------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
UK seeks cuts of radioactive waste from Sellafield
'Star Wars still unproven'
Russia denies secretly testing long-range missile
NRC admits deaths from reactor relicensings
Radioactive Waste Site: A Shift in Strategy

MILITARY
U.S. eyes military alliance in Pacific
Serbia Finds Where Bodies Are Buried, and Investigates
Tetovo: Rebel war songs blare out in cafes of occupied city
Colombia Drug Crop Fumigation Resumes
Israeli Missiles Destroy Gaza Police Headquarters
UN Votes to Downgrade Military Force in Lebanon
Waning surplus imperils defense
U.S. Shares Fault In Peru Incident

OTHER
Nigeria to launch largest AIDS treatment program
Rare Chinese Newspaper Exposé Details Prisoner Organ Harvests
Kosovo Aid Worker Questioned on Child Trafficking
Worm set to attack Internet



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

UK seeks cuts of radioactive waste from Sellafield

UK: July 31, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11826

LONDON - Britain's environmental watchdog yesterday proposed new limits for radioactive waste at British Nuclear Fuels' Sellafield site which could cut discharges by nearly a third.

"The Agency's proposals should lead to reductions in the potential radiation dose to members of the public, if discharges were made at the authorised limits, by 27 percent for liquid discharges and by 21 percent for aerial discharges", Barbara Young, chief executive of the Environment Agency said in a statement.

Young said the proposals would help Britain implement the OSPAR (Oslo and Paris) convention for the protection of the marine environment in the northeast Atlantic. In 1998 Britain signed up to the plan aimed at cutting articifial radiation at BNFL's showcase Sellafield facility to nearly zero by 2002.

State-owned BNFL has in the past attracted criticism for the amount of radioactive waste it discharges into the air and into the Irish Sea. Not only have environmental groups campaigned against the Sellafield plant on Britain's north eastern coast, but Ireland and Norway have both said discharges needed to be dramatically reduced.

Research has shown lobsters and other shellfish in the North Sea and Irish Sea have high levels of Technetium 99, a radioactive isotope generated during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

The Environment Agency said it will wait until December 3 for comments from interested parties on the proposals.

-------- missile defense

'Star Wars still unproven'

Saturday, 28 July, 2001, 03:13 GMT 04:13 UK
BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1461000/1461288.stm

Britain's most senior military officer has questioned American plans for a missile defence shield - saying he has seen no evidence that the technology will work.

Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British defence staff, has also warned that participating in the missile defence shield, designed to protect the US from "rogue states", would leave little in the budget for other defence spending.

Interviewed in The Guardian he says it would be irresponsible not to face up to the potential threat of ballistic missiles.

But he added: "So far we have no hard evidence from the Americans as to what they think is in the art of the technology.

"No-one has actually come up firmly on the American side because they are still exploring it. I have seen nothing yet to give me a technical description of what has been proposed."

Sir Michael also made clear that he had misgivings about the American suggestion that missile defence should be embraced by the European allies.

'Too costly'

Sir Michael said: "There is no point in completely impoverishing ourselves in order to provide ourselves with a defence against one particular system and not being able to do anything else.

"As far as I am concerned there is no way I'm in a position to suggest we can pay for any missile defence technology from within the existing defence budget and carry on doing what we are doing at the moment."

Sir Michael stressed that it would be for politicians to decide whether Britain took part in the missile defence project.

Regardless of whether missile defence is deployed to protect European allies, the Americans are likely to want to use British radar stations as part of the system.

-------- russia

Russia denies secretly testing long-range missile

USA Today
07/31/2001
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/07/31/russia.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian military officials denied reports of a recent secret test of a long-range missile that raised concerns in Washington that Russia is working on a program to foil a proposed U.S. anti-missile shield.

"We had no experimental missile launches two weeks ago. To conduct them secretly is impossible: The United States continuously controls such launches through space-based and other means," Alexander Bovk, spokesman for Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, was quoted Tuesday by the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily as saying.

A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman said he had no information about any launches two weeks ago, but would not say when Russia last test-launched a missile. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Washington Times newspaper reported Monday that a road-mobile SS-25 with a new jet-powered last stage was launched from central Russia two weeks ago and reached its target on the Russian Far East peninsula of Kamchatka.

U.S. officials said a test had taken place about two weeks ago but gave no details. Bush administration officials were studying it to determine whether the missile's flight took an unusual path and whether it carried new technology designed to overcome U.S. missile defense plans.

The newspaper report said the missile was fired nearly into space; then its last stage dropped down and flew at supersonic speed to the target range. The SS-25, known as the Topol RS-12M in Russian, has a maximum range of more than 7,000 miles.

Washington insists its program is aimed at defending against nuclear attack from states such as North Korea or Iraq - not at major nuclear powers such as Russia. But Moscow is skeptical of the argument and strongly opposes the U.S. plans.

Russian officials have also warned that if Washington pulls out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, Moscow could fit existing single-warhead missiles with multiple warheads and scrap other arms control treaties in retaliation.

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

NRC admits deaths from reactor relicensings

Tue, 31 Jul 2001
From: michael mariotte <nirsnet@nirs.org>

Dear Friends: We encourage you to send this release to your local media and to your elected officials.

Michael Mariotte NIRS

NEWS FROM NIRS/WISE-AMSTERDAM
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
1424 16th Street NW, #404,
Washington, DC 20036
202-328-0002; f: 202-462-2183;
nirsnet@nirs.org; www.nirs.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 31, 2001

Contact: Michael Mariotte, Paul Gunter 202-328-0002

GOVERNMENT ADMITS EACH NUCLEAR REACTOR RELICENSING EXPECTED TO KILL 12 PEOPLE

MORE THAN 1,200 COULD DIE UNDER BUSH RELICENSING PROGRAM

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday acknowledged that 12 people are expected to die as a direct result of each commercial nuclear reactor that is relicensed and operates for its 20-year license extension period.

The admission came in a correction to its 1996 relicensing regulation, which was published in the Federal Register July 30. According to the Federal Register notice, each relicensing is expected to be responsible for the release of 14,800 person-rem of radiation during its 20-year life extension. The figure includes releases from the nuclear fuel chain that supports reactor operation, as well as from the reactors themselves. The NRC calculates that this level of radiation release spread over the population will cause 12 cancer deaths per reactor.

However, this figure understates the ramifications of continued reliance on nuclear power. Additional releases from the storage, transportation and disposal of high-level radioactive waste created by the reactors would cause additional deaths. The purpose of the Federal Register correction notice was to except the effects of high-level waste from the previously published but little-noticed 14,800 person-rem figure.

Accidents and non-routine radiation releases are not included in the NRC's figure, and could cause still higher casualties. The NRC only calculated likely cancer deaths, so deaths from other radiation-induced diseases and non-fatal cancers are not included in its calculations.

There currently are 103 commercial reactors operating in the U.S. The Bush administration and nuclear power industry have made relicensing the vast majority of these reactors a centerpiece of their strategy to maintain and increase reliance on nuclear power. The NRC has said it expects as many as 100 reactors to apply for license extensions; this would result in some 1200 cancer deaths among the U.S. population.

"This admission by the federal government gives the lie to the administration and nuclear industry's claim that nuclear power is somehow an 'emissions-free' technology," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "Not only does the nuclear fuel chain result in meaningful greenhouse gas releases, but the deadly radiation emitted at every step of the process kills people directly. The Bush administration thinks killing more than 1,000 people is an acceptable price to pay for continued use of nuclear power. We think it's a national scandal."

(Mariotte noted that the only operating uranium enrichment plant in the U.S., at Paducah, Kentucky, is the nation's largest emitter of CFC-114, which was banned by the Montreal Protocol for being a major ozone destroyer and greenhouse contributor.)

Paul Gunter, director of NIRS' Reactor Watchdog Project, pointed out, "The NRC's notice implicitly admits that the 103 reactors now operating-if they last only until the end of their original license period-will be responsible for more than 2,400 cancer deaths in the U.S., even without all of the dozens of accidents and 'incidents' that have plagued the industry over the years and caused additional releases of lethal radiation."

