA will pour $15 million into computer-modeling systems aimed at simulating various climate systems. Another $10 million will go toward linking these modeling systems with similar systems overseas.
The new funding was announced less than a week before Mr. Bush departs for his second visit to Europe. Last month, during his first visit, leaders of France and other nations expressed their disapproval at the president's declaration that the Kyoto Protocol was "fatally flawed."
The White House is sending a representative to Bonn this month for a conference on Kyoto. In advance of that conference -- and the president's forthcoming trip to England, Italy and Serbia -- the administration wants to remind the world that the United States spends far more than the European Union to fight global warming.
"We spend over $1.8 billion annually, which is 50 percent of the climate-change research dollars worldwide, three times as much as the next largest contributor, and more than the EU and Japan combined," an administration official said yesterday.
In addition, only one legislature in Europe, Romania's, has actually ratified the treaty.
Many conservative Republicans dismiss global warming as an unsound scientific theory.
They point out that some scientists and the press were warning about global cooling a quarter-century ago.
But Mr. Bush has repeatedly stated that global warming is a reality. Still, environmentalists view this assertion with suspicion and have placed more emphasis on the president's opposition to Kyoto.
--------
Scientists Puzzle Over New Climate Data
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Climate-Conference.html
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- Ever since global warming became a major issue, scientists have been discovering a blizzard of bewildering new data, feeding them into computer models, trying to frame the planet's present course and to project its future.
New facts -- and new questions -- will be at hand for politicians and policy makers gathering next week in Bonn, Germany, to resume negotiations that collapsed last November on controlling the greenhouse gases blamed for the gradual warming of the Earth.
Among the new research: Measurements collected since Cold War submarines prowled under the Arctic ice show the ice cap is getting thinner. But why? Is it global warming or a natural cycle -- or both?
In the Himalayas, the Andes and other middle latitude mountains, glaciers are receding, while others in high latitudes like Scandinavia are expanding. In the coming decades, parts of the Earth will get less rain, while some will get more. What does this mean for food production, fresh water supplies, population shifts?
Also puzzling: As temperatures climb, the Earth's cloud cover will grow and reflect more sunlight, cooling in some places but perhaps warming others. No one is sure what effect this will have on the ground.
This week, at a conference of 1,500 scientists in Amsterdam, only a few basic assumptions were universally accepted: that Earth is indeed getting warmer because of human activity; that the warming already has begun to change our lives and the trend will increase; and that we ought to do something about it.
``The problem of global change is real, and it is more serious than is currently perceived politically,'' said Berrien Moore III, of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A report published by the panel this week documented evidence that the Earth is warming faster now than at any time in the previous 1,000 years, and that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air is higher than it has been in the last 400,000 years.
The primary manmade cause of global warming is the emission of greenhouse gases -- especially carbon dioxide from cars, factories and power stations. That thickening blanket of heat-trapping gases has already raised ground temperatures by 1.1 degree in the last 100 years. In the next century, the global thermometer could rise an astounding 6 degrees more.
The Kyoto Protocol, set in 1997, outlined targets and timetables for industrialized countries to reduce emissions.
Further negotiations on how to reach those targets have become embroiled in contention, pitting the United States against its European allies, and poor nations against the rich.
The Hague talks last November deadlocked on how to credit countries for managing forests and farms that absorb carbon from the air, in so-called ``sinks.'' The U.S. delegation wanted broad leeway, while the Europeans saw sinks as ploy to avoid forcing American industry to clean up its act.
Since then, Washington has made prospects for an agreement in Bonn even dimmer. In March, President Bush renounced the U.S. commitment to Kyoto, calling the protocol a flawed plan that would harm the U.S. economy.
The top U.N. climate official, Michael Zammit Cutajar, said Friday parts of the treaty could be reconsidered if it would persuade Bush to retract his withdrawal from Kyoto -- but the basic concepts should remain.
German police are braced for the arrival of thousands of demonstrators, fearing the violence that has accompanied recent government meetings on global issues. Much of the anger may be directed at Bush, whom environmentalists accuse of endangering the planet.
Bush wants to replace the Kyoto agreement's mandatory controls with a voluntary regime relying on market forces. He also objects to the exclusion of India and China from any obligation.
But he has suggested no alternative. ``I don't think the American administration itself knows what its aiming for,'' said Dutch negotiator Yvo de Boer.
-------- genetics
Unexpected Priority: Stem Cell Research's Rise as a Test for Bush
New York Times
July 14, 2001
NEWS ANALYSIS
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/politics/14STEM.html
WASHINGTON, July 13 - The debate about research on embryonic stem cells has traveled in just a month's time from relative obscurity to magazine-cover ubiquity, and, many political analysts and lawmakers say it has become a defining issue of President Bush's first year in office.
With social conservatives imploring Mr. Bush to withhold federal support for the research and moderates pushing him to permit it, he faces a decision that could fix his place on the political spectrum more firmly than anything he has done to date.
Both Republicans and Democrats said that for many voters, the course Mr. Bush charts would be interpreted as a indicator of the extent to which he feels bound to the right or, alternately, is willing to reach toward the center.
During a period when some polls have shown a drop in Mr. Bush's approval ratings and he could use more support from moderates than he seems to have, his decision could shape voters' attitudes toward him in crucial ways, analysts said.
