Sunday June 18 9:33 PM ET

RFK Jr. To Fight Vieques Bombing

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) - Minutes after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to
stop the U.S. Navy bombing on Vieques island, officials said Sunday the
Navy plans to have battleships and aircraft bombard the firing range this
week.

``We will not allow one more bomb to be dropped on Vieques,'' Kennedy told
250 protesters outside the gates of the Navy's Camp Garcia base.

Kennedy spoke after the Navy refused to allow him and a group of
scientists into the camp to collect soil samples from the range as
evidence in a suit against the U.S. government over environmental and
human rights issues on the Puerto Rican island.

Half an hour later, the Puerto Rico Planning Board sent out a statement
saying the Navy planned to begin two to six days of exercises starting
this week in which five ships will fire 600 five-inch shells at the range
and aircraft will drop as many as 830 inert bombs.

Navy spokesman Robert Nelson said he had no information about the planned
exercises.

It would be the first shelling from warships since April 1999 exercises in
which a Marine F-18 jet dropped two 500-pound bombs off target in the
range and killed a civilian guard.

The accident fueled resentment over the Navy's use of Vieques, and was
compounded by the Navy's admission later that in February 1999 it had
accidentally fired 263 shells tipped with depleted uranium on the range -
a violation of U.S. federal law.

Protesters invaded the range and camped out there for a year until federal
agents forced them out last month. Days later, the Navy resumed live-fire
training. Protesters have continued to invade the range, and dozens have
been detained and charged with trespassing.

The raid came after President Clinton promised to order the Navy out of
Vieques by May 2003 if the island's 9,400 residents vote to expel it in a
referendum expected next year. In the meantime, he ordered the Navy to
stop using live bombs on Vieques.

Dozens of islanders are preparing lawsuits against the Navy, blaming six
decades of military exercises on the 20-mile-long island for a rash of
illnesses from intestinal complications to cancer.

The Navy says the site is the only place its Atlantic Fleet can practice
coordinated air, sea and land attacks.

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