"Instead of relicensing atomic reactors," said Gunter, "we should be closing them and accelerating implementation of clean, sustainable, energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies."


To see the Federal Register posting of July 30, 2001 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

http://frwebgate2.access.gpo.gov/cgibin/waisgate.cgi?WAISdocID=9155315596+0+0+0&WAISaction=retrieve

See Table B-1

-------- us nuc waste

Radioactive Waste Site: A Shift in Strategy

July 31, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD

LAS VEGAS - After spending 14 years and $4.5 billion to figure out whether Yucca Mountain is dry and stable enough to entomb highly radioactive waste for 10,000 years, the Department of Energy is shifting its focus from geology to the protective powers of titanium and steel.

What began as an exercise to find dry rock with predictable characteristics in an ancient desert ridge has evolved into a debate about whether the engineers can create materials that will survive the natural environment at Yucca.

Nevada officials, who oppose the waste site, argue that 95 percent of the federal plan for safe storage now relies on tough containers, not on the geology that attracted federal interest in the first place. Since a repository with containers that good could go anywhere, said Robert Loux, director of Nevada's Nuclear Waste Project Office, "then you could put it in Central Park."

While the alternative to Yucca, near here, is not really Central Park, the federal emphasis on engineered safety features represents a revolution in thinking. To debate that approach, the federal government and the State of Nevada are fielding opposing teams of scientists.

When preliminary work on the site began 20 years ago, the emphasis was on the safety afforded by the mountain's geology. At the time, the federal government said the engineered aspects of a "geologic repository" (engineers wince at the word "dump") could not be counted on to keep things safe after the first thousand years, and perhaps not even that long.

But as the Energy Department moves nearer to advising President Bush this year on whether to proceed with seeking a license for the site, the "engineered" portion of the design is dominating the discussion. This spring, the department issued a report that said containers could be counted on to hold up for at least 11,000 years after the site was sealed.

The wastes will be dangerously radioactive for many millenniums, although the Energy Department need show only that releases will be small for the first 10,000 years.

The problem is that Yucca Mountain has turned out to be wetter and its geology more complex than proponents had first thought.

"The original perception was that it is drier than it is today," said Dr. Michael D. Voegele, the chief science officer of Bechtel SAIC Company, the Energy Department's chief contractor for investigating the mountain. The site is still extremely dry, Dr. Voegele said. Most of the six or seven inches of annual rainfall evaporates, he said, so a square centimeter of Yucca's surface would generally see a column of water only one centimeter high move through it in a year. Even if climate change triples rainfall at the site, it will be dry enough, they say.

But water is more of a consideration than initially thought. One of the characteristics that drew scientists to the site was how slowly water was transmitted through the solid portions of the rock. But water flows through the mountain are about 10 times as large as first thought, largely because the rock, put there by successive volcanic eruptions nearby, turns out to be liberally laced with small fractures that were created as the volcanic ash cooled, and those fractures conduct water quickly.

There is no agreement on how fast any escaping radioactive material would move through the dirt and to the nearest well, now about 11 miles away. At this geologic time scale, language tends to change. The state argues that the time for leaking waste to percolate down to those wells would be "essentially instantaneous" - only 300 years or so. Federal officials say that is a misinterpretation of their numerous computer studies and that any leaking waste would move extremely slowly.

But the officials agree that their work has shifted into a new area, into how to design a repository consistent with what they have learned about the rock.

"There's been an evolution after finding that the site isn't what it's supposed to be," said Mr. Loux of the state's nuclear waste agency. "They're doing engineering to shore it up."

The latest design (still described as "conceptual") is to dig about 100 miles of tunnels and fill them with 11,000 to 17,000 containers, each about the size of a tank on a tanker truck, between two faults in the mountain. Each container would be made of stainless steel two inches thick and wrapped in a layer of a durable metal called Alloy 22, then topped with a $500,000 titanium drip shield that would resemble a giant rural mailbox.

What water there is will be drawn away down the sides of the tunnel, not drop into the metal, federal engineers predict. A recent innovation is to perch the containers on metal rather than concrete, since concrete can turn the water acidic, encouraging corrosion.

Corrosion is very much at issue. Experiments commissioned by the State of Nevada at a laboratory at Catholic University of America showed that Alloy 22 could break down in as little as 15 days - under harsh conditions, with the right recipe of heat, acidic water and trace amounts of lead, arsenic and mercury. One task now is to determine whether heat and time will cook any of those elements out of the rock and create those conditions.

Rainwater at the site is not acidic, but state scientists say it will become so in the mountain, by absorbing carbon dioxide there. Scientists working for the federal government doubt that the water can become acidic enough to dissolve and carry lead to the canisters.

Difficult decisions lie ahead. Engineers are still trying to determine whether the repository should be "hot" or "cool" - above the boiling point or below it. The peak temperature, which would be reached over a few hundred years, depends on how closely the waste containers are spaced.

The "heated halo" around a hot repository would boil water into steam and drive it away, at least for the better part of the first thousand years, protecting the containers from corrosion. But state and federal scientists disagree over whether the steam may also cook trace elements out of the rock and later cause problems when the water flows back to the canisters.

Engineers for the Energy Department say, however, that by spacing the emplacement tunnels more widely, they can ensure that the water will not accumulate above the repository but will filter through the cool areas between tunnels. A cool system would avoid the question but would allow water in almost immediately.

Federal scientists say Yucca meets one of the early criteria listed for a site: it is a "noncommunicating hydrologic regime," which means that water leaving the site through the ground goes to a dead end, not to major rivers or oceans. In this case, the dead end is Death Valley, which lies just beyond the Funeral Mountains, clearly visible from the summit of Yucca.

State scientists said they would be more impressed if the land between Yucca and Death Valley were not the Amaragosa Valley, with pistachio and alfalfa farms.

To fill in the blanks in their research, federal scientists are dumping large volumes of water to see where it comes out again and heating areas of the rock the way spent fuel would heat it to measure the physical and chemical effects.

New doubts about the site were raised about five years ago, when scientists found a synthetic isotope of chlorine at the depth of the proposed repository, about 1,000 feet below the summit and 1,000 feet above the water table.

That was important because the isotope was created by atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs and spread worldwide by weather. The implication was that rainfall at the summit since 1945 had already penetrated to the repository. But when engineers did the tests again recently, they did not find the chlorine isotope, raising the possibility of testing error.

"It's all a little bit disconcerting," Dr. Van Luik said. The working assumption is that the water did, in fact, travel the 1,000 feet in about half a century. "Until it's resolved," he said, "we don't want to step away from the conservatism."

The "fast path" for water provided by cracks is important for another reason: beneath the repository level, some materials are zeolites, absorbent clays that chemists say would bind up radioactive materials that escaped their containers.

But if the area directly beneath the repository is similar to the rock above it, much of the water will travel through cracks and bypass the zeolites. Engineers say they are confident that the zeolites will be beneficial but say they cannot figure that into their official calculations because they cannot demonstrate what will happen.

To be confident in Yucca, federal scientists are trying to turn geology and geochemistry - the study of the interaction of water, pressure, heat and soil - into predictive sciences. At the urging of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they are also extending their study of volcanism. A line of cinder cones is visible from the mountaintop; scientists disagree about how old they are and when, and where, the next is likely to form.

One cone was initially estimated to be half a million years old and later thought to be only 50,000 years old; a joke among project opponents is that when its age is estimated again, the eruption that produced it will not have happened yet.

While the questions persist, so does the work at the mountain. About 1,800 people are involved in the project, arriving at the site on air- conditioned buses from Las Vegas. The group is well enough established that it has an employee association that sells coffee mugs and tote bags that say Yucca Mountain.

And as the work goes on, the waste piles up at sites around the country. The Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to hold 70,000 metric tons of waste. But the radioactive waste from power plants already exceeds that amount - even before any increase in the number of nuclear plants, as envisioned by the Bush administration. The military also has a lot of waste that needs to be stored permanently somewhere.

The alternative to Yucca is probably a purely artificial environment, the dry-cask storage yards now going up at nuclear reactors around the United States. These are thick concrete pads surrounded by razor wire and motion detectors, where enormous steel canisters loaded with spent fuel sit for the indefinite future.

