------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Bones 'stolen' for A-bomb research
Thousands protest nuclear reactor
U.S. denies trade-off with China over missiles
China Said Planning Military Buildup
Hopes Fade Ahead of India - Pakistan Talks in New York
Russia sees more nuclear reactors for Iran - minister
Levin Requests Missile Defense Look
Alaska Asks Feds for Radiation Tests
U.S. Restates Its Stand on Missiles in China
US intends to cut nuclear arsenal unilaterally: Pentagon official

MILITARY
Women in combat costly, 'criminal'
U.S. Wary of Weapons Tech Sales
Report Says Macedonians Killed Civilians in Revenge
Battelle's laboratories key to germ-warfare research
U.S. Anthrax Plan Worries Russians
When Is Bomb Not a Bomb? Germ Experts Confront U.S.
Military seeking a greener, gentler explosive
Laws against marijuana should not go up in smoke
U.N. Challenges Iraqi Expulsion
At Arab, Israeli Schools, Hatred Is Common Bond
Jerusalem Is on Edge After Spate Of Bombs
N. Carolinians to Navy: No bombs in our backyards
Army Meets Recruiting Goal Early and Credits Ad Effort

OTHER
Toxic Sites Being Cleaned Up Slowly
E.P.A. Faults Ohio Agency Headed by a Bush Nominee
Bush Administration Says Not All Stem Cell Lines Ready
Mobile phone users 'at greater risk of brain tumour'
Virus May Help Fight HIV
Tension is again rising in Chiapas
More Walkouts Threaten Racism Talks
Judge tosses 300 tickets from photos
Bid to Crack Down On Leaks Is Put Off White House Not Ready to Back Plan
European Parliament OKs Spy Plan
US Echelon spy network a fact, European Parliament told
US spy network sees everything in Europe

ACTIVISTS
SAN FRANCISCO CANCER DEATHS DECLINE
Globalization's Diverse Foes



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- australia

Bones 'stolen' for A-bomb research

News Interactive
By SUE DUNLEVY
05sep01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,2767202%255E421,00.html

THE bones of 21,830 dead Australians were removed and used in a nuclear research program without their relatives' consent.

Nearly 5000 bones came from infants and stillborn babies, says a report on the program that ran between 1957 and 1978.

Pathologists in major public hospitals were paid to provide the samples and were initially told to keep their participation "confidential".

An Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) report released yesterday reveals Australia ran its own nuclear research program similar to the US "Project Sunshine".

And it confirms that the bones of other Australians were sent to the US for use in Project Sunshine, which tested 10,000 bones from 39 countries between 1953 and 1960 for the effects of radiation from nuclear tests.

The US researchers had private deals with Australian pathologists to supply the bones and there is no record of the number involved.

The ARPANSA investigation was ordered after outrage in June about Australian pathologists sending bones to the US.

The report reveals Australia ran its own program established by the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee in 1957 to measure strontium 90 in human bones, soil, vegetation, milk and sheep bones.

Strontium 90 is a contaminant resulting from atmospheric nuclear testing and Australia wanted to check whether nuclear weapons tests being carried out on our soil were affecting the population.

A letter sent to pathologists in December 1957 requesting their participation stressed the secrecy of the program.

"You may consider . . . that the sampling and radiochemical assaying of bones would not be regarded kindly by the general public. Consequently I would be grateful if you could treat this matter . . . as either confidential or personal."

More than 400 bone samples were collected in 1958 rising to about 1200 a year in 1962 and about 1000 a year after that.

NSW pathologists provided 4598 bones used over the 20-year program. They were asked to concentrate on samples of those under 40, particularly infants and young children.

In 1968 as collection of samples fell off pathologists were paid a $50-a-year bonus to encourage them to collect.

The committee running the program told hospitals in a letter: "Direct payment by us has unfortunate overtones and too much of the appearance of buying tissue."

Instead, the money was paid to a hospital account and passed on by the hospitals.

In the mid-1970s the bonus payment was increased to two payments of $50 per year.

The research showed that humans were being adversely affected by radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

The program contributed to the eventual banning of atmospheric testing worldwide.

Health Minister Dr Michael Wooldridge said yesterday he had asked the Australian Health Ethics Committee to advise how relatives could be contacted and given information about the program.

--------

Thousands protest nuclear reactor

News Interactive (Australia) From AAP
05sep01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,2775123%255E421,00.html

THOUSANDS of Australians have raised concerns about a new nuclear reactor at Sydney's Lucas Heights, appealing to the nuclear safety regulator to consider its impact on safety and health.

The proposal to build the reactor drew strong opposition from communities around the nation amid calls for another expert review.

The chief nuclear regulator, John Loy, today received 8,700 submissions from people across Australia, concerned about health, safety and waste management issues.

The organisation which he heads, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), had called for submissions on the proposal to build the new reactor at Lucas Heights.

Greenpeace, the Maritime Workers Union and Sutherland Shire Council also sent submissions with safety and radioactive waste management concerns.

The council said two independent nuclear experts had recommended the Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) of the proposal be subjected to another expert review.

ARPANSA is set to decide if a construction licence can be granted to Argentinian company INVAP, which was selected by the federal government to build the reactor.

In July, the initial safety report for the reactor was given the all-clear from world experts.

But the former director of a wing of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Robert Budnitz, and senior analyst with the University of Vienna's Institute of Risk Research, Steven Sholly, said a more comprehensive peer review was needed.

"I did ... identify a number of areas where I have important technical questions about safety - where the safety analysis seems to overstate the case somewhat, or where the documentation in front of me does not fully or adequately support the safety case as well as it should," Mr Budnitz said.

There were also concerns about the site's proximity to the Holsworthy Military Reserve, in south-western Sydney.

"It is nearly unprecedented for a nuclear facility of this nature to be located so close to a military base," Mr Sholly said in the report.

Their reports were commissioned by the council, which said an independent open inquiry into the proposal must be held.

An application for a licence to build the reactor, from ANSTO (the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation), must satisfy safety concerns before a decision is made next February as to whether it is satisfactory.

Last May, a Senate committee found the government failed to establish a compelling case for a new reactor in Lucas Heights and recommended an independent review be held.

INVAP has been contracted to build the reactor in 2002, to replace the existing installation, once official safety approvals are in place.

Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Stephen Campbell said thousands of people had now raised concerns about nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel.

"ARPANSA must take these concerns seriously and not grant a construction licence," he said.

-------- china

U.S. denies trade-off with China over missiles

September 5, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010905-81193180.htm

The Bush administration does not plan to lessen its objections to China's strategic nuclear arms buildup in exchange for Beijing backing a U.S. missile defense shield, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday.

Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters that recent news reports suggesting such a trade-off were "not correct."

"We have concerns about the Chinese development of long-range nuclear capabilities," Mr. Feith said.

Both the long-range missile development and short-range missile deployments "have not contributed to stability," said Mr. Feith, who took up the senior defense policy-making post six weeks ago.

Asked later to elaborate on the Pentagon's concerns about China's strategic arms buildup, Mr. Feith said: "Less is better than more."

He said the Pentagon also does not plan to discuss with China a mutual resumption of underground nuclear testing.

Earlier, Victoria Clarke, the new assistant defense secretary for public affairs, was asked if the United States intended to tell Beijing that the administration is not opposed to an increase in Chinese nuclear warheads.

"Absolutely not," the spokeswoman said.

"The president's policy is to seek to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, offensive weapons around the world," she said. "He has made this one of the priorities of his administration. He wants to lessen the risk of nuclear war. He wants missile defense as one part of a broader deterrent strategy."

However, the administration will provide a briefing to China on U.S. missile defense plans, as it has done with U.S. friends and allies and Russia, Mrs. Clarke said.

China is engaged in a strategic nuclear arms buildup that includes two new types of road-mobile strategic missiles, the DF-31 and DF-41.

In addition to the two new types of ICBMs, China also is developing a new class of ballistic missile submarines known as the Type 094 that will carry a naval version of the DF-31.

A new attack submarine, Type O93, also is being developed.

China's current long-range nuclear arsenal consists of about 20 CSS-4 ICBMs. It also has a single ballistic missile submarine and hundreds of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

Asked about the buildup, Mrs. Clarke said: "We are worried about it. We have made that clear before and we'll make that clear going forward."

"Increasing nuclear weapons is not a good way to enhance international stability and cooperation."

The comments were a stark contrast to those of the Clinton administration. In the past, the Pentagon limited all its statements about China's arms buildup by saying China is modernizing its nuclear forces. No expressions of concern about the buildup were made public.

China is opposing U.S. plans for a missile defense shield against long-range attack.

Over the past several days, unidentified Bush administration officials have suggested in news reports that the administration might not oppose the Chinese strategic buildup as a way to win Beijing's support for the U.S. defensive shield.

"Our position on missile defense is that we intend to do an aggressive, robust research and development program with the intent to test and deploy a limited system that protects us, and our forces deployed abroad, and our friends and allies from the threat of missile attack from rogue nations or an accidental launch," Mrs. Clarke said.

"And the only ones who should be worried about that, or concerned about that, are those who have less than the best of intent toward us."

Chinese officials will be offered a briefing on U.S. missile defense plans in meetings set to be held over the next several weeks, she said.

--------

China Said Planning Military Buildup

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-China.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- China intends to modernize its nuclear and other military forces whether or not the United States follows through with development of a defense against long-range missiles, a Chinese diplomat said Wednesday.

Upgrading China's forces is a natural development along with growth of the Chinese economy, the official said. They go hand-in-hand, he told reporters at the Chinese Embassy.

China will hold to its pledge under the international test ban treaty not to conduct a nuclear weapons test explosion, he said.

But there are other ways, in the laboratories and using computers, to improve China's missile arsenal, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

On Capitol Hill, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the Bush administration does not intend to approve or condone a buildup of China's nuclear forces.

Rumsfeld disputed news reports the administration would tacitly accept such a buildup.

``The suggestion that the United States has or is poised to approve of China's military and nuclear buildup for some reason in exchange for something is simply not the case, notwithstanding what people are reading in the press,'' Rumsfeld told a Senate appropriations subcommittee.

Meanwhile, a senior U.S. official told The Associated Press that China's forces were slated for expansion and modernization long before the Bush administration came on the scene and began talking about missile defenses.

The primary concern is whether China intends to step up development of medium-range and long-range missiles, the official said. China is far behind in both areas, but it is not barred from developing intermediate-range missiles as the United States and Russia are by treaty, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said the United States can do nothing to prevent China from modernizing its strategic forces, but the Bush administration would not sit idly by if it did.

For one thing, he said, the administration intends to enforce stringently an agreement reached with China last November to curb the spread of missile technology.

China is thought to have about 20 long-range ballistic missiles and an estimated 100 medium-range missiles.

The official also disputed newspaper reports that the United States will signal China it recognizes that both sides want to resume nuclear weapons tests.

The Senate has refused to ratify the test ban treaty, but the Bush administration has extended the President Clinton's moratorium on testing.

Last week, the administration accused the China Metallurgical Equipment Corp., a government-owned engineering company, of supplying missile-related parts to Pakistan.

For two years, the company will be denied all new U.S. licenses for production of electronics and military equipment and for material used to launch commercial satellites.

On Wednesday in Beijing, and also at the Chinese Embassy, the U.S. allegation was denied. The company did not ship material to Pakistan in violation of the agreement, the Chinese official said, and China has asked the Bush administration for evidence.

In saying China will proceed with modernizing its nuclear arsenal, the official said it was not designed as a threat against any country.

At the same time, he registered his government's objections to a U.S. anti-missile system, saying it would upset the strategic balance of the last half-century and would touch off a nuclear arms race.

The Bush administration has based its pursuit of a shield on claims North Korea, Iraq, Iran and possibly other countries could threaten the United States with long-range missiles.

The Chinese official said the threat from North Korea is either exaggerated or imagined.

-------- india / pakistan

Hopes Fade Ahead of India - Pakistan Talks in New York

September 5, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-pakistan.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Leaders of India and Pakistan are headed into another peace-seeking meeting this month but there are few signs either side is ready to bend on the decades-old dispute over Kashmir.

The two nations have stepped up the rhetoric and separatist violence in Indian-administered Kashmir has escalated as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf prepare for talks in New York later this month.

Indian foreign ministry spokeswoman Nirupama Rao told reporters the talks would be held on September 25 on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.

Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani on Wednesday blasted Islamabad for what he called its ``obsession'' with Kashmir.

``..their obstinacy and obsession over Kashmir raises serious doubts over their sincerity in finding a lasting solution to the problem,'' Advani, widely perceived to be a hard-liner, told a conference of top police officials.

Earlier, junior Foreign Minister Omar Abdullah said a stream of harsh statements from Islamabad had clouded prospects for the New York meeting.

``I am very pessimistic now about the possibility of a New York meeting ... because unfortunately nothing has changed since Agra,'' the minister told Star television in Durban where he was attending a U.N. conference on racism.

Spokeswoman Rao said Abdullah's comments were ``perfectly justified'' considering the kind of ``rhetoric coming out of Pakistan'' in recent days.

``The tone and substance of comments emanating out of Pakistan indicates they seem to have not learned any lessons from Agra,'' Rao said on Wednesday.

BAD SIGNS

Vajpayee and Musharraf held two days of talks in the northern Indian town of Agra in July but the high-profile summit collapsed over Kashmir, the focus of a 54-year-old row between the neighbors.

Since then the two nuclear-capable neighbors have stuck to their positions with New Delhi insisting talks must be broad-based, and not just confined to Kashmir which it considers an integral part of the country.

``New York going Agra way,'' said a headline in the Hindustan Times over a report that little progress could be expected from the New York meeting.

Islamabad has repeatedly sought to put revolt-racked Kashmir at the top of the agenda, saying the dispute lay at the heart of its troubled ties with India.

Local media reports quoted Pakistani officials as saying Musharraf intended to raise the Kashmir issue in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, a step bound to raise hackles in New Delhi.

``The signals from both capitals are not good at all,'' J.N. Dixit, a former Indian foreign secretary, told Reuters.

``The only good thing is they have not broken off communication and as long as they keeping talking, the shooting perhaps will be proportionately less,'' he said.

India has expressed concern at the mounting violence in Kashmir for which it holds Pakistan responsible.

Islamabad denies direct involvement in the Kashmir revolt, but says it offers moral and diplomatic support for what it calls the Kashmiri people's struggle for self-determination.

The two armies, locked in an eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation along a control line running through Kashmir, have also repeatedly exchanged fire in the past month.

-------- iran

Russia sees more nuclear reactors for Iran - minister

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
RUSSIA: September 5, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12283/newsDate/5-Sep-2001/story.htm

MOSCOW - Russia is putting new plans to Iran for building further nuclear power plant reactors in the southern port city of Bushehr, deputy Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Reshetnikov said yesterday.

Reshetnikov, in comments carried by Itar-Tass news agency, said a team of Russian specialists would visit Iran soon to present a feasibility study for assembling more nuclear reactors at Bushehr.

"Iran can order from us the construction of at least one more reactor," Reshetnikov said.

