-Caveat Lector- [radtimes] # 153 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --Report finds wide money-laundering --EU plans to issue 'identity number' for every citizen --Phony banks moving dirty money through U.S. --The dangers of genetically modified food --Beyond the Fringe: J20 report --NIMA: The Eyes of the Nation =================================================================== Report finds wide money-laundering <http://www.msnbc.com/news/526369.asp> Banks, regulators let billions slip through, Senate panel says By Kathleen Day THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 The failure of U.S. banks and regulators to track transactions with foreign banks enables criminals to route billions of dollars from drug sales, Internet gambling, tax evasion or other illegal activities into the United States each year, a new Senate subcommittee report concludes. ALTHOUGH REGULATORS have prodded U.S. banks in recent years to bolster their efforts to control money laundering through individual accounts, the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations found that banks and regulators have been lax in applying similar standards to correspondent banking, in which foreign banks use U.S. banks to perform wire transfers and other transactions. The subcommittee's report, which concludes a yearlong investigation, is to be made public today. Regulators and bankers familiar with the inquiry say it is the first comprehensive look at this aspect of banking and how it facilitates money laundering. "Inattention and disinterest by U.S. banks in screening the foreign banks they take in as clients have allowed rogue foreign banks and their criminal clients to carry on money laundering and other criminal activity in the United States and to benefit from the protections afforded by the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking industry," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the subcommittee. RUSSIA SCANDAL SPARKS PROBE The subcommittee launched its investigation after a Russian money-laundering scandal erupted at Bank of New York 18 months ago. It examined a number of well-known banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and First Union Corp. In all, the subcommittee staff questioned 20 institutions and pursued, in detail, cases at more than a dozen U.S. banks involving "dirty money" flowing through U.S. accounts from suspicious foreign banks, especially offshore banks in jurisdictions with weak money-laundering laws, according to the report. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Citigroup and First Union each said they terminated the accounts studied by the subcommittee as soon as they became aware of suspicious activity. They also said they are constantly monitoring and improving oversight of money laundering, correspondent accounts in particular. "We're constantly trying to balance a customer's right to privacy with the monitoring of bank activity," said Shirley Norton at Bank of America. "It's not easy." Correspondent banking is a legitimate banking practice, allowing companies to transact business globally for clients. So is offshore banking. Most U.S. financial institutions have established offshore banks in jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas because they have fewer regulations than the United States and can offer higher interest rates or lower tax rates. But the estimated 4,000 offshore banks in such jurisdictions are also used by criminals to launder money into the United States, according to the subcommittee report. That's because many of these jurisdictions have secrecy laws that prevent law-enforcement inquiries and have few if any money-laundering regulations. The correspondent relationships that offshore banks have with American banks have become a major tool to facilitate such laundering, the report says. $1 TRILLION LAUNDERED ANNUALLY Money laundering, which the Clinton administration declared a national security threat, is the act of concealing the source of funds obtained from an illegal activity. An estimated $1 trillion is laundered each year about half of it, or $500 billion, through the United States, according to the report. Although money laundering is a crime and the law requires banks to have policies to guard against it, neither criminal statutes nor bank regulations detail what banks must do. Regulators have issued guidelines telling banks that one important way to guard against money laundering is to know each customer, and banks have stepped up their efforts when individual accounts are opened. But this "know-your-customer" standard has been routinely ignored by correspondent divisions of American banks, the Senate subcommittee report says. "U.S. banks rarely ask their client banks about their correspondent practices and, in almost all cases, remain unaware" of who the ultimate clients are using the accounts, the report says. Even when U.S. banks do ask questions, they can end up unwittingly facilitating crime, the report says. In one case, for example, subcommittee investigators found that a convicted felon in California used Citigroup to launder nearly $8 million obtained through credit-card fraud. The money first went from the United States through bank accounts in the Cayman Islands to those in the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu and then back into the United States via an account in New York at Citigroup. The transactions occurred without Citigroup knowing the criminal origin of the money, the report says, even though Citigroup executives asked questions about where the money in the Vanuatu accounts had come from and conducted on-site visits of the bank. Public and government attention was focused on correspondent banking in the summer of 1999, amid news accounts chronicling how $7 billion in suspicious money flowed from