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to grow into any cell or tissue, holding promise for repairing and replacing damaged organs. The research draws opposition from religious conservatives, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, because it results in the destruction of embryos.
The issue's potency is reflected in the months of meetings that Mr. Bush has devoted to it and the frequency with which it pops up in conversations around the West Wing. Several White House officials said that stem cell research has provoked as much formal and casual discussion as anything since Mr. Bush's inauguration nearly six months ago.
Several lawmakers characterized the issue as something of a litmus test for Mr. Bush.
"It's an opportunity for him, having fully established his conservative credentials, to establish compassionate credentials," said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supports the research.
Ms. Collins said the issue was also an opportunity for Mr. Bush "to show a degree of independence" from social conservatives in his party.
John Weaver, a senior political aide to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that the way Mr. Bush acted on this issue, along with his handling of a patients' bill of rights, could speak powerfully to "a perception, and I'm not saying it's fair, that this administration is too tied to corporate interests and very conservative."
Mr. Weaver added that Mr. Bush's actions could "lock some of those perceptions down permanently among voters or, if the administration goes in a different direction, could soften those perceptions."
Administration officials have said that Mr. Bush will most likely make a decision on the research financing before the end of July. If he withholds or severely restricts federal support, the decision may be seen as more ideological than, say, his ban on federal funds for overseas groups that provide abortion-related counseling, because many abortion opponents support the stem-cell research.
"We're into new territory here," one senior administration official said. "It doesn't slice nice."
This official and others said the issue was complicated enough - and stirred enough passion - that the only sure benefit Mr. Bush could wring from his decision was a public perception that he reached it thoughtfully.
To that end, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, has repeatedly said that Mr. Bush was listening to every viewpoint and taking a deeply "deliberative" approach.
Mr. Bush has received contradictory political analyses. Some prominent Republicans contend that a permissive decision on the research will not be enough to win over moderates, so he would be wisest to stay with his conservative base. According to this thinking, only conservatives can be trusted to reward him.
Other Republicans who advise the administration see serious political danger for Mr. Bush, at this particular juncture, if he reinforces the most socially conservative aspects of his image.
"If he goes and refuses to use stem-cell research - if he bans it - then I think he will look more rigid and inflexible than he wants to," said one Republican strategist who often speaks with administration officials.
Another administration adviser said: "It's a defining issue. If the administration can find a middle ground, they can really move people's impressions of him as a very conservative president."
Several people familiar with the White House deliberations said Mr. Bush might not feel completely tethered to a campaign position of seemingly unwavering opposition to the research.
Conversely, some administration officials are studying scientific arguments against the research, apparently in the hope of justifying a ban on the research along those lines.
The argument would be that similarly controversial research on fetal tissue has not yielded measurable progress and that doctors are intrigued by the promise of stem cells derived from body fat that do not involve the destruction of embryos.
There have been no clear hints of what Mr. Bush will decide.
David Gergen, a longtime political strategist who has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said the president's prolonged contemplation of the issue suggested he was moving beyond his thinking during the campaign.
"Why would he delay otherwise?" Mr. Gergen asked. "Why would he go through this process that is only raising the political price of any decision? I don't think the public was paying much attention to it just three to four weeks ago."
Polls generally show much more public support than opposition to federal funding of the research, but they also suggest that people are still sifting through their feelings - and can be swayed one way or the other. Partly for that reason, some political analysts contend that Mr. Bush can safely make any decision he likes, as long as he articulates it well.
"The president has a great deal of flexibility," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster. Mr. McInturff added that by his reading of current polls, "I don't see any evidence that he's been pushed beyond a comfortable center-right majority of this country."
On his tax cut and education plan, Mr. Bush has indeed attracted significant Democratic support. But he has alienated many moderate voters with his positions and actions on environmental issues.
"Swing voters are moving away from him," said Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster. "So this is the time when he really has to make key decisions." Foremost among them, Mr. Schoen said, was federal support for embryonic stem cells research.
Little more than a month ago, the public interest in it was minimal.
"Now it's an avalanche," said Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who supports the research. "It's just overwhelming."
--------
Va. Candidates Debate Stem Cells
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Stem-Cell-Debate.html
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. (AP) -- Virginia's two candidates for governor expressed alarm Saturday that researchers had created human embryos in the lab solely to harvest their stem cells.
News that the embryos had been created by the private Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Norfolk, Va., sparked national debate earlier this week.
Scientists had previously been known to derive stem cells only from excess embryos donated from infertility treatments.
``I was troubled at the idea of creating stem cells,'' Democrat Mark Warner said. ``I have asked for a briefing on it, but we need to hear this issue out before we rush to judgment.''
Warner, who has a daughter with diabetes, said stem cell research offers enormous potential for cures for such diseases.
Republican Mark Earley, while not condemning all stem cell research, attacked the use of embryos.
``You ought to be more than troubled, Mark, if there is a place in Virginia that -- on its own basically without public discussion -- begins to create human embryos for the sole purpose of experimentation and destruction,'' Earley said.
Earley said it was possible to research the lifesaving possibilities of stem cells by using the bone marrow of adults.
Interest in embryonic stem cells centers on their ability to generate other tissues of the body. Doctors hope using stem cells could possibly cure diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and cancer.
Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has called for an ethics investigation into the research.
President Bush has said he will soon decide whether to allow taxpayer dollars to be used for embryonic stem cell research. He is under pressure from patient groups that favor the research and opponents who feel the work is inherently unethical.