He said negotiations with Tehran on signing the contract could start as early as December.

Reshetnikov's remarks seemed certain to raise eyebrows in Israel just as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon begins a visit to Moscow on Monday in which he was to press Russia to stop the transfer of nuclear know-how to Iran, its regional rival.

Both Israel and the United States have criticised Russia's construction of the 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant at Bushehr though Moscow and Tehran insist the project has no military purpose.

The United States sees the development of nuclear technology in Iran as a threat.

Reshetnikov said work at the Bushehr plant was on schedule and the first reactor was likely to be shipped in November.

-------- missile defense

Levin Requests Missile Defense Look

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate Armed Services Committee chairman said Wednesday he doesn't want to give the Pentagon a blank check to develop a missile defense system that would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia.

``We're being asked to approve money in the dark,'' Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the day armed services subcommittees met in secret to work on details of the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2002, which begins Oct. 1.

The House committee worked in open session last month as it completed that chamber's $343 billion spending bill for the Defense Department and defense work of the Energy Department.

Levin said Congress needs to know whether missile defense activities in the budget will violate the ABM treaty because President Bush has said he will withdraw from the treaty if it impinges upon development of the system.

``I do not believe that unilateral withdrawal from the treaty is the right way to go at this time,'' Levin said. ``I think it could leave us a lot less secure if we do it.''

For months, Pentagon officials have told congressional hearings they were analyzing what planned activities might violate the ABM treaty, but their determinations have not been forthcoming.

``We've asked for it 10 different ways, and so far we've been given 10 different answers,'' Levin said. ``They've told us, `We don't know. It's a work in progress. It's under consideration. It's under deliberation.' They either won't tell us, or they don't know.''

Simply deleting the money won't solve the problem, he said, because the activities might turn out not to conflict with the treaty. ``You're looking at a guy that supported testing'' a missile defense system, Levin said. ``I think most Democrats voted for it.''

Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the House Armed Services Committee's top Democrat, said Tuesday he would seek to divert $860 million from missile defense to other Pentagon needs when the bill hits the House floor. The committee rejected that on a party-line vote last month.

Levin refused to say whether he would try the same tactic, but he said some of the missile defense money ``cannot be justified.''

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was promoting missile defense to the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense panel.

``If we remain vulnerable to missile attack, a rogue state that demonstrates the capacity to strike the U.S. or its allies could have the power to hold our people hostage to nuclear or other blackmail,'' he said.

Rumsfeld also implored the senators to provide all the money Bush requested for his budget, including $18.4 billion the administration sought late in the process.

``We need every nickel of it,'' he said.

Democrats and Republicans expressed support, despite Democratic criticism of the $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut that erased virtually all the non-Social Security budget surplus and left scant funds for extra defense spending.

``I saw the attack on Pearl Harbor. I remember June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans attacked,'' said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, the panel chairman. ``There is one lesson I will never forget: If we want to prevent war, we must be prepared for war.''

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said enough money is available for defense spending, but Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the panel's top Republican, said ``it's going to be a tough fall'' as rival interests compete for scarce money.

Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., was the most colorful, and critical, supporter of full financing for the Defense Department.

``The problem,'' Hollings told Rumsfeld, ``is your commander in chief is running around hollering, `Cut spending! Hey, watch that Congress' spending, that spending Congress!' That's outrageous nonsense. ... So just ask the commander in chief if he can cut that shabby political charade out.''

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

-------- alaska

Alaska Asks Feds for Radiation Tests

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Alaska-Radiation.html?searchpv=aponline

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Alaska's environmental officials have asked the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate possible radiation contamination on and around Amchitka Island, where the military exploded atomic devices from 1965 to 1971.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham last month, the state said a thorough assessment is needed to reassure Alaska natives on other Aleutian islands that subsistence foods are safe. Amchitka is uninhabited, but people who live on nearby islands rely on fishing and hunting.

The energy department has said it has found no evidence that buried radiation from the tests may be leaching to the surface or into the ocean. But the agency has conducted no tests for radiation there since the 1970s, state officials say.

Two years ago, the energy department agreed to finance a medical surveillance program for people who worked on the island during the atomic era, and Congress has funded a benefits program for former Amchitka workers who later developed radiation-related cancers.

-------- us nuc politics

U.S. Restates Its Stand on Missiles in China

September 5, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/international/asia/05MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - The Bush administration issued a new set of statements today about how it views the buildup of Chinese nuclear forces, declaring that it would not "seek to overcome China's opposition" to Mr. Bush's missile defense plan by dropping any objections to the modernization of China's nuclear forces.

In the statement, issued by Mr. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, the White House also said it would not "acquiesce" in the resumption of nuclear testing by China.

The statement was prompted by an article on Sunday in The New York Times, quoting senior administration officials who said they would not object to China's nuclear modernization. China will add intercontinental missiles to its modest fleet of 20 to 24 such weapons no matter what the United States tells China, the administration concluded.

The article quoted officials and outside analysts as saying that once China has more missiles in its arsenal, it should be less concerned about Mr. Bush's missile defense system - because China would have a sufficient number of missiles to overwhelm any American missile defense now being contemplated.

The article prompted criticism of the administration's position by Democrats, and some Republicans, who said they worried that China would interpret it as a go-ahead to build more nuclear weapons. In response, White House officials, led by Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said the administration was recognizing the strategic reality, and was not offering China any kind of a deal in which American approval of the buildup would be traded for Chinese approval of a missile defense plan.

The statement - issued late this afternoon, officials said - was intended to reinforce that point.

"The United States will not seek to overcome China's opposition to missile defense by telling the Chinese that we do not object to an expansion of their nuclear ballistic missile force," the statement said. "Nor will we acquiesce in any resumption of nuclear testing by China. We are respecting the nuclear testing moratorium and all other nations should as well."

Speaking on background, however, several administration officials have repeated in recent days that China may decide it needs to test its new weapons to assure their safety and reliability.

At the heart of the administration's revised statement today appears to be a distinction between what Mr. Bush's advisers believe China will do and what it will tell them to do. The article on Sunday quoted one of Mr. Bush's senior advisers as saying, "We know the Chinese will enhance their nuclear capability anyway, and we are going to say to them, `We're not going to tell you not to do it.' "

But today White House officials said they also do not plan to tell China to go ahead with the modernization. "It's not a conversation likely to take place," one senior official said. "We don't have a script that says `You may proceed.' "

--------

US intends to cut nuclear arsenal unilaterally: Pentagon official

Agence France-Presse
(AFP) Sep 05, 2001
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/010905005307.tcjlqblt.html

WASHINGTON The United States intends to make unilateral cuts in its nuclear arsenal rather than engage Russia in protracted arms negotiations, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.

Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, said he will go to Moscow September 10-11 to resume talks with Russian defense officials on missile defense and nuclear arms cuts.

Russian officials have called on the US side to provide detailed proposals on arms cuts so that negotiations can get underway linking them to missile defense.

But Feith said the United States would not wait to cut its nuclear forces once a review now being conducted by the Pentagon identifies ways to reduce the US strategic arsenal.

"Once we've identified that a reduction is justified, we're not looking to tie up the reduction process in protracted negotiations," he told reporters.

"When we identify nuclear weapons that we don't need, we will eliminate them," he said.

"And we hope that the Russians will take a similar attitude, and it's clear that they're on a path to offensive nuclear force reductions also," he said.

On missile defense, Feith said Washington hopes to reach an agreement with Moscow to move beyond the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

But he added, "it's not absolutely required."

Absent an agreement, the United States will withdraw from the treaty while continuing to pursue "a cooperative, non-hostile, one hopes eventually even quite thoroughly friendly, relationship with Russia."


-------- MILITARY

Women in combat costly, 'criminal'

September 5, 2001
By Robert Fox
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010905-44280604.htm

LONDON -- Sending women into front-line combat units will reduce the British armed forces' efficiency, increase costs and could prove "little short of criminal," a study by a leading military authority has found.

In a warning to the Ministry of Defense, the research uncovered widespread evidence that female soldiers undermined the battlefield effectiveness of troops.

The study was conducted by Martin Van Creveld, a specialist in international conflict who lectures regularly at army staff colleges, by examining the integration of women into armies in Israel, in Europe and in the United States.

His findings will influence Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, who is due to announce his decision on whether to lift the ban on women joining the infantry, the Royal Armored Corps, the Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force Regiment.

The heads of the three armed services and the chief of the Defense Staff, Adm. Sir Michael Boyce, are preparing recommendations to Mr. Hoon on the subject, with a final decision expected this month.

Mr. Van Creveld, whose book "Men, Women and War -- Do Women Belong in the Front Line?" is to be published on Sept. 13, found that women lack the physical strength needed for fighting at close quarters.

Their relative weakness could, in some cases, put themselves and their comrades in unjustifiable danger, which he described as potentially "criminal."

In the book, Mr. Van Creveld quotes a study of recruits at West Point in the United States showing that after eight weeks' training, men typically develop 37 percent more power in the lower body than women, and do 48 percent more work at the leg press.

The U.S. Army has calculated that the average woman recruit has 59 percent of the upper body strength of her average male counterpart and 72 percent in the lower body.

Women are more vulnerable to injury than men, the research found. A study of 310 volunteers in the United States found that women are twice as susceptible to leg injuries and five times more prone to broken bones of all types.

Mr. Van Creveld found that anecdotal evidence of women fighting in historical conflicts was unreliable. Stories of female warriors, Amazons, were myths, he said, adding: "There is no more reason to believe they ever existed any more than Barbarella or Wonder Woman did."

Myth also surrounds the roles of women in more contemporary armed forces, including the Soviet Red Army, the U.S. forces and the Israeli Defense Force, Mr. Van Creveld argues. Although Israel called up women more than any other modern army, few served in the front line, and were conscripted for shorter periods than men.

Women also accounted for a small proportion of troops in the U.S. armed forces, Mr. Van Creveld found. During the Vietnam War, there were only eight American women among the 57,000 dead. Of the 388 Americans killed in the Gulf War of 1991, 13 were women.

He witnessed women training for the Israeli army in scenes he described as bordering on farce. When men and women recruits set out on runs, the men were soon out of sight. During stretcher drills, women struggled to cope with the weight of their male colleagues.

Women in front-line units increased costs because separate facilities were needed for a relatively small number of recruits.

Active-duty and former army officers have echoed the book's findings. Col. Mike Vickery, who commanded the 14th/20th Hussars during the Gulf War, told the Sunday Telegraph: "Being shut down in a tank for hours on end in combat could be very difficult with women in a unit. It can mean having to urinate in a bottle, for example. Handling ammunition is tough for the loader. Hardest work falls to the driver, who relies on leg strength as much as arms and hands. After a difficult day driving, you often have to replace the tank tread, which is hard enough for three men at the best of times."

An artillery commander added: "So far, women have proved excellent in training, but they haven't been tested in war."

A British Defense Department spokesman said: "The chiefs of staff have a very large amount of information on the issue to consider. They will make their recommendations in due course."

-------- arms sales

U.S. Wary of Weapons Tech Sales

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Despite urgent U.S. pleas, Russian companies are continuing to provide Iran with technology for weapons of mass destruction, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

The technology could help Iran in its programs to develop chemical, biological and especially nuclear weapons, the official said.

By contrast, he said, Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying hard to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to abandon or at least curtail his program to develop long-range missiles.

The Russians do not agree with the Bush administration that North Korea will be able to mount a long-range threat. They say North Korea is patterning its program on shorter-range Russian Scud missiles.

But, the official said, the Bush administration has advised the Kremlin that tests show the program can be adapted to pose a long-range threat and Russia does not deny there is a North Korean missile problem.

Speaking to reporters at the State Department on condition of anonymity, the official said the technology sales to Iran are a sore spot in generally improved U.S. relations with the Russian government, which, he said, is aware of the deals.

Officially, Russia agrees with the United States that curbs should be placed on proliferation of technology to Iran. But the Bush administration has not made much progress in persuading Russian authorities to clamp down, the official said.

Still, the administration persists, telling Russian officials that an Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction poses a threat to Russia as well, the official said.

On another troubled front, Russia has not given up its attempt to crush secession in Chechnya with force, the official said.

The United States ambassador to Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, plans to make a trip to the troubled republic to signal U.S. concern.

-------- balkans

Report Says Macedonians Killed Civilians in Revenge

New York Times
September 5, 2001
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/international/europe/05MACE.html

That night's newscast showed Ljube Boskovski, the hard-line Macedonian minister of the interior, planted behind a stone wall in the village of Ljuboten, surrounded by soldiers and the sound of gunfire. He was there, the newscast said, as part of a military operation to sweep the village of the ethnic Albanian "terrorists" who had planted the antitank mines that had killed eight Macedonian soldiers two days before.

On the day of the newscast, Aug. 12, seven ethnic Albanians were killed in Ljuboten. But nearly a month later, no evidence has emerged that those people, or three others also killed from the village, were anything but civilians.

In a detailed report to be issued today, Human Rights Watch accuses the overwhelmingly Slavic forces of Macedonia's government of summary execution of civilians, arson and torture. The operation over that weekend, the report says, "had no military justification and was carried out for purposes of revenge."

By the standards of a decade of war in the Balkans, the number of dead around Ljuboten was not high. But the killings were the worst single loss of life in six months of low-level warfare in Macedonia. They were also the clearest and bloodiest example yet of the cycle of revenge that prolonged other Balkan wars. NATO recently embarked on what is intended to be a one-month mission to calm the Macedonian conflict.

In an interview, Mr. Boskovski, perhaps the most outspoken proponent of a military solution to the insurgency, sought to distance himself from what happened in Ljuboten. He said that he arrived only at 4 p.m. that Sunday, after the military operation had ended, and that he did not direct the operation.

But he also maintained that it was "stupidity" to think that the ethnic Albanian rebel force - which calls itself the National Liberation Army - was not in Ljuboten that weekend, even though he said he had no idea if those who died were fighters or civilians. He also attacked Human Rights Watch, which investigated the incident, calling it an "international mercenary organization."

"They accuse me of being present there and watching when civilians were murdered," Mr. Boskovski said. "That is a monstrous accusation."

"Who would bring a camera with him if he wanted to do something like that?" he asked.

The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, charged with investigating allegations of war crimes in all of former Yugoslavia, has sent investigators to Macedonia to decide whether to begin a full investigation into what happened in Ljuboten and who might be responsible.

"It's important to understand that he doesn't have to witness the people being killed to have some responsibility for what happened," said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch who wrote the group's report on Ljuboten. "It was done by troops under his authority in an action in which he was intimately involved."

Mr. Bouckaert said the killing of civilians in Ljuboten could be a dangerous precedent for Macedonia's future. The peace deal signed on Aug. 13 by the Macedonian and ethnic Albanian parties in Macedonia's government grants ethnic Albanians many of the greater civic rights the rebels say they have sought. NATO has 4,500 troops in Macedonia collecting arms from the ethnic Albanian rebels so that the political part of the peace deal can proceed. But no one is sure that the deal will hold, particularly, in Mr. Bouckaert's view, if a government minister like Mr. Boskovski is seen as condoning attacks on civilians.