several Russian banks into the U.S. through several accounts at Bank of New York. Last year, a former Bank of New York vice president, her husband and three shell corporations pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to launder money. =================================================================== EU plans to issue 'identity number' for every citizen http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2001-02/eu050201.shtml By Stephen Castle in Brussels and Andrew Grice 5 February 2001 Ambitious plans to help European Union citizens move more freely between countries during the course of their working lives may include giving every person an individual "EU social security number". A task force to be set up at next month's summit of European leaders in Stockholm is to study the proposal as part of a drive to sweep away barriers stopping people from moving easily between member states. Senior EU officials are pressing for a feasibility study into a common social security coding system for Europe. This would enable entitlements to benefits and insurance contributions to be "portable" for each person, regardless of which country they might live in. Officials stressed that the move would not be designed to win new powers for the EU, and that the levels of state benefits and insurance contributions would continue to be fixed by national governments. But a more unified system would enable those who pay social security contributions while working in another European country to claim benefits when they returned home. If adopted, the controversial plan would bring American-style mobility to the European employment market. In America, people readily move from state to state to look for jobs, but only a tiny minority of EU workers are prepared to migrate to another country for work. In the EU, 0.5 per cent of the working population moves abroad each year compared with 2 to 3 per cent of Americans who move states to find work. Officials in Brussels acknowledge that Europeans encounter more problems in changing countries, including language difficulties. However, they point out that while states in America have different benefit rules, every American has a nine-digit social security number, which records contributions throughout the country. The British Government, which wants to encourage freer movement of workers within the EU, is keeping an open mind about the proposal until it sees the details. Ministers would oppose any move towards common EU benefit levels but do not believe Brussels is trying to achieve this. However, an EU-wide coding system would be politically sensitive, fuelling Tory claims that Britain was being sucked into an EU superstate. A spokesman for Anna Diamantopoulou, the social affairs commissioner, said the remit of the task force remained under discussion but added: "It will look at the A to Z of legal, administrative and practical problems for people living and working in different countries which obstruct mobility, with a view to removing these obstacles by 2005." Frits Bolkestein, the European commissioner responsible for the internal market, will discuss plans to improve labour mobility with Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, today. In a speech in London, Mr Bolkestein will welcome the British Government's support for moves to create an EU single market but accuse ministers of failing to match their words with actions. The European Commission wants the Stockholm summit to look at other issues such as the mutual recognition of professional qualifications throughout the EU, another barrier to free movement of labour. =================================================================== February 5, 2001 Phony banks moving dirty money through U.S., report says <http://www.miamiherald.com/content/today/news/world/digdocs/038517.htm> Phony banks target U.S., probe shows S. Fla. financial institutions accused of 'facilitating' money laundering BY ANDRES OPPENHEIMER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Major U.S. banks, many of them in Miami, have become conduits for massive international money-laundering operations through special accounts from phony foreign banks, according to a yearlong Senate investigation scheduled to be released today. Some of the most prominent corporate names in the banking industry, Bank of America, Citibank and Chase Manhattan, are among those cited for allegedly "facilitating" the laundering of illicit proceeds from drug trafficking and corruption in countries from Mexico to Argentina. The report blames a common industry practice known as "correspondent banking," an agreement that allows banks in the United States to provide services for banks in other countries, so foreign banks can serve their clients in places where they have no offices. By cloaking deposits as bank-to-bank transactions, the transfers avoid the scrutiny, and suspicion, that would be cast on a similar transaction conducted by an individual customer. Although most of these deals are legitimate, the Senate investigation found that many offshore banks with accounts at major U.S. financial institutions are engaged in criminal activities and move huge amounts of dirty money into the U.S. banking system. South Florida is a "target" for many dubious offshore banks, because so many of them are in the Caribbean and Latin America and pick Miami as a place to conduct business in the United States, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the investigation's leader, told The Herald. "The Miami banking community needs to be vigilant in opening accounts for high-risk foreign banks," said Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate subcommittee. Some of the offshore "banks" included in the probe existed only on paper, or on brass plates in Caribbean banking havens. They had no building, no offices and