------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Lone opponent of military force 'agonized' before vote in House
Nuclear Safety
Missiles defense system is off-target
Russia Takes Stand Against Terrorism
They're targets: Shut down all nukes NOW!
New York stations troops at nuclear power plants
Unannounced Military Exercises Over Nuclear Plant
The Y-12 National Security Nuke Bomb Complex

MILITARY
Holy Warriors Escalate an Old War on a New Front
What Would 'Victory' Mean?
Taliban threatens to invade Pakistan
Experts Suggest Bio War Could Be Worse
Waiting Nervously for Response
India shares key information on extremists with U.S.
U.S. may allow Iran to join anti-terrorism coalition
Palestinians Suppress Coverage of Crowds Celebrating Attacks
Pakistan ultimatum for Taliban
Pakistan Moving Armed Forces
Pentagon Outlines Needs for Fighting Terrorism
War Won't Be Short, Bush Says

OTHER
Memos Lead to Duke Power Scrutiny
Report Says AIDS Leading Cause of Death in S.Africa
2 Suspected Hijackers Were Sought by F.B.I. at Time of the Attacks
Friendly forces patrol capital
Lawmakers See Need to Loosen Rules on C.I.A.
REIGN OF TERROR - PARALLELS SEEN IN AFGHANISTAN AND COLOMBIA
Terrorists targeted EU's parliament
Bin Laden: Architect of New Global Terrorism
Why They Attack Us by Samuel Francis
1998 bin Laden Directive OK'd
America widens 'crusade' on terror

ACTIVISTS
Protesters ask Bush to resist force
Anti-war groups urge restraint, introspection
In One Vote, a Call for Restraint
Please lend your support to this petition.
The Deeper Wound: Words From Deepak Chopra


---- Top Story

Lone opponent of military force 'agonized' before vote in House
Calif. Democrat says U.S. has alternatives for preventing terrorism

By Karen Hosler
September 16, 2001
Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.congress16sep16.story

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Barbara Lee did not come easily to the decision that made her the lone member of either the House or Senate to oppose President Bush's plan to use military force in retaliation for last week's terrorist attacks.

The California Democrat tearfully told her colleagues Friday night that she shared their anger at the calculated murder of thousands of innocent civilians. Like them, she said, she was filled with sorrow for the victims and their loved ones.

"Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world," Lee said during debate on the resolution endorsing sweeping powers for the president to strike back. "I have agonized over this vote."

And yet, Lee, now in her third term as one of the most liberal members of Congress, found that in the end she had to "rely on my moral compass, my conscience and my God for direction."

"Our deepest fears now haunt us," she said. "Yet, I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States."

Lee suggested that the president could more effectively combat terrorism by improving U.S. intelligence sources, tightening domestic security and prosecuting those behind the attacks.

Lee, 55, who represents Oakland and Berkeley, has a history of reservations about military action and comes from a community where many share her views.

She studied at the University of California at Berkeley while it was a hotbed of sentiment against the Vietnam War. She got a master's degree in social work and then took a job with Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, her predecessor in her district and one of Congress' leading doves until he retired in 1998.

Lee carries on much of his work. She favors cutting defense spending and converting military bases to civilian use. She criticized President Bill Clinton's bombing of Iraq in 1998 and was the only House member in 1999 to oppose Clinton's use of troops in Kosovo.

She has twice been re-elected with more than 80 percent of the vote, and her political strength isn't expected to weaken as a result of redistricting battles.

Even so, it wasn't easy to stand alone against a president and Congress united in a bipartisan fashion not witnessed in Washington perhaps since Pearl Harbor.

"She showed a lot of courage and integrity," said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, a Southern Maryland Democrat with whom Lee talked before her vote. "I don't happen to agree with her decision, but I know it was very, very tough for her. She was choked up when she made her statement."

Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, a Baltimore Democrat, said that while other members expressed uneasiness about aspects of the use-of-force authorization, he knew of no one other than Lee who questioned taking a military response.

"I think the overwhelming majority of Congress represents the sentiment in the country as a whole, which believes the only way to discourage such attacks is with a forceful and effective response," he said. "Barbara represents the one-third of 1 percent who disagree."

Lee told the House, "Some of us must say, 'Let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.'"

She said she made her decision during the "very painful yet very beautiful memorial service" for the terrorists' victims Friday at the National Cathedral. "As a member of the clergy so eloquently said: 'As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.'"

===

Barbara Lee, Congresswoman (east bay) was the ONLY vote against giving Bush sweeping powers to do whatever he wants in this "war". We talked to her this morning, and Barbara is already getting hate calls. She needs to hear from those who support her position and respect her courage, because you can be certain she will be bombarded by those who oppose her act of wisdom and conscience.

President George W. Bush: president@whitehouse.gov Vice President Dick Cheney: vice.president@whitehouse.gov Laura Bush: first.lady@whitehouse.gov Lynne Cheney: mrs.cheney@whitehouse.gov

==

Ms. LEE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank our ranking member and my friend for yielding time. Mr. Speaker, I rise today really with a very heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and the loved ones who were killed and injured this week. Only the most foolish and the most callous would not understand the grief that has really gripped our people and millions across the world.

This unspeakable act on the United States has forced me, however, to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction. September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter.

This resolution will pass, although we all know that the President can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, ``As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.''


-------- NUCLEAR

Nuclear Safety

by MATT BIVENS
September 16, 2001,
The Nation FEATURE STORY
http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=special&s=bivens_wtc_20010916

What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America's 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex--or, worse, through the enormous and barely-protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?

These questions are even more obvious and urgent than they may seem at first glance. Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility." [see www.nci.org] Meanwhile, eight years ago,in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to The New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.

That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who would hit "nuclear targets." As if to drive home the point, those same terrorists had trained beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania 30 miles from Three Mile Island. U.S. law enforcement had them under surveillance at least a month before they struck--and at one point observed them conducting a mock assault on an electric power substation. That very same weekend, a man later judged to be mentally unwell drove his station wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile Island and parked next to a supposedly secured building. [see www.tmia.com/threat.html]

There are nuclear power plants outside many urban areas. There's Indian Point on the Hudson River, some 25 miles northwest of New York City; Limerick Plant some 20 miles outside of Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, 45 miles from the nation's capital; and a handful of nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from Dresden to Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion--but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas.

So given the extraordinary events of this week, we're taking extraordinary measures to protect our nuclear plants, right?

Well, in France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants...But in America, not much is being done.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday in a statement said it had "recommended" that plants tighten security. Bob Jasinski, an NRC spokesman, said Friday that nothing had changed since then. (What about Wednesday's Russian TV report? Or the repeated insistence by authorities that there are more terrorist cells out there?) The NRC also says there have been "no credible general or specific threats to any of these [nuclear] facilities"--and does not seem interested in reconsidering the specific and, it now seems, very credible "93 threats of 150 suicide soldiers" headed the NRC's way.

David Orrik, a former U.S. Navy Seal, until recently ran a program that tested the security at civilian nuclear plants by organizing mock attacks against them. His exercises don't sound terribly ambitious--they pit a small team, moving on foot, against a nuclear plant security force that would be warned six months in advance of the test. Even so, half of all plants tested failed--and in at least one case, Orrik's men were able to simulate enough sabotage to cause a core melt. And remember, these tests did not simulate, say, the Osama bin Laden truck bombs so successful in demolishing U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

The nuclear industry did not enjoy failing, and did not enjoy shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for Orrik's tests--or to install security upgrades as the penalty for not passing. So it began to lean on the NRC to gut the program. This fall, the NRC is doing just that--phasing out Orrik's program in favor of one in which nuclear power plants will carry out "self-assessments." An NRC spokesman could not say if that plan would now be scrapped, and neither could Orrik. Asked on Friday if NRC was considering any dramatic new security measures, Orrik said he had "no sense at all" what would happen next. "I'm curious myself--will it be a sea change? Or business as usual?"

Ironically, one of the first real critical looks at the NRC's decision to let nuclear plants who failed security tests make up their own tests instead appeared in U.S. News & World Report's Monday edition--the day before, well, Tuesday.

That article quotes a representative of the Nuclear Enterprise Institute--the nuclear power industry's Washington-based trade group--as arguing that nuclear power plants "are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risk." On Friday, the NEI's offices were closed. But a statement on the NEI website [www.nei.org] trumpeted the "extensive security measures" insisted on by the NRC, including employee background checks. These are the same background checks that let a man named Carl Drega work at three nuclear power plants throughout the 1990s. Shortly after leaving the third plant, Drega went on a 1997 killing spree that left dead two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor. Nor did such background checks blackball a computer programmer who worked at the Maine Yankee nuclear plant and slept in a coffin. That man goes on trial next year for the murder of seven co-workers at a Massachusetts technology company.

The NEI statement on nuclear plant security states that the reinforced concrete containment buildings that surround U.S. reactors--they are there to prevent the spread of radiation in case of an accident--are "designed to withstand the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and airborne objects up to a certain force." In reality, as even the NRC conceded on Friday, reactor containment buildings were not built with the idea of resisting an intentional assault by a modern-day jet--certainly not the monster 767s that crashed into the World Trade Center. The literature is actually strangely silent on this point--so much so that experts interviewed all named the same study, published in 1974 in Nuclear Safety, about probabilities of a plane accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study concluded that some reactor containment structures had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large" plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons, and were probably moving at top speed.

In fact, the security vulnerabilities at nuclear plants are so ghastly that almost everyone contacted for this article balked at discussing them in any detail. Paul Gunter, an expert with the anti-nuclear power Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), recoiled when asked about one possible scenario. "Oh, I don't want to prescribe that. It's too terrifying to imagine." NRC spokesman Jasinski also refused to discuss that scenario. Bennett Ramberg, author of a 16-year-old book called "Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: an Unrecognized Military Peril," turned away some questions, saying, "I feel a little discomfort talking about that now." Later Friday, after Ramberg saw Wednesday's report of Pakistani terrorists threatening to target nuclear installations in India, and Tuesday's report of Israel thinking of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, he felt freer to talk. "The cat's out of the bag," he observed.

This week's events have changed the national landscape for nuclear power. For starters, they make the industry's gushy talk about the next-generation Pebble Bed Reactor--the reactor so safe it won't even need a containment building--seem ghastly and ridiculous.

Terrorism also has implications for the Great Waste Debate. Our reactors have for 50 years been piling up vast quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of what to do with all takes on a new urgency. Do we ship it all to a central site like the one proposed for Yucca Mountain--and create a spectacular series of terrorist targets for years, turning trains and trucks of waste into what critics deride as "Mobile Chernobyl" Or do we keep waste in vast pools on site at reactor complexes--in buildings so frail that David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says they could be pierced "by a Cessna"--and also keep producing more such waste every day?

There is no easy answer--which may explain such a sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific probability, and that terrorists had a moral impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for.

Nuclear power had been previously discredited on environmental grounds, on public safety grounds and even on financial grounds--don't be fooled, it's immensely costly, even with the public paying for both waste disposal and liability insurance. This week, nuclear power was also discredited on grounds of national security. A country that has nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed over to "the enemy" a quasi-nuclear military capability.

We get 20 percent of our electricity from our fleet of enormously expensive and dangerous reactors. Regardless of what our vice president may think, through better energy efficiency and conservation alone we could reduce energy demand to the point of not needing any of those plants--of not even noticing that they had been shut down. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that "up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself."

Given that our national will and purpose are now being mobilized, does anyone doubt that, properly channeled, we could succeed in this? Or that along the way we could also establish wind power, solar power and hydrogen fuel cells--and in so doing, completely wean ourselves from the oil of the Middle East? Surely this--and not open-ended war against every nation that has every stamped bin Laden's passport--is the path to real victory and national security. After all, as Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this week is calling his colleagues in the alternative energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to windmills.

In the meantime, we can follow France's lead and post National Guardsmen around all nuclear facilities. We can restore the NRC's compulsory security drills, and make them even more demanding. Hey, we can even consider anti-aircraft emplacements at each power plant. And we can see how safe that makes us feel when the White House starts trying to punish Afghanistan.

-------- missile defense

Missiles defense system is off-target

Ron Dzwonkowski
Detroit Free Press
September 16, 2001
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/erdz16_20010916.htm

Why is the Bush administration so intent on spending hundreds of billions of dollars for a missile defense system when, as the horrible events of the past week demonstrate, the real threat to the United States is from terrorism?

America's enemies don't fire missiles. They hijack planes and turn them into missiles. America's most dangerous foes are not nations with ICBMs; they are fanatics with twisted beliefs and box cutters. They are at war with the United States, but they have no appetite for conventional battle; they sneak in, murder civilians, and commit suicide. They are a far more serious threat than any rogue nation trying to assemble a nuclear weapon. Missile defense is useless against them.

The money that's proposed for this unproven system would be better invested in building a global intelligence network capable of detecting terrorist plans and disrupting them; in training and equipping a quick-strike force to spot-clean terrorist cells; in motivating overseas allies to join the crusade; in beefing up domestic security; and in stronger safeguards for airports, water supplies and data banks.

With the nation reeling and angry from Tuesday's incredible carnage, military and political leaders have to be asking whether this much-ballyhooed missile defense system is really the most pressing need for American security in the 21st Century. How could the most powerful nation on Earth be caught so unaware? How could all of our experts be so focused on incoming missiles when such danger was taking shape on the ground?

Earlier this year, a sweeping study by government and private intelligence experts came to a frightening conclusion that didn't get much attention but now appears prophetic.

The experts said the most serious threats to the United States over the coming 15 years would come from terrorists using low-tech tools of war. They said the threat was magnified by increasing collusion among terrorists, drug traffickers, weapons proliferators and organized crime.

"Most adversaries will recognize the information advantage and military superiority of the United States. . . . Rather than acquiesce to any potential U.S. military domination, they will try to circumvent or minimize U.S. strengths and exploit perceived weaknesses," the experts said.

They held up as an example the attack a year ago on the USS Cole as the Navy destroyer refueled in Yemen. A small boat maneuvered alongside the huge destroyer and delivered a bomb that tore a hole in the ship and killed 17 sailors.

Responding to such tactics will be the "defining challenge" of U.S. national security strategy and military force development in coming years, these experts said. Was anybody listening?

Another alarming report that seems to have made hardly a ripple in the U.S. defense community followed a May 2000 exercise in containing a terrorist attack. Congress directed the Justice Department to stage the $3-million exercise, simulating the release of a biological weapon into the air of Denver.

Government health agencies, law enforcement and Denver-area hospitals participated, but without advance notice of when the trouble would start or its exact nature. The three-day exercise began with the supposed release of a deadly, airborne plague by a terrorist at the Denver Performing Arts Center.

By the third day, hospitals were overwhelmed. "Even without the emotion of a real event, a feeling of hopelessness quickly overwhelmed a number of public health officials as well as those participating at medical facilities," according to a report on the exercise. By the end of the simulation, estimates of the death toll ranged from 950-2,000 -- including the suspected terrorist.

This is the kind of enemy America faces. This is the most pressing threat to national security. And this is not something that's going to be stopped by a missile defense system for which the president is seeking $8.3 billion -- and that's just to expand testing of it next year. The system is most often described as hitting a bullet with a bullet -- employing a combination of sophisticated radar and guided missiles to intercept incoming warheads. In preliminary tests, it has worked half the time.

In addition to its cost and unreliability, the proposed system also vexes the rest of the world at a time when we need allies in a global crusade to stamp out terrorism -- the real, practical threat.