It was the gubernatorial candidates' first debate leading to the Nov. 6 election. They spoke at the Virginia Bar Association's annual summer conference at the Greenbrier Resort.
-------- human rights
Women Elders Arrested
From: inea1111@webtv.net Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 19:10:41 -0500 (CDT)
BACKGROUND: Since the early '70's the US Government has been pursuing a policy to 'relocate' several hundred Dineh (Navajo to the dominant culture) Indians from the homesteads that they have lived on for generations. You may do a web search for Big Mountain Land Dispute, Big Mountain Dineh, or Big Mountain Resistance to learn more about this decades long dispute. ( a search for just 'Big Mountain' will get you pages of links for a rock band, so be sure to add dispute, dineh, navajo, etc. to your search request). The Big Mountain issue is not covered by the mainstream media, because it is one of the biggest human rights issues in our current time, and the powers that be do NOT want these indigenous peoples supported by public sympathy. This past week has been the Big Mountain Sun Dance Ceremony. If you don't know what Sun Dance is, look it up, but to be brief, it is one of the Holiest Ceremonies for the Native American population. This week several Big Mountain Resisters, women who have fought the relocation for nearly 30 years were arrested at Sun Dance, and as the letters below state, there is even more pressure on these folks right to gather than there was on the Rainbow Gathering. This is a RELIGIOUS Gathering on Big Mountain, and they are arresting and fining folks for attending. Unlike the Rainbow Gathering, this Ceremony takes place on private land, yet the roads in are blocked and folks are being harassed for trying to attend. You will not see this story on CNN or FOXNEWS. Native American issues and actions are VERY censored in this country. Please help as you can, and spread the word. inea
Women Elders Arrested Hello, friends,
Here is the latest thoughts and information from the Kahn family, Navajo/Osage, who live on the Navajo reservation, following these few words:
What is most needed from all of us are sincere and daily prayers that these atrocites in our land will cease..that we will provide a good role model to the rest of the world in how our indigenous peoples are treated by our government, and by the citizens of this land. It is a well-published fact that our native political prisoners and their plight are better known outstide the United States than within it.
Following the lead of all our beloved sacred figures--whether Christian, Baha'i or Indian, we know they one and all, espoused non-volent approaches to atrocites, as individuals. We are not the army from the nations of the world called upon by the Founder/Prophet of the Baha'i Faith, to (paraphrazing) arise and put down those nations who choose to be aggressive toward another nation. As individuals we can only voice our extreme hurt and displeasure at these actions taken, and we can most certainly voice our opinions to those in power if we so choose, as a means of support for both the Hopi and the Navajo peoples.
I know by history, education, and association that both the Hopi and the Navajo are peaceful people. People who have lived together and intermarried countless times over the centuries. They are relatives. They are one in spirit and in intent. They have been divided by the excess evils of materialism, politics, greed-based socialism... and listening/following their strayed leaders. When the men in power--start truly listening to the women--we will have no more war. There will be no more hunger for our children, nor lack of the necessities of life. We as mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, will no longer have to weep the loss of our fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, in battle--whether it is a physical battle or a battle of the conscious.
An enormous apology should be extended to the women Elders arrested, taken from their families, and subjected to the discomforts of a night in jail. Our Elders are so few and so very precious.
I apologize if my words offend anyone. They are not intended to. But the hurt runs deep in all people of native blood.. whether full-blood or mixed. It easily opens old wounds that we have tried to hide and heal. The very earth, our mother, Turtle Island, cries with the blood of our ancestors. WE MUST STOP HERE!
Wado, All My Relations,
Linda Covey Carries Light
Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2001 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: More Sundance Updates......
Greetings Dear Elder of our Plains Peoples Ways, Thank you for responding with the positive spirit of a true lover of the Blessed Beauty. It means a lot to know the direction taken for others - those living under oppression - is a way to help our people as well. No matter what. Feels a lot like apathy, when we stand back...time to act will become clear after prayer, reflection & "True Baha'i Consultation" ...as mentioned to our Board member for Protection, we can react like mother bears when our children or elder loved ones are endanger... Taking the printed info. you sent to Chester to night... he is at the 4 Corners Baha'i school by Gallup, as is our Board member for Protection who has reminded us what the Gaurdian causions us reguarding taking action in disputes... Reminded of the powerful influence of the travel teaching with Inuit elder & friends through the area & will remind the friends that the concorse as assisted the sharing of the Healing Message - which we all have actively supported... this has an influence which can be creating a change as we know...This is a challenge...Thank you dear one for support the activist in us... with balance & wisdom... as always...we trust you...TRK & ALK Sr
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 5:20 PM
Subject: Fwd: More Sundance Updates........
I recieved another phone message from Big Mountain today, folks who had snuck out of the dance to get supplies. This is their latest update: The Sundance began as scheduled with the Tree of Life planted in the arbor, Thursday morning about 6:30 a.m. The five ladies were detained while on their way to meet with Wayne Taylor(Hopi Tribal Council Chairman). Apparently they are all doing fine. I was told that a certain resident of Big Mountain is being targeted for being vocal and the tribal police is asking for them by name. People are not being allowed to leave and return to the Sundance grounds. Those who leave and choose to return face fines of $500 and up depending on how many times they leave and re-enter. But they wanted us to know that everyone is praying, and the Sundance is on.