Reactor operators say these will operate flawlessly for decades. On the other hand, many sit in places that hardly anybody would have chosen for permanent disposal. Yucca advocates say the site has the advantage of being remote, as opposed to storage sites like Prairie Island, in Red Wing, Minn. That site, on the Mississippi River, is adjacent to a casino and a day care center.

-------- MILITARY

-------- asia/pacific

U.S. eyes military alliance in Pacific

July 31, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010731-886106.htm

U.S. and Australian officials talked yesterday about closer military cooperation among themselves, Japan and South Korea as a counterweight to China's growing military power, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said.

Mr. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were in Canberra for annual security talks with the conservative-led Australian government, one of the few to wholeheartedly support the United States on missile defense and opposition to the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Both American officials told a U.S. Embassy news conference that they hoped China would evolve peacefully.

But asked about coordinating separate U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan and South Korea, Mr. Powell told reporters: "We just began speaking about that today.

"There might be a need for us to seek opportunities to come together and talk more often. So, yes, we've talked about that, but not in the form of some formal kind of new organization."

Mr. Powell said the United States "is a Pacific nation, has been a Pacific nation and will remain engaged in this region politically, diplomatically and with the presence of our military forces."

"Let there be no doubt about that. Don 's and my presence here today, I think, is solid evidence for that."

The United States has 96,000 troops in East Asia, mainly in Japan and South Korea, and maintains a new fleet service facility in Singapore after losing huge air and naval bases in the Philippines around 1990.

The United States has beefed up its use of Australian military sites for training.

Any new merger of the three U.S. alliances in the Pacific would not be tied with a formal military pact, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said following talks with Mr. Powell.

"We wouldn't want new architecture in East Asia which would be an attempt to kind of replicate NATO," he said. He said he had spoken with Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka about holding an "informal dialogue" among the U.S. allies.

Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell took pains to parry implications by journalists that the American chiefs of the departments of Defense and State were at odds over China and other policies.

"Colin Powell and I talk every day and meet several times a week, and I don't know that there are differences between us," said Mr. Rumsfeld.

"My personal view is that the People's Republic of China's future is not yet written, that they are evolving. And we certainly hope it evolves in a peaceful and constructive way."

Mr. Powell said that with "engagement," the United States could "move in the right direction."

"At the same time we have to be strong. We have not to be naive. Obviously, I come at it from a foreign-policy perspective and the secretary from a defense perspective. But there is no real space between us as suggested."

When a reporter continued to seek differences between Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Powell on China policy, the defense secretary asked the journalist: "Are you trying to find some daylight between Colin and me?"

Mr. Powell interjected: "Yes."

Mr. Rumsfeld quipped: "Well, except for those few cases where Colin is still learning."

Mr. Powell's initial attempt to continue the Clinton administration's policies toward North Korea were abruptly halted by President Bush, who insisted on a complete review before renewing talks with Pyongyang.

Mr. Powell yesterday said he was open to renewing talks with the North and "I want to keep the ball in their court."

He said he had asked Russia to urge North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who visits Moscow later this week, to pay a return visit to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in Seoul and to advance Korean peninsula peace talks.

A North Korean diplomat in New York, however, told The Washington Times last week that "the ball is in the United States' court."

On his flight to Australia from talks in South Korea, China and Vietnam, Mr. Powell said he had dropped the term "strategic competitor" as a description of China.

He said the Clinton administration had called China a "strategic partner" but he felt that was "a little bit too strong a statement for an emerging relationship with a country that does not really share our value system entirely." Mr. Powell said he had adopted the term "strategic competitor I didn't mean that in a warlike sense."

Mr. Powell said he has "rediscovered that the relationship is so complex with so many different elements to it that it is probably wiser not to capture it with a single term or a single cliche."

During talks in Beijing last week, Mr. Powell said, he had a "good exchange of views" a diplomatic phrase that generally suggests disagreements.

The most difficult issue between the two countries is Taiwan, which China considers a renegade province that eventually must unify with the mainland peacefully or otherwise. Mr. Bush has said he would defend Taiwan against an attempt to forcefully append it to China.

Mr. Powell said he now has a better understanding of the "one-China policy as they see it" and has explained to them "our one-China policy understanding." The policies evidently differ.

However, he said the Chinese had "reinforced their view that America does belong in the Asia-Pacific region and they welcome an American presence in the Asia-Pacific region as a stabilizing factor."

China is "very much looking forward to President Bush's visit" in October, Mr. Powell said.

-------- balkans

Serbia Finds Where Bodies Are Buried, and Investigates

July 31, 2001
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/31/international/europe/31SERB.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, July 25 - Capt. Dragan Karleusa, deputy head of the police organized crime unit in Belgrade, is amazed to find that he now leads an ever-expanding investigation into war crimes.

He is stunned by the number of bodies he and his men are now discovering, and the unexpected role now played in his life by freezer trucks in which the bodies - thought to be those of victims of Serbian security forces in Kosovo - were hidden.

"We started investigating a single incident, but we ended with a very big case," the burly Serbian policeman said. "We ended up chasing a wolf."

Since he began investigating the first freezer truck of dead people found in the Danube in May, Captain Karleusa has discovered nine more truckloads, the most recent with 40 to 50 bodies in Lake Perucac, an artificial reservoir 90 miles southwest of the capital.

As many as 1,000 bodies have been found so far, including those of three Albanian-American brothers from New York. Serbia has astonished foreign countries with its sudden and open investigation of mass graves found around the republic in recent months and with its transfer on June 28 of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Far from lessening the pace of war crimes investigations after Mr. Milosevic was handed over, the authorities have pressed on with the investigation of killings of Kosovo Albanians by the Serbs during the war over the province in 1999. Serbia's government is exhuming more bodies and opening its first war crimes case at home against two men alleged to have killed 19 people in Kosovo.

The government ran a deliberate campaign in the news media to reveal the details of the mass killings in Kosovo to sway public opinion in advance of the transfer of Mr. Milosevic to The Hague.

Even if some politicians try to use it for their own reasons, once an investigation like this is under way, it takes on a momentum of its own, said Natasa Kandic, leader of the Humanitarian Law Center, an independent human rights group that has carried out considerable research on the mass killings in the Balkans.

The authorities say they now have solid evidence that Mr. Milosevic, at a meeting with senior officials in late March 1999, after the war began, ordered his security forces to cover up any evidence of crimes that would be of interest to the Hague tribunal.

At least 10, but maybe dozens, of truckloads of bodies were shipped from Kosovo to Serbia proper and dumped underwater or in mass graves. "This whole operation was a crazy thing to do, a crime and for us incomprehensible," Captain Karleusa said. "The goal was to hide something."

Dusan Mihajlovic, Serbia's interior minister since voters elected an anti-Milosevic coalition late last year, has said he is determined to get to the bottom of the original killings and continue the investigation beyond the cover-up operation.

"The police have three aims," he said, "to find all the mass graves in Yugoslavia, to find who gave the orders to bury them there and to establish if these bodies were victims of war crimes, or of war, or of the NATO bombing against Yugoslavia.

"Because if there were war crimes, we have to find who gave the orders and who were the executors. And we will publish it when we find out, because we want to find the men who did those crimes and also to remove the collective guilt that is weighing on the police and army and on the Serbian people.

"We are going to reconstruct all crimes and will shed light on them all."

The reaction of ordinary people in Serbia to the disclosures has been shock, and there have been many calls for full investigations and for finding the people responsible.

An account in the Belgrade newspaper Danas by an army reservist who saw a truck being dumped into a lake said the bodies had floated to the surface and then had been pulled out by the police and buried nearby.

"This is a shame," he said. "They buried 50 people, and I am supposed to take my children to this lake and swim. We are all living here with the fact that they buried human bodies and are still silent."

But the investigations are advancing slowly, not least because senior officials of the Milosevic years and of the army and the police forces are refusing to cooperate.

What is known is that bodies were dumped in mass graves, either in the Danube or on land. The exhumations of the 800 to 1,000 bodies known about so far will take months. Captain Karleusa says he will need much longer to establish who gave the orders for the carnage and who carried it out.