"As in all guerrilla conflicts, the question of who is a civilian and who is a fighter is a thorny one. Many rebels live in Albanian villages, and government officials often argue that their status as combatants is a matter of putting on a uniform.

Ljuboten, home to about 3,000 ethnic Albanians and a handful of Slavic Macedonians, lies about five miles north of the capital, Skopje, and is surrounded on three sides by Macedonian villages and to the northeast by the Skopska Crna Gora mountain, where the rebel army is active.

It was on the mountain that on Friday morning, Aug. 10, the two antitank mines exploded a few miles from Ljuboten, killing eight Macedonian soldiers. Two days earlier, 10 Macedonian soldiers had been killed in another ambush. Emotions were running high among the nation's police officers, soldiers and reservists.

Almost immediately that morning, police checkpoints sealed off Ljuboten, and shelling began. The Human Rights Watch report says that Haxhi Meta Xhavit, about 70, died "apparently from shock or heart failure" when his home was hit by a shell.

Early that evening, after a lull, the shelling resumed. A villager, Fazil Duraku, 25, said he saw a panic- stricken boy, Erxhan Aliu, 6, die in the shelling. "There were two or three people in one spot, and this boy was trying to go toward them," he said. "The shell landed maybe the distance of one palm-width away from him, and it threw him into the air." On Friday evening, he said, "We went to our basement because the shooting didn't stop all night."

On Saturday, villagers said, the government continued its shelling, and many villagers were blocked by the police from fleeing Ljuboten. But it was not until Sunday that Macedonian soldiers swept into the village in search of what the government said were terrorists in the area.

In a house across from a Macedonian Orthodox Church, the Jusufi family heard an explosion and crash at the front metal gate about 8:20 a.m. Rami Jusufi, 33, went to lock the door. A burst of machine gun fire bored through as he clicked the lock. The rest of the family - including his 58-year-old father, Elmaz, confined to a wheelchair - could do nothing but pour iodine on the three bullet wounds of Mr. Jusufi, who spent the next several hours bleeding to death. "In the last half-hour, he started breathing slower and slower," his father said. "And then he just faded away."

One man, Aziz Bajrami, 66, was himself shot and lost two sons on that Sunday. Sitting with his left hand bandaged in a house in the Albanian quarter of Skopje two weeks later, Mr. Bajrami described an atmosphere of chaos and fear as the soldiers entered the village, firing into houses and setting cars, houses and barns ablaze. He said he hid in the basement of a neighbor, along with three of his sons and eight female relatives. The police found them, he said, shot into the basement, stole jewelry from the women and marched the men to a spot where perhaps 10 other Albanian men, most of them young, lay on their stomachs.

"I heard one soldier go up to my son and kick him in his head," Mr. Bajrami said. "When they kicked him in the head, they shot me in the hand. Then my son stood up because of the pain. He tried to run, and they all opened fire on him."

He said the police shot his son, Sulejman, 22, at least twice more before ordering Mr. Bajrami and his cousin, Muharrem, 68, to leave.

"They said, `You old men go home,' " Mr. Bajrami said. "We got up, quickly, and I ran into a little door. Then I heard two shots. I was behind the wall and went into the garage. They killed my cousin. It was only me left."

Two days after the attack, foreign journalists went to Ljuboten, where the bodies of Sulejman and Muharrem Bajrami still lay, each shot repeatedly, in the back and in the head. On a nearby ridge lay three more bodies, including another of Mr. Bajrami's sons, Xhelal, 24, along with the Jashari brothers, Bairam, 33, and Kadri, 31, who had arrived on vacation from Austria 10 days before.

The three had been shot, witnesses said, fleeing a house that Macedonian forces had fired at with rocket- launched grenades.

Later that week, a plumber named Bejtullah Qaili, 43, ended a search for his missing brother at the Skopje morgue. His brother, Atulla, 32, one of more than 100 men arrested in Ljuboten on that Sunday, had apparently been beaten to death, his skull crushed, eyes black and swollen shut, cigarette burns on his arm, his testicles blackened from blows. Most of the arrested were released and all are now accounted for, though roughly a dozen remain in prison, including a 13-year-old boy.

"I wouldn't feel as bad if he was one of the guys who fought," said Mr. Qaili, who added that he had to pay $670 in bribes to have the body released. "If he was a soldier, he would have died for a cause."

Family members of the dead contend that none of them belonged to the rebel army. None were armed, and none wore a uniform or combat boots.

"It is significant that the government has not presented any credible evidence that there was an N.L.A. presence in Ljuboten, such as confiscated N.L.A. weapons or uniforms," the Human Rights Watch report says.

Guerrillas held positions in the mountains outside Ljuboten in August, and had been in the village as recently as June, meeting with foreign reporters. One explanation put forward by outside monitors of what happened in Ljuboten is that government forces saw firing from the mountain and believed that it came from inside the village.

Mr. Boskovski, the interior minister, said he had no doubt that the rebels were in Ljuboten, and that they had attacked Macedonian civilians, a contention that has been widely reported in the Macedonian press.

"It is the easiest thing to make accusations today and to put an equal sign between the aggressor and the victim," he said.

-------- biological weapons

Battelle's laboratories key to germ-warfare research

Wednesday, September 5, 2001
David Lore Dispatch Science Reporter
http://www.dispatch.com/print_template.php?story=dispatch/news/news01/sep01/830957.html

Battelle's biological-warfare programs have expanded in recent years, raising questions about whether the research is strictly defensive, as required by U.S. treaty commitments.

As many as 800 Battelle employees are involved in chemical- and biological-warfare research at the institute's laboratories on King Avenue and in West Jefferson, said Gregory Frank, executive vice president for government contracts.

That compares with fewer than 500 in 1998.

Nearly a third of the employees are involved in research to defend against biological attacks, Frank said. The rest work with chemical weapons.

Much of Battelle's role has been to improve the anthrax vaccine being given to most U.S. military personnel.

Pentagon officials confirmed yesterday that the Defense Intelligence Agency wants to develop small amounts of a potentially more- potent variant of the bacterium that causes deadly anthrax.

"We plan to proceed'' after internal legal reviews have been completed and Congress has been informed, said Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Anthrax is a likely biological-warfare agent because it's easy to make and carry and kills at least 80 percent of those who inhale the spores.

Battelle is a consultant to the vaccine manufacturer, BioPort of Lansing, Mich., and is doing animal testing at West Jefferson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine whether the six-shot series can be reduced.

However, Frank denied a report in yesterday's New York Times that the Defense Intelligence Agency has chosen the West Jefferson lab to attempt to genetically engineer the enhanced anthrax microbe.

"That would probably be done at West Jefferson, but it's not been approved for the government,'' he said.

Frank also said there is no plan to move thebiological programs to the $22 million laboratory. Battelle announced last week that it will build a center for chemical- and biological-warfare programs in Maryland near the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Clarke said the purpose of developing a new strain of anthrax is strictly defensive: to ensure that an effective vaccine is available should a biological weapon be used against American troops.

After Russian scientists said in a 1997 article in the British journal Vaccine that a new strain of anthrax existed, the U.S. government asked for a sample to test. But it never received it, Clarke said.

"We have a vaccine that works against all the known anthrax strains,'' she said yesterday. "What we want to do is make sure we are prepared for any surprises, we're prepared for anything that might happen that might be a threat.''

Dr. Ken Alibek, a former Soviet expert on biological weapons before he defected in 1992, said he expects Battelle to be involved in U.S. research on a new anthrax strain.

"From at least what I know, they would be involved significantly,'' Alibek said.

He worked for Battelle during 1998-99 and now is vice president of Hadron in Washington, another Pentagon contractor for biological defenses.

Alibek and Clarke said the Defense Intelligence Agency's proposal would not violate the Biological Weapons Convention against developing biological weapons.

"No, I don't see this as crossing the line,'' Alibek said. "But it comes very, very, very close.''

Mary Elizabeth Hoinkes, who was general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1994 to '99, disputed that the experiment falls within the limits of the 1972 treaty. She said that interpretation is a "gross misrepresentation'' that "risks doing serious violence'' to an accord the United States has long championed.

Clarke said that the experiment would involve small quantities of a new anthrax strain, although she could not say how much.

The work would be part of Project Jefferson, an unclassified, congressionally mandated program managed by Battelle "to assist the intelligence community in preventing a technological surprise in the world of biological warfare,'' said Lt. Cmdr. James Brook, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Although Project Jefferson's existence is unclassified, its specific tasks are secret, Brook said.

Battelle officials said that classification made it impossible to comment in detail on the anthrax engineering or an earlier Central Intelligence Agency project at West Jefferson to replicate some Soviet- era, biological-bomb components.

The Times said the purpose was to study how well the bomb could disperse biological agents under varying atmospheric conditions.

Alibek said he considers Battelle a major player in the military's biological-weapons defensive effort.

"The U.S. is not involved in actual biological-warfare work in developing actual weapons,'' he said. "But when you do defensive work and start modeling or mimicking actual weapons, you come into very sensitive areas.''

This can lead to charges abroad that the United States is developing offensive weapons, especially if details are kept secret, he said.

"The Russians yesterday immediately published (the Times article) on the Internet as information that the U.S. is developing biological weapons,'' Alibek said.

Information from the Associated Press and The New York Times was used in this story.

dlore@dispatch.com

--------

U.S. Anthrax Plan Worries Russians

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Germ-Warfare.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian experts voiced concern Wednesday about U.S. plans to develop a potentially more lethal version of the bacterium that causes deadly anthrax, but the government refrained from immediate reaction.

The Pentagon confirmed its intention Tuesday to conduct the research once legal reviews have been completed and the U.S. Congress has been informed. The plan was first reported by The New York Times, which said it was part of a broader research effort to improve U.S. defenses against biological agents.

Despite assertions by U.S. officials that the research was strictly defensive, some experts have pointed out that such work could violate the 1972 global ban on developing or acquiring biological weapons.

``It's not prohibited to develop vaccines against biological weapons, but developing a new strain of anthrax would be a violation of the ban,'' said Alexander Gorbovsky, an expert at the government's Munitions Agency, which in charge of legal issues relating to the ban on biological weapons.

There had been no official government reaction to the U.S. research, he said in a telephone interview, as Moscow was still studying official U.S. statements on the issue.

The Russian Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

With the United States' rejection in July of a draft protocol intended to strengthen the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, ``the report on U.S. research is causing concern,'' Gorbovsky said in a telephone interview.

The ban failed to make a clear distinction between defensive and offensive research and contained no mechanism of control, creating a wide gray zone.

``The Clinton administration supported the protocol as did U.S. allies in Western Europe, and the reversal of Washington's stance on the issue has vexed a liberal part of the American establishment,'' Alexander Pikayev, a military analyst at the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow.

``George W. Bush will now find himself in an awkward position, fending off accusations of breaching the ban.''

--------

When Is Bomb Not a Bomb? Germ Experts Confront U.S.

New York Times
September 5, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/international/05GERM.html

A former senior government lawyer yesterday vigorously disputed the Bush administration's assertion that the global treaty banning biological weapons permits nations to test such arms for defensive purposes.

The lawyer, Mary Elizabeth Hoinkes, who was general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1994 to 1999, said such an interpretation of the 1972 treaty was a "gross misrepresentation" that "risks doing serious violence" to an accord the United States has long championed.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the United States had made and tested a model of a small Soviet-designed biological bomb as part of a series of secret research projects that officials said were aimed at defending against a growing threat of a germ attack.

The projects were begun under the Clinton administration and approved then by Pentagon and Central Intelligence officials, but Ms. Hoinkes said she did not know details of the project at the time. She refused to discuss it further.

The treaty bars nations from developing, acquiring or stockpiling biological weapons to be used for "hostile purposes or in armed conflict." It permits experiments on microbes, provided that quantities are small and the purpose is defensive.

An administration official contended this week that the treaty also allows such experiments as long as the aim is "protective," not hostile.

The distinction, Ms. Hoinkes said, was "too cute by half."

She said the treaty was intended to bar even initial research on munitions that spread disease. The Bush administration's interpretation - apparently shared by the Clinton adminstration - gives nations too much latitude to research offensive weapons in the name of defense, Ms. Hoinkes asserted. "You see a room full of people manufacturing bombs, and they say, `I'm only doing this for defensive purposes and I have no intention of ever doing it for real because my heart is pure,' " she said.

State Department and other administration officials describe Ms. Hoinkes as a leading expert on the germ weapons treaty. She joined the State Department in 1976 and began working in 1981 at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which was merged into the State Department in 1999.

She was not alone in her dismay.

Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., a deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977 to 1981, expressed similar concerns about the interpretation of the treaty and how such an assertion would be perceived abroad.

"In the eyes of the world, it's going to look like we've been clandestinely violating the treaty," said Mr. Keeny, who is president of the Arms Control Association, nonpartisan experts who support efforts to curb weapons of mass destruction.

Bill Harlow, spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, which tested the bomb model, said yesterday that the device was not a weapon because it lacked a fuse and did not contain dangerous germs. "Everything we did was in full compliance with the treaty," he said.

The State Department declined to discuss the experts' arguments. A spokesman said the administration had found that the research programs were "in compliance" with existing treaties and that appropriate legal "mechanisms" were in place to conduct such reviews.

An international conference to discuss how to strengthen the germ treaty is scheduled for November, and Mr. Keeny said the administration could expect accusations that Washington had ignored a treaty that most nations have signed.

"If any other country was found to be doing what we were supposedly doing, they would call it a dangerous violation of the treaty, and it surely appears to be a violation of the treaty in terms of common interpretation," he added.

Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, also confirmed yesterday that the Defense Department had drawn up plans to produce small amounts of genetically modified anthrax, a deadly toxin, but that the project had been "put on hold" earlier this year to make sure it did not violate international treaties and domestic laws.

Still, she said, the Pentagon intends to press ahead with the anthrax project. Pentagon officials have said that producing the stronger poison would aid in developing vaccines and other defenses.

-------- britain

Military seeking a greener, gentler explosive

By Steve Connor Science Editor,
UK Independent
05 September 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92387

Eco-warriors have a new weapon at their disposal - the green grenade. Scientists have invented a kind of explosive which, although not good for one's health, is gentle on the environment.

Professor Thomas Klapotke, a researcher from Ludwig- Maximilians University in Munich, told the British Association that strange as it might sound, the military were very keen to produce an explosive that did not pollute the environment. "You have to keep in mind that shooting, missile launches and explosions, within the army and also the police force, are done 99.9 per cent in training."

Professor Klapotke said the military did not want to pollute their own environment or put their own policemen and soldiers at risk.

Rocket propellants used in missiles, for instance, emitted potentially toxic aluminium oxide and hydrochloric acid. Explosives specialists were therefore trying to replace the metals and chloride compounds in explosives and propellants with more inert chemicals, such as nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen.

"All you get from these materials is ... hot air," Professor Klapotke said. Two "green" explosives were being developed by the German army and had passed laboratory tests, although they had not been tested in field trials.

