Page 6- The Behrend College Beacon - Thursday, September 3, /998
Air Force sending
surplus chimps to
controversial
researchers
By Jennifer Lee
The Washington Post
They launched a glamorous but
hazardous career at the dawn of
the space age. The Air Force chim
panzees captivated millions with
their snazzy astrosuits and space
craft maneuvers during two 1961
journeys into space.
But in the decades since, the
astrochimps and their descen
dants became military dead
weight. Earlier this month, the Air
Force officially announced 141
chimps would be retired from ac
tive duty next year, victims of mili
tary belt-tightening and
downsizing.
The Air Force has faced a chal
lenge shared by scientific institu
tions: a surplus of ex-research
chimps and few places for them to
go once they have outlived their
usefulness.
"Typically the Air Force auc
tions off excess equipment," said
Col. Jack Blackhurst, project
manager for the chimpanzee di
vestment. "In this case, because of
the number of chimpanzees and
the fact there aren't a whole lot of
interested organizations, it was a
much more difficult problem."
After a controversial bidding
process to seek caretakers for the
primates, the Air Force an
nounced 30 chimps will be retired
to Primarily Primates, a private
sanctuary in San Antonio, Tex.
The 111 others will enter civilian
life as biomedical research sub
jects with the Coulston Founda
tion, a facility based in
Alamogordo, N.M., which has
come under intense scrutiny since
it was established in 1993.
The Coulston Foundation has
been charged twice by the U.S. De
partment of Agriculture with al
leged violations of the Animal Wel
fare Act related to chimp deaths,
said Jamie Ambrosi, a spokesman
for the USDA. In October 1993
three chimps died overnight after
the room temperature soared to
140 degrees following a thermo
stat failure. The foundation nego
tiated a settlement in 1996 for
$40,000, half of which was to be
used to improve the facilities. Last
March, the USDA filed a second
complaint based on the deaths of
two chimpanzees.
The founder of the facility, 83-
year-old pathologist Frederick
Coulston, has been the subject of
attack by animal welfare groups
for ideas including farming chim
panzees for their blood and or
gans.
The foundation vigorously de
fends its record, saying it has been
the target of a "very deliberate,
very organized smear campaign."
"There is not anybody who cares
for chimpanzees any better than
Jamaica sets hanging as death
penalty gains favor in Caribbean
By Serge F. Kovaleski
The Washington Post
KINGSTON, Jamaica -- The gal
lows in Jamaica have been idle for
more than a decade. But if the gov
ernment here gets its way, convicted
murderer Neville Lewis will soon be
hanged, reflecting a new resolve to
ward using the death penalty that is
sweeping the English-speaking Car
ibbean and stirring international de
bate between capital punishment ad
vocates and abolitionists.
Although the 1992 slaying Lewis
and an accomplice committed is one
of the hundreds of killings that oc
cur here each year, his case has be
come a rallying point for state execu
tions at a time when public outrage
over an epidemic of deadly crime,
most of it related to drug trafficking
and economic problems, has been
rising.
Lewis, 29, has been on death row
since October 1994, when he and the
we do. We pioneer in it," said
Coniston Foundation spokesman
Don McKinney. "Chimps are mor
tal creatures. They have accidents.
If you look at the number of deaths
in any given year, as a percentage
of population we are probably far
lower than the human population
for D.C."
The Air Force, which has leased
chimps to Coulston for several
years, supports the foundation's
claims of safety.
"I would say that in the case of
both winning offers, Coulston and
Primarily Primates, they provided
convincing evidence that they had
the ability to take care of chimpan
zees," Blackhurst said.
The two other organizations bid
ding for the chimps, Chimp Haven
and the Institute of Captive Chim
panzee Care and Well-Being, had
prominent endorsers, such as Jane
Goodall, but were unable to raise
the $10.6 million estimated to be
necessary to support the chimps.
Caught in the wild, the original
Air Force chimps played a critical
role during the 1950 s and 1960 s in
testing the limits of human endur
ance under flight conditions such as
ejection impacts, G-forces and sleep
deprivation. Two chimps, Ham and
Enos, attained cultural eminence as
"astrochimps" with space shots in
1961.
But beginning in the 19705, the
chimps were bumped aside by
crash dummies. Computer sensory
devices allowed for more detailed
data and "the mannequins don't re
quire day-to-day care," Blackhurst
said.
The cost of caring for chimps can
add up to hundreds of thousands of
dollars over a 40- to 50-year aver
age lifespan. Before deciding to di
vest, the Air Force leased the chim
panzees for short periods to re
search institutions such as the Na
tional Institutes of Health, the Cen
ters for Disease Control and Pre
vention, the Food and Drug Admin
istration and private companies.