He has not been able to interview Vlajko Stojilkovic, Mr. Milosevic's former interior minister and the man whom police officials say was ordered by Mr. Milosevic to clean Kosovo of bodies and other evidence that might interest the Hague tribunal.

Mr. Stojilkovic, who is one of the four ministers indicted along with Mr. Milosevic by the tribunal for war crimes in Kosovo, is still living openly in Serbia, where as a member of the Yugoslav Parliament for Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party, he can still claim parliamentary immunity.

Until that is revoked - and so far no motion has been brought before Parliament to strip him of the immunity - investigators cannot question him, Captain Karleusa said.

Information gathered so far about the mass killings has come mostly from witnesses and the truck drivers, many of whom were police reservists called up during Yugoslavia's war with NATO and were unsettled by what they saw.

Some police officers have come forward only when prodded after the press started writing stories. Police officers led Captain Karleusa to the second freezer truck in Lake Perucac.

"It had been declared a secret," the captain said, "and they were ordered not to talk. But people are now talking openly, and that is the way we find things out. We get information from the bottom, not from the top."

One predicament is that Captain Karleusa's boss is Sreten Lukic, the police director of public security, who served as the commander of police forces in Kosovo during the war. Mr. Lukic, if anyone, knows at least some of what went on in Kosovo and who was giving the orders. Although he helped set up the original unit to investigate the first freezer truck, he is not contributing to the investigation.

Captain Karleusa is adamant that his boss will not be spared if he is responsible for any crimes.

"If he was responsible for anything, we are going to determine it," the captain said. "Although he is my boss, he cannot influence the investigation or me, because it was decided to go with this all the way to the end. Those are the words of Minister Mihajlovic: `no matter what the price.' "

Mr. Lukic has appeared to shunt some of the blame toward the army, reminding journalists at a news conference in June that the army had overall command during the state of war declared for the 78 days of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

The army has admitted to exhuming bodies, saying it was necessary to clear them to prevent disease. According to documents published in the well-informed Belgrade weekly Nedeljni Telegraf, exhumations by the army included the 145 victims of killings in Izbica, who were buried by villagers and whose bodies disappeared in May 1999, shortly before the end of the war.

But military officials have denied any involvement in the cover-up or in mass killings. The army says it is conducting a number of investigations and trials against its own members, but the cases are thought to be minor and remain largely closed.

"The army has their own very closed judicial system and is not our jurisdiction," said Mr. Mihajlovic, the interior minister.

Captain Karleusa noted that the investigation was complex. "You have to have in mind," he said, "at the battlefield there were several different kinds of units - army, police, paramilitaries, different volunteer forces and different local groups - and everybody could have done it.

"It was war, and you could have two units crossing the same area on the same day."

--------

Tetovo: Rebel war songs blare out in cafes of occupied city

By Justin Huggler
Independent (uk)
31 July 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/europe/story.jsp?story=86174

In a café whose windows have been blown out by shell blasts, and whose walls are scarred with bullet holes, Albanian rebels who have brought Macedonia to the brink of civil war sit quietly cradling their Kalashnikovs. Everyone is silent because the local commander, known as Leka, in heavy beard and bandana, is on his mobile phone doing a live television interview about the deadlocked Western-brokered peace talks, which dragged into a third day yesterday.

This is rebel-held territory, but it is not some remote mountain village. The area under rebel control includes part of Tetovo, the main Albanian city in Macedonia. You cross an invisible line among the neat suburban villas near the stadium. There is no way of telling you have just crossed the front line, except for a glimpse of a black-uniformed rebel sentry hiding behind a wall.

A mile or so down the road, you are flagged down by rebel police. There is no nervous gun-waving, just a polite document inspection. The rebels are in control here. Albanian civilians sit calmly in cafés by the roadside. In one, the rebels' pop song is blaring out of the radio, a jaunty Turkish tune with a chanted chorus of "UCK! UCK!", the initials of the rebel National Liberation Army in Albanian. You can hear similar war songs from the other side in the capital, Skopje - songs of the ethnic Macedonians, set to Western pop beats.

The West is trying to make both sides sit down and talk peace, but war songs are topping the charts. This is the territory the rebels were supposed to have left, under a new ceasefire hastily agreed under Western pressure last week. But even as the peace talks continue in a desperate bid to avert full-blown civil war, the rebels are ignoring the deal and occupying part of Tetovo.

Western monitors told reporters they had seen the rebels pulling back. But clearly they have not. Commander Leka says: "We stayed here because we fear Macedonian paramilitaries might attack our civilians." He is based just beyond Tetovo, in Poroj, a satellite village. He shows grisly pictures of civilian casualties killed in the fighting last week. The Macedonian army fired indiscriminately on civilian areas in Poroj, as it has done elsewhere.

Jehona Saliu, a 12-year-old girl, was killed when shrapnel tore across the her front door. Her mother, Latife, and her 16-year-old sister, Agrone, died on the spot. Jehona was rushed across the front line to Tetovo hospital, where she died.

A young rebel, his head swathed in bandages, says with a smile: "Two week ago I was still a civilian." He was working in Austria and sending his earnings home. His Vienna-registered car is parked in the street. "I came back to visit," he says. "When I saw how bad things were, I had to join up."

Leka is the commander of the area where the car of the hardline Macedonian Interior Minister, Ljube Boskovski, was attacked on Sunday night, in what the Macedonians are calling a serious ceasefire violation. Leka claims the minister's bodyguards opened fire first.

The rebel commander says his men will respect a peace deal if one comes, but that it would have to be guaranteed by Nato. A deal is going to be difficult. Macedonian refugees returned to their homes up the road, in the village of Tearce, in what Western diplomats said was a vital confidence-building measure. The refugees found their homes burnt, and the rebels still here, so they fled back to Skopje. In effect the area has been ethnically cleansed, just as the southern city of Bitola was cleansed of Albanians, chased out in riots last month.

And if the peace talks break down? "We won't attack Tetovo again. We've already won here," Leka says. "If we attack anywhere it will be Skopje."

-------- colombia

Colombia Drug Crop Fumigation Resumes

New York Times
July 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Fumigation.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia will not stop spraying coca and poppy fields, despite a judge's order to temporarily suspend fumigating drug crops, the chief of the country's anti-narcotics police said.

Anti-narcotics chief Gen. Gustavo Socha said Monday that he ordered the fumigation to continue -- except in the Amazon.

Amazonian Indians petitioned to have the U.S.-backed fumigation stopped, saying the spraying poisons the rivers and harms farmers' health. On Friday, Judge Gilberto Reyes of Bogota District Court ordered the aerial operations temporarily suspended until the Colombian government responds to health and environmental concerns.

But the ruling has left officials with conflicting interpretations of how far-reaching it is.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Charles Hunter said U.S. officials believed fumigation was suspended in all of Colombia.

But Socha said he understood that it applied only to the Amazonian region in south-central and southeastern Colombia. Spraying missions were proceeding in Narino and Cauca states, where many of the planes are currently based, he said.

``Today, I ordered the spraying to proceed,'' Socha said by telephone Monday, but bad weather kept the planes grounded.

DynCorp, a U.S. firm contracted by the State Department to pilot the spray planes, said the company got the go-ahead from the Colombian government and U.S. officials to fumigate Tuesday, spokeswoman Charlene Wheeless said.

Fumigation of coca and poppy -- which produce cocaine and heroin, respectively -- is funded by a $1.3 billion aid package from Washington.

The initiative is meant to reduce the flow of cocaine and heroin to the United States -- and deprive Colombian rebels and paramilitaries of a fortune in proceeds from the drug trade.

The fumigation is ``a key component of our counternarcotics effort,'' Hunter said.

-------- israel

Israeli Missiles Destroy Gaza Police Headquarters
Seven Palestinians Injured; Regional Violence Escalates

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 31, 2001; Page A14
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7463-2001Jul30?language=printer

JERUSALEM, July 30 -- Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at Palestinian police headquarters in downtown Gaza City, destroying a building Israel described as an arms-producing workshop, as violence quickened today in Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

It was the first Israeli aerial attack in several months in the thickly populated environs of Gaza City, and it produced thunderous explosions at midday as Palestinians worked, shopped or napped after lunch. Seven Palestinians were injured in the blasts.