After this past week, a missile defense system is not going to make Americans feel more secure. We need real, practical weapons against enemies who make weapons out of whatever's handy, and make war on their own deadly terms.

RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page. You can call him at 313-222-6635, or write him in care of the Free Press editorial page, or via e-mail at dzwonk@freepress.com.

-------- russia

IN MOSCOW
Russia Takes Stand Against Terrorism, but the Stance Wavers Quickly

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/international/europe/16RUSS.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, Sept. 15 - To see why Russia has enthusiastically backed President Bush's call for a global war against terrorism, look at who visited the Kremlin last week. And to see why that enthusiasm shows signs of flagging so soon, look at who did not.

The visitor was Ariel Sharon, the third prime minister of Israel to come to Moscow since 1999.

Those visits mark a compelling turnabout since the days when Soviet client states trained anti-Israeli terrorists.

Indeed, Mr. Sharon took pains during his Moscow trip to say that the two nations were "united in our concern over the spread of Islamic terrorism."

The man who stayed home was Ali Shamkhani, defense minister of Iran. Protesting Mr. Sharon's visit, Mr. Shamkhani postponed his own trip, which was meant to seal the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian arms.

This time it was the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who took pains to show Russia's other side. After meeting with Mr. Sharon, Mr. Ivanov said that Russia was nurturing its relations with Iran "and shall obviously continue to do so."

When it comes to terrorism, Israel and Iran are the two faces of Russia's dry-eyed foreign policy.

If there is a true Western-led war on terrorism, "Russia will have to make a strategic decision, and it's going to be a painful one, no matter which way it goes," Pavel Felgenhauer, a journalist and military analyst here, said in an interview this week.

"This is war. And in war, it's very hard to hold the middle ground."

Russia has been increasingly vocal in its own opposition to terror. It surpassed itself on Thursday by offering NATO unsolicited support for a global struggle against terrorist groups.

Mr. Ivanov even tacitly endorsed American military retaliation, saying the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon justified "all possible means" in the fight against terrorism.

But within hours, the Russian military pulled back from those positions. The Russian defense minister Sergei Ivanov, today ruled out "even hypothetical assumptions" that Russia and other former Soviet states would lend troops or bases to any NATO military action.

Russian officials also warned the United States that any retaliation that caused civilian suffering would only provoke a greater terrorist response.

That is precisely the argument the West has used - and Russians have ignored - in Moscow's own war against Islamic extremists in Chechnya.

Russia's view of terrorism's threat has moved much closer to that of Western nations. But where the Bush administration now calls for an us-versus-them coalition, Russia's view of the problem is far more shaded.

Good relations with Israel are one interest. Moscow's old policy of propping up an Arab bloc dedicated to Israel's extinction died with the Soviet Union.

Russia no longer has the money to ship weapons and aid to its old allies. Nor does it have a good reason: today it is Israel, with Western technology, Western entree and one million Russian emigres, that has increasingly become the Kremlin's logical Middle East partner.

Chechnya is another reason. The breakup of the Soviet Union not only helped Islamic extremists gain a foothold in Chechnya and other southwest Russian provinces. It also opened the former Soviet republics in central Asia - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and others - to influence from the same extremist movements.

Already the victim of terrorist bombings that claimed more than 300 lives two years ago this month, Russia sees an extremist central Asia as a looming threat on its southern border.

As Chechnya has shown, it also sees a threat to the mostly Muslim provinces like Tajikistan, poor and militarily weak regimes, on its southwest flank.

That threat comes mostly from Afghanistan and the ruling Taliban, the same group that is suspected of having sheltered Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the terrorist attacks this week.

It is in Afghanistan that the Russian pledge to join the West in stamping out terrorism begins. Some would say that is where it ends, too.

For whatever their shared antipathy toward the Taliban and bin Laden, Russia and the United States part over the broader definition of a terrorist.

Iran is the prime example. Although it is an enemy of Israel and on the United States' list of sponsors of terrorism, Iran buys a large number of Russian arms. More worrisome to Jerusalem and Washington, Russia is helping to build a nuclear reactor on the Persian Gulf, at Busheir, that some Western experts fear could help Iran build nuclear bombs or other radioactive weapons of mass destruction.

Iran's support of Russia's flagging arms and nuclear industries gives it a powerful voice within the Russian government, Mr. Felgenhauer, the journalist and military analyst, and others said.

So does Iran's willingness to work with Russia on dividing up the oil riches of the Caspian seabed.

Nor does it hurt that Iran is an ideological rival of Afghanistan and the Taliban, whose extremist brand of Islam differs markedly from that of Teheran.

"Iran is not a problem, but a solution," said Sergei A. Karaganov, a top official of the Council on Defense and Foreign Policy in Moscow.

"They have been putting great pressure on Afghanistan," Mr. Karaganov said. "They did what they could have done to calm the situation around Chechnya. There we have parallel interests. And we are making money, too."

Iran's backing of certain terrorist groups can be overlooked in that context, Russia's first ambassador to Israel, Aleksandr Bovin, said in an interview.

"We know Teheran supports the Hezbollah in Lebanon," he said. "But our national interest doesn't require any special relations with Iran because of this. Everything is relative in this life."

To enlist Russia fully in the fight against terrorism, the West would have to offer something beyond the warm feeling of joining a cause.

So far, Mr. Karaganov argued, the opposite is true. NATO and Washington are each shielded by a mutual- defense clause branding an attack on one of them as an attack on the other. If Russia were to take the risk of joining such a coalition, it would not have the protection of the defense commitment.

"We need some sort of guarantee if we are left alone with all kinds of political problems in our south," Mr. Karaganov said.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

They're targets: Shut down all nukes NOW!

From: Hayduke Rocks! <hayduke@efmedia.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 19:22:05 -0700

Thanks to Mitzi Bowman of the Ct. Coalition for the article below:

See http://www.usnews.com
The September 17, 2001 edition of "US News & World Report" on how easy it is to saboatge nuclear power plants[NPPs].

To everyone reading this- PLEASE call both of your Senators & your Rep through the Congressional switchboard at: 202-224-3121. Tell them to shut down any and every nuclear power plant in your state immmediately. Tell them to organize a press conference NOT with NRC[industry lapdogs & financial friends of industry] but with organizations like UCS[http://www.ucsusa.org] , NIRS[http://www.nirs.org] , Greenpeace[http://www.greenpeace.org], Critical Mass[http://www.citizen.org] , SECC. The public in and outside the USA needs to know that these reactors are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. If they don't get it now, they'll never get it.To those in other countries reading this please do likewise with your polititians and local media. Call them, meet with them. Shut them down and do everything possible to guard the spent fuel pools, reactor buildings and backup generators. Imagine an airplane crashing into the spent fuel pool or a saboteur detonating an explosive charge in one of the spent fuel pools.

The Union of Concerned Scientists joined the Coalition in expressing concern about the potential of saboteurs to target commercial nuclear facilities.

"A 1974 study by General Electric reported a 100 per cent chance of a large plane penetrating the 18-inch thick concrete containment wall of boiling water reactors like Millstone Unit 1," Lochbaum said.

"It is not difficult to imagine an intruder carrying a small plastic bomb in a backpack escaping detection and doing a suicide jump into any of the three spent fuel pools at Millstone," Reynolds said.

"The resulting explosion would be catastrophic and would dwarf the devastation of Chernobyl," Reynolds said.

"The nation's commercial nuclear facilities are not prepared to withstand suicide missions," said Joseph H. Besade, a Coalition member.

===

ANTI-MILLSTONE GROUP CALLS FOR NUKE PLANT SHUTDOWNS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2001
Contact: Nancy Burton 203-938-3952

Waterford - The Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone today called upon the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to close the nation's commercial nuclear power plants and order heightened security in light of Tuesday's terrorism.

The Coalition charged that the nuclear plants have not been adequately analyzed nor designed to withstand attack by commercial jetliners operated by kamikaze pilots bent on mass destruction.

The Union of Scientists joined the Coalition in expressing concern about the potential of saboteurs to target commercial nuclear facilities.

"While federal regulation does require nuclear plants to be protected from radiological sabotage, the rules were not envisioned to apply to the types of attacks experienced Tuesday," said David A. Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Washington, D.C.-based U.C.S.

"A 1974 study by General Electric reported a 100 per cent chance of a large plane penetrating the 18-inch thick concrete containment wall of boiling water reactors like Millstone Unit 1," Lochbaum said.

"Since 1991, the NRC has been conducting force-on-force tests of nuclear plant security," Lochbaum said.

"About 48% of the tests have been failures," he added. "In the years 2000 and 2001, six of the eleven sites tested resulted in the mock intruders causing core damage."

Pete Reynolds, a Coalition member who worked at Millstone Unit 1, pointed out that it would not take a jumbo jet on a rogue mission to unleash the billions of curies of radiation stored at the Millstone nuclear station in the three reactors' spent fuel pools.

Unlike the reactor core, which is protected by a five-foot-thick concrete roof, the spent fuel pools' lack of containment coverage makes them especially vulnerable.

"During a training exercise at Millstone, mock intruders were able to penetrate Unit 1 all the way to the refueling floor before detection," Reynolds said.

"It is not difficult to imagine an intruder carrying a small plastic bomb in a backpack escaping detection and doing a suicide jump into any of the three spent fuel pools at Millstone," Reynolds said.

"The resulting explosion would be catastrophic and would dwarf the devastation of Chernobyl," Reynolds said.

"The nation's commercial nuclear facilities are not prepared to withstand suicide missions," said Joseph H. Besade, a Coalition member.

"What had once been dismissed as incredible scenarios have now occurred," Besade said.

"We as a nation must wake up to the realities of the twenty-first century and act swiftly to protect ourselves from high-tech terrorists undeterred by concern for their own lives," Besade said.

====

September 11th, 2001

Fellow Citizens:

If I had told you, yesterday, that today two commercial airplanes, loaded with passengers and fueled for cross-country flights, would crash into New York City's World Trade Center, one into each of the twin tower buildings, and that shortly thereafter both towers would come crashing to the ground, and also told you that the Pentagon would be hit at about the same time, and another plane would be brought down too, you would have called me "Chicken Little".

America's nuclear power plants are vulnerable. And don't call me Chicken Little.

A structural engineer who appeared on CNN today said that the World Trade Center towers were designed to withstand a 707 crashing into them. 757s and 767s are somewhat bigger than a 707 (but with two less engines). However, the airplanes probably aren't directly responsible for bringing down the towers. The real culprit was most likely the fires they started.

My understanding is that the design criteria for the containment domes of America's nuclear power plants was that they should be able to withstand the impact of a 727, which is even smaller than a 707.

I don't know if the design criteria included that the plane would be full of fuel as these planes obviously were. Whatever the design criteria was, it was never actually tested. (Note that in a conversation by phone with me in June 2001, Charles Marschall, from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Region IV office in Texas, claimed that a nuclear power plant's containment dome could withstand an impact from a 747. He refused to put his claim in writing. But regardless, would any of us believe it today?)

It should be obvious now that we have no reason to think the nuclear containment domes are safe from planes. But in any event, many of the systems vital to keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down are located OUTSIDE the containment dome, including the control room, the primary coolant pumps, and other systems. There are numerous holes in the containment dome for pipes, wire, personnel, and equipment to go through. Accidents outside a containment dome can affect systems inside the containment dome, and a subsequent meltdown inside the containment dome WILL release radioactivity to the environment.

A meltdown at a nuclear power plant would be 1000 times worse than everything we saw today.

There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that a meltdown would have occurred if one of the hijacked airplanes had been flown into a nuclear power plant. We can be thankful the hijackers passed over these targets.

The spent fuel pools are outside the containment dome, providing an even easier target than the containment dome. And, spent fuel storage casks located near some reactors can also be potential targets, and thus add significantly to the danger at those facilities.

In short, America's nuclear power plants are extremely vulnerable. And don't call me Chicken Little.

Our nation's firemen and other emergency personnel are NOT adequately trained or equipped for handling a severe nuclear radiation emergency, and the evacuation plans for nuclear power plants are absolute garbage.

Everyone recognizes what an incredible job the firefighters, police, and other emergency personnel must be doing, but their task today pales when compared to what emergency personnel would face if a nuke plant was attacked.

All nuclear reactors need to be shut down immediately and permanently, and their waste needs to be stored underground. (However, I am not advocating Yucca Mountain as a solution.)

Clean, renewable energy solutions do exist, and they are far less vulnerable to terrorism and other calamities than our nuclear power plants, and provide cheaper energy as well. Perhaps quickly switching to safe renewable energy solutions would cause some temporary hardship, but nothing is impossible for our great nation, if we recognize our vulnerabilities and seek to eliminate them as quickly as possible.

I for one, want to know who masterminded this wicked act of ignorance. But even more, I want to know why we left ourselves so vulnerable in the first place, and why we continue to leave ourselves vulnerable to additional natural and man-made misfortunes? Today it was an act of man. Tomorrow it could be an act of Providence. Perhaps an asteroid smashing into a nuclear power plant. Perhaps an Earthquake. Perhaps a Tsunami along Southern California's coast. But whatever it is, we should no longer be able to say it came as a complete surprise. Very little should surprise us now.

Sincerely,

Russell Hoffman Concerned Citizen Carlsbad, CA THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY http://www.animatedsoftware.com

Attachment: Last week (Wednesday, September 5th, 2001) I attended a hearing in Nevada on Yucca Mountain. At that hearing I stated that nuclear power plants are potential targets of terrorists. I have attached an additional commentary about that hearing, which was written as an Op-Ed commentary for the North County Times (San Diego, CA). As far as I know the NC Times did not publish this item, but America MUST start to face these issues:

===

To: Editor, North County Times

September 6th, 2001

To The Editor:

The Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) for permanently storing High Level Radioactive Waste (HLRW) is unlikely to ever open. So, every nuclear power plant needs to get realistic about nuclear waste. The nuclear reactors themselves are dangerous, the spent fuel pools are dangerous, and we have no place to safely put the waste.

Nuclear materials cannot simply be taken out of the ground, used, and then placed back in the ground. It's not that easy. Before nuclear fuel is used it's mostly uranium. Approximately every 18 months, a third of the fuel in a reactor is removed as "spent" fuel. Spent fuel contains hundreds of newly-created radioactive daughter products, including various isotopes of plutonium, strontium, cesium, iodine, and many other elements. These new elements will continue to be created, and will themselves decay into other substances, for thousands of years.

Each day in America, another 10 to 12 tons of HLRW is created (mostly spent fuel), which must be stored away from humans and other living things for hundreds of thousands of years. Spent fuel is susceptible to sabotage, earthquakes, tornados, tsunamis, bad welds, cracked fuel cladding, coolant leakage, train wrecks, and 1000 other dangers.

Most of the plans for YMP are just that -- plans. There have been very few experiments done with real nuclear waste. Nearly everything is still on the drawing board. And the YMP team have computer-drawn some very beautiful full-color renditions of things they think will work. But they haven't tested very much of it. And they keep rewriting the standards. America's nuclear waste storage system was originally supposed to rely on natural barriers. That was a design goal (or just another nuclear industry lie). When that wasn't possible, more and more man-made systems were added.

I've looked at the YMP information that has been made available to the public, and there is so little real science there, that I find it incomprehensible that anyone without a financial bias would support YMP. YMP is the last hope of a dying industry, which has lied to the American public for half a century. We haven't built a new nuclear power plant in America in two decades because nuclear power isn't really financially viable. Without YMP to take the waste, the nuclear industry should rightfully go bankrupt. It was their last ditch effort, literally.