no employees, nor had they undergone an examination by banking regulators, says the 59-page report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. U.S. banks did not even check whether they had a physical presence before opening correspondent accounts for them in Miami or New York. The U.S. banks examined in the investigation operated "in an atmosphere of complacency, with lax due diligence, weak controls, and inadequate responses to troubling information," the report said. As an example of lax oversight, the panel cited two South Florida banks Security Bank N.A. and Banco Industrial de Venezuela, which it said never took a close look at transfers totaling $50 million from a bank called British Trade and Commerce Bank (BTCB) in the Caribbean island of Dominica. These funds included millions linked to money laundering and financial fraud, the report said. Asked about it, Banco Industrial de Venezuela's Miami manager, Ildefonso Ferrer, said that the BTCB account had been opened by a previous Banco Industrial administration. "As soon as our bank's new management took over, we closed that account within 15 days," Ferrer said. Security Bank N.A. executives did not return phone calls. The report charged that "the prevailing principle among U.S. banks has been that any bank holding a valid license issued by a foreign jurisdiction qualifies for a correspondent account. . . . U.S. banks have too often failed to conduct careful due diligence reviews of their foreign bank clients." The Senate subcommittee that conducted the inquiry is the same that held 1999 hearings on U.S. private banking practices, in which Citibank was grilled with questions over its handling of more than $100 million in questionable funds from Raúl Salinas, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas. Congressional sources say the subcommittee expects to hold similar hearings in March on U.S. correspondent banking practices, including many of the banks cited in its report. The findings of the Senate probe underscore a criticism often made privately by law enforcement officials about the inconsistency of current U.S. regulations, which require U.S. banks to monitor carefully cash deposits of more than $10,000, yet require little supervision for billions of dollars that enter the U.S. banking system daily through bank-to-bank transactions from abroad. Senate investigators say their probe did not target mainstream correspondent banking relationships, which are perfectly legal and necessary. Typically, such deals allow well-respected foreign banks to save the costs of licensing, staffing and operating their own offices in the United States by opening accounts within an existing U.S. bank. 'SHELL BANKS' Rather, the probe targeted offshore "shell banks" that have no physical presence in any country, or that are not subject to any serious supervision from their countries' banking authorities. The investigation found that of the 570 banks licensed in the Cayman Islands, about 75 are not branches of any other banks, and some of them are mere brass plates in a lawyer's office. In the Bahamas, out of about 400 licensed banks, some 64 are not affiliated with any bank, and a smaller number are "shell banks." Among the "shell banks" that were used to funnel dirty money into the U.S. financial system were M.A. Bank and Federal Bank, licensed respectively in the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas as foreign subsidiaries of Argentine banks. Also cited were Hanover Bank and Caribbean American Bank, both licensed in Antigua and Barbuda. "None of these four shell banks had an official business office . . . none had a regular paid staff," the report says. "The absence of a physical office with regular employees helped these shell banks avoid oversight by making it more difficult for bank regulators and others to monitor bank activities, inspect records and question bank personnel." M.A. Bank, a subsidiary of Argentina's Mercado Abierto holding company, had a correspondent banking account with Citibank in New York. That account was used in the late '90s to shovel funds from the so-called Juárez Cartel, a Mexican drug gang, into the United States and then on to Argentina, according to U.S. court documents filed in February last year. The Senate probe noted that even after a California judge froze $1.6 million in that account on suspicion of money laundering, Citibank never looked into the case and may have allowed the bank to continue doing business as usual. Citibank officials said they could not comment on the Senate inquiry's findings, because they have not seen the report. Federal Bank Ltd., identified in the Senate report as an offshore affiliate of Argentina's Banco Republica, had a 10-year correspondent banking relationship with Citibank in New York, yet Citibank was apparently unaware that Argentina's central bank had reported in 1996 and 1998 audits that Banco Republica had no program to prevent money laundering, the report said. Standard banking practices require the reporting of suspicious transactions, such as unusually large deposits, to banking regulators. When asked by Senate investigators what he had done to find out whether Banco de la Republica had an anti-money laundering program, a Citibank official responsible for the account, not named in the report, said he took the bank's word for it, "but he did not confirm that with documentation." Banco Republica was headed by Raul Moneta, a well-known Argentine banker who was charged with "financial subversion" following the closing of Banco Republica. Some of his legal cases are still pending. Argentine press reports say he was a close friend of former President Carlos Menem. U.S. Senate investigators say they have received allegations from Argentine legislators that Federal Bank is owned by Moneta, and that they are looking