The missile attack punctuated a recent surge in the fighting after 10 months of intermittent violence. Israeli police in Jerusalem were on high alert, and American consular employees were advised to avoid public places. The Palestinians, for their part, said they were braced for further assaults and assassination attempts.

In other incidents around the region today:

• Two Israeli border police were critically injured when at least three Palestinian gunmen opened fire on their jeep along the border separating Israel from the West Bank near the city of Tulkarm, north of Tel Aviv.

• In a narrow alley of Jerusalem's Old City, a religious Jew was stabbed in the back after he left the plaza of the Western Wall. The man was in serious condition this evening. Police said the assailant was probably Palestinian.

• In Jewish West Jerusalem, a small nail bomb in a can of Heineken beer exploded on a supermarket shelf, causing no injuries but frightening residents and triggering a massive downtown traffic jam. It was the second bombing in two days in the Jerusalem area.

"We think the Palestinians want to draw Jerusalem into the cycle of violence, and they are making very great efforts to do so," said Kobi Zarhav, an Israeli police official in the city.

• Scattered fighting broke out in the West Bank city of Hebron and in the southern Gaza Strip. And a small roadside bomb exploded as a bus carrying Israeli children passed near the Jewish settlement of Ofra, north of Jerusalem in the West Bank. No one was injured in the bombing.

Meanwhile, six Palestinians who died in a huge explosion before dawn today were buried in their village of al-Fara, near the northern West Bank town of Nablus. The six, three of whom were members of a Palestinian security force and all of whom were said to be militants who had fought against Israel, were given a martyrs' burial. Their corpses were borne through streets draped by Palestinian flags as angry mourners chanted anti-Israeli slogans and shook their fists.

The cause of their deaths remained unclear. The Palestinians said the men had been targeted and may have been killed by Israeli tank shells, but no physical evidence of such an attack was produced. Israel denied killing the men, suggesting they had died preparing a car bomb that detonated prematurely.

The Israeli army justified today's missile attack on the Gaza police headquarters by saying the building was used to produce mortar shells and other weapons. In the recent months of violence, Palestinians have fired more than 230 mortar rounds at Israeli military positions and Jewish settlements around Gaza, the army said. But the Palestinian police chief, Ghazi Jabali, heaped sarcasm on suggestions that his headquarters in Gaza had harbored a weapons workshop.

"This isn't the first time they bombed the police," he said. "They've attacked the police 20 times. . . . The police are a national target and always have to be attacked."

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

UN Votes to Downgrade Military Force in Lebanon

New York Times
July 31, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-lebanon.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to downgrade the U.N. force in Lebanon, cutting troops and eventually turning the 23-year-old operation into a military observer force.

Over the objections of Lebanon, the council asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to present plans before Jan. 31, which could reconfigure the force along the tense Lebanese-Israeli border ``to an observer mission in light of developments on the ground.''

The council renewed the mandate of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, until Jan. 31 and said Annan should continue consultations with the Beirut government.

In the interim, it approved a plan by Annan that would slash peacekeepers by 20 percent in the next few months.

UNIFIL's current strength is 4,500 troops from 10 nations and has been dropping steadily since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May after 22 years of occupation. The force stood at around 5,800 at the beginning of this year and Annan intends to draw it down to 2,000 by next summer.

Although Annan's report did not spell it out, UNIFIL has been cutting back its presence in Lebanon primarily due to frustration over Beirut's failure to assert control over south Lebanon following the Israeli withdrawal.

Annan has urged the Lebanese government to send troops into the south, up to the Israeli border. But Beirut has declined to do so, leaving the area in the hands of Hizbollah guerrillas.

Security Council members then decided that UNIFIL could not serve as the buffer force and began to reduce troops.

Lebanese Ambassador Selim Tadmoury, in a letter to the council last week, said it was ``unacceptable to change that mission to an observer mission'' and that alterations had to be approved by the government.

He said Beirut would extend its sovereignty ``by such means as it considers appropriate'' and that the Lebanese authorities in southern Lebanon had their ``own legitimate force and administrative organs.''

UNIFIL was first deployed in south Lebanon following an Israeli incursion in 1978 to drive Palestinian guerrillas, who then controlled the south, away from the Israeli border.

That inaugurated the Israeli occupation of a strip of land several miles (km) deep. Over the years, UNIFIL remained largely powerless to prevent violence, and in 1982 was brushed aside in a full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Palestinians were forced to leave the region but were quickly replaced by the Shi'ite Muslim Hizbollah guerrillas, backed by Iran and Syria.

The United Nations in June marked a border between the two countries but Lebanon and Syria have disputed the so-called blue line ever since. Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas have conducted cross-border attacks with Israeli forces responding.

When Israel pulled back last year, its troops remained in one small area known as Shebaa Farms, which Beirut says is part of Lebanon but the United Nations says belongs to Syria.

Guerrillas kidnapped three Israeli soldiers from the Shebaa Farms in October. Later, Israel learned that UNIFIL personnel had videotaped vehicles that appeared to have been used in the abduction.

U.N. officials, initially unaware of the videotape's existence, then offered Israel and Lebanon a chance to see the tape with the faces of guerrillas obscured and Annan ordered an internal investigation into the handling of the incident.

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

Waning surplus imperils defense

July 31, 2001
By Dave Boyer
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010731-740793.htm

The Senate's top Republican said yesterday that lowered surplus projections could force lawmakers to whittle President Bush's request for increased defense spending.

"If we don't have $18 billion, we won't do $18 billion," said Minority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, referring to the administration's request for increased defense spending in the new fiscal year.

The Congressional Budget Office next month will release a revised forecast of the federal budget surplus for fiscal 2002, which CBO projected in January would be about $38 billion.

But an internal Republican memo circulating on Capitol Hill estimates that, based on changes in the economy and other factors, the projected surplus essentially will vanish in the new CBO report. That would leave no surplus dollars, outside of Medicare and Social Security, for increased spending on defense.

White House budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. told The Washington Times in an interview published Friday that surplus projections will be smaller than anticipated, but the government will end the current fiscal year with a surplus of about $160 billion.

Mr. Lott said the Pentagon's budget constraints have been 10 years in the making, and it will take Congress more than one year to fix the problems in military readiness and other areas. The comments are his first to suggest that even congressional Republicans might look to scale back Mr. Bush's requested increases in defense spending.

And it comes at a moment when some Pentagon brass are already chafing at the administration for not pledging a bigger increase in military spending. Military sources have said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld urged the Office of Management and Budget to approve an increase of more than $30 billion to next year's Pentagon budget of $310 billion.

If Congress adds the $18 billion President Bush is requesting to the $310 billion defense budget for fiscal 2002, it would bring total defense spending to $328 billion, an 11 percent increase over the fiscal 2001 budget. The extra money would be earmarked for readiness, spare parts and other priorities.

Mr. Lott met last week with Mr. Rumsfeld about, among other topics, improving the Pentagon's relations with Congress. Mr. Rumsfeld told The Washington Times last week that the military's deficiencies "have accumulated over a decade" and he understands they may not be addressed at "a more rapid pace."

"You accept the world like you find it and you go about the business trying to work the problem as successfully and effectively as you can," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Other senators say if surplus projections do decline, it could make it difficult to reach the target of $18 billion extra for the Pentagon.

"That's going to be a real challenge, and I don't know how exactly to get around it," said Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "It's going to take some commitment and courage on the part of Republicans to stand up for the president and the secretary and national security. It's a ballgame yet to be played."

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, is "trying to resolve the dilemma we face."

"How do you provide for additional commitment and resources to defense when we know that to do so would mean dipping into Medicare?" Mr. Daschle said.

Mr. Lott said it was "premature" to predict the new surplus projections or how they will affect lawmakers' spending decisions this fall. But he stressed the need for fiscal discipline.