One aim of the research was to replace the lead azide used in the explosive charge of bullets. The growing use of indoor firing ranges meant that police and military personnel were now regularly exposed to plumes of lead, a potentially dangerous heavy metal, when training.

Professor Klapotke said soldiers or police officers using firing ranges "find themselves in a plume of lead oxide particles, which so far haven't caused any health problems, but you have to be concerned. We want to replace that with carbon."

Conventional explosives were based on compounds that persisted for a very long time in the environment. TNT produced pollutant chemicals that were absorbed into fat, went into the food chain, and were toxic to the liver at high concentrations.

-------- drug war

Laws against marijuana should not go up in smoke

Christian Science Monitor
September 05, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0905/p10s3-cole.html

Unfortunately, the lenient approach to marijuana possession in Britain is just one of many events that openly contradict the "war on drugs" which so many countries - the US and Great Britain included - have waged ("Europe's antidrug bastion reconsiders," Aug. 30). I believe governments that try to legalize marijuana or classify it as a "soft drug" will eventually realize that neither tactic will aid in the fight against supposed "hard drugs" such as heroin and cocaine. Marijuana is illegal for a reason: It is a gateway drug that leads users down a path to more-serious substance abuse.

Political leaders cannot change the rules of the game halfway in. If marijuana were accepted today, it would hinder our chances of fighting more dangerous drugs and reduce the slender headway we have gained. Accepting one drug while outlawing others would be the equivalent of prohibiting the consumption of hard liquor while allowing beer and wine. Ashley R. Smith Gainesville, Fla.

-------- iraq

U.N. Challenges Iraqi Expulsion

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-UN.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- United Nations officials said Wednesday that Iraq failed to support its charges that five U.N. workers expelled from the Mideast nation were leaking security information to ``enemy states.''

Also Wednesday, U.N. officials in New York said on condition of anonymity that a sixth employee, a Dutch national, had been expelled Friday for taking photographs in public.

The five officials, a Bosnian and four Nigerians, worked at the U.N. office overseeing humanitarian programs in Iraq, which is allowed to sell oil for necessities such as food and medicine.

Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, interviewed Wednesday on Iraqi television, said U.N. employees ``must protect the security of information available to them and should not supply such information to another country.

``The many wrongdoings of the U.N. employees, who were serving the goals and policies of enemy states of Iraq, are shame enough for the United Nations,'' he said.

Sabri did not name any countries. Asked if the U.N. officials had been spying, he said, ``It is something within this frame -- the frame that harms the security of the country, the national security of Iraq.''

Iraq sent the expulsion order for the five to the United Nations in New York Sunday. The U.N. office in Baghdad said the Nigerians had left Iraq Tuesday. The Bosnian woman was not in Iraq when the expulsion order was delivered.

In a letter to Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Benon Sevan -- the head of the U.N. Iraq program -- said , ``I very much regret that, despite our request, the government of Iraq has not provided any detail or supporting evidence to charges leveled against the five staff members,'' wrote the U.N. official.

The U.N. monitors Iraq's oil sales and the use of the proceeds to buy humanitarian goods. U.N. sanctions, imposed to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait in 1990, bar Iraq from trading freely and can be lifted only after Iraq proves to it has dismantled its weapons of mass destruction.

The Dutch national was employed by the Swiss company Cotecna, which is subcontracted by the U.N. to handle supply inspections at entry points into Iraq.

No names were available for the six employees.

-------- israel

At Arab, Israeli Schools, Hatred Is Common Bond
Conflict Hardens 8th-Graders' Stereotypes

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 5, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42610-2001Sep4?language=printer

QALQILYA, West Bank -- At Peace Junior High School in Qalqilya, the windows are pocked by bullet holes, the classrooms are mostly low-tech and almost every one of the Palestinian students can name a relative or acquaintance injured or killed during the last year. If the children went anywhere for summer vacation, it was across the river to Jordan.

At Ben Zvi Junior High School, in Kfar Saba a couple of miles away and across an invisible border separating the West Bank from Israel proper, the perimeter gate is patrolled by guards, 70 computers are hooked up to the Internet and practically every student has a cell phone. Many students took summer trips to Europe, the United States or Turkey.

The two schools, separated by years of hostility, seem bound by precisely nothing. But spend a few hours talking to eighth-graders in both schools, located 15 miles northeast of Tel Aviv, and what connects them becomes clear: hatred, stereotypes and ignorance.

As schools reopened for Palestinians on Saturday and for Israelis on Sunday, children returned to class saturated by media images of violence and the prejudices rife in each society. At Peace and Ben Zvi alike, eighth-graders saw themselves as victims of the other side's hatred and aggression. Each seemed to imagine the other as violent and greedy by nature, and wondered why "they" couldn't just "leave us alone."

Each understood the territorial claims underlying the conflict, but neither had a grasp of the other side's historical narrative. Much as the Palestinian children were ignorant of the Holocaust and other chapters of Jewish history, the Jewish children knew little about the Palestinians' loss of homes and villages in Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

Reverence for Militants

A poster is taped to the wall of the all-boys Peace School in Qalqilya, right by the front door. It lionizes a man many Palestinians here consider a local boy made good: Sayeed Hotari, a suicide bomber who killed himself and 21 others at a Tel Aviv disco in June.

Ask three eighth-graders at the Peace School to name their heroes, and none mentions Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader whose portrait adorns all public buildings here. After some nervous glances and fluttering smiles, Hotari is the name they produce.

In fact, Hotari and other militants are so revered that some of the students have petitioned to change the name of the school, which was dubbed the Peace School a generation ago after the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal. The boys proposed the School of Martyrs.

"We're happy [about suicide bombings] because the Israelis are occupying our land and the al-Aqsa mosque" in Jerusalem, said Sami Bassem Saber, 13, a compact boy whose father owns a shoe store. "I say it's okay whether it's Israeli kids or soldiers or old people who are killed, even in Tel Aviv, because they're occupying land that doesn't belong to them."

Like other boys at the 772-student Peace School, Saber is not too clear on whom Hotari killed at the disco. He thinks the victims were Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers. In fact they were mostly teenage girls, a fact the Palestinian media tended to obscure.

But if Saber and his friends are fuzzy on how the Palestinian uprising is sometimes fought, they are clear on why it is worth fighting: to expel Israeli forces from the West Bank, where they still control 80 percent of the land.

"It's worth fighting for an independent state," said Khaled Bassem Hindi, 13, polite and soft-spoken, a lawyer's son. "I live on the fourth floor of a building near the Israeli army checkpoint at the south entrance of town, and my family smells tear gas [fired at stone-throwers] and sees the tanks there all the time."

The boys who traveled on summer holidays with their parents, generally to see relatives in Jordan, got a taste of the stakes. All described long waits at Israeli army checkpoints at the exits from Qalqilya and trips that took twice as long as their families expected. One student said an Israeli soldier cursed his mother and older sister. Another said his family was turned back by soldiers on the first day and had to try again the next.

To the students at Peace School, the Palestinian uprising that began last September is something heard, seen and felt, not only glimpsed on a television screen. The school lies 300 yards from the Israeli army checkpoint on the northern edge of Qalqilya, and in the walls and windows upstairs, unrepaired bullet holes are evidence of sniping between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen. Not that the boys need reminders: Nearly all have watched what they call "red bullets" -- tracer fire -- flying overhead in nocturnal exchanges.

Their parents have warned them against going to the town's swimming pool because it is within rifle range of an Israeli checkpoint. And at school they are presented with special classes tailored for the conflict -- how to rush a wounded man to safety, how to evacuate classrooms in case of bombardment.

"One of my relatives was chased and shot and killed by the Israelis," said Wael Mohammed Nafeh, 13, a slight, solemn accountant's son, referring to a man Israel described as a terrorist bomber. "He was killed defending his homeland against the occupation."

Few of the boys have ever spoken to an Israeli, even though Israel sits practically on their doorstep, and they know little about Jews. What they do know is informed by a mixture of envy, resentment, fear and hatred, even when they imagine the lives of Israeli boys their own age.

"They spent their summer breaks in peace and security, but we didn't," said Wael, the accountant's son. "Everything is open to them -- they can go to the beach, but we can't anymore. We have good hearts, but they have hard hearts. They're merciless. One of their soldiers shoved my father. They're not kind."

The perceptions of Israelis are reinforced by teachers and textbooks. Newly published Palestinian textbooks say little of Jews and Israelis, and what they do say focuses mostly on Palestinian grievances. According to a new text for the seventh grade -- the latest to be published -- the goal of Israel's 1948 War of Independence was to "seize Palestinian lands and displace the original inhabitants after expelling or exterminating them." The text goes on to detail the destruction of Palestinian villages and the replacement of Arabic place names with Hebrew ones. In a lesson on the architecture of the Holy Land, the text describes prominent mosques and churches but makes no mention of Jewish holy places.

In interviews, several teachers at Peace School said the Holocaust has been enormously exaggerated and hardly rates a mention in Palestinian schools. When they were asked what Palestinian children should know about Jews, their answers were uniformly negative.

"That they're terrorists, murderers and thieves, and to the nth degree," said Omar Abu Salah, 37, an English teacher. "That they're murderers of prophets. That they're greedy in every respect."

He added, "How can we create the conditions for peace with a kid whose father who was murdered, or with a refugee who's been kicked off his land?"

Separately, the eighth-graders were asked if they could imagine the existence of a good Jew.

"Maybe," said Khaled, the lawyer's son.

"Maybe, but not many," said Wael, the accountant's son.

"I don't think so," said Sami, the shoe salesman's son.

'Death to the Arabs'

When a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Kfar Saba in April, the explosion not only rattled windows at Ben Zvi Junior High, it rattled everyone. Students pulled out cell phones to find out if relatives had been hurt. Some of the younger pupils dissolved in tears. Classes shifted gears into impromptu counseling sessions.

"They were hysterical, and they were very angry," said Carmela Goldglass, 43, an English teacher and administrator at Ben Zvi. "They really didn't see the connection between bombing people on a bus or at a restaurant or in a disco and starting an independent [Palestinian] country."

In the following days, as students digested the bombing's impact and casualties -- one dead, a local doctor, and dozens injured -- Goldglass noticed what had become familiar graffiti scrawled around the school: "Death to the Arabs."

Just across the so-called Green Line from Qalqilya and other West Bank Palestinian towns, Kfar Saba has been a frequent target for bombs -- near city hall, at a gas station, on the bus. The bombings have reinforced the conviction in Israel that the country is in the grip of an existential struggle, and that conviction has taken hold even among Ben Zvi's eighth-graders.

"I don't believe they want their own state next to ours -- they want the whole country for themselves," said Ben Mymon, 13, a building contractor's son who wears three earrings and the shadow of a first mustache.

Such suspicions are now run-of-the-mill at Ben Zvi, a 750-student school named for Israel's second president, Yitzhak Ben Zvi. But it was not always so.

For 13 years, hundreds of the school's students have participated in an annual program designed to break down barriers with Arabs inside Israel, at a school in the nearby town of Tira. Although the students had no contact with Palestinians across the Green Line, the hope was that tolerance and coexistence would take root through contact with the Palestinians within Israel proper.

After the Palestinian revolt erupted, however, half the school's parents yanked their children out of the program, preferring they not come into contact with Arabs. The program survived, but judging from interviews with eighth-graders, the last year's violence has taken a toll on notions of coexistence and tolerance.

"They have kids one after another, so they don't care if they lose some," said Ben, the contractor's son. "They have so many cousins marrying cousins -- maybe that's why they fight. They have kids like fish."

"They're taught violence," said Lior Yadin, 13, the slight, quick-witted son of a high-tech executive, who dreams of becoming the Israeli army's chief of staff. "To the Arabs, honor is more important than their lives. But we'll win in the end. We'll hit them with helicopters. Even if they kill all of us, then the last living Jew will drop a bomb on them."

The eighth-graders at Ben Zvi may look like their counterparts in America -- scruffy around the edges, with T-shirts and droopy backpacks -- but when it comes to danger and death they are a lot savvier. Even while roughhousing on the bus, they know to keep one eye out for abandoned packages. And all know that even a watermelon can contain an explosive device -- as one did on an Israeli bus this summer.

They also know to watch out for anyone who looks suspicious, and for students here that means anyone who is Arab.

"Especially an Arab with a mustache or wearing a long coat or a baggy jacket," Lior said. "Also, we have to be careful at the mall. Our parents told us not to go, or to avoid big groups of people there."

They are less savvy about Palestinian history or Palestinian grievances. For instance, they seem scarcely aware that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were evicted from their villages in 1948. And while some teachers and textbooks might mention that, students at Ben Zvi are in no mood to feel sorry for people who are blowing themselves up on local buses.

Faced with nightly newscasts about Palestinian bombs, ambushes and sniping, and with concurrent international criticism of Israel, some of the Israeli youths are convinced that the world is ganging up on Jews. "They do everything to us and no one says a thing, and then we fire just one missile at them and the whole world gets mad at us," said Shlomi Moalem, 13, a chunky, shy boy whose father is a soft drink distributor. "It's because they hate the Jewish people."

None of the children could imagine ever having a Palestinian friend, and none could foresee a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. "They're succeeding only at getting us angry," Ben said. "And it'll go on until we hit them back with everything we've got. Then that'll be the end of it."

Glumly, Shlomi nodded and stared at his hands. "It'll end by war," he said. "Either we'll die or they'll die."

--------

Jerusalem Is on Edge After Spate Of Bombs

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 5, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42452-2001Sep4?language=printer

JERUSALEM, Sept. 4 -- Dressed in the skullcap, white shirt and black pants of an ultra-Orthodox Jew, a Palestinian suicide bomber was just blocks from the heart of downtown Jerusalem this morning when a pair of Israeli policemen became suspicious. As they ran up to him yelling "Stop!" the bomber turned, smiled from behind a beard and blew himself to bits.

The blast sent the suicide bomber's head hurtling into the courtyard of a French international school, badly injured one of the policemen and left a dozen other people with less serious wounds. It was the fifth bomb to explode in Jerusalem in two days and potentially the most lethal: Had the bomber reached a busy intersection or snack bar a block or two away, many people could have died.

The bombings this week have left Israelis in Jerusalem on edge. When the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, toured the scene of today's bombing and denounced the "terrible criminal act," he was booed and heckled by Israelis and hustled back to his limousine by bodyguards. Some of the hecklers evidently associated Solana with the United Nations, whose conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, has become a forum for criticizing Israel.

"Anti-Semite, go back to Durban!" one of the hecklers yelled at Solana.

The bombings, coupled with clashes throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, have cast a pall over efforts by Solana and other diplomats to arrange talks between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Arafat, speaking in Gaza, issued an expression of regret at attacks that hurt either Israeli or Palestinian civilians.

The Jerusalem explosion occurred during the morning rush hour on the Street of the Prophets, a block from a pizzeria where a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 people last month. At least one pedestrian noticed the man, who seemed out of sorts and was nearly running down the street, and alerted a pair of policemen on patrol.

