Datelines

...The State Department claims the program is designed to prevent police abuse...

...As ATAP program officer David Epstein put it in a letter to McNamara, "Please be assured that no country is accepted for antiterrorist assistance unless it passes muster by both our Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs as well as the U.S...

...All three were tried and convicted, and all carried their cases to the Supreme Court...

...If it decides to accept the recommendations of the Royal Commission, Great Britain would face a bill of $70 to $140 million, and Evans has acknowledged that Australia would also have to meet some of the costs...

...What worries the Vermont activists is that they and other American customers of the implicated utilities may pay an enormous price for this corporate piracy...

...There are others who may not stand up, but they'll start looking for other jobs...

...That action marks the only time in the memory of ATAP spokesman Michael Kraft that a community has not wanted to take part...

...LONDON From October 1952 to September 1957, the British tested twelve nuclear devices at Emu and Maralinga in South Australia and on the Montebello Islands off the West Australia coast...

...Cat's like any big corporate bureaucracy," says a professional engineer who prefers to remain anonymous...

...That's what it takes to prevent it: a constant vigilance...

...Any compensation to Australia, however limited, would open Britain to claims from soldiers present during the tests...

...A year ago, he began urging its leadership to bargain for a supplemental "conscientious - objection clause" in the standard contract to protect members who refused to work on Midgetman...

...and West German corporations who do not own shares but participate in "extraction, processing, and sales of Namibian uranium...

...The company responded with press conferences, thus generating the public debate the union wouldn't start, alerting the workers to the conscientious-objection idea...

...Only two other men, Fred Korematsu of San Francisco and Minoru Yasui of Portland, defied the evacuation orders...

...The company has held press conferences to deny that it plans to become another General Dynamics...

...utilities may get a bill for plundered uranium...

...Greiner's first target was the United Auto Workers Local 974, which represents Caterpillar workers...

...And they got to the mayor before Chief McNamara had a chance to present his case...

...There are maybe five guys in the whole company who wouldn't work," he says...

...Nonetheless, a tiny band of activists has shaken up Peoria's image...

...No Way to San Jose for Third World Cops SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA A State Department program to teach the police of Third World countries how to combat terrorists will have to do without the help of police in San Jose, California, thanks to a campaign of public pressure directed at the San Jose city council...

...Australia's current Labour government faces a growing antinuclear lobby...

...On February 10, he finally won...

...The two-year-old program has enlisted the aid of twelve others, including police departments in New York City, Miami, and Los Angeles, despite the controversial record of ATAP and its predecessor, the police assistance program of the Agency for International Development (AID...

...Before 1980, Peoria was a company town...

...If Vermont Yankee knows the source of the fuel, then they have the obligation under international law to avoid buying Namibian uranium...

...His challenge was a lonely one...

...District Judge Donald Voorhees found the Government guilty of misconduct for concealing the DeWitt report from the Supreme Court and reversed Hirabayashi's conviction for refusing the evacuation order...

...About 160,000 of Australia's 15.3 million people are aborigines...

...foreign policy...

...The complaint asks the Board to assure customers they will receive no electric service generated with South African uranium in the future, and its argument concerns South Africa's occupation of Namibia...

...It considered allegations of negligence in exposing British and Australian soldiers—as well as the aboriginal inhabitants of the test territory—to dangerous levels of radioactivity...

...We did not anticipate this sort of response...

...The Central American Action Network, a coalition of twenty-seven community, church, labor, and student groups, began lobbying the council and publicizing the program...

...Not Playing in Peoria PEORIA, ILLINOIS In the popular imagination, Peoria is the mythic apotheosis of middle America, a town where people swallow conservative cant whole, without gagging...

...decree informs violators that they "may be held liable in damages by the future government of an independent Namibia...

...permission...

...The case is based on the utility's 1983 uranium purchases...

...The Constitution is a mere scrap of paper unless you defend it," he says...

...When Namibia finally frees itself, U.S...

...He said 30 per cent of the soldiers' children had died or suffered from congenital deformities...

...And local editors and television pundits editorialize in Cat's behalf, denouncing the peace group for damaging Peoria's "business climate...

...In 1981, the three men secured, through the Freedom of Information Act, evidence withheld forty years earlier...

...Greiner turned next to the company, peppering executives with letters demanding to know their Midgetman intentions and sending copies to the local media...

...When Caterpillar Tractor Company, the city's largest employer, tried to sell the Midgetman mobile missile launcher to the Pentagon, the peace group suggested that Caterpillar employees have the right to object to working on weapons...

...But it's harder to get at the figures...

...Owners include British and French firms and a South African state-owned corporation...

...report documents the international plundering...

...Eighteen U.S...

...But a campaign organized by local labor leaders, lawyers, and the San Jose Central American Action Network led the city council to vote ten-to-one in December to turn down the Federal request...