"There has been a request for additional funds for defense, for instance, and in education," Mr. Lott said. "I do think we're going to have to exercise some fiscal discipline. We may not be able to see as much spending as some people would like in a number of areas."

He added, however, "We're going to have the or second-largest surplus in the history of the country."

A Senate Republican aide said Mr. Lott was issuing a "shot across the bow" to lawmakers who want to increase overall spending more than the administration has requested.

Democrats argue that the administration's $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut has left them with little room in the budget for increased spending on other items such as defense. Republicans say the tax cut was a needed boost for the economy and will serve to curtail runaway spending by Democrats.

"How we address the critical issues of education, defense, prescription drug benefits, and the array of other priorities that we have legislatively is going be a question we'll grapple with for the balance of this year and well into the next several years," Mr. Daschle said. "It is a terrible box. I think it's the height of chutzpah to see now some of our Republican colleagues even considering the proposal to pass a constitutional amendment to balance the budget when they've created this mess in the first place."

Complicating matters is the slow pace of the Democrat-led Senate in approving appropriations bills. The Senate has approved three spending bills this summer and has a chance to approve two more before adjourning Friday for its monthlong August recess -- far short of the nine spending bills that Mr. Daschle set as a goal.

Congress must approve 13 appropriations bills to fund the government. The new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

--------

U.S. Shares Fault In Peru Incident Probe Blames Procedures in Shootdown

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 31, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8005-2001Jul30?language=printer

Peru and the United States were undisciplined and "sloppy" in the way they conducted a joint program to interdict airborne drug smugglers in recent years, and share responsibility for the mistaken shootdown of a civilian aircraft carrying American missionaries over northern Peru in April, according to sources familiar with the findings of a State Department investigation.

The shootdown occurred after a CIA surveillance plane flown by American contract employees targeted the aircraft as a suspected drug flight, tracked it and helped guide a Peruvian Air Force fighter jet to it. A Baptist missionary, Veronica "Roni" Bowers, and her 7-month-old daughter were killed, and pilot Kevin Donaldson was seriously wounded.

Although the United States preliminarily concluded in the days after the incident that Peru did not comply with shootdown procedures established in a 1994 agreement between the two countries, the report does not assign direct blame, according to several sources, all of whom refused to be identified. Instead, the report compiles facts about the aerial interdiction program as well as the immediate events leading to the April 20 deaths.

Although the sources declined to provide specific details of the report, they said it characterizes the program as having limited U.S. oversight and having evolved over the years into lax adherence to procedures by both the United States and Peru. They said it is likely to prompt calls from Congress and elsewhere to circumscribe or shut down U.S. ground and air radar and tracking assistance to interdiction programs in Peru and Colombia -- neither of which has the radar capability to operate on its own.

The Bush administration suspended intelligence agreements with both countries after the missionary plane shootdown, pending the results of the investigation to be jointly conducted by the United States and Peru. But Bush officials, and Clinton administration officials before, have cited the program as the key factor in a sharp decrease in the cultivation of coca and export of cocaine from Peru over the last five years. They have repeatedly warned that the shipments could easily start up again now that traffickers know the skies are unpatrolled.

Officials said U.S.-based over-the-horizon radar fixed on the Andean region had detected no increase in suspected drug flights during the past three months. But Colombia's ambassador to Washington, Luis Alberto Moreno, said last week that his government, using its own resources, is now detecting only about three or four flights a month, compared with about 20 each month with the Colombia-based U.S. radar and tracking assistance that has been cut off.

Although the CIA has near-exclusive control over the air surveillance program in Peru, the U.S. Customs Service has provided much of the service in Colombia. The Colombians have used the assistance primarily to follow planes reentering the country after suspected drug runs to the Caribbean and the United States, attacking them after they land rather than shooting them down. Much of Colombia's cocaine, which supplies 90 percent of the U.S. market, is transported by sea or land, or a combination of the two.

Administration concern about the program's future has been reflected in its reluctance to release the State Department's Peru report, which was completed weeks ago. Last month, the administration hired an outside expert, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Morris D. Busby, to study the report and conduct a broad review of the entire policy before it decides what to do.

Based on videotapes and audiotapes from the CIA two-engine Cessna Citation V, it initially appeared to U.S. officials that the Peruvian colonel aboard, his fellow officers in radio contact on the ground and the pilot of the Peruvian Air Force A37B had rushed through, or even skipped, steps set out in the 1994 agreement. The agreement prescribes a sequence of identifying, contacting and then warning a drug flight before firing shots.

But the situation became more complicated after investigators interviewed U.S. and Peruvian program participants and discovered correspondence, training information, memos and other documents from the last six years that made it more difficult to dismiss Peru's insistence that it had not done anything the United States had not agreed to.

The State Department report indicates that tracking and shootdown procedures had evolved, with mutual awareness, into something "much less detailed and defined" than when they started in 1994, a source said. "In bureaucratic language . . . [the report] comes out and says we were sloppy."

Even before the report, questions were raised by former U.S. employees of the program about the initial decision by the CIA contract pilots, on a routine surveillance flight, to track and then target a civilian aircraft that was headed directly toward the region's main airport in Iquitos at midday.

It also appeared that the Peruvians had not checked the registration number, which was written clearly in large black letters on the wing and sides of Donaldson's single-engine Cessna 185.

The State Department and the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, which employed Donaldson, Bowers and her husband, still disagree on whether Donaldson -- who flew regularly in the area -- had filed an acceptable flight plan for their round-trip mission to the Brazilian border. Bowers's husband and son survived the crash.

Beyond procedural problems, sources said, investigators found that overall training of CIA and Peruvian program participants -- many of whom did not share a common language -- was less than ideal. They also found that there was little U.S. oversight of how the policy was conducted beyond the CIA station and American Embassy in Lima.

"There wasn't somebody each and every year, every quarter, going in and saying, 'Hey, are we sure this policy is still being carried out correctly? Is there a checklist of procedures in the plane? Is training being done correctly?' " a source said. The checklist "didn't exist."

A draft report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which conducted its own investigation of the interdiction program and April 20 incident, reaches similar conclusions, sources said. Although the CIA said it also would investigate, officials there declined to provide information on the inquiry.

The shootdown provoked widespread public and congressional outrage in April, echoing concerns raised inside the Clinton administration in early 1994, when Peru and Colombia said they intended to force airborne smugglers located and tracked with U.S. assistance to land or, if necessary, to shoot them down. As a result, the Clinton administration suspended an earlier version of the air intelligence-sharing program.

Lawyers in the Defense and Justice departments argued at the time that it was against U.S. and international law to fire at civilian aircraft except in self-defense. They said it would undermine U.S. arguments on air terrorism in international forums, and that the United States could be held liable if it provided assistance to shoot civilian planes out of the air, no matter what was aboard them.

But President Bill Clinton was under strong political pressure to adopt a tough line against drug smuggling and, after a prolonged administration debate, he proposed, and Congress passed, a law exempting U.S. government employees from liability for any "mistakes" that might occur while cooperating with another country's shootdown policy.

In December of that year, Clinton certified that such cooperation was a national security necessity and that the countries in question -- Peru and Colombia -- had "appropriate procedures in place to protect innocent aircraft."

Before Bowers and her daughter were killed, Peru had carried out 38 shootdowns or forcedowns with U.S. assistance since the program restarted in late 1994, resulting in 20 deaths. All were confirmed as drug smugglers after Peruvian investigations conducted on the ground with no U.S. participation.

After the April incident, the Bush administration fended off congressional demands for immediate details about the overall program and specifics of the shootdown by ordering the investigation. Based on its findings, officials said, they would take whatever measures were necessary to prevent future mistakes before reactivating the program.

Officials estimated that the inquiry, headed by Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, would take no more than a few weeks, and promised the report would be handed over to Congress immediately. But a "collective" decision was made in June by "the most senior levels of this government" to withhold the Beers report pending a separate policy review, an administration official said.

An administration official said last week that Busby's findings and recommendations would "not necessarily result in immediate action. It will be used to stimulate discussion within the administration about what the policy should be with regard to that program."