"We began chasing him . . . and at a distance of four [yards] we ordered him to halt," one of the patrolmen, Guy Mughrabi, told Israel Radio from his hospital bed a few hours later. "He stopped and at the same time moved his right hand to his bag, pushed a button and blew up. He didn't speak -- he just smiled."

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Israeli officials immediately said they suspected the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.

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

N. Carolinians to Navy: No bombs in our backyards
As Navy searches for alternative training sites to Vieques Island, US communities sound the alarm.

By Patrik Jonsson
Christian Science Monitor,
September 05, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0905/p2s2-ussc.html

FAUX INVASION: Marines at Camp LeJeune, N.C., move into a mock city during a military exercise in 2000. The Corps has called the area home for 50 years. ANDY NELSON ­ STAFF/FILE

VERONA, N.C. - Up here on High Hill, which isn't so high, John Campbell feels as if his brick bungalow has become a bunker. He jumps at the racket of small-arms fire ricocheting through the scrub pines. Tanks roll up the road, creaking and complaining past McCoy's Garage and M'own Doll Hospital.

"It's not war, but it's a war zone," says Mr. Campbell, a UPS driver who lives about half a mile from where US Marine platoons train for battle. "The fact is, we can't take any more."

But thanks to protests over military bombing exercises on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico, the battle of Verona may grow louder. The US Navy, which has promised to leave Vieques by 2003, is taking a hard look at where to move its training ground. And right now, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) says one potential replacement is at the Marines' Camp LeJeune - well within earshot of Campbell's home.

But the bombs may not be the only things to relocate from Vieques, as citizens here bristle at the thought of more friendly fire in their backyard. If it's unacceptable to conduct bombing exercises on an island near Puerto Rico, many residents say, why is it all right to hold them off the coast of North Carolina? Answering that question may prove a difficult public-relations maneuver for the Navy.

"I don't think it's a good move to start leaking ideas that suggest to the casual viewer that you're going to start bombing the beaches of Texas and North Carolina," says Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Part of the problem may be a population that feels a growing disconnection from its military, and that has difficulty understanding why their community should sacrifice quality of life for national defense. Already, a grumble is growing at other potential sites around the US. In Texas, the Navy scuttled a proposal for more bombing after the Sierra Club threatened a protest. In Virginia, some citizens are suing for emotional and financial suffering from base noise. And in North Carolina, a group has gathered to thwart low-flying Harrier maneuvers near Cherry Point.

The arrival of Navy battleships near Verona is far from certain. But the steadfast symbiosis that has emerged between eastern North Carolinians and the Marines is sure to factor in the Navy's decision. In fact, the Marines have been blowing up this stretch of sandy real estate for half a century, a spokesman for Camp LeJeune points out. That's longer than many of the houses have been here.

Experts say that protests are unlikely to reach the international proportions of those on Vieques.

"I doubt that there would be the same level of protests here as in Puerto Rico," says Peter Feaver, an analyst with the Triangle Institute for Security Studies in Durham, N.C. "For one thing, the issue does not have the overlay of colonialism and nationalism that made Vieques so thorny."

Still, residents say the battle noise can be deafening - and they aren't eager to add the Navy to the Marine contingent already here. Near Nag's Head, jets regularly buzz tourists. Off shore, fishing boats scramble to get out of the way when the Marines signal they're about to lob tank shells to waterborne targets. On some days in Manteo, N.C., verses of the play "Lost Colony" get drowned out by the boom of battle.

To many, any plan to boost this commotion just doesn't make sense. "The area here is not as large as Vieques, the population here is far greater, and the danger of a stray shell doing harm is more intense here than it would be in Puerto Rico," says Fred Holt, a county commissioner in Onslow County. "This is a political situation, and it's bad politics."

Indeed, Mr. O'Hanlon says the emerging situation here may cause the Navy to rethink the battle-scale maneuvers that took place on Vieques and instead focus on smaller skirmishes using quieter "smurf" bombs, as the Army has done in recent years. The Navy has hired two retired North Carolina soldiers - Gen. Charles Wilhelm and Adm. Leighton "Snuffy" Smith - to make a second recommendation by next spring. Navy officials say that, in fact, the plan is likely to focus on smaller skirmishes and simulations.

Still, a growing number of former Marines, who settled in the area after their tours of duty, have joined the clamor against the plan. "We've got well over 100,000 people living around Camp Lejeune and 9,000 people living in Vieques," says Robert Goins, a retired Marine colonel. If the Navy ships pull in, they'd be firing over the Intracoastal Waterway, and over his home in Hubert. Others point out that those plans may threaten the region's increasingly important mainstay: tourists.

Campbell has become a shirt-sleeved general for the civilians on High Hill. "We've protested so much, it's pathetic," he says.

--------

Army Meets Recruiting Goal Early and Credits Ad Effort

New York Times
September 5, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/national/05ARMY.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - After struggling in the late 1990's to overcome the roaring economy and a stodgy image, the Army said today that it was experiencing its most successful recruiting year since at least 1997, having met its goals for the 2001 fiscal year one month early.

While the Army used the announcement to boast about its new, much-debated slogan, "Army of One," and the $150 million advertising campaign built around it, experts said other factors were probably more responsible for the improved numbers, particularly the slowing economy.

Indeed, the other three services reported today that they were also on track to meet their recruiting goals for the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. And the Air Force said it was having its strongest recruiting year since 1986, though like the Army, it attributed its success to aggressive promotion rather than a tightening job market.

To dramatize what Army officials described as a major turnabout in their recruiting fortunes, the Army held an elaborate event at the Pentagon today to swear into service its 75,800th recruit of the year: 19-year- old Rodrigo Vasquez III of Karnes City, Tex., who will begin basic training next week.

"A lot of people weren't quite sure that we crazy people were headed in the right direction," the Army secretary, Thomas E. White, said in a news conference. "Well, I tell you, the proof's in the pudding. You either make the numbers or you don't. And we have exceeded those numbers in the Army of One campaign. It's working."

Last year, the Army did not meet its recruiting goal until the last day of the fiscal year. And it missed its goals in the two preceding years: narrowly in 1998, and then badly in 1999, when it fell short by 6,291 recruits.

The Army attributed those lean years largely to the strong economy siphoning off potential recruits into better-paying jobs. But the run of failures also embarrassed senior Army leaders and spurred much soul searching in the Clinton administration over whether the Army was out of touch with young Americans.

As a result, the Army last year replaced its advertising firm of 13 years, Young & Rubicam, with Leo Burnett U.S.A. of Chicago. And in January, it dropped its slogan of 20 years, "Be all you can be," in favor of "Army of One," which has become the centerpiece of stylish new advertisements and an elaborate recruiting Web site, goarmy.com.

The new slogan immediately drew sharp criticism from some veterans and military analysts who said it emphasized individualism over collective action. Some analysts also scoffed at the Army for running the spots not just during sporting events, as was typical in the past, but during popular programs like "Friends" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," as well as on MTV and Comedy Central.

"I keep telling the old guys like me who are a little concerned about the nontraditional message that we're not recruiting you," Mr. White said. "So go ask your son or daughter or your grandson or granddaughter what turns them on, and that's where you're going to find the Army."

But some experts expressed doubts about the value of the new slogan and splashy marketing campaign, arguing that economic forces were more significant in determining recruiting results.

"It was a fortuitous circumstance for the Army that their new slogan came out at the same time that the economy was weakening," said Charles Moskos, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and an expert on military manpower issues.

Professor Moskos argued that the images of the armed services are shaped far more by current events than by advertising. As an example, he said that during a talk before military recruiters in 1996, he asked whether the audience would rather have their advertising budgets tripled or have Chelsea Clinton join the Army.

"They unanimously raised their hands for the Chelsea option," he said.

Such arguments have not deterred the services from intensifying their marketing efforts over the past three years. In 1999, the Air Force began running television advertisements for the first time in its history. This year, the Navy tried to update its advertising by featuring a new theme, "Accelerate your life."

And the Marine Corps, which is the smallest service and rarely misses its recruiting goals, started buying advertising on stock cars last year and is preparing to roll out a new, sharply different advertising campaign this year.

Those efforts are clearly paying off, military officials asserted. The Air Force, for instance, met its recruiting goal for the 2001 fiscal year in May, when it signed a contract with its 34,600th recruit. That is the earliest the Air Force has met its annual goal since 1986, Air Force officials said.

Army officials also attributed their improved recruiting to the goarmy.com Web site, which has featured two-minute video "Webisodes" tracking the boot-camp experiences of six recruits.

But the campaign experienced one public relations setback when a soldier who had been featured in one of the first Army of One commercials, Richard P. Lovett, voluntarily withdrew from a rigorous 24-day screening program for the Special Forces. Army officials said Corporal Lovett plans to try again this fall.


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Toxic Sites Being Cleaned Up Slowly

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Cleanups.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Thousands of former military sites with contaminated soil and water or unexploded ammunition are being cleaned up much more slowly than the Pentagon is claiming, congressional auditors said in a report.

The General Accounting Office was releasing the report Wednesday, but House Democrats who requested it were making it available and issuing harsh criticism of the military's stewardship of the cleanup program a day earlier.

``These seriously contaminated sites must be addressed in a timely manner before this dangerous brew threatens public health and safety,'' said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The GAO, an investigative arm of Congress, said a Pentagon report on the $200 million-a-year program provided ``a misleading picture'' by claiming that more than half the work had been done when only about a third had been completed.

``As a result, it appears that after 15 years and expenditures of $2.6 billion, over 50 percent of the ... projects have been completed,'' the GAO said. ``In reality, only about 32 percent of those projects that required actual cleanup actions have been completed, and those are the cheapest and least technologically challenging.''

The Army Corps of Engineers manages the program, aimed at cleaning up sites thought to contain hazardous, toxic and radioactive waste in the soil and water or in containers such as underground storage tanks.

Dingell also criticized the Corps for ``tearing down buildings and pulling tanks while many high- and medium-risk properties with toxic groundwater contamination or unexploded ordinance have been left to percolate'' in the soil.

About one-quarter of the more than 9,000 potential cleanup sites across the country as of Oct. 1, 2000 had cleanup projects, the GAO report found, while most of the remainder did not require or were ineligible for cleanup, based on a lack of records.

However, the Corps reported many of those projects as having been completed, even though they were closed as the result of administrative action rather than an actual cleanup.

Spokesman Lt. Col. Eugene Pawlik said the Corps probably would have more to say on the report soon. ``We've got to read the report and review the contents,'' he said Tuesday. ``We know it's a big program, and it seems to get bigger all the time.''

The GAO noted that Pentagon officials provided oral comments agreeing that they need to clarify their method of accounting for the cleanup efforts in future annual reports to Congress.

The Corps estimates the remaining projects will cost more than $13 billion and take at least a half-century more to complete, the GAO said. But those estimates do not account for removing unexploded ordinance -- at an additional cost of $5 billion.

--------

E.P.A. Faults Ohio Agency Headed by a Bush Nominee

New York Times
September 5, 2001
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/05/politics/05POLL.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - The Environmental Protection Agency released a preliminary report today that found severe flaws in several Ohio environmental programs, some of which were supervised by a former official who has been nominated to become the agency's top enforcement officer.

President Bush's nominee, Donald R. Schregardus, the former administrator of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, was approved last month by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But since then, several Democratic senators and environmental groups have protested the nomination, saying Mr. Schregardus was too lax in enforcing environmental laws in Ohio.

The release of the report was essentially forced by Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who opposes Mr. Schregardus's nomination, and its release strengthened her resolve to block a vote by the full Senate on the nomination, a spokesman said today. The report stemmed from a petition filed in 1997 in Ohio by several environmental groups that complained about the state's implementation and enforcement of many environmental programs under Mr. Schregardus's control. In the preliminary review, the federal agency found severe failures in several areas.

For example, the review concluded that the Ohio agency was ill- equipped to enforce the federal Clean Air Act, saying it employed fewer people than it had indicated it needed to run its air programs and that there had been a decline in recent years in air inspections, investigations of complaints and amounts of penalties collected.

It also said that the state had no program to ensure minimal training for employees; it had not provided required information about strategy, tracking and enforcement, and it had "a very high level of vacancies with no system in place to expeditiously fill those vacancies."

The report also listed what it described as "more serious" shortcomings: Ohio has fallen behind the statutory and regulatory timetable for issuing certain permits; it has not implemented an acid rain program; it has not obtained "sanitized" versions of permit applications from applicants with confidential claims, and it might be modifying certain permits through an administrative process rather than a formal public comment-and-review process.

The review said that if these findings were subsequently verified, they "may provide a basis for the commencement of withdrawal or revocation proceedings" of one or more clean air programs overseen by Ohio unless the state made "definitive commitments to address U.S. E.P.A.'s concerns."

The language was unusually strong for a federal agency examining state implementation of its programs. Although the review was prepared by the agency's regional office in Chicago, it was still striking coming from the federal government in the midst of a political battle over a presidential nomination.

Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for Christie Whitman, the head of the federal environmental agency, said Mrs. Whitman stood by Mr. Schregardus. Ms. Kreisher cited a letter Mrs. Whitman wrote last month in which she said Mr. Schregardus had compiled "an impressive record" in Ohio.

Regarding the federal criticism of a nominee, Ms. Kreisher said: "This study didn't start under the Bush administration. This is not a study on Don Schregardus. That is apples and oranges."

Sandy Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Ohio Citizen Action, one of the groups that initiated the petition, said, "While they were trying to throw the nominee a life preserver, they've thrown him an anchor instead."

It was clearly an embarrassment to the federal agency, whose leader recently initiated an administration effort to rally support for Mr. Schregardus.

A press release from the federal agency sought to cast the review in a positive light. It quoted Mrs. Whitman as saying: "Overall, Ohio continues to make progress in protecting the environment. Nonetheless, there is work to be done, together. Concerning clean water programs, Ohio has committed to actions that will allow its continued administration of these programs."

The press release continued: "For the clean air programs, the report clearly identifies steps that must be taken by Ohio to prevent any future proceedings that could revoke the state's delegation of those programs. The E.P.A. will work closely with Ohio to implement these changes."

Mr. Schregardus was the administrator of the Ohio agency from 1991 through 1999, and the report covers 1995 until 2000.

Senator Boxer has placed a "hold" on Mr. Schregardus's nomination. A "hold" is a procedural move that can block a nomination from reaching a vote by the full Senate.

Ms. Boxer had said she wanted the review completed before she would consider releasing her hold. David Sandretti, her spokesman, said today that the report failed to reassure the senator and that she would keep the nomination on hold indefinitely.

"The information we have received thus far about the E.P.A. report on the Ohio investigation does not appear to resolve Senator Boxer's concerns about the Schregardus nomination," Mr. Sandretti said.

The Bush administration dispatched Ed Krenik, the agency's liaison to Congress, to Capitol Hill today to brief the staffs of senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee. And environmentalists took that as a sign that the administration was worried about Mr. Schregardus's fate.

"This is an indication they know this nomination is in trouble and they feel a need to explain it," said Laura Chapin of the Environmental Working Group.

Several senators, including James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the environment committee, have taken the position that a president is entitled to have the team he wants. As a result, it is not clear if opponents of Mr. Schregardus could get the 51 votes needed to block his nomination.

