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Administration officials told congressional panels a military retrenchment is a real possibility, now that both sides have gone home from the peace talks.
"The threat of force remains in effect" Deputy Defense Undersecretary Walter Slocombe told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He cautioned Milosevic, in Belgrade, against using the recess to prepare a new Serb offensive against ethnic Albanians in the province.
"If Belgrade were foolish enough to attack the KLA in some deluded effort to destroy the insurgency before an agreement took effect, Belgrade would meet with strong NATO military action," Slocombe said.
By the same token, he added, Kosovo's independence-minded ethnic Albanian and the Kosovo Liberation Army "must show restraint or risk losing NATO's support.
Peace talks will resume in France on March 15. The talks, held in a chateau in Rambouillet, near Paris, recessed earlier this week after 17 days of intense negotiations failed to produce a breakthrough.
On both sides of the Capitol, administration officials encountered skepticism over the fate of the peace process and toward the future U.S. military role in Kosovo should an agreement be reached.
President Clinton has said he's prepared to send up to 4,000 Americans to a 28,000-strong NATO peacekeeping force to go to Kosovo if a peace agreement is reached.
At a House International Relations Committee hearing, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Chair Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.) whether there was an exit strategy - or would Kosovo become another Bosnia?
"I think we have a tendency to forget that Bosnia has actually been a success," Albright said, noting that the peacekeeping there has enforced the peace accord and stopped the bloodshed.
"In Kosovo, we learned a lesson, I think, from Bosnia - or many lessons. One is not to wait as long as we did to do something. And the second is not to set an artificial deadline for exit."
Clinton initially assured Congress U.S. peacekeeping troops sent to Bosnia in late 1995 would be home within one year, but the mission is continuing today. There are about 6,700 U.S. troops in Bosnia, down from more than 22,000 at one point.
Albright said that the hope was that any peacekeeping force in Kosovo would be out in three years, but there was no guarantee.
Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), chair of the Senate Armed Services panel, said he hoped that Congress could work with the administration in the coming weeks "in a unified way" in hopes of not undermining diplomacy designed to get both sides back to the peace table.
He urged Republicans and Democrats alike to support the administration.
But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asserted: "We have witnessed another major failure of diplomacy as U.S. and NATO-imposed deadlines have passed without commitments from either side."
Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering told the Senate panel that the administration "didn't achieve all that we had hoped on a very ambitious set of goals. But the negotiations were important building blocks."
Pickering said the proposed settlement, which calls for a restoration of self-rule in Kosovo over a three-year period, "is the best deal either side can expect."
Still, Pickering said, "the key challenge in the run-up to March 15 will be to minimize the military activity on both sides."
Pickering said that there is no indication that Milosevic has softened his resistance to the idea of a NATO military intervention force.
"Our job No. 1 now is to keep the Albanian delegation moving on track," he said. "If they come along, they will have a NATO intervention force. They will have real opportunities to ... work their own future over the next couple of years."
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) asked Pickering whether a consensus remains among the United States, its European allies and Russia on dealing with the Kosovo crisis, "or is it already beginning to fragment?"
"It is my belief that it will hold, but we must do a lot of work to continue to keep it there, as we have in getting it there," Pickering said.
The proof of a link suggests that at least some of the 961,000 deaths from heart disease in the United States every year could be prevented by treatment with antibiotics or, even better, by immunization against the responsible organisms.
It might also lead to new ways to identify people at the highest risk of death, experts said.
In the new study, to be reported today in the journal Science, researchers from the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto found that injecting mice with proteins from chlamydia bacteria can produce heart disease. As many as 95 percent of people are exposed to chlamydia during their lives.
The chlamydia protein, which sits on the bacterium's surface, is virtually identical to one found in healthy heart tissue. When the mouse's immune system gears up to attack the protein, it also damages the heart and coronary arteries.
"Ours is the first experimental proof to show how bacterial infection ... can lead to heart disease," said Dr. Josef Penninger of the Ontario Cancer Institute. "The results nearly knocked me off my chair."
The results do not mean that high cholesterol, smoking, obesity and hypertension are not important factors in heart disease, said Dr. Paul Ridker of the Harvard Medical School. Rather, the findings add one more risk factor to the constellation of health problems that lead to heart attacks.
Though Ridker and some others do not believe that the case against chlamydia has been conclusively proved, they are supporting human trials to see if antibiotics can prevent some heart attacks. "The public health importance is large enough that well-designed clinical trials (of antibiotic therapy) are worth the effort," he said.
Already, three large trials enrolling more than 8,000 heart disease patients are under way to determine if antibiotics effective against chlamydia reduce the risk of heart attacks.
One of those trials is directed by Dr. P.K. Shah of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He thinks the new results "may be enough to tip the balance" of evidence toward the idea that bacteria cause heart disease.
But, he added, "The proof is still going to be in the pudding. We won't be sure until we see the results of the clinical trials."
The idea that infection can cause heart disease is not new. The streptococci bacteria that cause rheumatic fever also attack the heart, causing lingering damage. Several viruses attack the heart directly, producing myocarditis, which is often fatal.
Staphylococcal and streptococchal bacteria also have been shown to cause Kawasaki syndrome, a disorder of children that is marked by severe heart disease.