In the meantime, the House voted last Tuesday to withhold $65 million in military and development aid for Peru next year, part of the administration's overall counterdrug plan for the Andean region, until it gets the report and the president, State Department and CIA certify that corrective steps have been taken. The Senate intelligence committee is still considering what recommendations will accompany its report.

In apparent response to concern over the aid cuts, and the imminent release of the Senate intelligence committee report, sources said the administration has decided to release the Beers report this week before Busby's policy review is completed.

-------- OTHER

-------- health

Nigeria to launch largest AIDS treatment program

USA TODAY
07/31/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/07/31/nigeria-aids.htm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Nigeria plans to launch the largest AIDS treatment program in Africa using cheap generic drugs on Sept. 1, a U.N. special envoy said.

The 10,000 adults and 5,000 children who will receive a drug cocktail are just a tiny fraction of the more than 2.6 million Nigerians infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

But the Nigerian government's commitment demonstrates that within Africa efforts are under way to tackle the epidemic that has infected about 26.5 million people across the continent, said Stephen Lewis, special envoy of Secretary-General Kofi Annan for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

"It's a quite extraordinary intervention, a measure of the president's determination that they maintain the level of the pandemic where it is and try to turn it back," Lewis told a press conference on Monday. "They recognize that if Nigeria fails, then much of Africa will fail."

Nigeria, which is an unlikely country, was patched together by British colonialists. The most populous nation in Africa with 123 million people, Nigeria combines hundreds of ethnicities and languages in West Africa.

Botswana in southern Africa, which has a population of only 1.6 million, has the world's highest rate of AIDS infections, will launch a treatment program using anti-retroviral drugs in early 2002, he said.

At the first U.N. conference on AIDS last month, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo warned that "the prospect of extinction of the entire population of a continent looms larger and larger." He called for cancellation of Africa's debts and international help. But he also took action himself.

Obasanjo sent his health minister to India a few weeks ago to negotiate with the pharmaceutical company Cipla Ltd., which makes generic AIDS drugs.

In February, Cipla offered to sell a three-drug AIDS cocktail to nonprofit agencies for $350 a year per African patient - provided the patients weren't charged. The company said at the time that African governments could purchase the same drugs for $600 per patient.

But the Nigerian health minister was able to negotiate a $350 a year per patient deal with Cipla, Lewis said.

The Nigerian government will subsidize about 80% of the cost, but patients who receive treatment will have to pay between $7 and $8 a month, Lewis said.

Nigeria intends to use a six-drug regimen for 60% of the patients and a two-drug regimen for the other 40%, he said.

The drugs are expected to have similar results, but the government will monitor and evaluate how patients cope with the different programs, which will be administered by Nigeria's teaching hospitals, he said.

"It is the government's intention on Sept. 1 to begin a process of anti-retroviral treatment in Nigeria which will be at least initially larger than anywhere else on the continent," he said.

Lewis, who just returned from visits to Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria, said governments are anxiously awaiting help from the global AIDS fund which Annan proposed. It has received $1.4 billion, but the secretary-general says it needs $7 billion to $9 billion annually.

Despite financial and other obstacles, Lewis said he was "even more confident" that Africa could turn the tide on AIDS than he was before the trip. He cited "the extraordinary" degree of public awareness of the disease and "the quite profound determination" of political leaders to tackle it.

In Kenya, parliament unanimously passed a law last month allowing the government to suspend patent rights in times of emergency, which clears the way for cheaper, generic AIDS drugs.

The East African nation, which has 2 million adults living with the HIV virus, is expected to start importing or manufacturing anti-retroviral drugs shortly, Lewis said.

In Rwanda, only 500 people are receiving AIDS drugs because the $140 per month cost is half the average income for an entire year, Lewis said.

But the Rwandan government through testing, counseling and provision of some drugs to HIV-infected mothers appears to have significantly cut transmission of the virus to their children.

The U.N. Children's Program tested 33 children born to mothers who took part in the program and only two were HIV positive, which is just 6%, "much, much lower than the anticipated rate," he said.

-------- human rights

Rare Chinese Newspaper Exposé Details Prisoner Organ Harvests
Report by Small Weekly Posted on State-Run Paper's Web Site

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 31, 2001; Page A14
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7415-2001Jul30?language=printer

JINXI, China -- On the afternoon of Sept. 29, 1999, a former soldier in the Chinese army flew into a rage, raped his girlfriend and killed his newborn son and the mother and grandfather of his girlfriend. He then turned himself in to the police.

Fu Xinrong was executed with a bullet to the head on May 30 last year. In a country that puts more people to death than all other nations combined, his case would have passed largely unnoticed but for what came next: He became the focus of what appears to be the first exposé in the Chinese media about the practice of selling executed prisoners' organs without their permission.

According to the report -- "Where Did My Brother's Body Go?" -- that appeared in the April 11 edition of Today Family Weekly, a small newspaper in Jiangxi province, where the crime occurred, Fu's body was immediately placed in a van and driven away. The van's license plates were traced to a hospital in Nanchang, the provincial capital.

The newspaper quoted unidentified government investigators as saying that officials from the Pingxiang county court, where Fu was sentenced, had sold his corpse to the hospital for an undisclosed sum. There, his kidneys were extracted and transplanted to unidentified patients, the newspaper said.

Though the Beijing government has attempted to suppress discussion of organ-harvesting, the article was picked up by the People's Daily Online, the main Web site of the most powerful official newspaper in China, where it remains posted. Several other newspapers in China also reprinted it.

"There are people who are against this practice," said one journalist, who was trying to explain how such an article could have appeared on the newspaper's Web site. "Sometimes in China, things sneak through the cracks."

Meanwhile, in a sign of another change in China -- people's increasing willingness to seek justice through courts -- Fu's sister, Fu Mulan, said she wants to sue the government for selling her brother's organs without his permission. Her lawyer, Wei Liyuan, said he is building a case. And at least one court official in the county where the alleged organ-harvesting took place has been removed from his position, local sources said.

Chinese journalists who have investigated the case say numerous other organ deals have been made in that courthouse in the past few years.

"This is a bad practice," said a local official in Jiangxi province with knowledge of the case. "People like me want it stopped."

A Growing Phenomenon

The illicit trade in organs is a worldwide phenomenon brought on by a shortage of donors and a threefold increase in demand in the United States alone, according to the United Network for Organs Sharing, which coordinates American organ donations. Taiwan also harvests organs from executed prisoners, and says it does so with their consent. In India, and now China, poor people routinely sell their body parts.

In the United States, doctors report an increased number of patients seeking medical help after they have received transplants in China. Many of those are assumed to be from executed prisoners. Amnesty International says that China executed at least 1,781 people between April and June, more than all other nations combined in the past three years.

Chinese criminal lawyers, journalists and doctors say the practice of extracting organs from executed prisoners without their permission has been going on for years. Most recently, Wang Guoqi, 38, a doctor from the Tianjin People's Armed Police General Brigade Hospital, told the U.S. Congress on June 27 that he helped remove corneas and skin from more than 100 executed prisoners.

China's government has denied this practice occurs. A few days after Wang's testimony, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue called Wang's testimony "sensational lies" and "vicious slander" against China. "With regard to the trade in human organs, China strictly prohibits that," Zhang said. "The major source of human organs comes from voluntary donations from Chinese citizens."

China allows the removal of organs from executed prisoners under regulations issued in 1984. In theory, those regulations require the consent of the condemned prisoner or the prisoner's family. However, a close reading of those rules indicates the Beijing government and local officials are concerned that the process be kept secret.

One section says: "The use of the corpses or organs of executed criminals must be kept strictly secret, and attention must be paid to avoiding negative repercussions." Under the rules, ambulances are permitted on execution grounds but they are not supposed to be marked with Health Department insignia. Doctors extracting the organs are not allowed to wear "white clothing."

"Guards must remain posted around the execution grounds while the operation for organ removal is going on," the regulations say.

And while the regulations say permission is needed for organ removal, Robin Munro, a British expert on the Chinese criminal justice system, said prisoners' bodies are usually cremated before being returned to relatives, making it impossible to determine if organs have been removed.

Organ transplants began increasing in China in 1984 with the introduction of cyclosporin A, the drug that prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs. Only this year did China begin to establish a voluntary organ-donation program.