-------- genetics

Bush Administration Says Not All Stem Cell Lines Ready

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Stem-Cells.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration acknowledged Wednesday that fewer than half the stem cell lines approved for federal funding are fully developed and ready for researchers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said more cell lines will probably be ready by the time federal grants are issued next year. But even if they aren't, he said, two dozen cell lines are enough to get the science moving. ``That is adequate,'' he told a Senate hearing.

Thompson also said the administration had reached an agreement on patent issues that will allow federally funded researchers to work with existing embryonic stem cell lines.

The agreement with Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds the patents on the method of isolating stem cells, removes one of the major barriers to the promising research.

Thompson defended the administration against criticism for its decision limiting federal research funding to the stem cell lines that already exist. President Bush imposed the restriction to remove the incentive for destroying any future embryos, which is necessary to create new cell lines.

Of the 64 cell lines approved for research, Thompson said 24 or 25 are ready now. The others are in earlier stages of development. ``That is adequate,'' he said, ``but I think we'll have many more.''

Critics say Bush's restrictions will hold back research.

``Many of the lines cited are not really viable or robust or usable,'' said Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., as the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee opened hearings on stem cell research. He accused HHS of not giving the president complete information on which to base his decision.

Specter and others have said they will try to lift the restrictions, although Bush appears to have satisfied enough people to keep Congress from acting.

Thompson called the patent agreement groundbreaking and said it ``gives us even more momentum and incentive to get to work.''

Without an agreement, scientists outside the University of Wisconsin, where the first embryonic stem cell lines were produced, cannot conduct their own research, with or without federal funding.

Thompson said the deal was reached late Tuesday and will allow for researchers to work with the five stem cell lines developed at the University of Wisconsin. Researchers will be allowed to freely publish their results, although they will have to negotiate separate agreements with Wisconsin if they want to apply that research for commercial purposes.

The patent issue was one of several that critics of Bush's policy have cited.

If the actual number of usable cell lines winds up significantly fewer than 64, Bush's restrictions could jeopardize the promise of research that could aid millions of Americans, Kennedy said.

``Many in the scientific community are concerned that the president's decision ... will delay development of cures for dread disease for many years -- at the cost of countless lives and immeasurable suffering,'' said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate committee.

A developed stem cell line comes from a single embryo, becoming a colony of cells that reproduces itself indefinitely. But scientists who work with some of these cells say many of the 64 are not yet developed and some may never pan out.

Embryonic stem cells are the basic building blocks for some 260 types of cells in the body and can become anything: heart, muscle, brain, skin, blood.

Researchers hope that by guiding the transformation in the laboratory, they can coax stem cells to make new cells that could be used to treat diabetes, Parkinson's disease, heart disease or other disorders.

Embryonic stem cell research is opposed by many who believe an embryo is a life and that destroying it for any reason is wrong.

As Wednesday's hearing began, Dr. Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor of the Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology in Israel confirmed that his lab had shipped human embryonic cells to outside labs without permission from the Wisconsin foundation that holds a patent on the cells. He said his institute did not need permission, although foundation officials have suggested otherwise.

Bush's decision permits research only on cells coming from embryos processed before the cutoff date. He also required that the cells be derived from embryos considered surplus at fertility clinics and which were donated for research, without compensation, by couples who were fully informed about the process.

Opponents of stem cell research also were testifying Wednesday.

``We do not consider it appropriate to take organs from dying patients or prisoners on death row before they have died in order to increase someone else's chances for healing or cure. Neither, then, should we consider any embryos `spare' so that we may destroy them for their stem cells,'' Kevin Fitzgerald of Georgetown University said in prepared testimony.

-------- health

Mobile phone users 'at greater risk of brain tumour'

By Charles Arthur Technology Editor
05 September 2001
From: Preston Truman <hermit@downwinders.org>
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=92389

People who used mobile phones for two hours a day in the 1980s and early 1990s have a "significantly raised" risk of developing a brain tumour, a Swedish scientist has found.

The study by Lennart Hardell, a cancer specialist at Orebro University in Sweden, is a landmark piece of research in the debate over whether the microwave radiation put out by mobile phone handsets can cause cancer. It is due to be published later this year. His research compared 1,600 people who survived brain tumours with 1,600 healthy people. He found that those who had used mobile phones for more than five years were 26 per cent more likely, and those who used them for more than a decade were 77 per cent more likely, to develop a brain tumour than those who did not. The tumours were 2.5 times more likely to be on the same side of the head as the phone was usually held.

The findings will fuel the debate over the use of mobile phones by children ­ which grew in intensity yesterday when speakers at the British Association science conference in Glasgow condemned companies for encouraging young people to use the phones.

Professor Hardell said it was not possible to extend his results directly to modern phones, which emit about 10 times less power than the older analogue ones. But he did advise adopting a "precautionary" approach.

Dr Michael Clark, of the National Radiological Protection Board, which set limits on radiation exposure, said: "A study like that has to be taken seriously ... But analogue phones were pretty much phased out around 1997. The new digital ones emit significantly less power."

--------

Virus May Help Fight HIV

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Virus-AIDS.html

Infection with an apparently harmless, newly recognized virus seems to interfere with HIV, slowing its progression and prolonging survival of AIDS patients.

What isn't known is exactly how the virus, called GBV-C or hepatitis G, inhibits HIV. Researchers say if they can figure that out, it could lead to new treatments for AIDS virus.

In the meantime, they warned patients against intentionally infecting themselves.

``If we can identify the path GBV-C is taking to inhibit HIV, then we're well on the way to making this something practical,'' said one of the researchers, Dr. Jack Stapleton of the Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Iowa.

The findings were reported in two studies in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. They confirm earlier, smaller studies that showed that patients with both HIV and hepatitis G lived longer than those infected with HIV alone.

The hepatitis G virus, discovered in 1995, does not appear to cause hepatitis or any other disease, unlike other blood-borne hepatitis viruses that cause liver damage. It is found in about 2 percent of healthy blood donors.

The Iowa study looked at 362 HIV-infected patients treated between 1988 and 1999. About 40 percent, 144 patients, were also infected with hepatitis G.

About 29 percent (41 patients) of those infected with hepatitis G died during four years of follow-up, compared with 56 percent (123 patients) who were not infected with hepatitis G.

Researchers calculated that HIV-infected people without the hepatitis G infection were nearly four times more likely to die than those with both infections during the four-year period.

A second study of 197 HIV patients conducted at Medical School Hanover in Germany also found significantly longer survival for the 33 HIV patients with hepatitis G, even after more potent AIDS drugs became available in 1996. Researchers also tested hepatitis G-infected blood and found the more hepatitis G infection, the less HIV was in the blood.

``We don't have any clues how it works at the moment, but I'm quite confident that we will gain this information in the next 12 months,'' said Dr. Hans L. Tillmann, one of the researchers.

The German researchers did one of the earliest studies that showed that hepatitis G may be beneficial for HIV patients. Tillmann said they were trying to determine whether GBV-C had the same negative effect as hepatitis B and C on people with HIV, but found the opposite.

Dr. Steven Wolinsky of Northwestern University Medical School, co-author of an accompanying editorial, said the findings of the two studies need to be kept in perspective.

``While we're looking at larger numbers of patients, we still don't really have a specific mechanism, nor have we ruled out any other potential variables that may be responsible,'' Wolinsky said.

Tillmann and Stapleton both strongly warned against intentionally infecting HIV patients with hepatitis G while research continues, a warning echoed by Wolinsky.

``We don't really know what the long-term consequences of infection with this virus is,'' Wolinsky said. ``We also know that it seems to travel with other viruses, and we don't know if it's an accidental tourist or not.''

-------- human rights

Tension is again rising in Chiapas, and the government has opened 12 new military posts there.

Christian Science Monitor
September 05, 2001
By Dan Murphy/Special to The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0905/p6s1-woam.html

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LOS CASAS, MEXICO - Mexican President Vicente Fox boasted during his presidential campaign that he could solve the seven-year-old Zapatista Indian rights insurgency in the southern state of Chiapas "in 15 minutes."

But a recent setback has observers in this mountainous state, and analysts in Mexico, saying a settlement of the lingering conflict is further away than at any other point in Mr. Fox's nine-month-old administration.

As Fox called on legislators to join him in a national political accord and back wide-ranging reforms during his state-of-the-union address on Saturday night, he was reminded of his failure to keep his ambitious promise by legislators who held up a banner echoing a widely held sentiment: "I will Resolve the Chiapas Conflict in 15 Minutes, Bla, Bla, Bla."

Talks with the rebels and their enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos, have completely broken down, and as a consequence, tension is rising again in troubled Chiapas. Rights activists allege the government has opened 12 new military posts in Zapatista areas in the past four months.

The break between the government and the Zapatistas has been caused by a package of constitutional reforms on indigenous rights that does not meet the expectations of the indigenous group. The reforms, drafted by the government's peace commission for Chiapas, were demanded by the Zapatistas as a precondition for negotiations, and Fox sent them to Congress two days after being sworn in last December - a major overture to the Zapatistas. Congress, however, feared the "Balkanization" of Mexico and watered down the reforms.

The original draft on indigenous rights, which Fox sent to Congress, would have granted indigenous people control over natural resources on their lands, the right to use traditional courts to resolve disputes, and some financial and political autonomy.

But Congress, concerned that the reforms granted too much power to indigenous groups at the expense of individual rights and national sovereignty, dramatically reduced the rights to be granted in the package. In a statement, the Zapatista's labeled the revised reforms a "call to war."

"The only thing this has accomplished is to push the Zapatistas and the government further apart," says Juan Carlos Paez, an official at the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center in Chiapas, which has been trying to broker peace virtually since 1994, when the Zapatista insurgency began with a brief occupation of this picturesque colonial city.

While analysts don't expect a fresh Zapatista offensive, they warn that other radical groups in the heavily indigenous states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, which had been following the Zapatista example, may become more active.

"The Zapatistas convinced other, more radical groups that there could be political solutions," says Andres Aubry, a historian and Zapatista expert in San Cristobal. "Now, maybe that strategy is losing credibility."

Mexico's 10 million indigenous people are among its poorest, and their mistreatment over the past 500 years is at the heart of the insurgency.

Mr. Aubry points to the bombing of three Mexico City banks in August by a radical organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the People, as a symptom of impatience.

Now, analysts say Fox's strategy for dealing with the Zapatistas is to invest heavily in the south, which he expects will create prosperity and ease grievances.

Mexicans in the north earn about $4,000 a year on average - about twice the income of southern Mexicans.

In a recent speech, Fox said his economic plan for the south, called Plan Puebla Panama, "is 1,000 times more important than the Zapatistas or any single indigenous community in Chiapas.' Francisco Yanez, a Fox economic adviser, says the plan is to invest about $4 billion in the southern half of the country in the next six years.

"Fox's mistake is to think that he can solve this situation with money," says Aubry. "The low-intensity conflict will continue."

That's why Chiapas needs a peace deal. The status quo leaves space for the communal conflicts over land and politics that have rent Chiapas for the past seven years, Aubry says.

Rightist paramilitary groups are still active, and though acts of violence are sporadic, the fear of them hangs over the towns and valleys like a constant mist.

"They should have given them what they wanted," says Hortensia Perez, owner of the modest Diana Laura Taco shop in the market town of Chenalho. "People are still afraid to go out at night." Ms. Perez was one of the few people in her town willing to talk to an outsider.

The atmosphere couldn't be more different from five months ago, when a carnival-like trek of Marcos and 23 masked rebels from Chiapas to Mexico City ended in a triumphant address before Congress.

Many Mexican's felt that Fox would be able to cut deals on land rights and autonomy for Mexico's indigenous people that the government he replaced, which had ruled for 72 years, couldn't.

"After the March, we were the closest we've ever been to peace," says Mr. Paez.

Observers say the Zapatista call to war is figurative. Since the 1994 fighting, the group has focused almost exclusively on political means to reach their goals.

"They're not going to fight. They're a political force now, seeking political solutions," says Aubry.

Still, there are broad risks for Mexico in leaving indigenous demands unresolved, analysts say.

"The Zapatistas aren't just about Chiapas. They gathered together indigenous and farmers' movements in a way that's never been done before," says Ernesto Ledesma, a Chiapas-based indigenous rights activist for the US group Global Exchange.

Within Chiapas, he says, municipal elections scheduled for October could spark violence between Zapatista sympathizers and the paramilitaries.

There's still a chance that the reforms will go back to the drawing board. Supreme Court challenges to the new law are being mounted.

With hindsight, some in the province say the euphoria of earlier this year was bound to turn to disappointment. "I voted for change, and I still think we're going to get it," says Perez, the taco shop owner. "But 72 years of problems don't just go away."

--------

More Walkouts Threaten Racism Talks

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Racism-Conference.html

DURBAN, South Africa (AP) -- Under threat of a devastating European walkout, the World Conference Against Racism held closed-door meetings Wednesday to try to find compromise language on the Israel-Palestinian conflict and reparations for slavery.

France warned that it and the European Union could follow the United States and Israel by walking out on the U.N. meeting, which was meant to highlight discrimination around the world, but has been marred by discord over efforts to condemn Israel for ``racist policies.''

``If comparisons between Zionism and racism remain, the question of France's and the European Union delegations' departure would be posed immediately,'' French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin told a Cabinet meeting, according to spokesman Jean-Jack Queyranne. ``France and the European Union would seek a departure from this conference, which would mark a failure.''

An EU deadline on the issue set for Wednesday night was reached without a compromise, said Koen Vervaeke, spokesman for Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel. He said a special drafting committee had finished its work Wednesday night without an accord.

Vervaeke said the EU had given South African mediators its position and would now wait to see what kind of text they come up with. It wasn't immediately clear if that would occur during Thursday's session.

Earlier Wednesday, in an effort to save the conference, Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorbjoern Jagland sent his deputy, Raymond Johansen, to Durban to take over leadership of the Norwegian delegation.

``The racism conference is in danger of completely breaking down. I am going to Durban to try to contribute to it reaching a result that does not damage the international battle against racism,'' Johansen said.

Norway had tried unsuccessfully earlier in the week to broker a deal between the United States, Israel and the Arab states.

Delegates from the 15 EU countries said they would act as a bloc along with 13 nations that are candidates for EU membership.

In the original draft text, Israel is the only nation singled out for condemnation. Among the sticking points were references to the ``racist practice of Zionism,'' and description of the movement to establish and maintain a Jewish state as an ideology ``based on racial superiority.''

Amr Moussa, Arab League secretary-general, has said if there were no specific references to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians a final declaration would be ``meaningless.''

The United States and Israel left the conference Monday when talks with the Arab League over removing the anti-Israel language broke down.

The dispute over the wording of the Mideast section has diverted attention from other issues, but the issue of how to deal with the legacy of slavery also have been contentious.

Many African delegations want the U.N. meeting's final declaration to include a mechanism for reparations for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Throughout the conference's planning stages, the United States opposed putting reparations on the agenda, and the U.S. departure appeared to harden some positions.