This is a good time for those of us on the outside to take action. I would encourage people to call Gale Norton's office, secretary of the Department of the Interior, who oversees the BIA and several other agencies with jurisdiction out on the land. She is at (202) 208-3100. Our congresspeople can be reached through the Congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121. It is theirs and our responsibility to act on this, as their land is being sacrificed to feed the growing demand for energy throughout the United States. Let's flood them with calls, and let them know we are paying attention and are willing to hold them accountable.
For those of you who have not seen it, following is a statement from Leonard Crowdog:
Statement from Chief Leonard Crowdog
July 12, 2001 Thursday PM
I, Chief Leonard Crowdog representing 262 tribes received a message a moment ago- we ask for the release of the elders. We don't want that Hopi jail to be historically marked in the eyes of the world. if it is marked we shall look into the violation of the 1934 Reorganization act - how we are come to be citizens of the united states.
By the human rights of the world great law- we are sick and tired of that kind of treatment.
We have the right to stand on our tribal relations federation enterprise. Immediately we want them to release the elders! We are 3000 people here demanding the release. Arrestees Ruth Benally, Pauline Whitesinger, Elivira Horseherder, Louise Benally, and Dan Asheki.
Express concern to the Hopi government.
520 738-2233
Thanks Sharon
Sharon Lungo Action Resource Center
P.O. Box 2104 Venice, CA 90294
(310) 396-3254 ph (310) 392-9965 fx
slungo@enviroweb.org
----
Added Rights for Indians Are Ratified In Mexico
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By GINGER THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/international/americas/14MEXI.html
MEXICO CITY, July 13 - With the approval of more than half its 31 state legislatures, Mexico ratified landmark constitutional changes on Thursday aimed at granting 10 million Indians new rights and protections against discrimination.
Of the 25 legislatures that have considered the amendments to the Constitution, 17 have approved them.
Yet indigenous leaders overwhelmingly rejected the amendments as an affront and said they would undermine government efforts to resolve a seven-year-old Indian uprising in Chiapas.
"The time has come to warn society that this reform, if approved, would be born dead," the governors of Chiapas and Oaxaca - which have the largest Indian populations - wrote in a letter that newspapers published on Thursday. The governors added that Indian organizations had "made clear that this law does not recognize the legal rights of Indian people; does not guarantee economic autonomy, nor does it make reconciliation possible among indigenous groups that have resorted to armed rebellion to demand radical changes in their living conditions."
The amendments, forged five years ago in peace talks between the government and the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas, were presented to Congress last year by President Vicente Fox, who had promised a quick and peaceful resolution of the Chiapas conflict.
The president dismantled military checkpoints across Chiapas and complied with Zapatista demands to close seven military bases there. Risking significant power, Mr. Fox urged Congress to support the changes, which grant limited autonomy to Indian communities.
At the end of a march on Mexico City, Zapatista leaders addressed Congress to demand the passage of a law that, among other changes, would have let Indian communities follow traditional customs in electing officials and enforcing laws. Critics of the original rights bill had worried that it would balkanize the nation and reduce government power to uphold federal laws in Indian areas. Many worried that it would weaken protections for Indian women.
After days of debate, a coalition of legislators from the Institutional Revolutionary Party and Mr. Fox's National Action Party significantly changed the proposals and pushed them through Congress. It was then sent to the states. The approval of 16 legislatures was needed to ratify the amendments.
Indian rights leaders, furious over the changes, conducted protests to defeat it. The Zapatistas cut off negotiations with the government.
Governments in eight states, representing more than half the Indian population, rejected the changes. But on Thursday, the amendments were ratified by legislators in Michoacán. The vote, 18 to 11, was taken after meetings in which a steady stream of Indian leaders expressed firm opposition.
Legislators discussed the bill for five hours before voting. Observers were denied access to legislative chambers by at least a dozen security guards.
--------
China's human rights record not a game
July 14, 2001
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010714-21340241.htm
Democratic and Republican lawmakers condemned the choice of Beijing yesterday as host of the 2008 Summer Games, and human rights groups threatened to disrupt the Olympics with public demonstrations against China's repression of dissent.
Protests erupted in Moscow even before Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), announced the decision granting the Games to Beijing.
Russian police quickly broke up a protest, arresting more than a dozen demonstrators near the site where the IOC vote was held.
The White House remained noncommittal on the decision, and IOC officials, before the vote, had voiced hope that the Olympic prize would encourage Beijing to liberalize its political system.
But defenders of human rights around the globe deplored the decision to grant China the world's premier sporting event.
"This may be a cause for celebration in Beijing, but it must be crushing news for thousands of prisoners in China," said former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, president of American Values, a pro-family human rights group.
Mr. Bauer said his group would begin a nationwide campaign to train Olympic visitors as human rights activists.
"The Chinese government may arrest and even kill its citizens, but it can't stop Western protesters," he said in an interview.
Other human rights advocates said Beijing's track record in hosting other major international events shows that abuses are likely to increase, with China strong-arming people to ensure that Olympics facilities are constructed on time and forcibly removing the homeless and destitute from public view.
"The selection of the Olympic site is a great honor to the Chinese people, but the government must not dishonor this opportunity by violating the rights of those citizens," Xiao Qing, executive director of Human Rights in China, told the Associated Press.