into the bank's activities. In a telephone interview Friday, Moneta denied that he owns or has any stake in Federal Bank. In addition to "shell banks" that don't have offices, the Senate inquiry found that U.S. banks are used often for money laundering by offshore banks that have fancy buildings and employees, but are not subject to anti-money laundering supervision from their countries' authorities. There are an estimated 4,000 offshore banks in an estimated 60 countries that are generally known to be financial havens, experts say. About 44 percent of these offshore banks are believed to be in the Caribbean and Latin America. In June 2000, a largely U.S. and European inter-governmental group known as the Financial Task Force on Money Laundering singled out 15 countries that it described as "non-cooperative" with anti-money laundering efforts. The Caribbean area countries are the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Panama, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Among others elsewhere are Israel and Russia. These countries "are more likely to attract persons interested in laundering illicit proceeds" that are channeled to the United States through correspondent banking accounts, the Senate report said. LIKELY REACTION Caribbean countries with offshore banking centers are likely to react angrily to the Senate inquiry, experts say. They say they are under attack from the U.S. and European governments, presumably to eliminate competition to their own banking industries. "They are unfairly lumping all Caribbean countries together," said Carlos E. Loumiet, an attorney with the law firm Greenberg, Traurig PA, which has attorneys who specialize in international banking issues. "There are some Caribbean countries that have state of the art legislation against money laundering, and are implementing it fully." =================================================================== Monday, February 5, 2001 The dangers of genetically modified food <http://www.postnet.com/postnet/stories.nsf/ByDocID/CB2CA7ECB724AE8E862569EA0038CE5D> A Jan. 19 editorial supported the decision by the Food and Drug Administration not to require labeling of genetically-modified foods. It cited the usual arguments by the agrichemical industry that the foods are tested adequately and have been proved safe and that the FDA should not "inflame fears that have no basis in scientific fact." Consider the science. To equate transgenic engineering to traditional cross-breeding is scientifically incorrect. Traditional crossbreeding is limited to the gene pool of plants that can sexually interbreed and results in slightly different versions of the same gene already present in the species. Transgenic engineering can draw on the enormous gene pool of all life to introduce completely foreign genes from another species at random sites into the host genome. Besides a new foreign gene, unintended expression of one or more host genes can be affected by its incorporation with unpredictable consequences. Are these hundreds of new man-made life forms safe? They will reproduce to become permanent additions to the world of plants. During future generations many of these new traits will probably be transferred to other crops and related weed species. Will they endanger human, animal, or other plant life? No one knows, but recent crises suggest it is only a question of how devastating. The "field tests" noted are generally on small plots of less than 10 acres under monitored conditions to limit escape of genes to wild or domestic relatives, a far cry from propagation over many millions of acres worldwide. In a Jan. 22 column, George Will expressed the potential "horrors" of genetic manipulation of humans to reduce "man to the status of just another man-made thing." There is a reluctance to design reproducing humans with someone's chosen traits. In terms of the balance of all life on the planet, why is there less concern for the world of plants (and animals)? Sustainable and organic agriculture, not expensive patented GM crops, can provide the world's food needs, as demonstrated by recent Essex University research with more than 4.4 million small farms that returned to sustainable farming and achieved a 73 percent increase in food production. For those who want to be able to choose what they eat, whether for reasons based on science, religion, ethics, ecology or health concerns, Greenpeace has compiled an initial listing of hundreds of food products divided into three categories of products and companies: those containing GM ingredients, those with no GM's and those companies and products phasing out GM ingredients. Log on to <http://www.truefoodnow.org/shoppersguide>. David Kennell University City =================================================================== February 22, 2001 Beyond the Fringe <http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010222052F> by DARRYL PINCKNEY "He lost by 500,000 votes, but we lost it five to four," a friend said while she urged me to get on one of the buses various political groups were renting to ferry demonstrators from New York to Washington on January 20. Five of my friends and I signed up by email for tickets, $35, to ride on one of the buses hired by Voter March, described as a moderate group with a "good-government agenda." Around four-thirty in the morning, on 31st Street, behind Penn Station, hundreds of people gathered under the street lights that relieved the dark. A white guy with a megaphone at his hip said that they had fourteen buses, that there would be room for all. As we boarded the tour bus, two volunteers from among the passengers checked our receipts and distributed the yellow Voter March information sheet, which included explanations about what to do if arrested, and where medical teams would be if needed. There hadn't been a protest