I was in North Las Vegas, Nevada, last Wednesday, September 5th, 2001, to attend the first of three scheduled public hearings on YMP (all in Nevada, although nuclear waste is a national problem). I have been to scores of public hearings, but I've never seen anything like this one!

Nevada's Governor, Kenny Guinn, spoke first. He opposes YMP, as do 80% of Nevada's citizens. Governor Guinn left to a standing ovation. Then Nevada's four Congresspersons (two Republicans and two Democrats) each spoke via live video feed from Washington. They also oppose YMP. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) often points out that the transportation issues have not been solved, and pointed again to the recent Baltimore train tunnel fire as a warning to the nation. YMP is supposed to take in 77,000 tons of HLRW. The shipments (50,000 to 100,000 are planned) will travel through at least 40 states, passing within 20 miles of about 70% of the population.

It's ridiculous. A million things could go wrong and the mathematical projections are highly suspect. The success of YMP depends on luck to an extent no reasonable human should allow!

And Nevadans, who make a living understanding the odds better than most Americans, aren't being fooled by the DOE.

To comprehend the vehemence that will have to be overcome for YMP to proceed, let me describe how the mayor of Las Vegas closed his speech. Mayor Oscar B. Goodman began to pull something out of his pocket, and as he did so he shouted (this is from memory here, but I'm sure it's close): "They tell me I can't arrest someone who drives a truck full of high-level radioactive waste through my town. The DOE says I don't have the authority. They say I can't put that guy in jail. Well, just watch me. That guy is going to jail, and he's not getting out of MY jail. One thing you should never do: Never give a former prosecuting attorney one of these."

He then flipped out his badge, and walked away to a wildly cheering crowd. These guys are ready for a fight with the DOE, and God Bless Them. We should all be so brave.

YMP is a terrible solution to an intractable problem, and the DOE will stretch out this process as long as possible. During that time, many tons of new HLRW will be produced. Someone will be stuck with protecting humanity from that waste. It will cost a fortune, and worse -- it may not work. Even if the DOE permits YMP to be built and become operational, they can't legislate away accidents or write a document that prevents a natural disaster.

It's time for every American to stop believing the lies that have supported the nuclear industry thus far. Yucca Mountain is only the latest lie (the first was: "it will be too cheap to meter"). There are clean energy alternatives available. Wind, wave, tide, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and many others. We have to change to these energy sources NOW, before another day goes by, and another 10 to 12 tons of HLRW is created.

(End of Op-Ed written for the North County Times (San Diego, CA)

-------- new york

New York stations troops at nuclear power plants

Tuesday October 16, 09:49 PM
http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/011016/80/ca2yg.html

NEW YORK, Oct 16 (Reuters) - U.S. National Guard troops on Tuesday patrolled six nuclear power plants in New York after Gov. George Pataki ordered their deployment to protect against potential attacks.

Already posted at tunnels, bridges, train stations, and airports, members of the National Guard will be stationed at the nuclear plants "as long as needed" to help state and local police guard the facilities, Pataki said.

The deployment comes as government officials and the public have become concerned about the safety of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants in the wake of the Sept 11. hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington.

As a precaution, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has temporarily shut down its Web site to review its contents and remove anything that might prove a safety risk. New Jersey has also ordered National Guardsmen to protect its reactors.

But other states have yet to deploy troops at their reactors, experts said, warning that a successful attack on a plant could kill thousands and spread radioactive contamination over hundreds of miles (km).

Steve Dolley, the research director at the Nuclear Control Institute, a research center specializing in problems of nuclear proliferation and safety, said such an attack could come from a hijacked airplane, a truck bomb or a "commando style raid."

"It's very difficult to determine how safe these plants are right now, based on information in the public domain," he said, adding "we hope that governors in other states will take similar measures."

New York's troop deployment was not connected to any specific threat. But given "general threats being made by terrorist groups, it is a prudent action to augment and enhance the high level of security that is currently being maintained," Pataki said.

At the Indian Point nuclear plant, located about 20 miles (32 km) north of New York City on the Hudson River, the troops come in addition to a series of security measures taken since last month's hijacked airplane attacks on the United States.

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. which owns the Indian Point plant, would not comment on details of the additional security.

But he said, "Imagine every possible way you can get into this plant, as authorized personnel, a visitor, a member of the media, and understand that every way you could have gotten into the plant in the past has changed."

Along with Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant Reactors 2 and 3, troops are stationed at Nine Mile 1 and 2 Nuclear Power Plants, the James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant and Ginna Nuclear Power Plant.

Pataki ordered the deployment of troops from the National Guard's 27th Brigade over the weekend.

-------- south carolina

Unannounced Military Exercises Over Nuclear Plant Create Concern

Sunday September 16
Yahoo Local Headlines
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/wyff/20010916/lo/907305_1.html

An unannounced military exercise over Duke Power's nuclear plant in Oconee County sent a scare into many residents Saturday night and brought out law enforcement from local, state and federal agencies.

Officials were quick to act Saturday night when unidentified aircraft started flying low over the Duke Power's Oconee Nuclear Station in Seneca around midnight.

The Oconee County Sheriff's Department called out FBI agents, State Law Enforcement Division agents and the Highway Patrol.

Singleton said Sunday afternoon that the military aircraft were using Duke Power's Oconee Nuclear Station, in Seneca, and Catawba Nuclear Station, in Rock Hill, S.C; and the Savannah River Nuclear Site, in Aiken, S.C., as reference points in their exercises.

Duke Power officials said Sunday morning that there was no threat at the plant.

Since Tuesday's terrorist attacks, nuclear plants around South Carolina have been brought to a heightened state of security.

Two more nuclear plants are located near Columbia, S.C., and Hartsville, S.C.

NRC officials said that 65 plants with more than 100 nuclear reactors operate in the United States.

-------- tennessee

The real story on The Y-12 National Security Nuke Bomb Complex in Oak Ridge

From: Magnu96196@aol.com
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 13:54:38 EDT

Hello Folks,

Some of you might like the real story in the Y-12 national security complex in Oak Ridge. Basically, its an industrial eyesore that some say made the entire city of Oak Ridge an EPA Superfund site, because it was so poorly managed.

The public first began getting a closer look at the nasty industrial complex called Y-12 that was operated by Union Carbide for a number of years when The Appalachian Observer in Clinton (credit goes to Ed Slavin) exposed the largest mercury spill in the US at this plant that contaminated the creek running right thru the middle of the entire city. The Y-12 plant dumping chemicals in the creek also caused very frequent fish kills.

The Y-12 machine shops used cutting coolants like PCB on uranium as a fire retardant and heat dissipater and lost so much that one of the largest PCB spills sits directly under the Y-12 plant trapped on a layer of UN-fractured bedrock. The problem with machining uranium is that it will catch on fire and burn, not unlike how the DU penetrators in the Gulf War burned thru tank armor, a U fire will burn down a machine used to make weapons parts. U fires also release a lot of metal oxides dusts that harm workers and the entire Y-12 site is contaminated with uranium dusts.

The Y-12 plant also directly dumped depleted uranium into unlined landfills and set the depleted uranium, DU, chips and the PCB oils on fire. There is some 2 million pounds of DU tossed into trenches at this industrial eyesore sight, because national security classification allowed the management to dodge regulation.

The Y-12 plant also has burial grounds that are in danger of chemical explosions due to various chemicals buried in them, example picric acid, and this just adjacent the 2 million pound DU burial zone.

One of the trenches at Y-12 also contains enriched uranium and this burial ground was observed shooting blue flames into the air from a suspected criticality, and now one has to wear a neutron dosimeter to just drive by this area. Criticality problems are always a problem at Y-12 and special handling procedures and containers help control this danger. Even with the special procedures in place the Y-12 plant was the site of a liquid moderate nuclear criticality accident that injured 5 persons in draining a chemical column into a barrel with unsafe geometry. Only one of these persons lives today.

One end of the Y-12 plant looks exactly like a car junk yard due to the Rust Engineering collection of all kinds of steel construction parts sitting around rusting all over the place.

Y-12 was constructed hurriedly in the war years of 42-43 for the purpose of enriching uranium using the calutron technique. Since then, the buildings have been repeatedly retrofitted. Many buildings are old creaking wooden types that are fire hazards and asbestos hazards. One huge building is closed that did the mercury work that was used to enrich the isotope Li-7, which was used in the fusion hydrogen bomb secondaries. This building literally has mercury draining out of the walls in the basement and so contaminated the Y-12 plant area that just digging in the dirt exposes liquid mercury.

As one might expect from such a toxic site, the work force is highly affected as well and there are many accidents. The Y-12 anhydrous HF operation killed a person because they sat on some wet HF and this toxic effect precipitated a heart attack. The fusion energy group of ORNL is inside one of the old calutron buildings and this group has the highest suicide rate at the plants. The Y-12 craft workers did really dumb things like cranking out active circuit breakers in power vaults setting the breaker on fire and causing an oil explosion. Other workers energized large magnet coils without physical constraints and cut a worker in half from the coil expansion. The fusion energy group melted down a large and expensive fusion experiment due to the entire building ignoring power system alarms.

The calutron buildings have some of the largest M-G sets in them that were used to power the calutron systems at one time, but now are used to power various extremely high current magnet experiments for the confinement of plasma in fusion research. These many high energy experiments cause all matter of accident situations. And many times expose workers to radiation and isotopes like tritium and deuterium.

The Y-12 nuke bomb plant operated an incinerator that released all matter of toxic burn products into the air.

The Y-12 nuke bomb plant had its own coal plant that emitted acid particles that would burn the paint off cars in the plants parking lot. This coal plant ran a pipeline over the hill from the plant to dump coal plant raffinate that turned a huge area into a barren wasteland.

The Y-12 plant also dumped lithium into a local quarry that exploded with such a force that a bomb shelter had to be built on the water fill quarries edge to keep from getting hit by flying projectiles from the intense lithium explosions. These explosions were so large that the town would call to ask what was blown up around the city.

One end of the Y-12 plant dumped so much uranium into ponds that the residue in the bottom was yellow and orange.

Y-12 processes a large amount of enriched uranium and tests were done at the Y-12 criticality test building that actually has fissile bubbling happening under the waves in a 2 inch deep tank. All this building is contaminated with fission product off gas fallout residues from these unconfined fission experiments.

However, with all this large mess from this ill run and operated plant, there was one other Oak Ridge plant that was much worse called the K-25 gas diffusion plant, which emitted all kinds of fluorides that added insult to injury of the EPA Superfund declared town called Oak Ridge. All matter of methods are used to keep this even more damaging toxic effluent covered up. Things like soil and plant sample stations that use K-mart dirt is used to keep from measuring the fluorides, metals, dioxin, PCB, etc. uptake in the plants. Folks grow gardens and consume the vegetables and all the vegetables grown in the town or around have Oak Ridge toxic chemicals in them, and this is lead by the fluorides levels.

This is the real story of the Y-12 national security complex. One must be wary of the limited view craft opinions from those working for Y-12 that suggest the Y-12 plant is doing better on one myopic issue, when the full story says the Y-12 plant is the keystone of a toxic disaster created by the purpose of building nuclear bombs and cutting corners to get the job done using national security as an excuse.

The Y-12 plant is a toxic industrial disaster that is worse than most mining sites. It is well known to make its workers sick, and the managers full well have known that putting workers into these conditions would cause them health harm.

Y-12's mission is to make huge nuclear bombs to kill people, which are against intonation laws on nuclear weapons.

Y-12 is hardly an operation to respect in any way, and its made little progress in openness and telling the total harm done to the region.


-------- MILITARY

THE ORGANIZATION
Holy Warriors Escalate an Old War on a New Front

September 16, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/international/16OSAM.html?pagewanted=all

This article was reported and written by Judith Miller, Benjamin Weiser and Ralph Blumenthal.

he airborne assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the culmination of a decade-long holy war against the United States that is escalating methodically in ambition, planning and execution.

At the same time, the trail of terror - much of it, officials say, either directly organized or inspired by Osama bin Laden - shows a remarkable coherence in structure and operations that is frustrating government efforts to extinguish the threat.

"This is the same old war that came to a new battlefield," said James K. Kallstrom, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Ivestigation office in New York, who oversaw major terrorism investigations in the 1990's.

The hallmarks of that old war are now being scrutinized by investigators with new urgency. They include the recruitment of willing martyrs and their indoctrination and training, the planting of agents in target countries years in advance, the preparation of false identity documents, the provision of money and credit, and the creation of a compartmentalized structure for security.

Above all, officials say, the new holy warriors are persistent. They learn from failure. And they revisit targets until their mission is accomplished.

Much current anxiety centers on whether this round of terror is over. One ominous pattern is the "one-two punch" that the jihad network strives to deliver. The plotters of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 intended to follow one devastating attack with another on other New York landmarks. And Middle Eastern intelligence officials say that a foiled bin-Laden conspiracy to destroy hotels and holy sites in Jordan at the millennium was to have been followed by a second wave of explosions.

Beyond that, administration officials who most closely monitor Mr. bin Laden's activities warn that the next round of terror could even involve weapons of mass destruction. Satellite pictures of dead animals on test ranges show that militants have been experimenting with various poisons at a terrorist training camp that Mr. bin Laden runs in eastern Afghanistan.

His group tried to buy chemical weapons and nuclear components in the mid-1990's, according to testimony in the embassy bombings trial earlier this year.

The evolution of guerrilla tactics coupled with an elusive infrastructure have repeatedly stymied campaigns by successive administrations to eradicate such terrorism. But the latest attacks have convinced American policy makers that they must now destroy the infrastructure as well as the terrorists themselves.

While the terrorists have shifted from bombs on the ground to airstrikes, their methods appear largely unchanged. Most have evolved from the training provided by Mr. bin Laden's network of nearly a dozen camps in Afghanistan which have produced the foot soldiers for every terrorist strike prosecuted in New York since the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

In last week's attacks, for example, investigators said the terrorists relied on small cells of four or five people to hijack planes and crash them into crowded targets. As they have done before, the cells appear to have received support from a larger network on the ground in the United States and elsewhere.

That use of such cells is characteristic, testimony showed in the recently concluded embassy bombings trial in New York. And the choice of the World Trade Center as a target could almost have come off of the pages of a terrorist training manual that prosecutors introduced earlier this year in that trial.

On Page 12, under "missions required," a little-noticed section of the manual lists "blasting and destroying" embassies and "attacking vital economic centers."

One of Mr. bin Laden's top aides has also written that small cells help ensure the safety and secrecy of operations. Agents communicate through the use of "dead drops" like spies, and each has discreet, designated responsibilities. These include conducting surveillance of targets, planning an operation and carrying out an actual attack.

On Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft characterized the attacks as "orchestrated, coordinated assaults" that were "conducted in a technically proficient way."

Officials said this week that the World Trade Center attacks may have been carried out by Mr. bin Laden working closely with other terrorist groups. But counterterrorism officials have long maintained that Mr. bin Laden's organization actually embraces like-minded militant Muslim groups, notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which helped assassinate President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981.

Officials said that some of the hijackers identified by the F.B.I. this week had lived in the United States for years. That also fits the pattern. One of Mr. bin Laden's former top aides told the F.B.I. in 1997 that Mr. bin Laden had planted hundreds of terrorists, known as "sleepers" or "submarines," who would lie low for years until they were activated.

The aide, Ali A. Mohamed, a former United States Army sergeant who pleaded guilty, also said that the United States was hampered in its efforts to stop terrorism because the profiles it uses to identify potential terrorists are flawed.