In London, the human rights group Amnesty International said China now faces the serious challenge of proving itself worthy of staging the games.
"Ironically, sports stadiums were the last places where many of those condemned to death were taken, to be subjected to ritual public humiliation in front of large crowds, just before being executed," the organization said in a statement.
The Dalai Lama's Tibetan government in exile said from its base in India that the decision would only encourage repression in China.
And while China celebrated its selection, a leading Tibetan-rights group charged that Chinese police had detained hundreds of Tibetans last week in advance of the Dalai Lama's July 6 birthday.
In Washington, the Bush administration said it remained concerned about the human rights situation in China but neither welcomed nor denounced the IOC decision.
"We understand that this was a decision for the IOC to take," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "What we do know is that American athletes are going to go there, and they're going to compete, and hopefully compete very well and bring home lots of gold medals."
The State Department said the Olympics were not a political event and that the United States had no intention of turning them into one.
"But we do think it's an opportunity for China to showcase itself as a modern and progressive country," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
On Capitol Hill, condemnation of the IOC decision came from both sides of the aisle.
Rep. Tom Lantos who introduced a bill in Congress opposing China's bid, denounced the selection of Beijing.
"This decision will allow the Chinese police state to bask in the reflected glory of the Olympic Games despite having one of the most abominable human rights records in the world," said Mr. Lantos, California Democrat.
"China lacks political, religious and press freedoms, and it is an absolute outrage that the IOC has decided to reward China's deteriorating human rights record by giving Beijing the honor of hosting the Olympics."
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, called the IOC decision "a mistake, because there is no evidence that the Chinese government has made any effort to become a part of the free democratic nations of the world."
"The Communist government continues to ruthlessly oppress its people, persecute religion and restrict the press," he said.
"The Chinese government also still refuses to renounce the use of force against Taiwan."
Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, accused the IOC of overlooking Chinese human rights abuses and religious persecution.
But Mr. Wolf also sounded a positive -- if somewhat fatalistic -- note.
"The decision has been made, and while history has proven otherwise, I am hopeful that China's hosting of the Olympics will bring increased freedom and openness to China, rather than serve as a platform to glorify the current repressive regime," he said.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, congratulated China.
"The bright light of the world community now shines on China to demonstrate a new, unwavering commitment to human rights and the dignity of man, the very ethos represented by the Olympic movement itself," he said.
-------- police / prisoners
Police to Return to Streets in Ravaged Brazil City
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-brazil-.html
SALVADOR, Brazil (Reuters) - Some of the thousands of striking police in Brazil's third largest city pledged to return to work on Saturday a day after soldiers were deployed to end the killing and looting that had erupted on the unpatrolled streets.
After days when armed and ski-masked strikers occupied their own police buildings and gangs took advantage of their absence to rampage through streets left deserted by residents, 2,000 soldiers poured into the area and about 300 fanned out on Friday to quell the spreading crime.
The troop deployment that followed an escalation of the violence when 11 people were killed between Thursday and Friday, pressured the police to agree to put about a third of their 28,000-strong force back to work and restart pay talks.
While there was no word on when the strike might end completely, state officials released two strike leaders who had been arrested and agreed not to fire other strikers.
``We understand that we need to put police back on the streets, not for the governor, but for the people of Bahia,'' said Isidoro de Santana, one of the police officers who was released.
The strike is throughout the northeastern state of Bahia, but the epicenter of the turmoil has been in the colonial city of Salvador on the Atlantic ocean.
The labor action began 10 days ago, but intensified mid-week when security guards and a special force of emergency riot troops used in prisons joined the strike in a nation where police work stoppages occur periodically.
State officials claimed few police had failed to report for work, but witnesses supported police accounts saying few, in fact, had disobeyed the call to strike to demand an average doubling of their wage hike to $480 a month. Salaries start at $72 a month.
On Thursday, inmates rioted in jails and swarms of people smashed doors and made off with televisions and fridges in urban areas, prompting President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to order the troop deployment.
``LOOKS LIKE A WAR''
While witnesses said the deployment appeared sparse, the violence began waning on Friday and by Saturday, many businesses that had closed due to the mayhem reopened.
``With the troops in the street, people are relaxing a bit,'' said Jose Ferreira Passos, the owner of a shoe store who returned to work on Saturday. ``With the Army out there it looks like a war, but for us it means safety.''
State Gov. Cesar Borges said in a televised speech late Friday: ``The police have created a rebellious environment, occupying stations, wearing hoods as though they were bandits and using arms that belong to the state.''
Police strikes are fairly common in Brazil. In 1997, police in 12 of Brazil's 27 states simultaneously went on strike and many ended up clashing with troops.
--------
Inmate Used Fake ID Card to Escape
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Inmate-Escape.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hours after he was convicted of attempted murder, a man walked out of jail by flashing a phony identification card bearing a picture of actor Eddie Murphy, authorities said.
Kevin Jerome Pullum, 30, remained at large Friday after slipping out of the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail a week ago. Police said a jail informant told investigators that Pullum made the card using a picture of Murphy's face that he clipped from a newspaper or magazine ad for the movie ``Dr. Dolittle 2.''
Sheriff's Lt. Carl Deeley said Pullum acted as his own attorney and was allowed to wear civilian clothing to court on July 6. Although he was reissued his jail uniform after the verdict, authorities failed to collect the civilian clothes, which Pullum apparently wore under the jail coverall during the bus ride back to jail.