at a presidential inauguration since Nixon took office for the last time in 1973, and no one knew what to expect. Of the forty-nine passengers, three were black, and none Asian or Hispanic from what I could see, but they ranged in age from student to middle-aged and elderly. The bus started off at five AM and by ten o'clock we were in Maryland. Two young women across the aisle from me were helping those who hadn't come with posters. They had extra boards, thick-tipped pens, clear tape to make the signs waterproof, which turned out to be necessary. One friend wrote, "Bush Comes to Shove," which won approval among us in the back of the bus. At eleven we joined the other buses parked in the lot of RFK Stadium on the edge of Washington. Walking to the Metro, we saw the first of what was to be an extraordinarily heavy police presence drawn from many forces from outside the District. Squad car lights rhythmically flashed against the white blanket of sky. We were on our way to the Voter March rally at Dupont Circle in the northwest of the city, but when we reached the subway stop for the Supreme Court building, Capitol South, we remembered that Al Sharpton, so we thought, was to take a Citizens' Oath there to defend voters' rights at the same time that a Bible was to be held on the Capitol steps. We jumped off the train, hoping that people in the group that had made it so easy for us to be there wouldn't think we'd ditched them to go to a better party, as a friend, a black woman, put it. On the escalator up to the street, we were surrounded by people on their way to applaud the inauguration. Ahead of us giant white men in white and zebra-striped stetsons strode through the turnstiles. "Oh no," my black woman friend said. I had a pretty good idea of what she was feeling, because I was feeling it, too, a feeling that went back to the early days of the civil rights marches, when blacks were routinely outnumbered and the looks of resentment from white onlookers said that they longed to slap us all with a huge wet mop. Out on the street, parade monitors exhorted the crowd to be sure that they were on the correct side for blue tickets. I took the colorful brochures advertising the inaugural medal, as though putting on camouflage. The protest at the steps of the Supreme Court was imaginative and intelligent for the most part and the mood of the few hundred protestors very serious. The signs suggested how articulate people would be when I got into conversations with them. And, of course, to complete the picture, helmeted policemen, one in intense blue reflector glasses, were spaced above us, guarding the concourse to the Greek revival temple, that place where Thurgood Marshall argued thirty-nine cases and won thirty-nine cases, a record unequaled in US history. In the opposite direction, the dome of the Capitol was sketched against the mist. I could see it and the branches of trees, but nothing else in that direction, because a wall of red and white buses, engines idling noisily, blocked the Capitol from our view and us from the Capitol audience's sight. The crowd in front of the Supreme Court was very mixed, racially, but my attention was drawn to four young black women, dressed from head to toe in black, each with a face painted either blue, red, or white. They faced north, west, east, and south, then moved in a circle behind another woman who carried a grotesque ET-like figure in suit and tie. The last of the four women beat steadily on a drum. One carried a message of mysterious, apocalyptic wishes: May the erinnyes rain upon your dreams Slashing the knots on your tongue. May the truth choke you like bile as it Spills upon you. Let blood be seen on your hands. A middle-aged white guy holding a transistor radio aloft threaded among us, spreading the news. "Cheney's being sworn in." Moments later, the four black women stopped moving and began to wail. Their posters and the eerie, potato-colored effigy were in a pile on the sidewalk at their feet. The drumming increased as their voices rose. And they just stood there and wailed, mouths wide open, arching back, hands moving slowly up to the sides of their heads. This said it was noon, the hour of the swearing-in ceremony in that place we couldn't see. The crowd around the women pressed toward them; a few photographers jockeyed for position; a white guy in sunglasses and yellow windbreaker with a black cord traveling from his collar to his ear chewed gum and stared, like a Secret Service man? The four black women were sinking to their knees, still wailing. Would they set their strange pile alight? One of the women moved her arms over the heap. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the wailing ceased. There was a burst of applause. The women began to walk around again in their silent circle. OK. A day of symbolism and sanity. It was clear that Al Sharpton wasn't coming and we decided to join the protest march that was to make its way to the White House. Behind us the ranks of the CWA Union from Trenton, New Jersey, predominantly black, continued to point their fingers at the Court building and hoot: Who let the Bush out? Who? Who? Who? Who-Who? Who let the dogs in? Who? Who? Who? Who-Who? As we left the Supreme Court, a black guy was playing the sax for spare change. Through the parted police lines a formation of motorcycle policemen emerged from Constitution Avenue. Inside Union Station, we felt like trespassers because people were busily setting up for one of the official inaugural balls. Black security guards guided us to the Metro entrance. We heard the tenor and guitar as we approached Dupont Circle, and it felt like our old student days, at least in the sense that the crowd of yet another few hundred didn't fill the place. A teenager carried a sign, "Bush is unelectable says Main Line Philadelphia." With him his