"Mohamed implied that trained terrorists don't order their people to blow things up," an F.B.I. document says. "Terrorists are trained and then they act."

One characteristic of a bin Laden operation is advance surveillance and meticulous preparation. In case after case, according to United States court documents and interviews with intelligence officials, Mr. bin Laden's followers have devoted months, even years, to laying the groundwork for their attacks.

Ali Mohamed said that the planning for the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, which killed 213 people and wounded thousands, had begun five years earlier, when he first went to Nairobi for Mr. bin Laden in 1993 to scout out potential bomb targets, including the American Embassy.

Middle Eastern intelligence officials have also said that in preparing to strike the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, militants in one of Mr. bin Laden's Afghan camps constructed a wooden model built to the scale of the embassy building to study how to attack it.

The millennium bombing plot to blow up tourist and holy sites in Jordan dates back to May 1998, according to Jordanian prosecutors. One of the plotters spent more than a year using a forged gold dealers' license to buy sulfuric acid and 5,200 pounds of nitric acid in quantities small enough to escape attention.

In the latest attack, hijackers who took over American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston were said to have repeatedly cased the airport before the hijacking, according to published accounts. Walid al-Shari, one of the hijackers, spent four years in pilot school in Florida learning how to fly airplanes. He was one of those who the F.B.I. said helped commandeer that plane and crash it into the first Twin Tower.

"The evidence indicates," Attorney General Ashcroft said on Thursday, "that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial."

Jihad operatives have long favored symbolic targets. In addition to the first strike on the World Trade Center in 1993, there was a failed plot later that year involving more than a dozen conspirators to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, which houses the F.B.I. In the millennium plot, recent testimony has shown, the Los Angeles Airport was one of the group's targets.

The use of jets recalls the aborted 1994 conspiracy led by Ramzi Ahmed Yousef to blow up as many as a dozen American jumbo jets as they flew over the Pacific. Mr. Yousef, who stayed in one of Mr. bin Laden's guest houses in Pakistan, and was convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, later lamented to F.B.I. agents that he had lacked the money and explosives to bring down the Twin Towers.

Several members of Mr. bin Laden's group, Al Qaeda, have been pilots. Before joining Mr. bin Laden, Ali Mohamed had worked briefly as a security adviser for Egyptian Air. And another, Ihab M. Ali, an Egyptian who drove a taxi in Orlando, Fla., underwent flight training in Norman, Okla.

Ihab Ali's "pilot training and international travels concerned efforts to assist in Al Qaeda's terrorist activities," federal prosecutors charged in an indictment last year.

Mr. bin Laden's form of terrorism is a study in persistence. In January 2000, officials say, his terrorists failed to blow up the Sullivan in Yemen because their overloaded dinghy filled with explosives sank as they launched it toward the American ship. Ten months later, the same group used a sturdier boat to attack the Navy destroyer Cole, killing 17 sailors.

It also transcends geographic, religious, and ideological boundaries. In the current investigation, officials suspect that the conspirators come from several terrorist groups based in different countries who were working together. Historically, Mr. bin Laden has forged alliances with a cross section of Jihad groups, some of which were traditional rivals, like Egypt's Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

In an indictment last year, the government said that Al Qaeda acted as an umbrella organization for jihad groups in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Kashmir.

The government has also said that there was a "working agreement" among Mr. bin Laden, Iran and the National Islamic Front of Sudan to "work together against the United States, Israel and the West." The American roots of Mr. bin Laden's jihad, officials say, lie in part in a now-defunct Islamic office on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn - the Alkifah Refugee Center, which served as a recruiting station for the Afghan war against the Soviet Union. Even before the Soviets withdrew from Kabul in 1989, Mr. bin Laden had begun expanding his holy war to other parts of the world, including the United States.

It was the 1993 arrest of Omar Abdel Rahman, the charismatic, blind Egyptian sheik in the plot to blow up New York landmarks, that partly inspired Mr. bin Laden's rage toward the United States, the government has said.

As in previous attacks, Mr. bin Laden also appears to have recruited a group of operatives all but unknown to American intelligence. While investigators have not said whether they had previously tracked any of the 19 suspects the F.B.I identified on Friday, no one has been able to tie them to previous incidents.

Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert who has called for a crackdown on terrorist networks in this country, said that none of the names had come up in his extensive research on many of the 5,000 militants who have received training in Mr. bin Laden's camps. "That is not surprising," Mr. Emerson said. "These people are the cannon fodder."

Counterterrorism officials have worried about the challenges of the new battlefield for years. "It's not like the old Mafia-type cases," said one senior F.B.I. official in a speech in 1997, "where you pigeonhole somebody and you say he's a member of this group.

"You tend to figure out who they may be associated with, and all of a sudden they're talking to all of the different groups at a conference where they are all bound again by the Jihad, by their religious beliefs and extremism.

"And almost all of the groups today, if they chose to, have the ability to strike us here in the United States. They're working toward that infrastructure."

The official who made those comments, John P. O'Neill, who oversaw the F.B.I.'s investigation into Mr. bin Laden, retired last month to become director of security for the World Trade Center. After the first plane rammed the trade center last week, he called a close friend to say that he was on the street and was all right.

He has not been heard from since.

--------

What Would 'Victory' Mean?

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/weekinreview/16SCHM.html

NO sooner had the great towers collapsed than talk of war began billowing from the twisted wreckage. "Attack on America," screamed the banners in the media. American flags sprouted over the wounds. These were not just acts of terror, proclaimed President Bush, "they were acts of war." Others saw the opening shots of World War III, the first war of the 21st century.

Allies rallied to their wounded leader in a way they never had before: NATO invoked its core pledge of mutual defense, proclaiming that the attack against one was an attack against all. Russia, bedeviled by its own Islamic terror groups in Chechnya, quickly proclaimed solidarity with the West. Israel anticipated a vindicating blow to all the Hezbollahs, Hamases and sundry jihads that plague its existence. Good and evil were at war, and it seemed improper to doubt which would prevail. "This is an enemy that tries to hide, but it won't be able to hide forever," the president intoned. "This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe, but they won't be safe forever."

In short, it was certain that America would retaliate, quickly and terribly. Perhaps there really was no choice: the helplessness that Americans felt on watching the great towers crumple, knowing that thousands of their neighbors were dying in the maelstrom, demanded action.

Yet even in the first, anguished clamor, there was a recognition that no retaliation, no war, could alone bring about the freedom from terror that Mr. Bush's martial proclamations implied. This was not Desert Storm, in which victory could be proclaimed once Iraqi troops were driven from Kuwait. This was not a struggle against a conventional guerrilla force, whose yearning for a national homeland or the satisfaction of some grievance could be satisfied or denied.

The terrorists who organized and carried out the attack on Tuesday, at the twin towers and at the Pentagon, issued no demands, no ultimatums. They did it solely out of grievance and hatred - hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage, but abhorred by religious fundamentalists (and not only Muslim fundamentalists) as licentiousness, corruption, greed and apostasy. The attack in Manhattan was not only against a nation or government, but against a symbol - the twin towers of Sodom and mammon.

That was the problem for a nation marching off to war: that the enemy was not a government, gang or despot, but hatred. And a hatred powerful enough to motivate a person to live for years among his victims while preparing their common death is a form of madness, a disease.

The prime suspect in the attacks, Osama bin Laden, probably was right when he told an interviewer that if he were killed, many new bin Ladens would take his place. His death would only promote him from leader to martyr.

There was another danger, common to fighting any disease - the threat of infection. Now and again, the fear that the pressure for action would lead to an erosion of America's own values could be heard through the acrid smoke.

"Not to respond would be unthinkable: it would diminish and demean American leadership and would surely invite further attacks," wrote Charles G. Boyd, a retired Air Force general, in Wednesday's Washington Post. "But to react excessively or inaccurately would put us on the same moral footing as the cowards who perpetrated yesterday's attack."

BUT how to strike that balance now, when the scale and horror of the disaster dominated every waking moment, and nightmares prevented sleep?

The terrible humiliation demanded a display of terrible wrath, untrammeled by empathy or explanations or doubts. Yet in some recess of their minds, many people knew that what had happened was not so simple, and except for the enormity, not even so new. Eight years ago, Islamic fundamentalists had almost succeeded in felling the twin towers, and there had been ample discussion of the tragedy that was then averted. There had been many attacks against American sites since then, the most recent against a warship in Yemen, each with renewed calls for action.

There had been many warnings, too, of the potential for massive destruction by terrorists carrying biological, chemical or nuclear devices, and if the use of commercial aircraft as a weapon was not foreseen, hijacking was familiar. Yet the focus of American attention had remained on missiles, geopolitical balance, rogue states.

"I think that what this should do is awaken us from a lengthy sleepwalk," said Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. "Despite a decade of cogent analyses of the objective reasons why this was likely and even probable, the system has found it impossible to take it seriously."

Yet the wake-up call was so violent that raw vengeance threatened to take the place of serious discussion. Though debate is bound to resume on the wisdom of building a costly defense against missiles now, the challenge went beyond deciding where to put the money. An effective war on international terrorism would require a fundamental revision of American national security strategy, as well as an admission that America cannot go it alone.

And dealing with terrorism rather than just terrorists surely requires not only stamping out cells, but understanding the poverty and hopelessness in which recruits are found, as well as the conflicts that, left unresolved too long, foster deep and lasting hatreds. It requires understanding that these are often forces Americans themselves have helped set loose, as when the United States armed and financed Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union.

We need to understand that this kind of operative thrives in a place like Afghanistan or Pakistan, that their humanitarian crises pose a tremendous security threat to the entire world, and that this requires a completely new response, that it requires intelligence, diplomacy - and yes, if the perpetrator is identified, a military response," argued Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has conducted extensive studies among the soldiers of various holy wars.

The war also requires an appreciation of the complexity of Islamic militancies and the governments that sponsor them. Israel's most respected columnist, Nahum Barnea of Yedioth Ahronot, said he was troubled by the Israeli politicians who now hope that the United States will step in and deliver the definitive blow to Islamic terrorism. The same complex of politics, grievances and hatreds that have confounded the Israelis will confront the Americans, he said: "There's no black and white in the war against terrorism. In order to fight the Taliban you need help from Iran. Or you can fight Iran, but then you have to confront the Russians, who are helping them get nuclear weapons. Or you can fight Iraq, but then you need support from Syria, which supports Hezbollah and George Habash. . . ."

AND it will require a recognition that America cannot go it alone. The people who attacked the United States on Tuesday attacked it as the leader of the first world, not as an island of prosperity. Moreover, the long-term, global campaign that the ensuing struggle demands, whether in crushing terror cells or alleviating the conditions that created them, will require extensive cooperation not only from NATO, but from agencies like the United Nations.

The outpouring of support from abroad last week was evidence that the friends and allies were there, awaiting a signal. But a question remains: Whether this administration is prepared to abandon its go-it-alone stance even as it welcomes, or solicits, offers of support from abroad.

But eventually the shock and pain will pass, and the first wave of retaliatory strikes will end. And then the depth of the scars, and the lessons, will become clearer, and the real debate will begin.

And, perhaps, the real war.

-------- afghanistan

Taliban threatens to invade Pakistan

September 16, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010916-99647694.htm

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia threatened yesterday to invade Pakistan and any other Muslim nation that provides bases for U.S. troops in the war on terrorism.

The threat came as Pakistan pledged "full cooperation" with a series of measures sought by the United States in preparation for a campaign against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who resides in Afghanistan under Taliban protection.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made the pledge in a phone call to President Bush at Camp David yesterday, in which the two leaders sought to work out details.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said that his nation would join the United States in "a coalition that will be built over time."

"We must not only go after the perpetrators but after the whole curse of terrorism on the face of the earth," Mr. Sattar said in a telephone interview from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

With Washington having zeroed in on bin Laden as the probable leader of Tuesday's strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, speculation surged yesterday of an impending attack on bin Laden's training bases in Afghanistan.

Mr. Sattar declined to discuss specifics on how his nation would cooperate with Washington, which has asked Pakistan for several measures that include:

• Sharing intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts.

• Sealing its border with Afghanistan.

• Cutting off shipments of energy to Afghanistan.

• Allowing U.S. forces to use Pakistani airspace.

• Providing land for U.S. forces to use as a base for anti-terror operations.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, with Mr. Bush at Camp David, thanked Pakistan for its offer of support, which he described as "very forthcoming."

"I especially want to thank the president and the people of Pakistan for the support that they have offered and their willingness to assist us in whatever might be required in that part of the world," Mr. Powell said.

As Pakistan and the United States appeared to reach an accommodation, Afganistan's militant Taliban leaders threatened to declare war on any nation that helps the United States -- a threat that Mr. Sattar said was obviously directed at Pakistan.

"If any regional or neighboring country helps the United States attack us, it would spark extraordinary dangers. It would draw us into a reprisal war," said Abdul Salam Zaeef, Afghan ambassador to Pakistan.

"If neighboring or regional countries, particularly Islamic countries, give positive response to American demands for military bases it would spark off extraordinary danger," Mr. Zaeef said. "We would attack such countries and occupy their territories."

Said Mr. Sattar: "The Afghan statement was not very veiled -- quite clearly what has been said is an unambiguous threat.

"Maybe it's a statement made in anger. We are not responding to that statement in the same tone."

Mr. Sattar also said that Pakistan, staggering under a $38 billion foreign-debt burden, expected the United States to lift economic sanctions imposed over its nuclear-weapons program before any terror cooperation could go forward.

U.S. sanctions were imposed in 1990 over Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. More sanctions were imposed when the country successfully tested its nuclear bombs in 1998. It applied additional sanctions following the 1999 military coup that brought Gen. Musharraf to power.

"Can you think of cooperation in the presence of sanctions?" Mr. Sattar asked.

Pakistani officials remain fearful of joining any attack on bin Laden and his Taliban backers because perhaps 20 percent of Pakistan's 140 million people are from the same ethnic group as the Taliban -- the Pushtun.

"This is a very serious concern in Islamabad on part of the government," Mr. Sattar said. "There are close ties between the people of the two countries along the border. We are people of the same ethnic group -- Pushtun -- we share the same language and history.

"What we hope is the United States will fully understand the deep anxiety that has prevailed in this country with regard to the developing situation."

The United States also picked up support from some centrist Arab nations yesterday, an apparent response to a series of calls Mr. Powell made Friday to leaders throughout the Middle East.

Egypt said yesterday it was cooperating with the United States in an investigation into the suicide attacks because one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was shown to be an Egyptian.

Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, is "prepared to cooperate with the United States as required at the present stage," said its emir, Sheik Hamad bin Issa Khalifa.

The United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries to have diplomatic relations with the Taliban, is "reviewing" those ties, a senior official told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

-------- biological weapons

Experts Suggest Bio War Could Be Worse

September 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Bioterror.html

As devastating as Tuesday's terrorist attacks were, national security and public health experts know this much:

Something even worse could happen. There are weapons that are invisible and next-to-impossible to trace.

A whiff of nerve gas. A droplet of anthrax. A particle of smallpox.

Infectious or toxic weapons in skilled hands could cause considerably more casualties among ordinary Americans than the estimated 5,000 dead and missing at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The use of biological or chemical weapons -- described by some as the poor man's atomic bomb -- is a sensitive topic, especially now.

Experts caution that a bioterrorism attack here is not inevitable. Their opinions are the products of war games rather than an immediate and real threat.

And there are those who say that few terrorists could pull this off, that this would be a much more complicated and difficult feat than it may seem.