African nations that had reportedly promised to drop demands for reparations suddenly put them back on the table this week. African-American groups have lobbied hard for reparations to be included in conference documents.

The EU on Wednesday was in talks with African delegations over the issue. It has offered a limited apology for colonialism and slavery, but does not want reparations mentioned.

Africans led by Zimbabwe and Namibia are demanding specific apologies from the countries involved in the slave trade and colonialism, reparations, cancellation of African debt and more investment in the continent, said Marcus Gama, assistant to the head of the Brazilian delegation.

``For the moment ... it's hard to be optimistic,'' Gama said. ``I think (all sides) will have to make concessions before the end of the conference or there will be no conference.''

The conference's draft document calls for ``an explicit apology by the former colonial powers,'' and requires ``substantial national and international efforts be made for reparations'' to Africans, African descendants and indigenous peoples.

Ivory Coast's justice minister, Siene Oulai, said his delegation was not interested in being paid reparations, but believed Western nations should forgive the huge debt owed by African nations to international financial institutions.

``What is necessary is that the slave trade be recognized as a crime against humanity and recognition that Africa suffered a lot from the trans-Atlantic slave trade,'' Oulai said. ``What is important is to create a partnership between those who have suffered and those who profited from the slave trade to cooperate better.''

The conference's final declaration and program of action is not legally binding, but represents a pledge by governments to carry it out. If a country is opposed to specific language, they can still sign the documents while rejecting specific paragraphs.

European newspapers said the efforts to condemn Israel threatened to scuttle the conference.

``In Durban it's clear that several governments are using the U.N. for their own purposes. They are holding the U.N. as hostage,'' the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter said in an editorial Wednesday.

The conference, which began Aug. 31, is scheduled to end Friday.

-------- police / prisoners

Judge tosses 300 tickets from photos

September 5, 2001
By Sean Scully
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010905-74784940.htm

SAN DIEGO -- A San Diego judge yesterday threw out almost 300 traffic tickets issued by automated red-light cameras, saying the city had given away too much police power to the private company that runs the devices.

"The evidence from the red light cameras will not be admitted," Judge Ronald L. Styn wrote in his brief ruling, tossing out 292 tickets written under a system with many resemblances to a red-light camera system being run in the District of Columbia.

In August, Judge Styn ruled that San Diego had surrendered almost complete control of the system to Lockheed-Martin IMS, the private company that installed the system at 19 intersections.

He said the fact that Lockheed-Martin received $70 for each person convicted of running a red light, coupled with the weak supervision by the city government, rendered the tickets "untrustworthy" as evidence in court.

The decision yesterday will not affect other similar systems, but it emboldens critics of the red-light cameras. They say this is the first major court ruling that casts doubt on the cameras, which have spread nationwide.

"I think this decision will have wide, sweeping effects not just in California but in the rest of the country, even though it is not legally binding," said Arthur Tait, one of the lawyers representing drivers challenging their tickets.

The evidence that the plaintiffs presented "has convinced us that this type of law enforcement needs either to be stopped cold or substantially modified so that the due-process rights of the citizens accused by these things are protected."

In a statement yesterday, Richard Diamond, spokesman for House Majority Leader Dick Armey called the decision "a major victory for due process in the biggest traffic case ever."

Mr. Diamond also said the judge's findings call into question the whole system of red-light cameras.

"San Diego still faces a separate lawsuit asking for full repayment of all tickets issued by the system since it was installed, as well as a RICO lawsuit. If the evidence is 'untrustworthy' in this case, then all of the tickets it has issued are equally questionable."

The city, however, insists the program is legal.

"I'm pretty adamant," Deputy City Attorney Steven Hansen told Reuters. "The judge's decision was incorrect. The judge said that there was no problem with the camera's system. The only problem ... was that a private company was operating it."

San Diego officials had tried to argue that it should be allowed to use the photos as evidence in court, even if the program did not meet all the requirements of state law. The judge firmly rejected the argument, saying this case "goes far beyond" a normal contracting out of government work on the city's part

"In this case, the failure of the city to operate the system as required by the legislature, combined with the contingent fee paid to Lockheed Martin goes far beyond" legal precedents.

Judge Styn did not invalidate San Diego's camera program entirely. In his August rulings, he said that the program is generally constitutional and legal under state law. He was, however, harshly critical of the San Diego system, pointing out particularly that Lockheed-Martin had moved the sensors that trigger the cameras in the street without even bothering to tell the city.

San Diego did, however, turn off the cameras in June after discovering that Lockheed Martin IMS had moved the sensors. Both San Diego and the District are considering changes to the program, and last week, Oxnard, Calif., officials said they will re-evaluate their system in light of the San Diego case.

The D.C. system resembles San Diego's in many of the respects criticized by Judge Styn.

Both systems are operated and set up by the same company -- Lockheed Martin IMS, which is being bought out by Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc.

In both the District and San Diego, Lockheed Martin issues the tickets with little or no direct oversight by the police department and the company gets a cut of every ticket issued. The company receives a fee of $70 for every $271 fine in San Diego resulting from the system. In addition, their employees install and maintain the system, review the photographs and actually print the citations for running a red light.

In the District, Lockheed Martin takes a $32.50 cut out of every $75 red-light-camera ticket and expects to make more than $44 million by the end of 2004 from the cameras, with the District taking in more than $117 million in revenue.

California is unusual among states that use red-light cameras because it chose to make the ticket a criminal violation, like a speeding ticket issued in person by a police officer. That means motorists caught by the camera get points against their driving record and the violation is reported to insurance companies.

Because the cameras shoot pictures of license plates, not drivers, most jurisdictions, including the District, make the red-light violations a civil matter, meaning the driver is only fined and does not face further punishment by the department of motor vehicles or insurance companies.

The Department of Transportation reports that there are 345 red-light cameras in use in 30 cities in 19 states. So far, 11 states -- none of them near the Washington metropolitan area -- have banned the cameras. There are 39 red-light cameras in the District.

Police officials told The Washington Times earlier this month that the cameras had generated more than 15,000 tickets during the first 10 days of operation, beginning Aug. 6. But police officials have not responded to requests from The Times for updated statistics on the tickets issued by the cameras.

The District also expects to have a harder time catching drivers from Maryland or Virginia, because neither state has a reciprocity agreement with the District on the speeding cameras, and lawmakers and officials from both states have said there is little chance of such a reciprocity agreement coming soon.

Nonresidents who fail to pay the District's fines could be arrested, however, if they are pulled over in the city.

In a preliminary decision two weeks ago, the California judge rejected arguments by critics who said the red-light cameras inherently violate a driver's privacy and due-process rights.

Judge Styn said then that there is "no question that there is a legitimate governmental purpose in installing red-light cameras to promote safety on highways."

-------- spying

Bid to Crack Down On Leaks Is Put Off
White House Not Ready to Back Plan

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42544-2001Sep4?language=printer

A controversial proposal that would make it easier to prosecute government officials for leaking classified information lost steam yesterday as the Bush administration signaled that it is not prepared to support the provision.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called off a long-planned hearing on the proposal scheduled for today.

President Bill Clinton vetoed the measure last year, calling it an excessive instrument for curbing unauthorized disclosures that could "chill legitimate" efforts to report on government activities. The measure, written by Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), was attached to a bill funding intelligence operations for fiscal 2001.

Shelby resurrected the proposal this year, and last month he sought the backing of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Sources said Shelby agreed to a postponement of the hearing after it became apparent that the administration had decided it would not support the idea, at least for now.

Spokesmen for Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and Shelby, the panel's vice chairman, said Attorney General John D. Ashcroft had "asked for more time to study the issue." Ashcroft was to have delivered the Bush administration's position on the measure at the hearing today.

A White House spokesman said only that the administration is still "reviewing whether a new criminal statute is needed." A senior intelligence official described the Bush administration as "not ready to break its sword on this."

"President Bush is extremely concerned about leaks that do grave damage to national security," the White House spokesman said. But he added that "current laws already make it a crime to provide many categories of classified information" and that the Justice Deparment "vigorously investigates leaks and is prepared to prosecute those found to have given classified information to unauthorized persons."

The Shelby proposal would make it a felony, punishable by a fine and up to three years in prison, for an active or retired government official or employee to willfully disclose classified information knowing that the person receiving the information is not authorized to have it. It would allow the executive branch to expand the definition of what constitutes classified information and would have relieved prosecutors of the need to prove that an unauthorized disclosure had damaged national security.

The provision is opposed by many Republicans and Democrats in Congress as well as by major news media companies, civil liberties organizations, unions and historians. Representatives of many of these groups were scheduled to testify at the hearing.

To replace the hearing, the administration proposed that an interagency working group be set up to determine whether a new law, as proposed by Shelby, is needed to curb leaks.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), has said that he would object to the measure being attached to the intelligence authorization bill this year. He said he would require it to be considered by his committee and to be reviewed in the House as a separate piece of legislation.

News organizations have been working to delay consideration of Shelby proposal, hoping that media and government representatives could agree on a common position in negotiations.

John Sturm, president and chief executive of the Newspaper Association of America, was to explain the initiative at today's hearing. The talks, scheduled to begin this month, "will allow all sides to better understand the dimensions of the problem of unauthorized disclosures that has been identified by the intelligence community and the alternative approaches to addressing the problem," Sturm said in his prepared statement.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, who was to have joined Ashcroft in presenting the administration's position at today's hearing, would have emphasized his concerns, a senior intelligence official said. But Tenet would have said that he would "leave it up to others to provide the prescription for what should be done," the official said.

----

European Parliament OKs Spy Plan

September 5, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-EU-Echelon.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- An alleged worldwide spy network dubbed Echelon and led by the United States does exist -- and European nations should set up an encryption system to guard against it, the European Parliament said Wednesday.

The European Union assembly voted 367 to 159, with 34 abstentions, to adopt 44 recommendations on how to counter Echelon.

The parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, France, also accepted a 140-page report confirming the spy network's existence, despite official U.S. denials.

``There were those who said we would not be able to find sound evidence, said Carlos Coelho, chairman of the investigative committee. ``We can say very clearly that Echelon does exist.''

The committee released a report in May after seven months of testimony from communications and security experts.

EU committee members went to Washington in May but both the CIA and the National Security Agency, believed responsible for Echelon, refused to meet with them.

The report said Echelon was set up at the beginning of the Cold War for intelligence-gathering and has grown into a network of intercept stations across the globe. Its primary purpose, the report said, is to intercept private and commercial communications, not military intelligence.

It said Echelon is run by the United States in cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

U.S. officials have refused to acknowledge the existence of such a system, and have denied that American agencies engage in industrial espionage.

The report called for closer European cooperation in setting up a joint encryption and intelligence-gathering system. It called on those sending sensitive information by e-mail to start encrypting them.

European Union nations should sign a ban on industrial espionage within the 15-nation bloc and should look more closely at existing national intelligence agencies, the report said.

It also called on the European Union and Washington to draw up rules to strengthen international laws on data and privacy protection.

News reports last year sparked widespread concerns among Europeans that the United States was using their private communications against them. The report concluded, however, that ``only a very small portion'' of global telephone, e-mail and fax communications were being tapped into, mostly via satellite.

The parliament's vice president, Gerhard Schmid, said the committee was unable to gather proof that Americans were passing European trade secrets to U.S. businesses.

``When we are talking about huge international contracts, we know that the U.S. in fact listened to business communications in detail,'' Schmid said, but added that no businesses affected would come forward with evidence.

Former CIA director James Woolsey has acknowledged that the United States secretly collects information on foreign companies, but said it was only done in cases where companies were suspected of violating sanctions or offering bribes to gain business.

--------

US Echelon spy network a fact, European Parliament told

Sept 5 2001
AFP
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/technology/afp/article.html?s=asia/headlines/010905/technology/afp/US_Echelon_spy_network_a_fact__European_Parliament_told.html

STRASBOURG, - Virtually no satellite-bounced communication -- e-mail, phone or fax -- is immune to the US-run Echelon global spying network, the European Parliament was told Wednesday after a year-long probe.

The good news, according German MEP Gerhard Schmid, rapporteur of the enquiry report, is that "the extremely high volume of traffic makes exhaustive, detailed monitoring of all communications impossible in practice."

Parliament accepted the 138-page report and its resolution of 44 recommendations by a vote of 367 to 159, with 34 abstentions.

The globe-girding Echelon system involving the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand -- a quasi alliance dating to World War II -- sucks up airborne data "much like a vacuum cleaner," Schmid told parliament in presenting the report.

"Then it uses search engines that filter for key words relevant to intelligence services," he said. "We're not asserting this. We've got evidence, a link of indices which would stand up in court under oath.

"We can assure you," he said, "that if there was anything really wrong (with the report) the intelligence services in the (Echelon) countries would have enjoyed pointing that out. But they haven't. And that speaks for itself."

But he said most industrialized nations, including many in the EU itself, have comparable, if inferior, spying systems and that it is basically a case of spy-versus-spy.

"Let's be honest," said Schmid. "The intelligence services in most of the EU member states use strategic telecommunications control...The purpose is usually relevant: fighting organized crime, terrorism, trafficking in drugs, human beings. That's fair enough."

And he said Echelon, with some asides for commercial spying, appears to be doing essentially the same.

The US justifies electronic spying to gain contract procurement advantage for its firms "on the grounds of combatting attempted bribery" by the European firms, he said.

Working largely unnoticed for some six months, the Echelon committee got sudden attention last March after a European Commission official told it that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tested the encryption system that Brussels uses to communicate with its foreign missions.

The EU's executive branch said afterwards that the 10-year-old system's supplier -- the German engineering group Siemens -- had claimed in its sales pitch that the NSA had tried but failed to crack its codes.

Last May, the EU sent a delegation to Washington to meet with the state and commerce departments, the CIA, and NSA, but those meetings were abruptly cancelled by the US side.

Schmid said other meetings would probably be held this fall -- in Europe -- in an effort to coordinate electronic surveillance and set ground rules, but provided no details.

The Echelon report called on EU states "to negotiate with the USA a code of conduct similar to that of the EU" concerning data security.

It called on EU institutions and public bodies of member states "to systematically encrypt" sensitive communications "so that encryption becomes the norm."

And it urged the European Commission, the EU's executive, to ensure its own data is protected and to update its encryption systems, and recommended member states do likewise.

The report had little to say about Britain, which as an Echelon partner harbors satellite listening stations on its soil.

But German MEP Christian von Boetticher, who headed the investigating committee, told parliament, "Our British friends, because of their EU membership, are asked to put an end to American espionage activities and control the ones carried out on their land.

"Otherwise," he said, "they are contravening European legislation."

Schmid earlier said that not a single European company had come forward during the investigation to complain about being spied upon by the Americans.

"One explanation for this is that companies, when they find they are being spied upon by the competition, don't want to talk about it. It's a question of prestige...of embarrassment."

"Imagine," von Boetticher told parliament, "that you are a policeman investigating a crime. There are five victims, and five suspects, but nobody will say anything and nobody knows exactly what happened.