For more than 15 years, discussion of organ transplants and harvesting was taboo in China's media. But in the last two years, anecdotes and interviews appearing in the Chinese media and testimonials posted on the Internet have begun indicating a considerable underground trade in human organs. None of the reports has gone as far as the investigation printed in Family Weekly. That report pushed the boundaries further by laying responsibility on a specific court and official.

The parents of one boy who died in a traffic accident are suing a hospital that removed his corneas for transplant without their permission. One recent report quoted a Chinese police officer as saying that black-market activity -- and even kidnapping -- related to human organ-trading is commonplace in less-developed areas of western China.

Most organ sales, according to the Chinese media, appear to involve voluntary sales of kidneys by poor farmers to wealthier urban residents. (The body can function with only one of its two kidneys). A report in October 2000 in the Yangcheng Evening News said that middlemen had posted advertisements on China's auction Web sites.

Pursuing the Leads

Jiangxi is one of the poorest and most corrupt provinces in China. Nanchang's police chief was recently involved in a scandal involving attempts to pilfer a large amount of cash from a Hainan Island restaurant in which his department had invested. Senior provincial officials were fired after 42 people, mostly schoolchildren, died in an explosion in March in a fireworks factory where they had been forced to work. Earlier this year, thousands of farmers in the province rioted against heavy taxes imposed by local officials.

Against this backdrop, Fu Xinrong's sister, Fu Mulan, received an anonymous call in August -- at a phone in a store down the street from her unfinished, ramshackle home -- saying that her brother had been executed and his body sold for organ-harvesting.

Fu contacted journalists in Nanchang, requesting help. A group of reporters from Today Family Weekly went to Pingxiang, 180 miles away, to investigate. They determined that on the day Fu was executed, he was driven to execution grounds closer to Nanchang than prisoners usually are, and that a van was waiting there.

After Fu was shot in the back of the head, four attendants got out of the van and picked up his corpse, the newspaper account said. A government prosecutor attempted to stop them, but they explained that they were from Nanchang and that they had a deal with the court. The paper said one of its sources wrote down the van's license plate number, which the reporters traced to a Nanchang hospital.

"We found the hospital's director and confronted him with the evidence," one reporter said. "In the beginning, he refused to say anything about it, but when he saw what we had, he had to admit it on the condition that we did not release the hospital's name in our report."

Further investigation indicated that a senior court official, whose surname is Yang, had sold the body to the hospital, the report said. Contacted in Pingxiang, Yang declined to comment.

The reporters attempted to persuade provincial court officials to investigate, but got no response. They then passed the information to reporters from the People's Daily and the Legal Daily, hoping that they would write an internal report to the Chinese leadership -- a common method used by China's media to deal with sensitive subjects. But instead, the People's Daily put the story on its Web site at the same time the provincial newspaper published it.

After the story appeared, Fu Mulan said she received a call from a Pingxiang county official, saying her brother's body had been in the county morgue all along. "I don't believe them," she said. "The official told me to collect the body, but I don't have any money to travel anywhere.

"Anyway," she added, "Why did they suddenly call me? It was because of the newspaper story. My brother's body has been missing for more than a year and suddenly they found it? We may be poor but we are not stupid."

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Kosovo Aid Worker Questioned on Child Trafficking

Reuters
Tue, Jul 31 2:06 PM EDT
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010731/14/international-yugoslavia-kosovo-trafficking-dc

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - International police are questioning a western European woman working for an international aid agency in connection with a child trafficking case in Kosovo, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

"It is an investigation on child trafficking," U.N. spokesman Andrea Angeli said, giving few details. "She is detained and they are interrogating her."

Angeli said the woman would be held by police for a second night Tuesday, but declined to give her name, her nationality or identify the aid group. "It's possible that everything was in good faith related to ... adoptions," she added.

International police in Kosovo have dealt with a variety of trafficking cases, most often of prostitutes, since taking over law and order issues in the Yugoslav province in June 1999 at the end of NATO's 11-week bombing campaign.

But it remains easy for people in Kosovo and others to cross the province's borders and boundaries.

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Worm set to attack Internet

July 31, 2001
By Tim Lemke
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20010731-168210.htm

Government and technology officials warned organizations worldwide yesterday to protect themselves against a vicious computer worm that is expected to start tonight.

The "Code Red" worm, named for a favorite soft drink of computer programmers, has the potential to do more damage than previous computer attacks because it can slow global Internet traffic before issuing brutal attacks on file servers.

The worm, which first attacked last month, latches itself onto one server at the beginning of the month, then expands to every vulnerable system within 18 hours. Its reproduction could slow Internet traffic by at least half immediately. The worm then will start a massive attack on predetermined computers Aug. 19, flooding their systems and possibly crashing them.

"We are taking this worm very seriously. This worm is vicious in intent," Ron Dick, director of the Justice Department's National Infrastructure Protection Center, said at a packed news conference yesterday.

Computer security officials said they expect Code Red to start itself tonight by latching onto an unknown server through a security hole in Microsoft software and multiply itself through Aug. 19, when it will order a "denial-of-service" attack on a predetermined target. A denial-of-service attack essentially floods a system with information until it crashes.

The worm is expected to start at 8 p.m. EST, which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time Aug. 1.

The Code Red worm affects only Microsoft servers running Windows 2000 or NT software with Internet Information Server 4.0 or 5.0 enabled. Computer workstations and any computer running Windows 95, 98 or ME will not be affected.

So far, the only way to prevent the attack is to download a free software patch available on Microsoft Corp.'s Web site. Microsoft's Scott Culp said more than 100,000 copies of the patch had been downloaded.

Chris Rouland, a director with Internet Security Systems, an Atlanta company that has analyzed the worm, said that little else could be done to eliminate Code Red, which he expects to appear each month until the software patches are universally installed.

"This little guy will be around for a while," Mr. Rouland said.

Security experts know so much about the worm because of how it worked last month and because they can see the worm's code, which is lying dormant in computers. Because the worm attacks holes in software, the only way to guard against it is to patch the holes.

The FBI is working with Canada, Britain and Australia to fight the worm's spread. FBI legal attaches stationed overseas have sent the word to 46 other countries. Investigators don't know who wrote Code Red or where it started.

Members of government agencies including the National Coordinating Center for Telecommunications and the National Infrastructure Protection Center joined with the Internet Security Alliance and other security-related businesses to discuss the worm yesterday. The worm is a genuine threat to the well-being of the Internet, the groups said.

The Internet slowed 50 percent in some areas during the first attack of Code Red, and any larger decrease could cause applications to fail, Mr. Rouland said.

Code Red is a greater threat than recent destructive entities like the Love Bug and Melissa viruses because it has proved to slow the performance of the entire Internet, Mr. Rouland said. He added that the coding indicates that it was created by an experienced hacker.

Code Red first attacked July 19 and infected more than 250,000 systems in nine hours. It tried to attack the White House Web site, but officials quickly changed the site's Internet protocol address after a similar attack on the Pentagon's site. The Pentagon shut down its site briefly, after the worm defaced it with the words "Hacked By Chinese."

The worm goes through three stages each month. The first ranges from the first to the 19th, when it attempts to attach itself to a site to duplicate itself. From the 20th to the 27th, it enters its "flood mode" in which it starts a massive denial-of-service attack. The worm then goes dormant until the first day of the following month.

Computer security officials said they have no idea what the next target will be. The White House site is still a possibility, but security measures have been taken.

Unlike viruses, which often must be downloaded before they can infect a user's computer, a worm can spread across the Internet by searching for weaknesses and installing itself. In this instance, the worm takes advantage of a flaw found in Microsoft's Internet Information Services software, which is used on file servers. As a result, a worm can take full control of the server and eventually order denial-of-service attacks on predetermined targets.

"Worms are definitely a scarier proposition" than viruses, said Vincent Weafer, director of the AntiVirus Research Center at Symantec Corp., the Cupertino, Calif., manufacturer of Norton AntiVirus software. "They tend to be more insidious because they need less human interaction to spread than viruses."

• William Glanz contributed to this report.

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