The Coniston Foundation's
chimp population hovers around
650, or more than a third of all the
research chimps in the United
States. The foundation says it is
building a pool of chimpanzees for
an expected surge in research on
aging. However, earlier this year the
National Institute on Aging, a divi
sion of the NIH, declared there was
no scientific demand for a center for
aging chimpanzees.
Rep. James C. Greenwood, R-
Pa., plans to introduce chimp sanc
tuary legislation when Congress re
convenes. "Until there are those
kinds of resources, there are going
to be chimpanzees in facilities like
ours where chimpanzees are basi
cally being warehoused," said Tho
mas Insel, director of Yerkes Re
gional Primate Research Center.
other assailant were found guilty of
killing a local businessman. The two
were convicted of strangling the vic
tim, robbing him and then dumping
his body in a lake.
"In Jamaica, we have a serious
situation in which people are reck
lessly killing other Jamaicans for no
sensible reason, and it is getting
worse, almost out of control," said
Rolston Williams, an official at the
Ministry of National Security and
Justice who is involved in the Lewis
case. "The great majority of people
are firm that those who are proven to
have committed these dastardly acts
should suffer this, hanging."
Galvanized by the increasing
popularity of hangings, a vestige of
British colonial rule in the region, a
number of governments in the Car
ibbean have undertaken controversial
steps to change their justice systems
and constitutions and sever ties with
international appeals bodies to make
it easier to carry out executions. Pro-
World and Nation
Kneecappings part of street
justice delivered by IRA
By Marjorie Miller
Los Angeles Times
BELFAST, Northern Ireland - An
drew Kearney, known in his Roman
Catholic neighborhood as a street
fighter, was cradling his 2-week-old
daughter on the sofa when eight
masked men burst in after midnight.
Kearney was pulled out of his
eighth-floor North Belfast apartment,
forced face down in the elevator and
shot three times, in the ankle and be
hind each knee, in what has become
a trademark form of "punishment" by
Irish Republican Army gun squads.
His crime -- a bar brawl with an IRA
man -- did not warrant capital pun
ishment, but one of the bullets hit an
artery and the 33-year-old Kearney
bled to death before help arrived.
"They left him to die in an old stink
ing lift," Kearney's mother, Maureen,
said in grief.
Raised on 30 years of strife, many
of Kearney's working-class neighbors
describe the killing almost matter-of
factly as "a kneecapping gone
wrong." Death by mistake, they say;
if the IRA gunmen had meant to kill
Kearney, they would have shot him
in the head and saved two bullets.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary,
Northern Ireland's predominantly
Protestant police force, sees the July
19 shooting as murder, pure and
simple. To call this a punishment, they
say, is to legitimize another case of
vigilante justice in which the IRA acts
as jury, judge and executioner.
Either way, the killing illustrates
one of the many complexities of turn
ing Northern Ireland's Good Friday
peace agreement into peace on the
ground. In addition to halting car
bombings and other acts of terrorism,
Northern Ireland's political leaders
must tackle a culture of violence born
of 30 years of conflict and resolve
questions such as how to administer
everyday justice.
While Kearney's killing has been
universally condemned, punishment
beatings and kneecappings appear to
have a large degree of community
acceptance in the working-class com
munities that have borne the brunt of
the Catholic vs. Protestant conflict
over British rule. When residents are
faced with "antisocial behavior," a
term that covers a range of crimes
from car theft to drug trafficking, they
often turn to the IRA or, in Protestant
neighborhoods, to the pro-British Ul
ster Defense Association and Ulster
Volunteer Force. And the paramilitary
groups readily comply.
Most people in Northern Ireland are
fed up with political violence, as the
universal public outcry against the
recent Omagh bombing, which killed
28 and wounded more than 200, has
shown. And yet, people still feel pow
erless and under siege, and crave im
mediate solutions where they can get
them, community workers say. They
ponents of capital punishment con
tend that those condemned to death
have been using these appeals
mechanisms to stall their fates for
years at a time.
This year, Trinidad and Tobago
partially withdrew from the U.N. In
ternational Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights and pulled out of the
Inter-American Commission on Hu
man Rights, both of which give those
on death row an international avenue
of appeal. Fourteen cases were be
fore the commission when the coun
try ceased its membership and one
was being reviewed by the U.N.
Commission on Human Rights.
The move by Trinidad and Tobago,
which has won praise from the
United States for its war against
drugs, followed a decision by Ja
maica earlier this year no longer to
participate in the death penalty pro
tocol of the U.N. accord. Several
other countries have said they are
considering similar moves.