But the science exists to launch such an attack and, obviously, so does the hatred. President Clinton said as much as early as 1999 when he said a biological or chemical attack on the United States is ``highly likely.''

Seattle thought so, too. Before the World Trade Organization meeting there, hospitals stockpiled antidotes, just in case.

A commander of Afghanistan's Taliban told The Associated Press last year that Osama bin Laden -- described by administration officials as the prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks -- was training his fighters in the use of chemical weapons. The New York Times reported Sunday that satellite photos show dead animals at a terrorist training camp in eastern Afghanistan operated by bin Laden.

Chemical weapons might have an extraordinary effect, wiping out masses of people, all at once. But the deadly effects likely would not spread beyond the people who came in direct contact with the nerve gas or other poisonous agent.

In contrast, the scope of an attack using certain biological weapons in an airport or a domed stadium would not be apparent for days or weeks until victims showed symptoms of a mysterious illness.

By then, they could have infected many others around the world. Waves of patients might overwhelm hospitals.

The public, panicked, might turn on their neighbors unless adequate medicines and vaccines were available.

Which, the experts warn, they are not.

``The biological threat is one we are not adequately prepared for,'' said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington think tank. Hamburg was New York City health commissioner during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

``This is a critical moment to assess where we are vulnerable,'' she said. ``The biological threat has to be very, very high on the priority list.''

Others share Hamburg's concern.

``I'm very, very alarmed,'' said Donald A. Henderson, a biodefense expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and adviser to former President Bush.

Skeptics said Tuesday's events, while horrific, don't mean that a bioattack is on the horizon. Most terrorists, they said, don't have the expertise.

``We need to be realistic in our threat assessments,'' said Jonathan B. Tucker, a nonproliferation expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Washington. ``A worst-case scenario is unlikely.''

Fighting with disease was prohibited by a 1972 treaty signed by 143 nations, but biological weapons have, on occasion, been used in the past. In the Middle Ages, sieges were broken by catapulting corpses over castle walls to spread poxes and plagues. In the western United States, American Indians were given the blankets of smallpox victims.

During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was accused of using chemical weapons against Iraq's Kurdish minority. He was believed to have possessed biological and chemical weapons, and the CIA says he is pursuing them again.

The United States and the former Soviet Union built vast germ warfare stockpiles. In July, the Bush administration pulled out of negotiations to further enforce the biological weapons ban.

Subsequent reports suggest both nations still investigate new bioweapons, including an enhanced form of anthrax, to understand how they might work. Experts speculate that hardships might prompt some Russian scientists to sell their know-how on the black market. In addition to Iraq, Iran and Libya have reportedly pursued germ warfare.

In Japan, a cult killed a dozen commuters on a Tokyo subway with nerve gas in 1995 after failing to spread biological agents with a sprayer truck.

With today's microcomponents, some believe a modified fire extinguisher or climate control system loaded with bioagents could do the job.

In the past 18 months, such simple scenarios have been featured in simulations with names like ``Dark Winter,'' ``Operation Top-Off'' and ``RED Ex.'' The exercises, hosted by think tanks, involved many high-level officials and analysts.

(Ironically, New York City was planning a mass vaccination drill on Sept. 12. The World Trade Center attack pre-empted it.)

Former Sen. Sam Nunn recently portrayed the president in the ``Dark Winter'' simulation of a smallpox attack. On Sept. 5, Nunn summarized it for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The 3,000 ``cases'' in Oklahoma from the initial ``attack'' mushroomed into hundreds of thousands of victims nationwide within 12 days, along with riots and a trade collapse.

``It's a lucky thing this was just a test,'' Nunn said. ``But our lack of preparation is a real emergency.''

Authorities identify six microbes that could be turned into fearsome weapons:

Smallpox tops the chilling list. Tens of millions of infectious virus particles can fit into an aerosol can.

A close second is anthrax, a spore-forming bacterium often carried by livestock that is especially virulent if inhaled.

Also worrisome are bubonic plague, ebola, botulism and tularemia.

They can be unstable and difficult to ``weaponize,'' although the biotech revolution in medicine may change that.

``Genetic modification of organisms can make them resistant to antibiotics and more difficult to detect,'' said Dr. Eric Noji of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. ``Of all the great things to come from the sequencing of the human genome, the downside is its potential for evil use.''

Tucker and other security experts aren't convinced.

Seed cultures of infectious agents are uncommon and hard to grow, they said. Smallpox was eradicated in 1979; only samples remain under top security here and in Russia. And, they are hard to disperse reliably.

As a wet slurry, biomaterials tend to clump and clog sprayers.

As a dry powder, the process is even more difficult and dangerous, they said.

Still, authorities recommend some steps.

First, money. Hamburg suggests using some of Congress' $40 billion war chest toward addressing bioterror.

And medicine. Nunn says there are only 12 million doses of smallpox vaccines in the nation now. CDC has contracted for 40 million more -- still only enough for one in seven Americans, and they won't be ready for several years.

Illness reports could be better shared to detect infection clusters.

But most doctors haven't seen a real epidemic, or treated the illnesses on the bioterror list.

In a Minnesota test, former state epidemiologist Michael Osterholm reported an emergency specialist failed to diagnose anthrax. Radiologists missed it on lung X-rays.

In a matter of days, Osterholm warned, it would be ``the closest thing to a living hell we've probably ever known.''

The first symptoms? Like the flu.

In that test, the world we know didn't end with a bang, but a sniffle.

-------- china

IN BEIJING
Waiting Nervously for Response

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/international/16CHIN.html

BEIJING, Sept. 15 - In President Bush's declared epic battle between good and evil, China clearly hopes to be counted among the good guys.

Most people here reacted with horror and compassion to the deadly attacks in the United States, although some hotheads - especially some young men who write on the Internet - said the United States had it coming.

Once the magnitude of the crimes sank in here, the government's expressions of sympathy became less restrained and President Jiang Zemin, in a friendly phone call to President Bush, made a vague promise of support for a global attack on terrorism.

But Chinese leaders would have to take a big gulp before endorsing American military strikes abroad. They are waiting nervously to see just how Washington chooses to retaliate, worried that an overly robust campaign could run up against Chinese strategic interests.

"China is put in a very awkward situation," said Jin Canrong, an expert on American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

China's quest for modernization and global economic ties remains the top priority, Mr. Jin noted, and that means cultivating good relations with the United States and being counted as a friend during the current crisis.

China's leaders are also very much aware that their own country is a potential target of radical Islamic terror. There is already suspicion that small numbers of Uighur Muslim separatists in the western region of Xinjiang have received training or aid from the Taliban.

At the same time, China is fearful of America's global domination and might, and generically opposes virtually all military intervention in sovereign countries. That stance was reflected in the vehement opposition to NATO's air war in Yugoslavia.

From a geo-strategic stance, Mr. Jin noted, China cannot cheer any expansion of the American military presence in the vicinity of Central Asia, as would occur if American troops entered Afghanistan.

China's support would come easier if Washington made a serious stop at the United Nations before it struck. "It would be best if the United States seeks United Nations endorsement first," said Shen Dingli, deputy director of American studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. "The Chinese would certainly give their support."

But even if the United States and NATO retaliate without United Nations approval, Mr. Shen said, the Chinese government is not likely to play the kind of angry, obstructive role it did in the Kosovo conflict. "I don't think China will denounce the actions, as long as the United States presents good evidence linking its targets to the crime," Mr. Shen said.

China felt threatened by the Kosovo war because, in the eyes of strategists here, it was intervention into internal affairs on cloudy "humanitarian" grounds, and carried out without seeking United Nations approval to boot. Leaders here feared that a precedent was being set for future Western intervention in a conflict over Taiwan, or perhaps Tibet.

But the latest attacks on American soil present a different case, many intellectuals here say, in part because of the extreme nature of the provocation and in part because of the partial convergence of Chinese and American interests.

China's main approach to controlling the smoldering separatist movement in Xinjian, in addition to keeping a chokehold internally, has been to cultivate relations with bordering Muslim states like Kazakhstan, offering commerce and friendship in return for their control over Chinese Uighur exiles. In an apparent effort to repeat that strategy of co-optation, China has even developed modest commercial and political contacts with the Taliban, though it has not granted formal recognition.

Still, experts here say, Chinese leaders would not mind seeing the fall of a destabilizing group like the Taliban. But the leaders will never say this out loud, because this would run up against China's long-held principle of "noninterference" as well as to invite reprisals.

In lively interchanges on Web sites, some writers, mostly anonymous, have gloated at America's comeuppance and one military expert, a co-author of a hawkish book called "Unlimited War," Qiao Liang, said that while Tuesday's dead and injured were victims of terrorism, "they are also the sacrificial victims of the United States government's policies."

But many intellectuals have condemned those who, as one letter posted by a group of Beijing liberals put it, have "taken joy from suffering." The group of scholars and editors said the gleeful responses underscored the urgent need for a thorough overhaul of the systems of propaganda and censorship that have often bred anti-Americanism.

-------- india

India shares key information on extremists with U.S.

USA TODAY
09/16/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/09/16/india-help.htm

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - Indian intelligence officials say they have shared sensitive information with the United States about Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including photographs, maps - and footage of militants using a picture of former President Clinton for target practice. A top Indian intelligence official told The Associated Press the information was evidence describing how Osama bin Laden and other Muslim militant leaders were financing guerrilla groups and running armed training camps in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

The official said the intelligence gathered over the years by India - Pakistan's eastern neighbor and its enemy in three wars since 1947 - can be of crucial help in the American investigation into the terror attacks on New York and Washington.

The documents provided to U.S. investigators included transcripts of conversations among militant groups and descriptions, locations, photographs and video footage of camps, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said video clips showed members of groups including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba - a large Pakistan-based militant organization that is fighting to separate the Indian-ruled portion of disputed Kashmir from India - firing at enlarged photographs of Clinton during training.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is among the most active groups battling Indian troops in Indian Kashmir. There are several strong militant Islamic groups operating in Pakistan, and tens of thousands of religious schools that turn out young boys dedicated to jihad, or holy war.

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and other militant groups have sharply criticized Pakistan's promise of cooperation with the United States in seeking to find and punish those behind the terror attacks.

U.S. officials say bin Laden, a Saudi exile who operates in Afghanistan under protection of its hard-line Islamic Taliban rulers, is the prime suspect.

A top Pakistani government official said Sunday that a delegation of senior Pakistani officials will go to Afghanistan on Monday to demand that the Taliban hand bin Laden over to the United States.

The Indian intelligence official said the United States has not asked India for permission to use its airspace or refueling facilities for possible air strikes on Afghanistan.

Two of the three wars fought between mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan have been over Kashmir, a disputed Himalayan province both claim in its entirety. Both countries conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

-------- iran

U.S. may allow Iran to join anti-terrorism coalition

USA TODAY
09/16/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/16/us-iran.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department said Saturday night it is willing to explore the possibility of welcoming Iran into an international coalition to fight terrorism. Spokeswoman Brenda Greenberg said Iran's "very positive" responses to Tuesday's terrorist attacks in the United States and "the sentiments that they raise" are worth exploring to see if a cooperative relationship in fighting terrorism is possible. She also noted that Iran has a long history of opposition to Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The United States has been at odds with the Taliban as well because it has given shelter to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is a suspect in the terrorist attacks. "We will not rule out the possibility of any country working with the United States and the international community in our fight against terrorism," Greenberg said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has been pushing for global anti-terrorism front since Wednesday, the day after the attacks in New York and Virginia.

After Tuesday's attacks, Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, condemned global terrorism and said it is an "international duty" to try to undermine it.

Greenberg's statement was the first of a positive nature about Iran since the Bush administration took office. The Clinton administration tried without success to open an official dialogue with Iran.

Powell withdrew the offer of talks with Iran last spring and said discussions can occur only when it "makes some sense."

For years, the State Department has said Iran is the world's principal exporter of terrorism. There have been no political discussions between the two countries for more than two decades, the result of bitter opposition to the United States from hardline clerics in Iran who control national security policy.

The first hint of a fresh look at Iran occurred Thursday when Richard Haass, a top State Department planning aide, floated the idea of a role for Iran in the proposed anti-terrorism coalition during an interview with BBC.

He cited Iran's positive response to the terrorist attacks.

At the time, Haass appeared to offer a personal opinion because other State Department officials were cool to an Iranian role in the coalition.

A senior official said then it would be just speculation to suggest Iran could be counted on to take action against terrorism.

Another official, also speaking privately, said signing up Iran and other U.S. adversaries in the proposed coalition would ensure its ineffectiveness because these countries would attempt to block decisive action.

James Philips, a Middle East expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he would be "extremely suspicious" that countries such as Iran and Libya could make a positive contribution to the proposed coalition.

Phillips said he might change his mind "if they would be willing to offer bases. That would be proof they would be serious in helping us stage possible air strikes."

Lee Feinstein, who was a top State Department aide in the Clinton administration, said a diverse coalition that includes Muslim countries would be more viable politically than one limited largely to Western allies.

He said Iran might be a helpful addition so long as unanimity is not a prerequisite for coalition action. He added that he does "not want to be in a position of dropping the legitimate concerns the administration has about Iranian actions in the Middle East."

-------- israel

Palestinians Suppress Coverage of Crowds Celebrating Attacks
Journalists Are Threatened;
Officials Contend Images Present a Distorted View of Public Opinion

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page A42
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38351-2001Sep15?language=printer

JERUSALEM, Sept. 15 -- Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority is trying to suppress broadcast images and photos of Palestinians glorifying the terrorist attacks on the United States and hailing their suspected mastermind, exiled Saudi financier Osama bin Laden.

Palestinian officials have told local representatives of foreign news agencies and television stations on several occasions that their employees' safety could be jeopardized if videotapes showing Palestinians celebrating the attacks were aired. Broadcast news organizations operating in the Palestinian-ruled portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have complied.

The suppression of the images is part of a concerted campaign by Arafat and his lieutenants to avoid being perceived in the West as part of the international terrorist scourge. Having sided with Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the Palestinians are eager to avoid a similar political blunder this time, analysts say.

Palestinian officials acknowledge suppressing the images, arguing that they distorted actual public opinion and would be used by Israel to mount a smear campaign against Arafat and his government. "These measures were not against the freedom of the press but in order to ensure our national security and our national interest," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian information minister. "We will not permit a few kids here or there to smear the real face of the Palestinians. This is a real insult to our people and our nation."

Meanwhile, Arafat was filmed donating blood for the victims of the attacks in Washington and New York, and he seemed suddenly more receptive to negotiations with the Israelis. Palestinian schoolchildren were made to stand in silence to commemorate the American victims, Palestinian officials and journalists signed a petition of sympathy and the Palestinian Legislative Council met in a special session to express its grief. Palestinians also held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Consulate in East Jerusalem.

Still, many Palestinians deeply resent the United States for supporting Israel and supplying it with weapons that have been used against them in the past year's Middle East violence. On several occasions since Tuesday, those anti-American sentiments have burst into public view.

Hours after the attacks Tuesday, Associated Press Television videotaped a small group of Palestinians, some of them children, rejoicing in East Jerusalem. That footage infuriated Americans and alarmed Palestinian officials, who moved swiftly to block the release of similar images elsewhere.

The same day, Palestinian police stopped photographers from covering a celebratory rally in the West Bank town of Nablus. Drivers honked their car horns, gunmen fired into the air and revelers handed out sweets, according to journalists at the scene.