parents, perhaps, draped in cashmere and shod in suede. The mother's handsome poster offered a quote attributed to Bush: "There ought to be limits to freedom." That various groups were organizing separate events and had done so rather quickly, without much coordination, until a joint news conference held the day before, would become a source of frustration to some among us who regretted that there was not one place for everyone to come to. The young were less distressed with the post-Seattle arrangement of small groups holding different protests. In any event, each group had a permit to hold a rally, but not to march from one rally to another. Some groups, such as the student Justice Action Movement, would have elected the cell approach to demonstrating anyway, but the police plans forced everyone else to adopt this strategy. We heard that Sharpton was speaking in Stanton Park, in another part of the city, and that the NOW demonstration at the Naval Memorial near Pennsylvania Avenue had been contained by police. We also heard that another group of demonstrators, at Freedom Plaza, had been hemmed in by police. Freedom Plaza was the announced meeting place of people demonstrating under the auspices of International Action Center, which, together with Partnership for Civil Justice and the National Lawyers Guild, had filed a suit on January 16, asking for a preliminary injunction to strike down the security plans and to challenge the discretionary powers of the Secret Service and the District of Columbia police. Apparently, the judge who heard the suit considered the police plans to filter people through parade checkpoints a logistical nightmare. For citizens to go through checkpoints at an inauguration was, she said, inconsistent with our way of life, but not with the law, and so she let the plans stand. The Mall was cordoned off by chainlink fencing for the first time at an inauguration, which meant that Bush supporters were rather hemmed in, too. Demonstrators had been advised to move about in groups of twenty-five or less, because the US Circuit Court for the District of Columbia had already ruled that the US government could not fine or arrest people in these numbers. Afterward, we would hear several people remark how arbitrary security was along Pennsylvania Avenue, how many holes and alleys people had found to get through. One young man from our bus said that his backpack wasn't even checked. I had an image of demonstrators springing up along the parade route like brush fires. Voter March, as far as I knew, was the only group with a permit to march in a mass. At Dupont Circle we were told that the main issue was not to tie up pedestrian and auto traffic and that we had to be respectful of the permit we had. When we were asked if there was anyone there who had been at the counter-inaugural in 1973, three hands went up in front of me. Behind me, from the empty fountain, a youth's voice shouted, "This is a civil action, not a reunion." The speaker went on to say that our route was not direct, but it was legal. "Damn the law," the youth rejoined. Rain, which had been sporadic, started again as we set off at 1:15 PM. There was some honking in support from passing automobiles, but as we hiked on and on past intermittent traffic police, our morale seemed to sag. An hour later, near the George Washington University campus, workers in hard hats on a balcony cheered us. At an intersection a few feet away we were startled by a red-faced white youth in a baseball cap, hanging from the back of a stretch limousine. "God bless George W.," he screeched over and over as the limo careened around the traffic circle. We'd been instructed at the start not to make eye contact with hecklers, though the organizers didn't think we'd encounter any on our route, perhaps because after a point we were walking empty, heavily guarded streets. Our winding, isolated route had become known among us as the Wear Out the Protesters permit. Our march finally turned into Constitution Avenue at the Department of State. "We can meditate when we get there," one young woman called out, "let's make some noise." But most of us hadn't the energy or the will. "This is lame," the young woman said over her shoulder as she ran toward the front of the march. "We're wet. We're cold. Democracy's been sold," the people were chanting at the head of the march. We slogged by parked Naval Academy buses and enormous horse trailers from Kentucky and Wyoming. Coming on to the blank and sad Ellipse, with the Washington Monument peeking up in the distance, someone asked of the mud and brown grass, "Is this it? There's no there here." But there was a six-foot chain-link fence and over behind the trees, somewhere, the White House. "That's our flag," people chanted. I could see the honor guard turning off from Pennsylvania Avenue. "Shame on you!" people cried at the motorcade following the military uniforms. We were at the rear of the White House, so maybe we were only yelling at the help moving in by a back door. To the tune of "We shall overcome," the crowd sang, "We will vote you out some day." And then, sometime after three o'clock, a soggy, disembodied feeling came over us again. My friends and I drifted off as a Zen group with a banner proclaiming "Meditation for Justice" sat down in the wet. Neither side of the election divide had been in such close proximity in such numbers since Florida. I'd come to Washington not to get close enough to the motorcade to lob an egg, but to hear the sound of that America that is seldom heard on television and to see the sort of Americans I'd organized my life to avoid, the sort I only come across by accident, like that time I was in the parking lot of Neiman-Marcus in Scottsdale, Arizona, and walked by a white woman just as she opened the trunk of her Lexus and put her shopping bags