...Who Will Clean UpAustralia...

...Although specific figures were not produced, the report shows the tests were conducted with insufficient precautions for the safety of the 1,500 aboriginal inhabitants of the vast Maralinga test zone...

...Greiner, who is sixty-one years old, is not an old-line activist...

...But union president Tony Green is skeptical...

...The theory is that it is stolen goods," says Tom Kennedy, an attorney in the case...

...I just got pissed three or four years ago," he says, "so I decided to do something about it...

...The home of House Republican leader Robert Michel, the place where H.R...

...The San Jose Mercury News reported in December that El Salvador and Guatemala might well be participants in ATAP—both countries whose security forces Amnesty International has named among the world's worst violators of human rights...

...They chiseled one small crack in the Reagan Administration's policy of continued intervention in Central America...

...It confirms cases of cancer but does not quantify the increased risk to the testing areas' inhabitants, saying only that "it is probable that cancers which would not otherwise have occurred have been caused in the Australian population...

...That screening process is a sham," counters Edwards...

...The judge who tried the original case disagreed, denying Hirabayashi's constitutional challenge of the military orders and directing the jury to consider only whether Hirabayashi was of Japanese descent...

...A 1974 United Nations decree prohibits the extraction of the colony's resources without U.N...

...In the years that followed, Hirabayashi somehow managed to maintain what he calls "my continuing faith in the American system of justice and my belief that there would come a day when the injustices suffered would be acknowledged and the convictions overturned...

...Maralinga was taken from its people without consultation or compensation and given back, still contaminated, to the Pitantjatjura Tribe in late 1984...

...It will not be complete until later this year, but Liberal Member of Parliament David Alton recently revealed evidence that the soldiers had been used as "guinea pigs" to test the effects of the bombs...

...Australian Energy Minister Gareth Evans maintains that several hundred acres of the Maralinga test site are contaminated with 100,000 tiny metal fragments containing three pounds of plutonium in "unacceptable concentrations," forty-four pounds of inadequately buried plutonium and beryllium, "large quantities of uranium," and unacceptable radiation levels—the result not only of the twelve big tests but also of the "minor trials," a series of 700 experiments conducted from 1960 to 1962...

...What the company is doing now, however, is harder to pin down, because DOE has stopped requiring U.S...

...The Royal Commission was especially critical of the Conservative British and Australian governments at the time of the tests...

...At the time, the British stated that taking part in such tests was a normal aspect of military life...

...government...

...Sue Davidson (Sue Davidson is a free-lance writer in Seattle...

...More than half of them were, like him, U.S...

...You can stand up and object to something, and they'll try to work it out with you...

...They want nothing to do with the defense industry...

...Says complainant Andy Davis, "We're trying to find out if there's a Vermont Yankee in South Africa's court...

...Two years ago, the British National Radiological Protection Board began a survey of some 20,000 soldiers involved in Western Australia and South Pacific atomic testing in the 1950s...

...Reality is what people pay attention to, so I decided to create a reality by focusing attention...

...George E. Hopkins (George E. Hopkins teaches history at Western Illinois University in Macomb...

...But even that settlement would take a British admission of liability—an action the British have reason to approach with extreme caution...

...Jubilant about his "complete vindication," Hirabayashi warns that the injustices suffered by Japanese-Americans can happen again...

...But Reagan-omics devastated Peoria, reducing Caterpillar Tractor's work force by half...

...The McClelland Report, published in November, attacks British "ignorance, incompetence, and cynicism" over treatment of aborigines contaminated by fallout...

...Australian and British officials decided at a meeting in January to appoint a scientific research unit to supply information for a further round of talks...

...With thousands of pages of documents and ten days of testimony, the Government sought to demonstrate that the War Department had genuine cause to believe that Japanese-Americans on the West Coast posed a serious threat of espionage, sabotage, and readiness to aid the enemy in case of invasion, and that the mass removal orders were necessary because time did not permit individual reviews that might separate the loyal from the disloyal...

...That was about a month after the British Embassy in Washington announced that Great Britain and the United States had just conducted an underground nuclear test of between twenty and 150 kil-otons in Nevada...

...But the Peoria Peace Network, led by a former Caterpillar employee named John Greiner, has caught the company off guard with the conscientious-objector idea...

...He was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison, in addition to the five he had already served awaiting trial...

...the report also lists several U.S...

...Through the years we've taught them good police practices and they still go out and kill people...

...Local Congressman Don Edwards supported the campaign...

...If there is, we want him to come home...

...But in the end, they'll just roll over you...

...I believe this program is a mistake, and I'm going to work to abolish it...

...Wayne Iverson (Wayne Iverson is South Bay Area Coordinator for CISPES-the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador—which participated in the coalition effort...