These three Caribbean states, and
Barbados, have also discussed elimi
nating dealings with the British Privy
Council, the supreme court for many
former colonies. Law enforcement
officials in those countries are frus
trated with a 1993 council ruling that
deems it inhumane to execute pris
oners who have been on death row
want instant justice, and paramilitary
groups deliver more quickly than a
bureaucratic legal system.
In the peace agreement reached in
April, political parties representing
Catholic and Protestant paramilitary
groups declared their opposition to the
use of threat or physical force for any
purpose. Political leaders had hoped
that this -- and the accompanying
cease-fires -- would bring a halt to
beatings and kneecappings, but they
have continued at least at the same
rate as in previous years.
Kearney's death, two weeks after
his final brawl in a bar, has become a
flag in the hands of adversaries in
Northern Ireland's sectarian politics.
Outspoken critics of paramilitary jus
tice, together with opponents of the
peace agreement, say the killing is
reason to keep the IRA's political
wing, Sinn Fein, out of a new power
sharing government until the IRA
hands over its weapons and renounces
all violence.
"You can't have a political party in
government with a private army," said
Glyn Roberts of the British-funded
Families Against Intimidation and
Terror. "I don't think it's too much to
ask the IRA to end all of the violence,
full stop."
Sinn Fein says the killing illustrates
a different problem -- the need for a
nonpartisan police force in Northern
Ireland. Until Catholics have a police
force they can trust, Sinn Fein lead
ers say, average families will continue
to seek out street justice against thugs
and common criminals in the form of
kneecappings and beatings.
"As far as we're concerned, this
shouldn't be happening and it is an
unacceptable form of discipline," said
Sinn Fein spokesman Jim Gibney.
"Whatever Kearney did, it didn't
merit execution, and that's what hap
pened." But he added: "Policing is a
touchstone issue. The RUC will never
be acceptable to the nationalist people
because they are a sectarian police
force. They don't live in our areas --
they occupy them. There is no alter
native to a properly constituted police
service."
Protestants generally are more in
clined than Catholics to see the Royal
Ulster Constabulary as theirs because
it is 93 percent Protestant and has been
a bulwark against IRA terrorism. But
there also is distrust among their poor
and working classes, who may see the
police as protectors of the rich.
According to Kearney's family and
news reports, his shooting was not a
typical punishment attack. Although
Kearney had had run-ins with both
police and the IRA, he apparently was
not accused of "antisocial behavior."
Rather, they say, he had had a bar
brawl with a known IRA man two
weeks earlier and made the mistake
of winning.
"I know why it was done: It was a
personal grudge," his mother said
for five years or more. It commuted
their sentences to life in prison.
Breaking away from the council
would end a colonial link stretching
back 165 years and, in the view of
some Caribbean leaders, end a hia
tus on hanging that stems from Brit
ish pressure to abolish the death pen
alty in the region. The European
Union, of which Britain is a mem
ber, considers state executions to be
a violation of human rights. Capital
punishment is not practiced in
Britain's half-dozen dependent terri
tories in the Caribbean.
In place of the council, Jamaica,
Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados hope
to establish a Caribbean Court of Jus
tice next year. It would, among other
things, hear appeals on capital pun
ishment cases.
Human rights groups have ex
pressed dismay over the push in the
Caribbean for the death penalty, con
tending that experience in the United
States shows it is not the solution to
violent crime.
"I see a very disturbing trend led
by Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago
to more aggressively implement the
death penalty for a greater number
of crimes with fewer due process pro
tections," said Sarah DeCosse, an
expert on the Caribbean for the or
ganization Human Rights Watch.
from a living room filled with flow
ers, photographs of her son and stacks
of condolence cards.
Angry as she is, however, Maureen
Kearney does not want opponents of
the peace process, such as the hard
line Rev. lan Paisley of the Demo
cratic Unionist Party, to use her son's
death for their cause. "I see them rub
bing their hands nearly in glee," she
said.
She does not want Sinn Fein to be
excluded from the new government
that will be selected from members
of the Northern Ireland Assembly that
was elected in June. "If they kick Sinn
Fein out, we'll just go back to where
we were (in the conflict)," she said.
Andrew Kearney grew up during
the conflict but did not take part in it,
preferring soccer to politics. He lived
and died in the New Lodge area --
grim government projects that are
home to about 9,000 Catholics, many
of whom are third-generation unem
ployed. Their children have few di
versions beyond a soccer ball, and
fewer prospects for the future.
For decades, the IRA fought an ur
ban war -- a campaign of terrorism,
the pro-British unionists would say _
from areas such as these. The British
army and Royal Ulster Constabulary
were the enemy. Catholics are reluc
tant to call the police on a crime, ei
ther because they see them as British
foot soldiers or because they fear re
prisals from the IRA, which does not
want the police force patrolling
Catholic areas.