Shortly thereafter, a Palestinian militia member threatened an Associated Press cameraman who managed to videotape the rally, demanding that the tape not be released. A high-ranking Palestinian official, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, told the AP bureau chief in Jerusalem, Dan Perry, that the cameraman's safety could not be ensured if the footage were released. AP decided not to release the footage, said Jack Stokes, a spokesman for the news agency in New York.

The Foreign Press Association in Israel, which Perry chairs, condemned the "direct threats" and "harassment" of journalists by the Palestinian authorities and gunmen.

On Friday, Palestinian police arrested five journalists in the Gaza Strip who were covering a rally of the militant Hamas organization in memory of an Israeli Arab suicide bomber who killed himself and three Israeli Jews. At least one person at the rally held up a poster of bin Laden.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces fired missiles on Palestinian security buildings and, combined with a pair of shooting incidents, three Palestinians were killed and more than 30 injured today, according to news agency reports. The strikes came as Israeli officials said talks tentatively planned for Sunday in Gaza between Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres would not take place.

[Early Sunday, Israeli tanks thrust into the center of the West Bank city of Ramallah, firing rounds while helicopters launched missiles, Palestinian witnesses told news services. The Israeli army declined to comment.

[A Palestinian military intelligence officer was killed in the incursion, and 15 people were wounded. The tanks began to withdraw from the area about four hours later.]

-------- pakistan

Report: Pakistan ultimatum for Taliban

UPI
September 16, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/nobyline-20019169456.htm

KARACHI, Pakistan, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- Pakistan officials Monday will deliver an ultimatum Monday to Afghanistan's Taliban leadership, to turn over in three days the prime suspect in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Osama bin Laden, or face a U.S. attack, CNN reported Sunday.

In return, Pakistan has told the United States neither India nor Israel can be involved in any military action and has asked for United States' help in restructuring its $30 billion international debt and for some relief from U.S. economic sanctions, the report said.

While action by ground troops is not contemplated, Pakistan will accommodate the needs of any air cover operation, CNN said.

Pakistan shares a 1,400 mile border with Afghanistan.

The Pakistani emissary's planned visit follows a late-night conversation between U.S. President George W. Bush and Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Mucharraf, CNN reported. On Sunday Mucharraf met with a wide variety of academic, political and media leaders to discuss Pakistan's decision to grant the U.S. most of the help it requested.

The spiritual leader of the Taliban movement, Mullah Mohammad Omar, called Islamic clerics to gather in Kabul on Sunday for an urgent meeting.

--------

Pakistan Moving Armed Forces
Focus Shifts From India as 'Full Support' for U.S. Is Vowed

By Molly Moore and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38395-2001Sep15?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 15 -- The Pakistani military today began repositioning air defenses and naval forces as the government announced it had agreed to give "full support" to U.S. requests for efforts to combat international terrorism, according to senior military officials.

The officials said the armed forces have begun redirecting some air, sea and ground forces away from India in anticipation of a possible missile and aerial attack against neighboring Afghanistan by the United States in retribution for Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Most of Pakistan's military forces are now directed against India, with which it has fought three wars, two of them over the disputed state of Kashmir. Details of the troop and military movements were not disclosed.

The military also was preparing plans to protect the country's many nuclear facilities -- for weapons, research and energy -- from the possibility of a stray missile or other aerial accident, officials said. Pakistan conducted five underground nuclear tests in 1998 and has numerous nuclear facilities scattered throughout the country, including a large enrichment plant 20 miles from Islamabad, the capital.

Pakistani authorities have expressed worry that the announcement of their decision to honor U.S. requests for cooperation could unleash violent unrest among Islamic groups that support the extremist Taliban militia in Afghanistan. The Taliban harbors Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. officials have identified as the primary suspect behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Both Pakistan and Iran said today they are trying to bolster security on their borders to deter an expected rush of Afghans fleeing the country. Many residents of Kabul, the Afghan capital, were already reported leaving the city today, while others began digging bunkers and stocking food items in preparation for an assault.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar, in a carefully worded statement, said today, "We have reached a consensus on the policy of giving full support to the world community in combating international terrorism."

The Pakistani cabinet and National Security Council met for four hours today, confirming decisions made by the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his senior generals after another long session on Thursday.

Although Sattar provided no details, senior Pakistani officials said they have agreed to open Pakistan airspace to missile and air attacks against Afghanistan, to provide detailed intelligence information to the United States on bin Laden and the Taliban, and to make greater efforts to control illicit fuel and other materials from crossing the border into Afghanistan.

Officials here also said Pakistan will permit military logistical and technical personnel to operate at Pakistani air bases, ports and some other locations in support of attacks against Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani officials involved in the negotiations said the United States has not sought permission to put ground combat forces in Pakistan. If asked, they said, the Pakistani government would consider a request for a multinational force that included representatives of Muslim nations.

The Pakistani military has said Pakistani forces -- many of whom have worked closely with the Taliban, including helping direct some of its military operations -- would not participate in any attack against Afghanistan.

As Pakistani officials were announcing their decision, the military was preparing contingency plans to cope with a potentially violent backlash against the government from radical Islamic groups in Pakistan, as well as terrorist attacks by the Taliban against Pakistan.

The United States has asked Pakistan to provide detailed intelligence information on the known locations and training camps of bin Laden as well as the headquarters, training locations and military equipment of the Taliban.

The Taliban's envoy in Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said at a news conference today that the Taliban would declare war on any country that cooperates in an attack against Afghanistan. He said the Taliban could order troops across the border of any participating country, though he stopped short of mentioning Pakistan by name.

"Pakistan has taken certain precautions in view of the tense situation," Foreign Minister Sattar said. "We have increasing vigilance on our borders. We do not want our borders violated by anyone."

He said Pakistani officials have been meeting with Taliban authorities.

In one sign of potential internal unrest, several hundred religious men gathered before a central Islamabad mosque late today and waved banners that read, "An attack against Osama is an attack against us all."

-------- u.s.

THE MILITARY
Pentagon Outlines Needs for Fighting Terrorism

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/national/16MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - As the Bush administration debates options for a broad, new kind of military campaign against terrorism, the Pentagon is describing what it needs to fight it - better intelligence, more cruise missiles and special forces, all to be financed with billions in emergency spending.

Combined with President Bush's decision on Friday to authorize the military to call up 50,000 reservists, mostly for defending the nation, the Pentagon spending outline illustrates how it will sustain a long-term offensive against terrorism.

The draft request for military spending proposes to buy more unmanned surveillance drones and high-technology reconnaissance aircraft, to enhance defenses for troops against chemical and biological weapons, and to speed the conversion of two Trident nuclear submarines to carry cruise missiles. And it projects payments for troops and for the reservists to stay on higher alert.

Military officials say they are prepared to strike with cruise missiles, manned bombers and, potentially, the special forces of any of the services as soon as the president gives the order, something that would require firm intelligence on the location of those who plotted and abetted the attacks on Tuesday.

But every indication is that the administration is developing a long- term offensive against an enemy whose soldiers hide in caves, but whose patrons are governments with central banks, power grids and organized armed forces.

"It's all very complicated," said one senior general involved in the planning. "If there was a quick and easy solution to this, you would have seen it by now."

Indeed, military strategists plan for nearly every imaginable contingency. But this situation does not resemble North Korea invading South Korea or Iraqi tanks rolling south toward Kuwait. No battle strategy for eliminating terrorists has been tested in war games and constantly updated.

"There is no campaign plan yet," said one senior officer at the military's European Command, whose 45 combat planes, including F-15's and F-16's, that fly patrols over northern Iraq could be shifted to other targets in the region.

The Pentagon said its budget request "funds those costs directly associated with the need to respond to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks" and "provides funds for enhancing America's capability to wage war against terrorism."

In its desire not only to provide more money for the Pentagon but to weave new international coalitions to attack terrorists in their bunkers and their bank accounts, Pentagon and administration officials describe a military buildup to rival that of President Ronald Reagan.

But officials already note the challenge of balancing the public's desire for immediate military action and the need to carefully arrange diplomatic coalitions, economic measures to squeeze the terrorists and a concerted military response.

"We're not going to fight this war with large arrays of soldiers on the battlefield," another senior general said. "We're not gearing up to punish. We're gearing up to eradicate the terrorism. And that's a different ball game."

With officials saying evidence is mounting linking the terrorist attacks to followers of Osama bin Laden, the militant Islamic leader, military planners in Washington and at the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., which oversees American military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, have been matching intelligence information with possible targets.

But taking aim at terrorists is extremely difficult. Senior military commanders say Mr. bin Laden's training camps have emptied. The Taliban government in Afghanistan, which has permitted Mr. bin Laden to operate his camps, has dispersed much of their military equipment, a senior Pentagon officer said today.

One Navy aircraft carrier, the Carl Vinson, is steaming in the Persian Gulf; a second, the Enterprise, is in the North Arabian Sea. Each has more than 40 attack aircraft on board. Other ships and submarines in the battle group can fire dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The United States has scores of fighter jets in the region that have been enforcing a "no fly" zone over northern and southern Iraq and they could be shifted to ground targets in Afghanistan or other countries.

And long-range Air Force bombers could be launched from the United States or the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

To begin preparation for a possible campaign, European commanders have canceled five training exercises and cut short another, sending hundreds of marines, soldiers, sailors and pilots back to battle stations.

Any sustained new military campaign would be expensive. The armed services are already identifying what weapons, precision munitions and fuel they would need, civilian and military officials said. But the armed forces are still waiting to learn what their share will be of the billions of dollars in emergency budget money proposed by President Bush and approved by Congress.

The call-up of reservists, the first since the 265,000 were summoned in the Persian Gulf war, will upset the lives of thousands of people.

"You disrupt their families, their jobs," said Lt. Gen. Russell Davis, the chief of the National Guard Bureau. "And if it's necessary, we certainly will do that."

Pentagon officials said today that the level of alert had been lowered at bases in the United States and elsewhere, except for some in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

After the attacks, the military was ordered to Force Protection Condition Delta, the highest of the four alphabetical levels of threat. Most have been ordered back to level Charlie, but even that may require the additional help of reservists.

--------

War Won't Be Short, Bush Says
Pakistan, Iran Beef Up Their Borders With Afghanistan

By David Von Drehle and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38044-2001Sep15?language=printer

President Bush met yesterday with senior advisers to plan a war that he warned "will not be short . . . will not be easy," as the repercussions of Tuesday's terror attacks were felt halfway around the world. Pakistan and Iran moved to bolster security at their borders with Afghanistan, a likely American target for reprisal.

"My message is for everybody who wears the uniform: Get ready," Bush said as he began a meeting with his national security team at Camp David. "The United States will do what it takes to win this war. And I ask patience of the American people."

For the fifth day, Bush upped the intensity of his war talk, specifically ruling out a single retaliatory raid or strike. "The course to victory may be long," he said in his weekly radio address.

In Afghanistan, government leaders and common folk grew convinced that the course will begin there. As residents of Kabul, the capital, stockpiled what food they could find or tried to flee the city, the leader of the ruling Taliban militia warned of a coming "holy war." Mohammad Omar exhorted his country to "stand proud as Afghans in the defense of Islam," in a rare speech broadcast to his impoverished, almost medieval, nation.

Omar also swore vengeance against any neighboring country that lends help to the United States.

The warning was surely aimed foremost at Pakistan. Previously a supporter of the Taliban, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor has agreed to an initial list of requests from the United States. These include access to ports and air space, an end to Pakistan's economic and military support for the Taliban, tightening of security along its 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan, and a promise to arrest the associates of millionaire Islamic radical Osama bin Laden, the suspected sponsor of Tuesday's attacks. The Taliban has provided safe haven for him and his forces.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly praised Pakistan at the beginning of yesterday's Camp David strategy session, and later Bush spoke by phone with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. But behind the scenes, American officials are waiting to see tangible action. "The track record of Pakistan has been a very mixed one," a senior administration official said. "There has been a credibility problem.

The ruling generals in Islamabad havenot been asked to allow American troops on their soil, but Pakistani officials said they would consider a request for a multinational force that includes representatives from Muslim countries.

When the American strategy is further developed for the military, covert, financial and diplomatic assault on bin Laden and other terrorist groups, Pakistan will be asked for yet more assistance. "That's not the final list, not the only list," a senior administration official said. "Additional requests will be made once we decide what we're going to do."

If the president decides to move against bin Laden and the Afghan government, one U.S. official said, the strategy could entail a significant, but complicated, covert attempt to pull Afghan tribes into the fight against the Taliban. "There are certainly plans and ideas for things," the official said.

Opposition groups in both northern and southern Afghanistan would constitute a crucial part of any U.S. offensive, an administration official said. Strategists are considering increased support for the Northern Alliance, a rival to the Taliban that controls a portion of the country. The alliance may have a grudge against bin Laden -- its charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, died last week after an attack by a suicide bomber. Leaders of the Northern Alliance blame bin Laden for Massoud's death.

But it would be a mistake to support only the Northern Alliance, the official warned, because of internal hostilities between northern and southern ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The United States must also foster resistance to the Taliban among the Pashtun tribesmen of the south, who object to the presence of bin Laden and his fellow Arabs in non-Arab Afghanistan, the official said.

"There are a lot of Pashtuns who have reached out to us over time to express their unhappiness," he said.

This internal intrigue is only one part of the strategy, however. The use of ground troops -- Americans and perhaps allies -- has not been ruled out, said White House press secretary Ari Fleischer after yesterday's 2 1/2-hour strategy meeting. "The president is preparing the public for all eventualities," Fleischer said.

It was, meanwhile, another very sad day in the aftermath of the deadliest attack on American soil in history. A few more of what will eventually be thousands of funerals took place in Washington, Virginia and Maryland, in New York and Connecticut, in Arkansas and California. Three of New York City's top fire department figures were eulogized, including Commissioner Peter J. Ganci, who took his last ride on an engine -- this one bedecked with flowers and beheld through tears.

Exhausted volunteers in New York's financial district again worked endlessly to clear the wreckage and again scarcely made a dent, but they found a passport believed to have belonged to one of the hijackers. Federal officials estimate that 200 million cubic yards of rubble fell on Ground Zero, much of it razor-sharp shards of glass and steel, thousands of pounds of it hazardous waste -- asbestos, battery acid, cooling system gases, cleaning fluids -- and hundreds of tons of it human remains.

At the Pentagon, where recovery workers found many more bodies and human remains near the center of the damage, officials estimated that repairs could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

Continental Airlines announced plans to lay off 12,000 employeesand cut 20 percent of its flights, and other airlines indicated they may follow suit. After the first nationwide shutdown of the commercial airways, and with passenger confidence shaken, the industry is reeling. Continental Chairman Gordon Bethune said that his airline flew scarcely more than half its normal number of flights yesterday and that those flights were only half full. But initial efforts to pass an emergency federal bailout for the airlines were rejected by Congress.

Washington's Reagan National was the only airport still closed yesterday; Boston's Logan International, where two of the hijacked jets began their flights on Tuesday, finally reopened.

And across the country, federal agents continued to run down myriad tips and leads in one of the largest criminal investigations ever. The Justice Department said two people have been arrested as material witnesses and 25 people have been detained for questioning in connection with the attacks. Among the possibilities being pursued: that at least two of the 19 suspected hijackers received training at U.S. military installations.

But even as the investigation sprawled from Texas to Germany, the president for the first time publicly identified his own "prime suspect" -- bin Laden. And he promised at Camp David to "find those who did it. We will smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running, and we'll bring them to justice."