...Australia's Prime Minister Robert Men-zies welcomed the British tests to demonstrate the nation's commitment to the Cold War, without informing Australians of the hazards involved, with little information on the testing program, and without consulting his cabinet...

...Hirabayashi was a senior at the University of Washington in 1942 when he deliberately violated the orders that led to the wartime imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans on grounds of "military necessity...

...A Quaker, a pacifist, and a former Boy Scout, Hirabayashi says he "had no choice but to disobey the orders...

...A 1982 U.N...

...This novel idea has stirred up the community, precipitating editorials, letters to the editor, and general furor...

...An incident last June supports his view...

...The Royal Commission on British Nuclear Tests in Australia, led by former Labour Party minister James McClelland, spent fourteen months taking evidence from 400 witnesses to assess the impacts of the tests...

...Bryan M. Pfeiffer (Bryan M. Pfeiffer writes for The Guardian and the Vermont Vanguard Press...

...They came to Cat precisely because it wasn't Martin-Marietta or General Dynamics...

...The lobbying effort got to the right people early on, and it worked, in part because the groups made it a local forum on U.S...

...The U.N...

...citizens...

...Congress...

...Jeff After (JeffApter is a free-lance writer based in Paris...

...U.S...

...His report was suppressed in favor of the one attesting lack of time...

...I don't want our police departments involved in training the police in Central and South America," he wrote the mayor and city council...

...Korematsu's and Ya-sui's convictions were overturned, but only Gordon Hirabayashi, now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, got a full hearing in court...

...He sat out the Vietnam war protests, but something about the Reagan Administration's military buildup stirred him to action...

...Radioactive wastes have since rendered the lands uninhabitable, and Australia insists that cleanup is "both [the] legal and moral responsibility of the U.K...

...The State Department wanted the city's police to begin sessions of its Anti-Terrorist Assistance Program (ATAP) in January—training officers of foreign police agencies in SWAT-team tactics, hostage negotiations, the use of explosives, and human relations...

...But Hirabayashi had evidence that the West Coast commander, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, ordered the evacuation because it was "impossible" to distinguish loyal Japanese-Americans from disloyal ones...

...San Jose activists got busy as soon as they heard about the State Department's approach to Police Chief Joseph McNamara...

...utilities to report the source of their uranium imports...

...The Rossing Mine, the world's largest uranium mine, is in Namibia, and the multinational corporations that own it are exploiting it illegally...

...I just don't have answers to the political questions that have arisen," says McNamara...

...The prospect of Midgetman's 6,000jobs promised to rescue the town, though it meant turning the tractor company into a major defense contractor...

...Several hundred aborigines met near Maralinga in January to urge the government to get the area cleaned up so they can return home...

...He adds, "My whole philosophy of life demanded that I uphold the constitutional guarantees...

...The British, for their part, question the need for a major cleanup and also say that their agreements with Australia absolve them of responsibility...

...Most of the purchases are considered 'proprietary information.'" So the Vermonters have also asked the Public Service Board to investigate their utility's fuel purchases...

...There's still South African uranium coming in," says Dan Horner, an analyst at the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute...

...The alternative, for me, was to give up on American principles...

...A Vermont Yankee in South Africa's Court BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT The nuclear power industry, long besieged by its environmental foes, has acquired new opposition in the form of anti-apartheid activists protesting the purchase of South African uranium...

...A hospital in El Salvador was the scene: A U.S.-trained Salvadoran SWAT team was sent in to arrest striking hospital workers, in the process killing one patient and four plainclothes police...

...We'd stand up for them, but we won't negotiate it into the contract...

...Congressional hearings showed that because of AID's program, "the United States is politically identified with police terrorism...

...utilities bought such fuel between 1977 and 1983, according to a Department of Energy report, and DOE expects South Africa to supply up to 26 per cent of the nation's uranium imports through the year 2000...

...Haldeman, John Ehr-lichman, and the rest of their crowd test-marketed the limits of reflexive Nixonian banality, Peoria seems an unlikely site for development of new tactics for the peace movement...

...Every time I turn on a light bulb or plug in an appliance, I could be involuntarily contributing to the racist regime," says Thomas Boud-reau, one of a group of Ver-monters who filed a complaint with their state's Public Service Board charging that the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant's use of South African uranium makes customers "de facto contributors" to apartheid...

...Maybe 5 per cent to 10 per cent at the outside will actively refuse to work on Midgetman...

...The Government defended the "military-necessity" argument with unsupported allegations of Japanese-American disloyalty...

...And that, says the activists' complaint, is an unreasonable risk to ratepayers...

...In an atmosphere of wartime hysteria, with a historical backdrop of racial prejudice, the Court accepted the Government's arguments, thereby accepting the idea that American citizens may be relocated and imprisoned on the basis of their ethnic identity and without due process of law...