The RUC sees itself as a highly pro
fessional force that needs to recruit
more Catholics but does not require
the major overhaul demanded by Sinn
Fein. They charge that the paramili
tary groups warn people away from
the RUC in order to keep control of
the neighborhoods. "They want to
create a degree of fear within their
own community to maintain their own
position in that area, to show who is
boss," said Robert Maxwell, com
mander of the RUC's subdivision in
North Belfast.
But some residents say the police
scare people away themselves by try
ing to recruit informants against the
IRA.
"You know, they'll say things like,
'Need help getting a mortgage? We
can help you with that if you help us,'
" said one resident of New Lodge.
"Well, that doesn't exactly make you
trust them."
Another excuse to avoid the police
is the fear of retaliation from crimi
nals who might be freed for lack of
evidence under a legal justice system.
Sometimes residents of these neigh
borhoods may turn for help to both
the police and paramilitary groups,
reporting a burglary to the RUC for
insurance purposes and seeking "jus
tice" from the IRA. As a result, a
criminal occasionally may be "tried"
twice, getting a sentence from the law
Research shows
rainforests resilient
The Washin. ton Post
New research suggests that tropi
cal rainforests are resilient and can
recover from commercial logging.
Charles H. Cannon of Duke Uni
versity in North Carolina and col
leagues conducted an inventory of
trees in a section of rainforest in In
donesian Borneo that had been logged
eight years earlier for commercially
valuable trees. Compared with
rainforest areas that had been logged
only a year ago, the study area did
have fewer large trees. But the num
ber of small trees was similar to that
of unlogged areas.
"These results go against a lot of
popular dogma," says Cannon. "The
main point to take from this is that
logged forests are not necessarily de
stroyed.... The forests are more resil
ient than perhaps people have given
them credit for."
The findings show that "in the
and a beating from the IRA.
But what appears to be the law of
the jungle is actually a highly orga
nized system, according to commu
nity workers, residents and police.
The victim of a robbery or car theft
takes his complaint to a local Sinn
Fein office or directly to an IRA man.
An "investigation" is conducted
through family and IRA networks,
and the suspect is confronted.
Young rowdies who cause trouble
are given warnings, and their parents
may be told to keep them in check. In
the case of a stolen car radio or other
theft, the suspect is pressed to give
the goods back. Drug traffickers and
other more serious criminals may be
ordered into exile. Beatings and
kneecappings are "a last resort," it is
said. "Ninety-five percent of the cases
are resolved without a beating," said
a Catholic community worker who
nonetheless decried the attacks.
Varying degrees of punishment are
handed out. Beatings may be deliv
ered with anything from a baseball bat
to an ax handle studded with nails. A
kneecapping may be a shot through
the fleshy thigh, a clean hole through
the kneecap -- easily repaired -- or a
bullet spinning downward through the
knee to splinter the shin.
A suspect may, in fact, be guilty of
a crime, but the legal punishment
would not be a broken leg. And in
some cases, people apparently are
executed intentionally, although there
is no capital punishment in Britain,
to which Northern Ireland belongs.
Sean McNally admits that he had
been joy riding -- stealing cars to ride
around town -- and filching car radios
when gunmen nabbed him outside his
house about 14 months ago.
"They came from behind and said,
'We want to have a word with you.'
They took me behind the wall, put me
down and took me leg off," McNally
said.
His attackers used a shotgun, shat
tering his right knee and hitting an
artery. A neighbor saved his life with
a tourniquet, but McNally lost his leg.
McNally insists he received no
warnings from the IRA before he was
shot, although he says he probably
would not have stopped what he was
doing even if they had threatened him
first. "They stopped me, because I
can't drive no more," McNally said.
Community workers argue that
punishment beatings are not only bru
tal, but they do not deter criminals.
Many young toughs view the IRA as
the establishment -- an authority to
rebel against -- and have little fear.
Some wear their punishment beatings
like a badge of courage; they may
even have been kneecapped more than
once and continue to steal or deal
drugs.
Still, many people in Catholic and
Protestant communities continue to
seek out this street justice.
tropical forest of Borneo many tree
species can recover from destructive
These results go against a
lot of popular dogma
Charles Cannon
Duke University
commercial logging operations, and
rare species that survive damage can
benefit from removal of the dominant
tree competitors," agrees Robin L.
Chazdon of the University of Ccn
necticut in Storrs in an editorial ac
companying the study in the Aug. 28
issue of Science.
While conservation measures are
still needed to protect tropical
rainforests, Chazdon says, the "regen
erative capacities of degraded, frag
mented, or cleared tropical forests
carry a hopeful message."