Pullum eventually took off the jail outfit, revealing his civilian clothing, put on what appeared to be a jail employee identification card and simply walked through security and out of the jail, Deeley said.
Sheriff Lee Baca said the escape raises questions about privileges given to inmates who represent themselves in court. Pullum had access to such things as copy machines, typewriters, paper and folders because he was acting as his own attorney.
Pullum was convicted of attempted murder for shooting a man six times in May 1999.
-------- spying
Bush Welcomes China Scholar Release
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-US-China.html
WASHINGTON AP) -- The Bush administration voiced satisfaction on Saturday over China's decision to release an American business professor shortly after he was convicted of spying for Taiwan.
The administration repeatedly had expressed concern over the fate of Chinese-born Li Shaomin, a professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Last month, Congress passed a resolution demanding Li's release.
China convicted Li on Saturday after a trial that lasted less than five hours, and then ordered him deported.
``The president welcomes this action,'' said Jennifer Millerwise, a White House press secretary.
``We welcome China's decision to release Mr. Li so that he can be reunited with his family,'' a State Department statement said. ``This has been a matter of great concern to many people in the United States and one that we have raised at high levels with the Chinese government.''
Chinese officials said before the trial that Li had confessed. His wife denied the accusations and said has she does not even know which activities Beijing considered suspicious.
Li is one of five Chinese-born intellectuals with U.S. ties who have been detained over the past year and accused of spying for Taiwan. He was the first to go on trial.
``We continue to urge the Chinese government to promptly resolve the cases of those who have been similarly detained ... so that they may also be reunited with their families in the United States,'' the State Department statement said.
Li's conviction came less than 24 hours after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. The U.S. Embassy was allowed to send a diplomat to watch the closed trial.
Li's expulsion would remove an irritant in U.S.-Chinese relations, which were shaken by the April collision of a U.S. Navy surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea that killed the Chinese pilot.
Li, 44, went to the United States in 1982. He later became an American citizen and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has lectured in China and worked as a U.N. adviser to Beijing.
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China to Deport U.S. Scholar
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/china-trial-verdict.html
BEIJING, July 14 -- Chinese-American scholar Li Shaomin was convicted by a Beijing court on Saturday on charges of spying for Taiwan and ordered deported, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
A U.S. official welcomed Li's release but said it was not yet known whether Li had left China after his brief trial at Beijing First Intermediate People's Court.
The report, first carried on Xinhua's Web site, did not say when or to where Li would be deported.
"Large number of evidences (sic) produced at the court show that Li accepted tasks from a Taiwan spy organisation and collected information for it, which harmed state security of China," Xinhua said.
Li, one of several U.S.-linked Chinese scholars arrested by Chinese police this year, was convicted on the morning after Olympic officials set aside concerns about China's human rights record and awarded Beijing the 2008 Games.
Many observers had expected a swift trial and expulsion to lift a major irritant in U.S.-China ties two weeks before a July 28-29 fence-mending visit to China by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"We can confirm that on July 14 Beijing First Intermediate Court sentenced Li Shaomin to be deported. We welcome China's decision to release Mr Li so that he can be reunited with his family," a U.S. embassy spokesman said.
"This has been a matter of great concern to many people in the United States -- and one we have raised at high levels with the Chinese government," the U.S. spokesman said.
U.S. PRIORITY
China had said that Li, a professor at Hong Kong's City University, had confessed to spying for Beijing's rival Taiwan, a charge his family and academic colleagues have dismissed.
China's arrest of Li and other detainees was raised last week by U.S. president George W. Bush in a telephone call with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
On June 25, the U.S. House of Representatives, in a 379-0 vote, called on Bush to make the release of the scholars a top priority in dealing with Beijing as he prepares to visit China later this year.
The State Department issued a China travel warning to Chinese scholars, angering Beijing, and some academics have called off summer visits.
There has been no word from China about trial dates for other U.S.-linked Chinese academics that Washington has raised concern about since their detentions on spying charges. They include U.S. citizen Wu Jianmin and permanent U.S. residents Gao Zhan and Tan Guangguang.
China has a history of levelling serious charges against dissidents and others and then expelling them.
In January last year, after lobbying from U.S. lawmakers and academics, Beijing released U.S.-based researcher Song Yongyi, held for several months on suspicion of gathering state secrets.
China said Song, a Chinese national weeks away from getting U.S citizenship, had confessed to sending documents containing state secrets out of China. He denied having confessed.
In 1995, China sentenced human rights activist Harry Wu to 15 years in prison for spying, but released him weeks later because of U.S. pressure. Wu said he fabricated a confession for police.
-------- activists
Gensuikyo protests against U.S. Missile Test
From: Japan Council against A & H Bombs (Japan Gensuikyo)
Sat, 14 Jul 2001 15:24:32 +0900
Dear friends,
Today, at 11:00 am on July 14 (Tokyo time), about 20 members of the Japan Council against A & H Bombs (Gensuikyo) carried out a protest action against the ballistic missile test of the U.S. Bush administration planned on July 14, in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, under the scorching sun. The members urged the President to stop the test and scrap the entire "Missile Defense Program". Please see below for the whole text submitted to the Embassy addressed to President Bush.