beside three rifles. Caught between those in fur coats and those in hoods, or so it seemed to me, were the black people employed in the service economy, the black guys making coffee in Starbucks while outside on Pennsylvania Avenue military units of the inaugural parade marched off; the drivers waiting beside all those limos and sedans parked around town; and especially the young black men selling inaugural sweatshirts and whatnots at the entrances to the Metro stations. The two young women from our bus who had helped the others to make signs told me afterward that in a bar in the MCI Center, a black employee had checked their IDs and taken away their signs. He put them by the door, facing in, so that patrons in Uncle Sam hats couldn't read them. This is not to say that blacks weren't among the supporters of Bush, the most famous beneficiary of affirmative action in the country when it comes to college admissions. While riding the Metro, I heard a little white boy say, "They're just trying to make George W. feel like he doesn't deserve it." His mother said something that ended in her proposing that my friend's "All Hail to the Thief" sign be stomped into the ground. When the family got off, the light-skinned black man who'd been quietly sitting with them, refusing to let me catch his eye, followed the mother closely, shielding her like a boyfriend. A "patriot's rally" had been scheduled to be held in front of the Supreme Court at nine o'clock that morning. Among the listed speakers was a black minister, Jesse Peterson, author of From Rage to Responsibility. Laura Flanders, a white talk show host and columnist for In These Times, said she found it curious that the Bush sympathizers she talked to after the inauguration blamed the counter-demonstrations on NOW, not on civil rights groups. She said they presented it as a matter of normal people vs. those women. Maybe it was because Jesse Jackson had stayed home from the protest in Tallahassee; maybe the January 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade was on their minds, but race was not the issue. It does seem that compassionate conservatism is not alone in wanting race and racial discrimination to be defused as an issue in politics, and particularly as reasons for black voters continuing to go to the polls as a bloc. Those two young women from our bus said that in one spot along the parade route dense with people, punk kids with shaved heads and pierced noses turned out to be pro-life demonstrators. Getting by them, their signs, and their anti-abortion chants was like running a gauntlet, they said. How striking that a spokesman for one of the most virulent right-wing youth groups on the Web believes that he is taunting liberals when he says that he "can't wait until the so-called American Race is so brownish/gray that there can be no more racism as currently practiced." But these people underestimate, I think, the reaction of most blacks to the Supreme Court's part in the Florida outcome. I would have liked to hear Sharpton speak, I would have liked to feel the consolation of being part of a large audience, but I doubted that I felt the disappointment and restlessness of one guy at Dupont Circle I'd seen in a gas mask, who I could easily imagine was not shy about direct action. Maybe light skirmishes with police and Bush supporters had taken place here and there around the city; certainly the security forces, thinking of 1973, or of the WTO fiasco in Seattle, were determined that protesters not be allowed to come together in significant numbers. But I didn't consider the day a waste of time or an exercise in impotence or an illustration of what doesn't happen in the absence of effective leadership, because I had attended what was for me a memorial service for the Supreme Court. Those wailing black women, that meant a lot to me, because I came of age in the days of the Warren Court. You could argue that those who showed up represented expected positions and also extreme ones. Off Pennsylvania Avenue, just beyond the White House, crowds of both supporters and opponents of Bush found themselves inches away from the other. A Voter March organizer gained a porch and told us to go around the line of people waiting to get into an inaugural event. As the anti-Bush chanting started afresh, they reacted in the same way we had when we caught the chill among the seemingly homogenous. As people who came to cheer and people who came to chant, if they got to do either, began to move away from Pennsylvania Avenue, casting suspicious, unforgiving glances, I found it hard to believe that the country would recover soon from the defensiveness and bitterness that I'd observed, and felt. It had been a day of unease, with the constant drone of helicopters overhead. Earlier, when my friends and I were wondering why we'd come to this shadow event, this shadow demonstration, one of us, my black woman friend, remembered the confident white men in stetsons and gave the answer: "To feel the fear again." =================================================================== NIMA: The Eyes of the Nation By Rudi Williams American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 2001 -- Nothing and no one in the military moves without NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Sanctioned by Congress and created by the Department of Defense on Oct. 1, 1996, NIMA is a national resource that supports everyone from the White House down to the foxhole, said Robert Zitz, director of NIMA's Initiative Group. "NIMA can be called the eyes of the nation," he said. The agency, he continued, serves three broad categories of customers: the national customer, including the national security leadership, White House and State Department; military users; and civilian users during natural disasters and humanitarian crises. Until NIMA's