Echoing his father's famous vow at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, Bush said: "This act will not stand."

Bush gathered his entire senior national security team -- including Vice President Cheney.

As he has said on previous days, Bush explained that the coming war on terrorism will target not only the terrorists but also the friends of terror -- "those who fed them, those who housed them, those who harbored" them. And so the diplomats proceeded with their work to draw the noose around Afghanistan.

On Friday, the State Department directed its bureaus to summon foreign ambassadors in Washington and to present them with a four-point message about terrorism. Senior State Department officials told the ambassadors from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe that the United States expects their countries to arrest terrorists, prevent them from moving across their borders, speak out forcefully against the kind of violence unleashed on Tuesday and join international efforts to combat terrorism.

U.S. officials hailed the news that the United Arab Emirates is reviewing its diplomatic relations with the Taliban movement. Late last week, officials asked the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia -- the only countries, other than Pakistan, that have recognized the Taliban regime -- to cut their ties. Powell personally asked Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to do so.

Even Iran, generally an American nemesis -- but, in the intriguing and tangled way of Middle Eastern politics, a great foe of the Taliban as well -- was listed as a possible ally in the fight. Having closed its border with Afghanistan to stem a wave of refugees, Iran has indicated that it might support the American cause.

A State Department official said anything is possible: "We will not rule out the possibility of any country working with the United States and the international community in the fight against terrorism."

But the diplomatic and strategic keystone, as of yesterday, was Pakistan. Powell said he especially wanted "to thank the president and people of Pakistan for the support they have offered and their willingness to assist us in whatever might be required in that part of the world as we determine who those perpetrators are."

U.S. officials hope this is only the beginning of the relationship. Ultimately, they want Pakistan to choose one side or the other, with no more point-by-point negotiations or lists.

Said a senior administration official: "We want them to decide whether they're going to be with us or not."

Staff writers Dana Milbank and Mike Allen contributed to this report.


-------- OTHER

-------- energy

Memos Lead to Duke Power Scrutiny

September 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Duke-Audit.html

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- Regulators have ordered an audit of Duke Power's financial statements to determine whether the company underreported income to avoid cutting rates for 2 million customers in North Carolina and South Carolina, The State reported Sunday.

Internal company documents obtained by the newspaper indicate that top executives discussed underreporting income as early as December 1998, the newspaper said.

The documents discussed how Duke Power could avoid exceeding its ``allowed return.''

The allowed return, set by state regulators, determines how much Duke Power can charge its customers. Should it exceed that return, it could have to cut rates for its customers.

The State obtained the documents from a Duke accountant who asked not to be identified. The accountant previously told South Carolina regulators about the possible underreporting of income.

A Duke Power spokesman said Sunday that the company never intended to mislead regulators and denied any deliberate wrongdoing.

``At this stage, it is far too early to make any accusations about what was done or not done,'' Duke spokesman Joe Maher said.

Maher said Duke Power had released more than 3,500 documents to the South Carolina Public Service Commission. Out of these, the commission staff identified 14 accounting entries it thought required further examination, the newspaper said.

Maher said of the 14 that Duke considered nine were made properly, four were ``inadvertent'' errors, and the last was justifiable, even though it differed from standard utility practice.

Duke has pledged full cooperation with the investigation.

Duke Power, a subsidiary of Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy Co., serves about 500,000 customers in South Carolina and 1.5 million in North Carolina.

Its rates are subject to regulation by the South Carolina Public Service Commission and North Carolina Utilities Commission, which are ordering an outside audit of Duke Power's books.

The company will cover the cost of the audit, which could run ``in the low six figures,'' said Gary Walsh, the Public Service Commission's executive director.

Commissioners on both state regulatory boards say they are awaiting the audit before taking a position on the issue.

-------- health

Report Says AIDS Leading Cause of Death in S.Africa

September 16, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-aids-safrica.html

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) - AIDS is now South Africa's leading cause of death and the disease accounted for 40 percent of all those who died last year between the ages of 15 and 49, a local newspaper reported Sunday.

The Sunday Times, citing a South Africa Medical Research Council report that has not yet been released, forecasts that as many as six million South Africans might die from AIDS by 2010.

The newspaper said that the report projects a threefold increase in deaths among children aged between one and five by 2010 if no effective preventive policies are put in place.

``The number of AIDS deaths is expected to rise to double the number of deaths attributed to all other causes,'' the Sunday Times said. It added that the report saw population growth halting because of the epidemic.

The report was published almost a week after reports that President Thabo Mbeki, who has attracted a storm of controversy for questioning the link between HIV and AIDS, once again stated that AIDS was not the biggest killer in the country.

In a letter to his minister of health, published in the Business Day newspaper Monday, Mbeki said HIV/AIDS was only attributable to 2.2 percent of total deaths in South Africa.

The figures that Mbeki cited were compiled by the United Nations World Health Organization in 1995.

The HIV virus that causes AIDS is believed to have infected over 20 percent of the country's adult population. The epidemic has been linked to rising poverty and crime as it kills off breadwinners and leaves an army of impoverished orphans.

-------- police / prisoners

THE INVESTIGATION
2 Suspected Hijackers Were Sought by F.B.I. at Time of the Attacks

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/national/16INQU.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - Two of the men believed to have hijacked the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on Tuesday were known to the authorities as associates of Osama bin Laden and had been sought in the United States since August by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, law enforcement and intelligence officials said today.

The two men, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi, used their own names to purchase airline tickets and board American Airlines Flight 77, which left Dulles International Airport and slammed into the Pentagon.

Today, even as it appeared that the government had been unable to keep up with the two bin Laden followers, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the investigation was "developing a kind of clarity" as the authorities pieced together the lives and recent movements of the 19 men and their ground-based accomplices.

In fact, 25 people have been arrested on immigration violations as part of the investigation, a government official said today. None have been formally charged, either on immigration counts or with crimes relating to the hijackings of four planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, the official said.

Investigators have interviewed all of those in custody and some are cooperating with the authorities. Among the 25 are two men arrested at an Amtrak station in Fort Worth. They were interviewed by F.B.I. agents, taken into custody and flown to New York.

The men, Ayub Ali Khan, 51, and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, who were traveling to San Antonio, were removed from an Amtrak train in what authorities said was a routine drug search. The men were found to have box cutters and about $5,000 in cash. Hijackers aboard Tuesday's flights used box cutters and knives to commandeer the aircraft, officials said.

In the case of Mr. al-Mihdhar and Mr. al-Hamzi, intelligence officials said they alerted immigration authorities nearly two months ago that the men might try to enter the United States. But when immigration records were checked, officials learned that the men had already entered the United States. Both arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Saudi passports, the officials said.

Mr. al-Mihdhar had been seen in January 2000 at a meeting of suspected terrorists in Malaysia that was under surveillance by American intelligence, officials said. After the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole, intelligence analysts began to review possible suspects among the participants in the meeting.

In August, intelligence officials advised the Immigration and Naturalization Service to place Mr. al-Mihdhar on a watch list to bar entry into the United States, along with Mr. al- Hamzi, because the two men had traveled to the United States together in the past. The F.B.I. was alerted after officials learned they were already in the country, but the agency could not find them.

Last year, Mr. al-Mihdhar and Mr. al-Hamzi rented rooms from a retired professor in suburban San Diego, The Los Angeles Times reported today. The professor, Abdussattar Shaikh, told the paper that Mr. al- Hamzi had lived with him from September to December and that Mr. al- Mihdhar had shared the room in September.

Another of the men believed to be on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjoor, attended the CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1996 and in December 1997. Each time, he tried to qualify for a private pilot's certificate and each time he failed.

"He'd be late; he wouldn't show up; he was unprepared; he didn't do his homework," said Paul V. Blair, controller of CRM. "He didn't seem like he was committed to being an airline pilot."

As the outlines of the plot began to emerge, law enforcement officials said they were disturbed by wide gaps in their knowledge of the scope of the operation, most significantly whether other hijacking teams might still be at large in the United States.

The officials said they had investigated a number of leads that hijackers were aboard other flights on Tuesday and failed to carry out their suicide missions or stayed on the ground preparing for a second wave of attacks.

So far, investigators have established that other men associated with the hijackers received flight training in Florida. Those men cannot be accounted for. Nevertheless, the officials said, the investigation has not produced concrete evidence that the terror plot included other targets.

Justice Department officials said today that they had obtained a second warrant in New York for a person wanted as a material witness in the investigation. Mindy Tucker, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said the warrant was issued by a federal court in New York under seal.

The first material witness was a man of Middle Eastern descent who was stopped on Thursday night at Kennedy International Airport with another person's identification.

The man, whose identity has not been released, was an associate of a brother of Osama bin Laden, officials said. The man was carrying identification documents belonging to his own brother. The man was also said to have used an address in the Boston area associated with people who may have been involved in the hijackings.

American and European law enforcement officials said today that they were examining whether any associates of Osama bin Laden may have tried to profit financially from the attacks by trading in put options or short-selling particular stocks, such as reinsurance companies or airlines.

Such kinds of trading are techniques for betting that a stock price would decline. American securities regulators said they had been contacted by their counterparts in Germany who were examining short- sales that occurred before the attack in three large European reinsurance companies whose stock plummeted inexplicably before the attacks.

Officials in Washington emphasized that they had no evidence of such kinds of insider trading but concluded that there should be a review of any significant and suspicious options trading or short-selling.

The authorities have distributed to other law enforcement agencies the names of 100 people, a list that includes suspected accomplices in the terrorist plot.

Out of the chaos of the attacks, several cities and regions in the country are emerging as focal points of the investigation, principally the cities where the flights originated or crashed and Florida, where a number of the hijackers received flight training.

Law enforcement officials in New York and northern New Jersey were tracing the movements made by several terrorists before Tuesday's attacks and examining possible support activities in the area, officials said.

On Wednesday, the F.B.I. searched the Marriott hotel at the Newark Airport, where some or all of the four hijackers of United Flight 93 are believed to have stayed on Monday night. The plane crashed in western Pennsylvania.

In Florida, where most of the hijackers are believed to have lived, particularly in recent months, F.B.I. agents spent three days searching a motel in Deerfield Beach where one of the suspected hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, apparently lived for two weeks before the attacks.

Richard Surma, the owner of the Panther Hotel, said that on the day before the attacks he noticed a black duffel bag in the trash. Inside the bag he found aeronautical maps of the East Coast, navigation equipment, books from a flight school, illustrated martial arts books, and a German/English dictionary.

Mr. Surma said the maps were "of the eastern half of the United States." The duffel bag also contained a computer printout that included a detailed list of airline flights and times, though Mr. Surma said he was not sure if they were departure or arrival times, or if they simply connoted flight patterns.

Mr. Surma said the F.B.I. also retrieved a box cutter from the room.

F.B.I. agents in New Jersey went to an apartment building in Jersey City to ask about the two men who had been seized on the Amtrak train in Texas.

The authorities believe that the men had lived at 6 Tonnele Avenue in Jersey City until recently. Residents said the agents broke into the apartment where the men appear to have lived.

Several residents said they knew little about the men. They said the agents arrested a Syrian truck driver who lived in the building and whose passport had expired. Other residents said they saw as many as four to five people leaving with the agents, though they did not know why.

--------

Friendly forces patrol capital

By JOHN BALZ
St. Petersburg Times,
September 16, 2001
http://www.sptimes.com/News/091601/Worldandnation/Friendly_forces_patro.shtml

WASHINGTON -- It rained Friday morning, which didn't help. The sun came out around noon, but that just made it easier to see the armed guards and Humvees patrolling the streets. As secure as Washington felt the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, it became more like a police state as the week continued.

Helicopters and fighter jets zipped through the air. The security area around the White House was extended for a while, more blocks were closed to cars and police directed pedestrians to walk on one side of street.

"It seems like there's strangeness afoot," said Tony Quattro, 33, of Arlington, Va. "Don't you get the sense that this is close to martial law?"

The flags were on T-shirts and suit lapels. They hung in store windows and fluttered from the tops of buses. They flew at half-staff over government buildings (and in Washington there are a lot of them). Some people simply carried a flag in their hands.

Of the thousands on display, the most famous rests on a table in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. The 30- by 34-foot flag originally flew over Fort McHenry outside Baltimore almost 190 years ago. There are older and bigger flags, but this one inspired the national anthem.

During the War of 1812, British troops detained hundreds of Americans before shelling Fort McHenry. Francis Scott Key, a lawyer and amateur poet, watched the bombardment from a British ship. Key, as the story goes, was so inspired by the sight of the flag the next morning that he wrote The Star-Spangled Banner.

The banner is now tattered and faded. For the past three years, it has been housed in a special laboratory where conservationists vacuum individual fibers to preserve them. This multimillion-dollar undertaking has been partly funded by fashion designer Ralph Lauren.

Lines to see the flag and the laboratory are usually long, but not Friday. A few people walked up to peer through the sheet of glass. Some, like Barbara Thill, remembered what happened on Tuesday and think about the country.

"It's patriotic but sad," she said.

At the Madhatter bar near Dupont Circle, owner Mike Tobin sees a lot of anger in his customers -- and in himself.

"People are talking about how they want to nuke Afghanistan," said Tobin, a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache.

Business is fine, he said, although the happy hours haven't been as rowdy. The two televisions in the bar have been running news coverage nonstop, and he has posted a flag outside that will fly "until it gets stolen."

Tobin "wants bin Laden's head rolled down the street. But that's just an emotional response."

The best way to defeat terrorism is for people to get back to normal. His son's soccer game was canceled this weekend, which frustrates him a bit.

"If it is (canceled) out of respect, that's fine," he said. "If it's canceled out of paranoia, that's ridiculous. We have to move on -- otherwise the b------- win."

At this point in the congressional session, aides are usually shuttling back and forth between offices and hammering out legislative initiatives. Since Tuesday, however, the hallways have been quiet as staffers focus almost exclusively on constituent mail and the terrorist attacks.

"We're not doing anything but this," said Adam Kovacevich, press secretary for Rep. Cal Dooley, D-Calif.

The atmosphere is tense. Staffers were evacuated three times last week. When Paul Anderson started work for Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., six weeks ago, he was told that people often don't leave their desks when the fire alarm goes off. Thursday, a bomb scare forced police to shut down his building, and "when that fire alarm went off, people moved," Anderson said.

-------- spying

THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES
Lawmakers See Need to Loosen Rules on C.I.A.

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/international/16INTE.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - The Congressional leaders who oversee the nation's intelligence system have concluded that America's spy agencies should be allowed to combat terrorism with more aggressive tactics, including the hiring of unsavory foreign agents.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have also revived discussion of reversing the United States' 25-year ban on using covert agents to assassinate foreigners. A consensus has not been reached on that point.

But after the attacks, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, the chairman of the House intelligence committee and two former directors of central intelligence said the attacks justified easing some restrictions on the behavior of spy agencies. Some of those leaders also said the terrorist assault represented a colossal failure of American intelligence.

"We have got to be a hell of a lot more aggressive," said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee.

R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said that "Washington has absolutely undergone a sea change in thinking this week."

Those comments reflect a turning point in the attitude of political leaders toward the need for sharp limits on the extent and nature of covert operations and perhaps for allowing American agents to carry out the kinds of actions that have long been prohibited as too ruthless or morally questionable.

They also reflect a strong public sentiment for a powerful, and prolonged, American assault on the terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in New York and Washington, and others like them. A New York Times/ CBS News poll conducted late last week showed that 65 percent of those questioned say American agents should be allowed to seek out and assassinate people in foreign countries who commit terrorist acts against Americans.