In the protest, Hiroshi Taka, Secretary General of Gensuikyo, strongly criticized the absurdity of the BMD and also pointed out the inhumanity of the testing itself. The site where the interceptor will be launched is the land taken away from the people of Kwajelain Atoll, the Marshall Islands, who had been forced out of their home islands and made to live in a barren, overpopulated island, like the entire Tokyo population living in a baseball stadium.
After the protest, they also submitted a letter to Prime Minister Jun-ichiro Koizumi on the issue, urging him to oppose the "Missile Defense Program" and stop the Japanese cooperation to it at the sacrifice of the safety of the Japanese people (see below for the text).
Photos of the protest action are available on Gensuikyo's web site: http://www.twics.com/~antiatom/ .
--
President George W. Bush United States of America
c/o U.S. Embassy in Japan
July 14, 2001
Stop the Missile Interception Test and Cancel the Whole "Missile Defense Program"!
Mr. President,
U.S. Department of Defense has announced that it will conduct a missile interception test on this July 14 as part of the "Missile Defense Program". We strongly protest against this plan, and demand that you should once and for all scrap the whole "Missile Defense Program".
The Bush Administration claims that the program has something to do with security or disarmament. This plan is intended, however, to install a multi-layer missile interception network to cover not only continental U.S.A. but also U.S. forces stationed abroad, including Japan. This amounts to an unprecedentedly huge arms build-up project.
Further, this program harbors the danger of re-igniting the nuclear arms race by scrapping the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.
We say that underlying this dangerous policy is an anachronistic and arrogant hegemonism of the Bush Administration, who places the U.S. national interest above the U.N. Charter, the international treaties and any other international law, in misapprehension that the U.S. alone can reign over the whole world.
While imposing "non-proliferation" on other countries, the U.S. continues "subcritical nuclear tests" and the development of mini-nukes; while imposing missile non-proliferation on others, the U.S. itself conducts missile tests, which target a territory of another nation. Further, the U.S. is coming to a point of suggesting to make a dead letter the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the U.S. administration itself used to promote --- So unreasonable is the attitude taken by the Bush Administration.
This anachronistic practice naturally brings the US to isolation from the rest of the world, as seen in the worldwide opposition to the "Missile Defense", including a large number of U.S. allies and many U.S. mayors. The Bush Administration should listen to their voices.
We urge you to stop the research and tests of the "Missile Defense Program" and abandon the whole plan. We further urge you to commit yourself to the ratification of the CTBT, as well as to the sincere implementation of the undertaking to accomplish "total elimination of nuclear arsenals", agreed upon at the May 2000 NPT Review Conference.
Japan Council against A & H Bombs
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Oppose the "Missile Defense Program" and Protest against Missile Tests!
Mr. Jun-ichiro Koizumi Prime Minister of Japan
July 14, 2001
On July 6, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that it would carry out a missile interception test on July 14 as part of the "Missile Defense Program". And the Bush Administration made public its outrageous policy of refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the U.S. Government itself used to promote, and persuading the countries that had already signed the treaty to make it a dead letter.
The so-called "Missile Defense Program" intends to establish a missile intercept network, covering not only the Continental U.S.A., but also the entire planet, with the pretext of "defending" U.S. troops deployed in other countries. This program itself is a new arms buildup plan, and evidently it holds the possibility of opening the way to a new nuclear arms race for both offensive and defensive purposes.
Underlying this attitude of the Bush Administration is its anachronistic and arrogant hegemonism, which places the U.S. national interest above the U.N. Charter, the international treaties and any other international law, in misapprehension that the U.S. alone can reign over the whole world. This practice naturally invites strong criticism from the rest of the world, including a large number of U.S. allies and the public opinion of the U.S.
Recently, in the midst of the massive criticism from the people and governments of the world against the outrage of the Bush Administration, you visited the U.S. There, you expressed your "understanding" to the Missile Defense Program of the U.S., and even agreed on the "counter-proliferation" strategy -- the very source of U.S. policy of nuclear threat and use of armed forces. Such a stance of the Japanese Government clearly betrays the opinion of the people of the A-bombed country, as well as the Constitution of Japan that upholds the settlement of disputes through peaceful means.
We urge you and the Japanese Government to reverse such shameful subservience to the U.S., sacrificing the safety of the Japanese people, and immediately stop the cooperation to the U.S. "Missile Defense Program". Further, we demand that the Japanese government should urge the U.S. to cancel the missile interception test currently planned, to ratify the CTBT as well as to implement the undertaking to accomplish "totally eliminate nuclear arsenals" agreed upon at the May 2000 NPT Review Conference.
Japan Council against A & H Bombs (Japan Gensuikyo) 2-4-4 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8464 Japan Tel: +81-3-5842-6034 Fax: +81-3-5842-6033 Email: antiatom@twics.com Web Site: http://www.twics.com/~antiatom/
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Homeless Rally in South Africa
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-South-Africa-Land.html
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) -- Thousands of homeless people briefly occupied government land Saturday near Cape Town, demanding they be given housing by the government.
The occupation came the same day authorities demolished the final shack on a plot of land outside Johannesburg that thousands of squatters began occupying about two weeks ago.
Thousands of people danced and began erecting shacks Saturday morning on land owned by the government in Macassar, near Cape Town.
``The land belongs to the Africans, the land belongs to God. No one owns it,'' local activist Peter Makute told e-tv television news.