establishment, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and military services had their own imagery intelligence capabilities. The entire community was fragmented, Zitz said. The situation presented an unsolvable challenge: They couldn't share knowledge easily during joint operations, so no one had a full picture of the battle space. Operation Desert Storm drove the point home when significant problems occurred in providing information, including imagery intelligence, he said. "We weren't getting imagery to tactical commanders fast enough for them to make use of it," Zitz noted. "The mapping data wasn't as current as it needed to be." The idea behind creating NIMA was to merge capabilities in imagery intelligence, mapping, charting and geodesy into one combat support agency, and then empower it with the best information technology available, Zitz explained. They must do this while balancing the support they provide to national policy makers. The military unified commands and the military services, retained some imagery analysis and map-making capability for tactical purposes, but they and NIMA work together closely today, he said. NIMA provides terrain and topographic information for ground troops, aeronautical information for the pilots and nautical information for the sailors to move through and control their battle space. Its best-known products among troops are the paper maps they use every day during training. "There's not a soldier who doesn't rely on a map to move around," Zitz noted. "Today, we use paper maps. We collect intelligence information using imagery sources and put that out largely in a paper analog process. "But we're moving away from that paper-slow process. Military commanders ask us to give them two things: speed and accuracy. In a digital environment, we can have more speed," he said. "That's where we're moving." Another force driving NIMA's creation: The U.S. military shrank after the Cold War, he said. The forces today are more lethal and agile than before, but they are also smaller, lighter and facing a changing world environment and more complicated set of threats. "NIMA must strive for information superiority," he said. "That doesn't mean flooding commanders with data. It means putting as much meaningful, relevant information as possible into their hands in time for them to exploit it." "Think about the power of going onto a battlefield knowing not only where you and your friends are, but also knowing where the enemy is and what he's doing," he said. "It's not all in real time now, but that's the direction we're moving in. "That way you can have a smaller force structure and still be able to win decisively," he said. "We're trying to harness the power of information technology the same way we've harnessed technology for weaponry. Warfighters have gone from dumb bombs to smart bombs to brilliant bombs. We're trying to go from dropping hundreds of bombs on a target to 'one shot, one kill' scenarios. NIMA headquarters are in Bethesda, Md. The agency has major facilities in Washington, D.C.; Reston, Va., and St. Louis, Mo. Liaisons and support teams are spread out around the world. The agency objective is to use imagery -- "remote sensing" fused with geospatial information to provide information swiftly and accurately. It's knowing what's happening at any given point on the battlefield, and when, Zitz noted. Using a peacetime scenario, for instance, NIMA contributes to navigational safety, he said. "When a military aircraft takes off and lands safely, NIMA was there providing the mapping, charting and geospatial information to help ensure the success of the mission," he pointed out. "That's true whether it's an aircraft, ship or soldiers on the ground moving across terrain." Besides being involved with everything that moves in the military, though, there are those services to other customers. NIMA information, Zitz said, supports a full range of diplomatic activities, disaster relief operations, "no fly" zone enforcement and other countermobility missions, force protection, and humanitarian and multinational peacekeeping activities. "On a daily basis in peacetime, we support the intelligence that goes to the president, State Department, CIA and other agencies that help shape national policy," said Zitz, a former Army counterterrorism analyst and former staff member of the CIA. NIMA's cartographers, imagery analysts, physical scientists, geodesists, analysts, computer and telecommunications engineers, and photogrammetrists compile that data. NIMA is also indirectly involved with commercial traffic because of its relationship and support of the Global Positioning System, or GPS. DoD spent more than $12 billion developing the system. Today, any users -- military or civilian, domestic or foreign -- with a GPS receiver can pinpoint their location on land or sea or in the air, their velocity and local time, anytime in any weather, anywhere, Zitz explained. First-generation GPS receivers were relatively bulky and heavy. Less than 10 years later, they're the size of wireless phones -- and just as cheap. The technology, he said, is in reach of virtually everyone, and it's creeping into everything from laptops to cars, boats, airplanes, construction equipment, farm machinery and a host of military items. "Some technologists predict that not too long from now, GPS will be almost as basic as the telephone," he said. "They give thanks to forward-thinking DoD military and civilian leaders." ---- NOTE: This is a plain text version of a web page. If your mail program did not properly format this information, current News Articles are online at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/#News Articles =================================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. 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