But those conditions are rare. Now some scientists are beginning to believe that infections may play a role in the vast majority of heart disease patients, perhaps as many as 80 percent of all cases. But pinning down those links has proved elusive.
There have been many findings hinting at such a link. As many as 20 percent of heart attack victims, for example, do not have any of the known risk factors for heart disease, according to Dr. Marvin Dunn of the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City.
Moreover, blocked coronary arteries show strong evidence of inflammation - an accumulation of white blood cells resulting from an immune attack on an infectious agent.
Ridker has shown that the risk of heart attack can be predicted by measuring the levels of so-called C-reactive protein, which is also produced in the inflammatory process caused by infections.
Many infectious agents have been tentatively linked to heart disease. Among them are: bacteria from the mouth, which can cause blood to clot; cytomegalovirus, a herpes virus that causes blindness; and "Helicobacter pylori," which causes ulcers.
But much of the focus has recently shifted to "Chlamydia pneumoniae" and its close relatives, "C. psittaci" and "C. trachomatis."
First identified in 1986 by Dr. J. Thomas Grayston of the University of Washington School of Public Health, C. pneumoniae causes at least 10 percent of all cases of pneumonia. C. psittaci causes psittacosis, or parrot fever, an influenza-like disease transmitted by birds. C. trachomatis is a common sexually transmitted disease and is a major cause of female infertility.
Since the discovery of C. pneumoniae, several studies have shown that it is present in a high percentage of clogged arteries, but rarely present in clean coronary arteries. Scientists have also found abnormally high levels of antibodies against the bacterium and other indicators of its presence in patients with heart disease or who have suffered heart attacks.
All that is suggestive evidence, but not proof that it causes heart disease, experts say. It is possible that the bacterium may simply thrive in the fatty environment of the plaques and infect them only after heart disease has developed.
Penninger and Dr. Kurt Bachmaier of the institute were not originally attempting to link chlamydia to heart disease. Rather, they were following up on earlier studies of myosin, a muscle protein that is found primarily in heart tissue.
Injecting mice with myosin triggers an auto-immune attack on the heart, producing heart disease. Penninger, Bachmaier and their colleagues found that part of the structure of myosin is virtually identical to proteins on the surface of chlamydia.
When they then injected mice with fragments from these chlamydia proteins, they observed that the proteins stimulated an immune attack on the heart and blocked or partially blocked coronary arteries within 21 days, suggesting that a bacterial infection could do the same thing.
They speculate that a chlamydia infection anywhere in the body can trigger a localized immune attack that spreads to the heart.
Only the mice with overactive immune system developed heart disease, however. That may be why most people do not develop heart disease, even though they have been infected by chlamydia. And Shah cautioned that the lesions in the mouse arteries do not look quite the same as those in human atherosclerosis.
"We need President Clinton to step up to the plate and provide leadership. We seek a meeting and concrete plans on how to deal with this problem," National Urban League President Hugh Price told a news conference.
Recent fatal shootings of young blacks by police under questionable circumstances in New York, Pittsburgh and Riverside, Calif., have focused attention on police confrontations that pit minorities against white officers.
Authorities must "stem this national epidemic of brutality and abuse," by ending police harassment of minorities, the targeting of black motorists without proper cause, abuses against Latinos by border agents and the practice of singling out minorities for questioning at airports, on highways and on streets, the coalition members said.
Attorney General Janet Reno, calling it a "very serious problem," said she would meet with civil rights representatives after she returns from a scheduled trip to Peru.
"There are so many good police officers in this country ... but there are some bad police officers, like there are bad people in every walk of life," Reno told reporters.
Price was flanked by NAACP President Kweisi Mfume; Jesse Jackson; attorney Johnnie Cochran; Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Raul Yzaguirre, president National Council of La Raza; Karen Narasaki, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium and Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Danny Davis (D-Ill.)
Wade Henderson, director of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, said he hoped the group's diversity could persuade Clinton to meet with the coalition.
"Today, many national organizations are speaking with one voice in hopes of (Clinton) moving immediately to address this growing crisis," Henderson said.
Foxman said he Clinton must understand police brutality isn't isolated.
"It is most necessary, Mr. President, for you not to see this as a New York problem or a Pittsburgh problem or a Los Angeles problem but as a national problem," Foxman said.
In New York City, four plainclothes police officers fired 41 bullets at an unarmed Amadou Diallo, 22, as he stood in his Bronx apartment house vestibule Feb. 4. Demonstrators have questioned why so many shots were fired.
In Riverside, Calif., the December police shooting of Tyisha Miller, 19, who was hit with 12 bullets in the back as she sat in her car, has sparked protests and charges the shooting was racially motivated.
In Pittsburgh, Deron Grimmitt Sr., 32, was shot to death after a police chase Dec. 21. Officer Jeffrey Cooperstein says he feared Grimmitt would run him over, but testimony showed Grimmitt was shot through the driver's side window, not head-on as might be expected if he were driving toward Cooperstein.
In addition to presidential action, coalition members wants federal funds withheld from police departments with numerous brutality complaints as well as more thorough background checks of police recruits and mandatory establishment of police review boards with subpoena powers nationwide.
02-26-99
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