"This was our situation when we began our enquiry. One year later we have ascertained that the weapon was not a bomb but high precision technology. And there was only one perpetrator. The victims gave us evidence, but were not willing to testify. And that's not enough for a court sentence."

---

US spy network sees everything in Europe

Sept 5
http://www.khilafah.com/1421/category.php?DocumentID=2130&TagID=2

STRASBOURG,: Virtually no satellite-bounced communication - e-mail, phone or fax - is immune to the US-run Echelon global spying network, the European Parliament was told on Wednesday after a year-long probe.

The good news, according German MEP Gerhard Schmid, rapporteur of the enquiry report, is that "the extremely high volume of traffic makes exhaustive, detailed monitoring of all communications impossible in practice."

Parliament accepted the 138-page report and its resolution of 44 recommendations by a vote of 367 to 159, with 34 abstentions.

The globe-girding Echelon system involving the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand - a quasi alliance dating to World War II - sucks up airborne data "much like a vacuum cleaner," Schmid told parliament in presenting the report. "Then it uses search engines that filter for key words relevant to intelligence services," he said. "We're not asserting this. We've got evidence, a link of indices which would stand up in court under oath.

"We can assure you," he said, "that if there was anything really wrong (with the report) the intelligence services in the (Echelon) countries would have enjoyed pointing that out. But they haven't. And that speaks for itself." But he said most industrialised nations, including many in the EU itself, have comparable, if inferior, spying systems and that it is basically a case of spy-versus-spy.

"Let's be honest," said Schmid. "The intelligence services in most of the EU member states use strategic telecommunications control...The purpose is usually relevant: fighting organized crime, terrorism, trafficking in drugs, human beings. That's fair enough."

And he said Echelon, with some asides for commercial spying, appears to be doing essentially the same.

The US justifies electronic spying to gain contract procurement advantage for its firms "on the grounds of combating attempted bribery" by the European firms, he said.

Working largely unnoticed for some six months, the Echelon committee got sudden attention last March after a European Commission official told it that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tested the encryption system that Brussels uses to communicate with its foreign missions.

The EU's executive branch said afterwards that the 10-year-old system's supplier - the German engineering group Siemens - had claimed in its sales pitch that the NSA had tried but failed to crack its codes.

Last May, the EU sent a delegation to Washington to meet with the state and commerce departments, the CIA, and NSA, but those meetings were abruptly cancelled by the US side.

Schmid said other meetings would probably be held this fall - in Europe - in an effort to coordinate electronic surveillance and set ground rules, but provided no details.

The Echelon report called on EU states "to negotiate with the USA a code of conduct similar to that of the EU" concerning data security.


-------- activists

SAN FRANCISCO CANCER DEATHS DECLINE AFTER REACTOR CLOSING, BUT BLACKS DO NOT BENEFIT

Press Conference Sept. 6: Tooth Fairy Project
Wed, 5 Sep 2001 13:11:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Leuren Moret <leurenmoret@yahoo.com>

MEDIA ADVISORY

A New Independent Report on Bay Area Public Health Issues After Closing of Rancho Seco in 1989

WHO: Ernest J. Sternglass, Ph.D., Scientific Director Radiation and Public Health Project Janette D. Sherman, M.D., Research Associate Radiation and Public Health Project Leuren Moret, Bay Area Coordinator of the RPHP Baby Teeth Study City of Berkeley Community Environmental Advisory Commissioner

Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify in Congress in 1963, as to how increases in strontium-90 in the environment produced by bomb test fallout would lead to worldwide increases in childhood leukemia. His research and testimony played a role in the U.S. Senate's ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty between the U.S. and the former-U.S.S.R. As professor emeritus of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Sternglass has written numerous articles on the health effects of low-level radiation. His books on Low-Level Radiation (1973) and on Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island (1981) established Dr. Sternglass as a pioneer in the study of low-level radiation and public health.

Dr. Janette Sherman is a specialist in internal medicine and toxicology. Her research, teaching and publishing encompass the causes of cancer and birth defects, as well as the neurological and other adverse effects from exposure to pesticides, drugs, chemicals and radiation. She is author of Chemical Exposure and Disease ­ The Professional and Layperson's Guide to Cause and Effect. Her new book is Life's Delicate Balance ­ Guide to Causes and Prevention of Breast Cancer.

Leuren Moret is President of Scientists for Indigenous People. She works on low-level radiation and public health concerns with Native Americans and in the global community. She writes and testifies on nuclear waste issues. She has written the Foreword to a new book, Discounted Casualties ­ The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium.

WHAT: Press Conference on the California Report of the Baby Teeth Study, dealing with measurements of Strontium-90 levels in California baby teeth

WHEN: Thursday September 6, 2001, at 11:30 AM

WHERE: St. John's Missionary Baptist Church 825 Newhall Street (corner of 3rd Street and Jerrold) Bay View Hunter's Point, San Francisco

CONTACT: Leuren Moret (510) 845-3139

----

Globalization's Diverse Foes
Wide Range of Protesters Unites Against IMF, World Bank

By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 5, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42635-2001Sep4?language=printer

Dave Zirin and Pete Capano have never met, but they share a common struggle.

Zirin has been organizing meetings with his Latino neighbors in Washington's Mount Pleasant community, talking to them about fighting the Goliaths of globalization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Capano has been spreading the word about the two institutions in Lynn, Mass., arranging a bus caravan to head to Washington with fellow union members eager to give the world's bankers an earful.

Zirin is 27 and a D.C. public elementary school teacher taking a year off in large part to devote more time to fighting global capitalism. Capano is 43 and an air-conditioning mechanic at a General Electric Co. plant in Lynn. He took a 12-hour bus ride to Quebec in April to protest a summit of trade leaders, and it turned into a family outing -- his 16-year-old daughter marched alongside him.

"We used to look at it as a bunch of old union guys trying to save their jobs, but it's really more than that now," Capano said. "It's sort of becoming one large movement against globalization the way it's practiced today."

Zirin and Capano are but two faces of a population that defies categorization -- anti-globalization protesters. As the gulf between the rich and poor widens nationally and abroad, the racial, economic and age diversity of the demonstrators has increased. There is no stereotypical globalization buster; those who rally against the gatekeepers of global finance are as likely to wear wedding bands as they are to wear nose rings.

Tens of thousands -- no one knows how many -- plan to turn the nation's capital into a melting pot of dissent at month's end to show opposition to the IMF and World Bank during their annual meetings. The issues sparking such a turnout center on the lending policies of two international financial institutions that organizers say strangle developing countries with debt and benefit multinational corporations at the expense of the impoverished and the environment.

The international move to change those policies has grown in size, sophistication and diversity, building strength by attracting union organizers, churchgoers, environmentalists, high school and college students, left-leaning activists, neighborhood leaders and anarchists.

"This is the early stage of the first-ever global revolution," said Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based group at the forefront. "It's a values revolution, shifting from money values to life values."

Protesters are drawn for various reasons. Some have spent a lifetime in social activism, protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s and South African apartheid in the 1980s. Many newcomers were stirred by something they read and then researched. What unites them is a sense that something has gone wrong and that it can be traced directly or indirectly to international economic bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank or the World Trade Organization.

Danaher said: "There are two basic world views: Their world view is that you subordinate society and nature to the economy. And we say, subordinate the economy to society and nature. It's understandable that bankers would have trouble with this concept."

The IMF and World Bank dispute such arguments. Officials have said that the demonstrators' characterizations are grossly inaccurate, and they point to a program that provides billions of dollars in debt relief to impoverished countries as one of many ways that they help reduce poverty.

The protesters' arguments have shaped a movement that has its own intellectual culture and jargon. Activists think up jokes and write chants. The Internet serves as their bulletin board, telephone and door-to-door fundraiser. They post scores of e-mail manifestos about where the movement is or isn't headed. These are bookish dissenters, speaking not of the Man or the System, but of the Economy. Virtually everyone knows the names of the IMF managing director and World Bank president, and some could write informed essays on the effect of bank user fees on primary health care in Tanzania. Some have.

Nathan Wyeth, 16, has been busy lately, juggling conference calls with fellow student activists and attending organizing meetings. It's easier to handle in the summer, when he doesn't have homework, he said. Wyeth is a junior at St. Albans School for Boys in Northwest Washington and a national coordinator of the student-run arm of the Sierra Club.

"These rules are being written for the new global economy, with these trade agreements being written with corporate interests at heart, and they're written to facilitate the movement of money and to facilitate corporations doing business," said Wyeth, who got involved after developing an interest in environmental issues about two years ago. When the Sierra Student Coalition organized a trip to the Quebec demonstrations, his mother told him the only way he was going to spend a weekend at an international protest was if she went with him. He took her up on the offer, and he was back in school the following Monday.

Jen Cohn, 24, manages her class work and organizing similarly. Cohn is a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania who is helping set up health clinic tents for protesters who might suffer from dehydration or might be injured in run-ins with police.

"Use of chemical weapons -- any police weapons, whether it's tear gas or rubber bullets -- is a public health issue and should be addressed as such," said Cohn, who has worked for several years in the HIV/AIDS community.

Cohn traveled to Washington in April 2000 to demonstrate during the city's first major battle over global capitalism, the A16 protests, named after the main day of the demonstrations. She said a police officer sprayed her with pepper spray. "A medic came and washed out my eyes," she said, adding that she was grateful for the help of someone she never saw again.

Daniel Holstein, 26, is a Washington waiter who lectures co-workers about the perils of free-market theory. Holstein, an organizer with the Mobilization for Global Justice, one of the main protest coalitions, has participated in demonstrations involving D.C. General Hospital and the commission that sponsors presidential debates. He sums up his philosophy: "Life is not about the endless pursuit of money. Period."

Spreading the Word

Wyeth, Cohn and Holstein are just a few helping to plan this year's round of demonstrations, organizing that is now in high gear in Washington. Anarchists seeking capitalism's extinction, Unitarian Universalists concerned with social justice and high school students who, like Wyeth, are still taking driver's education courses have been spreading their messages.

David Taylor, 23, a Unitarian Universalist, traveled from Oakland, Calif., to take part. He moved in with friends in the District last week to help the Mobilization. He now staffs the coalition's phone line.

"Our economic and political systems place more value in the accumulation of wealth than in the dignity of people," Taylor said. "I found a real contradiction between the values I was taught in my religious community and the values I saw portrayed not just by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, but by our political system and the parties involved in them."

Other activists who are planning a Latin American solidarity march Sept. 29 say they have seen shared strength in calls from Kansas and Ohio, from supporters who plan to come. Online donations and e-mail requests for housing assistance keep flooding the Internet site of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, said a member of the District-based network of anarchists who seek the abolition of the IMF and World Bank. Members of the Mobilization have met virtually every day in small and large groups to discuss logistics and to craft props, including a big cardboard dragon and various signs and puppets being built in the garage of a Takoma Park home.

The last weekend of this month is the focal point for organizers; IMF and World Bank officials decided to drastically consolidate their meeting schedule because of security concerns. The International Action Center, an organization based in New York City with offices across the country, plans a march that is to surround the White House on Sept. 29. And on Sept. 30, several groups plan to rally at the IMF and World Bank headquarters off Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Events geared toward Washington area issues are also part of the bill, including the People's Repo, a four-day squatters summit to focus on gentrification issues. Panel discussions, concerts, candlelight vigils and teach-ins are scheduled as well.

Protesters say they hope the gathering turns out to be the biggest anti-globalization demonstration in the United States since tens of thousands disrupted a summit of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999 and gave the movement momentum. Organizers said they plan peaceful rallies, but some say that a movement rooted in anti-authoritarianism is not about to start policing its participants.

Law enforcement agencies say that worries them. They say they have gathered intelligence that the Washington demonstration -- like those since Seattle that have rocked Prague, Quebec and Genoa, Italy -- has the potential for violence. They are taking unprecedented precautions, tentatively planning a nine-foot-high fence around a section of downtown Washington to keep protesters out.

Organizers have called the proposed security zone and police buildup -- including recruiting thousands of outside police -- a waste of tax money and an attempt to keep protesters away.

Activists say it won't work. And they are trying to shift focus from the police to District neighborhoods, where they seek to increase support.

Some African American leaders who fought against privatizing D.C. General Hospital have joined the global battle, the result of protesters pushing to form alliances with area activists. When D.C. General protesters shut down a meeting of the D.C. financial control board this year, IMF and World Bank protesters were there to pitch in people and attitude.

Zirin has been spending his days turning the global into the local on the Unite the Fight tour, an attempt by the Mobilization to reach out to neighborhoods.

One evening last month, Zirin and others brought the tour to a Methodist church auditorium in Columbia Heights. Zirin hoped that a half-dozen community activists would show up, but by the start of the meeting, about 50 sat in folding chairs, a mix of neighborhood leaders, health care workers, death penalty opponents and anti-capitalists.

Sonia Umanzor, of El Salvador's left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), said she wanted finance ministers to face crowds so large that they would have to use the back door to get to their meetings. After the meeting, Zirin lingered outside the church, grinning.

"You had black, white and Latinos, all in the same room," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, the United States has a Left. Call Mom."

Zirin studied labor history at Macalester College in Minnesota but tired of reading about it and wanted to make it. He joined the International Socialist Organization at 19.

"I see this movement as a vehicle for creating a different kind of world," Zirin said.

Capano sees his involvement in much the same way: "It seems like there's this economic battle brewing within each country . . . where workers everywhere suffer the effects of the policies that they're implementing."

Capano, a leader of the electrical workers union, is only one of many labor organizers coming to Washington for the protests. The AFL-CIO, which has spoken out against the IMF and World Bank for undermining labor protections in developing countries, has thrown its support behind the demonstrations, helping to organize the massive Sept. 30 rally.

A Dramatic Shift

It will be a dramatic change from the early years, said Washington activist Njoki Njoroge Njehu. She remembers when only a few dozen gathered outside the IMF and World Bank headquarters to protest the institutions' policies in April 1999. A year later, more than 20,000 demonstrators protested on those same streets. What happened was largely due to the spirit of Seattle, protesters say. More than 30,000 demonstrators succeeded in shutting down the WTO meeting in November 1999.

For many, Njehu said, the movement runs far deeper than the television images that most people saw. Njehu, 35, says she visits her family in Kenya, and while everything crumbles -- roads, schools, reliable health care -- international debt remains. Canceling such debt for poor countries is an economic as well as moral issue, she said.

"What is at issue here is the heart and soul and the morality and values of the international community," said Njehu, director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a longtime critic of the IMF and World Bank.

In July, more than two months before the upcoming protests, Njehu wasn't surprised to find about 40 men and women from a smattering of ages and races at a general meeting of the Mobilization for Global Justice, of which she is a member.

Everyone gathered in a community room at a Mount Pleasant church, where the evening's handwritten agenda was taped to a pillar in the center of the room. The discussion included fundraising, logistics and the environmental racism that members of the group said was inherent in the care of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

At the meeting, they passed around an envelope hastily scrawled with a dollar sign to raise cash for the Washington protests. And despite the talk of revolution that filled the room, they put away the chairs before heading home.


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