Many squatters said they had become frustrated by the long wait for free government housing.
Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has built 1.1 million low-cost homes, sheltering more than 5 million people. However, 7.5 million South Africans still lack proper homes.
After negotiations with local officials, the squatters removed their shacks and left the land.
On Thursday, officials began demolishing an estimated 1,300 shacks erected on a tract of land near Johannesburg that had been illegally occupied by squatters for about two weeks. The land belonged to the government, a state utility and a private company.
Authorities had left the last shack -- owned by 83-year-old Puleng Elisa Lidimo -- standing Friday after angry squatters surrounded it.
Church officials found her a place in a local nursing home and the shack was demolished Saturday.
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Policy of Jailing Protesters on Minor Crimes Is Revoked
Lawsuits Claim Breach of First Amendment
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/nyregion/14PROT.html
Facing two civil rights lawsuits, the New York Police Department yesterday rescinded a two-year-old policy under which people arrested for minor offenses at protests were jailed overnight rather than given summonses to appear in court later.
A lawyer who filed one of the lawsuits said that as many as 1,000 people may have been jailed under the policy. Both suits, filed in Manhattan federal court, argued that holding people overnight after such arrests violated their civil and constitutional rights because it treated demonstrators more harshly than others arrested for the same offenses.
Lawyers in both cases argued that the policy was intended to discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights - a charge city officials denied.
"The unmistakable message that is sent by this policy is that people who demonstrate risk spending the night in jail because of their part in a demonstration," said Christopher Dunn, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which brought one of the lawsuits. "And I think what follows from that is that it is a clear effort to discourage people - and indeed punish people - from participating in demonstrations."
Jonathan C. Moore brought the other lawsuit, which seeks to represent everyone arrested under the policy as a class of plaintiffs. Mr. Moore praised the decision to withdraw the policy but said that people who were wrongly jailed should be compensated.
The Police Department yesterday referred inquiries about the change to the office of Corporation Counsel Michael D. Hess, who is defending the department and the city in the lawsuits. Daniel S. Connolly, special counsel to Mr. Hess, said the policy was intended to discourage crime, not lawful protest, and he denied that the change was an admission that the practice was unconstitutional.
He said the decision, which came after a review prompted by the lawsuits and was made by the Police Department in consultation with his office, was an effort at "balancing people's First Amendment rights with issues involving public safety."
Yesterday, the Police Department notified commanders of the change with a single-sentence message.
The policy was informally started in the spring of 1999 under former Commissioner Howard Safir, who is named in one of the lawsuits. At the time, daily protests over the shooting of Amadou Diallo choked the wide red brick plaza in front of police headquarters, where the chanting demonstrators became a fixture on newscasts. For reasons that remain unclear, the policy was not formalized until May 1, 2001, in a brief message to police commanders.
It represented a significant change in handling arrests at peaceful protests and demonstrations. In the past, those arrested for offenses like disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration, both misdemeanors, would get a summons, known as a desk appearance ticket, to appear in court at a later date.
Under the policy, no summonses or desk appearance tickets were to be issued for offenses committed at demonstrations or similar events with more than 20 participants.
Mr. Connolly said yesterday that the policy was developed by the "upper echelon" of the Police Department in 1999, at a time when there was a significant increase in civil disobedience around the city. But he said no particular incident, like the Diallo protests, had been the driving force. He said he was unaware of whether his office was consulted at the time.
Mr. Dunn, who filed a lawsuit May 30 on behalf of two people who he argued were improperly jailed, said that he began asking the corporation counsel's office about the policy last summer, but they provided him no information on it and would not even disclose its existence.
But Mr. Dunn, who said he believed the office was aware of the policy, in late May got a copy of the May 1 message from someone at the Police Department. During the discovery process after the lawsuit was filed, Mr. Dunn said, police officials said that there were no other documents related to the policy, something he said was very unusual in an agency in which policy matters are usually carefully set out in writing.
"I think it raises troubling questions about whether they realized all along that this policy was inappropriate and thought they would get away with it because no one knew about it," Mr. Dunn said.
In the meantime, he said, city lawyers indicated last week that they were willing to settle the lawsuit. Discussions have begun on the matter, and will now center on monetary damages to be paid to those who were wrongly held.
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Egypt Unemployed Clash With Police
New York Times
July 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Egypt-Protests.html
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Thousands of jobless graduates clashed with police Saturday, protesting a government decision restricting new public sector jobs and training places to people under 28 years old, police said.
Police used tear gas to disperse some 3,000 protesters in Zagazig, capital of the Nile Delta province of Sharkiya, a police official said on condition of anonymity.
Graduates pelted stones at buses and disrupted traffic. Twenty-two rioters and police suffered slight injuries. Smaller protests took place in the Nile Delta towns of Mansoura, Dakahliya and Kalyoubiya on Saturday, the opening day for the new job applications.
The government decision promises 170,000 jobs across Egypt for unemployed tertiary graduates aged under 28. The protesters -- graduates aged over 28 -- were angered at being overlooked for the jobs because of their age.
The Minister of State for Administrative Development, Mohammed Abu-Amer, said Saturday the government can't find jobs for all graduates, saying it makes openings based on its ``real needs,'' according to a report carried by Egypt's Middle East News Agency.
Official figures put unemployment in Egypt at 8 percent, but independent economists believe it is much higher.
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