For the moment, the C.I.A. is not pressing Congress or the White House to change its rules. Administration officials said they understood that for many Americans the ban on assassinations was a significant symbol of the nation's role as a standard-bearer of ethical conduct. Under current law, President Bush would have to authorize personally any such change in the existing executive order governing intelligence operations.

But the public discussion among influential members of Congress about freeing the C.I.A. from restrictions on the recruitment of criminals and known abusers of human rights as informants and about outlaw assassinations stems from a growing debate over the causes of what many in Washington are now calling the nation's biggest intelligence lapse since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

In the 25 years since Congressional hearings disclosed the agency's role in assassinations and dirty tricks overseas, the government has imposed increasingly tighter rules and Congressional oversight of the conduct of America's spies. C.I.A. officers, for example, are not permitted to foster a plot that has the explicit goal of killing a terrorist leader.

But Congressional leaders said the C.I.A. should be put on a war footing and given the freedom not only to penetrate but also to destroy tightly knit terrorist organizations.

"Not everybody is playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules," said Representative J. Porter Goss, a Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence when asked if he would support an end to the ban on assassinations of foreign leaders, first imposed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976.

Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now willing to end limits on the C.I.A.'s recruitment of agents - spies - who have committed human rights violations, his spokesman said on Friday.

But one influential lawmaker warned that proposals to unleash intelligence agencies should be carefully considered.

Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority whip, said that while the C.I.A. should beef up its human intelligence gathering ability, officials should not move rashly to lift the ban on assassinations.

The nation is understandably "a little panicky," Mr. DeLay said. But he added, "I think we need to be very clearheaded, very deliberative, about where we're headed."

Tighter restrictions on whom the C.I.A. can recruit as spies were imposed in the mid-1990's after disclosures about the agency having had ties to a Guatemalan Army officer implicated in the killing of an American and the husband of another American. Although it is unclear whether the guidelines have ever really undercut the C.I.A.'s operations against terrorist organizations, the agency's officers have complained in the past that the rules were symbolic of a broader caution that took hold at the agency in the 1990's, when managers rejected high-risk operations for fear they would fail or lead to political scandal.

Senator Graham's spokesman, Paul Anderson, said, "The senator said something today that I hadn't heard him say before, and that is that we are not going to find the kinds of spies we need in monasteries."

Senator Graham said immediately after Tuesday's attacks that he was also willing to reassess the assassination ban. Mr. Anderson, the spokesman, said Mr. Graham had since modified his stance, but only because he had been told by experts that the United States could get around the ban if it chose to do so, even with the current legal strictures.

It remains to be seen whether Congressional leaders will continue to recommend that the C.I.A. be liberated from such restrictions once the heated passions in the aftermath of Tuesday's attacks begin to cool. Previous terrorist attacks like the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in Africa have been followed by calls to loosen the limits on the C.I.A.'s operations. Last year, an independent commission on terrorism recommended that the C.I.A. lift its guidelines on the use of agents who had committed human rights violations. The proposals were ultimately not embraced by the government, and C.I.A officials argued at the time that it was not necessary to lift these restrictions because they had not hampered operations.

But the new willingness among lawmakers to allow the C.I.A. greater latitude underscores the depth of feeling in Washington about the need to address the intelligence failings exposed on Tuesday.

Former President George Bush, who served as C.I.A. director under President Ford, spoke publicly this week about the need to "free up the intelligence system from some of its constraints."

The militant attitude in Congress comes just weeks after some American leaders were sharply critical of Israel's use of assassinations of Palestinian leaders in response to a series of suicide bombings against Israeli targets. But after Tuesday some current and former officials said that American security services might need to adopt some elements of the Israeli approach.

"We've never had the political will and the resolve to treat terrorism as a real foe," observed Ted Price, a former deputy director of operations at the C.I.A. "But now we're at war."

One former C.I.A. officer argued that the agency was not organized to fight an all-out war on terrorism and that other organizations might ultimately be needed. "The C.I.A. wants to penetrate these groups, to find out about the next attack," the former officer said. "But you can never stop all the attacks because you can never hear about all of them. You can't just spy on these groups. You have to destroy them. And that's not what the C.I.A. has been set up to do."

Mr. Woolsey said in an interview on Friday that he had been steadfastly opposed to lifting the ban on assassinations until this week's attacks. "Before Tuesday, I was opposed to anything like that," said Mr. Woolsey, who also supports an end to the restrictions on the C.I.A.'s recruitment of spies with troubling background. "But like a lot of people, I've been somewhat shaken in that conviction by what happened."

The question of whether to change operating orders of the C.I.A., which operates outside the United States, is up to President Bush. The restriction on assassinations is part of a presidential executive order that could be revoked or rewritten. The rules about recruiting spies are part of the agency's internal procedures and could be revised by the director of central intelligence.

But until today, Congress, which has broad oversight powers over the intelligence community, would almost certainly have weighed in on an effort by a president to end the ban on assassinations.

For now, the C.I.A. is not pressing Congress or the White House to support any change in its rules. Beyond quick fixes, the Congressional intelligence committees are also considering more fundamental reforms, and have promised to study closely why the C.I.A. and other agencies were caught by surprise by the attacks - the largest terrorist operation ever launched against the United States.

"I'm certain that we are going to find some significant intelligence shortfalls that contributed to this tragedy on Tuesday," Senator Graham said.

Intelligence officials defended the performance of the C.I.A. They emphasized that while the agency had failed to provide a precise warning of the attack, it had issued repeated warnings - one as recently as August - that the terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden and his network were seeking to attack the domestic United States.

"We have stated on a regular basis that bin Laden had declared that all U.S. citizens were legitimate targets," noted one American intelligence official. "Could we, should we, have given a tactical warning? Obviously we would have loved to."

Others note that the problems exposed on Tuesday range far beyond the C.I.A. and include the lack of coordination of the government's counterterrorism efforts, which are spread throughout several agencies.

Critics say the government fails to quickly process and analyze information that might help unravel terrorist plots. Often, crucial intelligence is found to have been sitting in the files, but is recognized as significant only in hindsight, after a terrorist incident.

For instance, United States officials noted that the C.I.A. had gathered evidence in August that Khalid al-Midhar, identified on Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as one of the hijackers aboard the plane that smashed into the Pentagon, had met with suspect associates of Mr. bin Laden in Malaysia in January of last year. Subsequently the C.I.A. determined that some people at that meeting may have been involved in the plot to attack the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000.

The C.I.A. also determined that Nawaq Alhamzi, another hijacking suspect aboard the same plane, had previously traveled to the United States with Mr. al-Midhar.

In late August, the C.I.A. notified the Immigration and Naturalization Service that both men should be placed on the watch list intended to prevent their entry into the United States. The I.N.S. responded that both men had already gotten into the country, using their real names.

The F.B.I. was notified, and the bureau began to look for them. But too late.

-------- terrorism

REIGN OF TERROR - PARALLELS SEEN IN AFGHANISTAN AND COLOMBIA

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001
From: "Kim Alphandary" <kalphandary@yahoo.com>
www.portland.indymedia.org www.narconews.com

AFGHANISTAN
by Kim Alphandary

REIGN OF TERROR - PARALLELS SEEN IN AFGHANISTAN AND COLOMBIA In the wake of the attacks on U.S. soil, Afghanistan and its ruling Taliban are at the center of media attention.

The Taliban, whose name means "students," were created by the the Pakistani Intelligence Agency (ISI), and developed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The Taliban army consists of Muslim fundamentalist mercenaries from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. And is armed and financed primarily by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Over the last six years the Taliban have gained control over 90% of the country. (Until recently the Taliban have been referred to as 'freedom fighters' in the western press.)

The Taliban, thus, began as a U.S.-backed paramilitary organization, using the same strategy as was used in Colombia with the formation of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). As in South America, the explosive mixture of paramilitary groups and the massive profits to be made in narco-trafficking under drug prohibition has grown into a force beyond control of its makers. Even as the U.S. government today opposes the Taliban in Afghanistan, it is creating another one in Colombia.

And as with the Colombian people and the paramilitaries unleashed upon them by U.S. policy, the Afghan people are not supporters of the Taliban. In fact, there is a very strong opposition movement in Afghanistan to the Taliban. Yet, as with Plan Colombia, a U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan could end up harming the innocent Afghani people who oppose the Taliban.

Just last week, the opposition movement to the Taliban lost it's heroic leader...

AFGHAN COMMUNITY MOURNS The Afghan community is now mourning the death of their most highly regarded leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, commander of the Northern Alliance (NA), opposition forces to the Taliban in Afghanistan. (The NA is referred to a as a 'rebel group' in the western press.)

Commander Ahmad Shah Mas'ood has held this fragile opposition group together since the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He is famous for leading battles on the frontlines.

Qand Dukhtar, an Afghan American states, "It is with great pain that I inform you that Ahmad Shah Masood, commander of the Northern Alliance forces against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden passed away [Sunday, September 9, 2001]."

Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Mas'ood was the victim of an assassination attempt by bin Laden this last Sunday -- two Arab men posing as journalists exploded a bomb at a meeting being held in his office in the Takhar Province of Northern Afghanistan.

Saudi dissident Ossama bin Laden is blamed for the attack. Osama bin Laden is not a member of the Taliban, but apparently assists the Taliban in it's objectives by violent means.

Masood's death is viewed with such deep concern that countries wary of Afghanistan's Taliban held an emergency meeting on Thursday, representatives from Iran, Russia, Tajikistan, India and Uzbekistan attended. His loss will be a major blow to the NA as Mas'ood has been the leader of the anti-Taliban forces for some 20 years.

Dukhtar explains, "While the whole world has been preoccupied with the events in NY and DC, this has been an extremely painful week for millions of Afghans who will never forget their fallen heroes and the sacrifices they have made for their country." Dukhtar went on to say that, " Ahmad Shah Masood was one of the bravest heroes in the history of Afghanistan. He spent his entire lifetime fighting to free his nation. The only dream and hope he had was for a free and peaceful Afghanistan. "

On Tuesday September 11th, two hours after the bombings of the World Trade Center, the Northern Alliance retaliated for the assassination of their leader by shelling Kabul, the Taliban controlled capitol of Afghanistan. At which point CNN reported that the US government could be responsible for the bombings -- and later apologized for the erroneous report.

HISTORY Afghanistan was once a stable nation of 15 million people has been literally destroyed as it has been forced to fight a civil war the past 20 years. Six million of its population are refugees, with more than 75 percent of the country laid to waste.

"The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. It was the last hot war it would fight, and one whose failure played a leading role in its loss of the Cold War and disintegration. Afghanistan is infamous today for being in the grip of the most benighted, fanatical and misogynist government in the world." [Cosma Shalizi's review of "The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982" (University of California Press, 1995), by M. Hassan Kakar, (http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/reviews/kakar-soviet-invasion/)]

Over the last few years the US has known that the Taliban has been a threat to the stability in the region - the Gulf, Central Asia, and South Asia - because of the growth of terrorism and the drug trade (Afghanistan is the second-largest producer of heroin in the world). And, especially because the Taliban can no longer be controlled by Pakistan and therefore cannot be controlled by the United States.

The US government has been examining its options for protecting its interests in the region for some time, and just this July 2001 chose to give the Taliban in Afghanistan $48 million dollars because they agreed 'to institute a ban on drugs.'

CURRENT SITUATION According to a September 14 report by the BBC, "A quarter of Afghanistan's 26 million people face starvation this autumn following three years of drought and the pull-out [of all foreign aid workers from the country]." The plea for help given by the Afghan people has been for the most part been ignored.

Pakistan's own civil stability is now at extreme risk because of economic pressures from decades of mounting debt combined with political and economic corruption that has made the country virtually ungovernable.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has reluctantly promised full co-operation with US demands Saturday September 15th, placing Pakistan in an extremely precarious situation. There are millions of Taliban-aligned extremists in Pakistan along with Islamic militant training camps. The Pakistani corps commanders and intelligence chiefs are deeply divided as its own secret service are backed by Islamic militants.

With current events unfolding as they are right now, Dukhtar remembers, "Masood's famous prediction that the war would end in Pakistan. Even if Pakistan sides with the US, the Taliban-aligned fundamentalists of Pakistan will declare a holy war against it's own government and destroy it."

... an attack on Afghanistan, could come as early as this week.

I refer you to http://www.antiwar.com for current coverage, such as current links entitled: US Troops Land in Pakistan Taliban Threatens Pakistan With War Bush finalises battle plan

----

Terrorists targeted EU's parliament

Washington Times
September 16, 2001
By David Bamber
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010916-11812968.htm

LONDON -- Islamic terrorists based in Britain and controlled by Osama bin Laden planned a devastating attack on the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France.

A six-strong terror cell funded by the Saudi fugitive planned to kill all 625 members of the European Parliament, and scores of officials, by releasing sarin gas into the parliament building.

The attack was scheduled to take place during the session of parliament from Feb. 11 to 14 this year and was to be the first in a series of assaults against prominent buildings across Europe.

Algerian terrorists based in London and funded directly by bin Laden worked with counterparts in Milan and Frankfurt.

The plot was foiled after German police smashed the Frankfurt operation in a series of raids. The six Britain-based men were arrested and charged with offenses under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The charges were dropped just days after the men appeared in Horseferry Road magistrate's court, London. The Crown Prosecution Service said that the decision was made for security reasons.

Senior British officials have told the Sunday Telegraph that the decision to cease action was prompted by a request from the British intelligence agency, MI5.

It is believed that the intelligence agency had uncovered details of further atrocities and wanted to monitor the group.

Details of the plan were kept secret from members of the European Parliament. They were, however, sent an e-mail warning about lapsed security in the building.

Sarin gas is a chemical weapon, 26 times more deadly than cyanide.

Developed during World War II by the Nazis, it is odorless and almost impossible to detect.

Its potential for use in a large crowd was proved when Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese sect, killed 12 persons and affected 5,000 more using sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995.

A spokesman for the European Parliament said: "We take all threats to security seriously and are constantly monitoring the situation."

The disclosure that the European Parliament was a target will raise concerns about the activities of bin Laden's followers in Britain and Europe.

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that the Special Branch in London is also examining allegations that two mosques in London have raised funds for his terrorist organizations in the past few weeks.

One London mosque, where Afghans pray, has reportedly raised funds for the terrorist group al-Qaeda, run by bin Laden.

Officers last year closed a community center attached to a mosque in Birmingham after money was raised to help train British-born terrorists operating in Kashmir.

British activists, who have supported bin Laden's activities in the past, have also established a base in America. The Al Muhajiroun movement, members of which have called for a jihad, or permanent holy war, overseas, has set up in New York.

The movement's new U.S. members remain in close contact with followers in Britain, Pakistan and Lebanon.

It is not the first time that British fundamentalists have extended their operations to America.

Last year, the Sunday Telegraph revealed that a company called Sakina Security was training volunteers to handle explosives and guns at a base in the United States.

The company, which is under investigation by the FBI, has set up a bank account in London to raise funds for anti-Israeli forces among the Palestinians.

Security sources believe that as many as 5,000 young Muslims in Britain may support bin Laden.

Most show their solidarity by making regular financial contributions, but about one in five of these supporters is believed to have taken part in some form of active military service abroad.

Dozens have also taken part in secret military training in sessions in Britain, after which they were drafted into the military wing of the International Islamic Front founded by bin Laden in 1998.

A number of such British volunteers later died during active service for Islamic forces in the conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Afghanistan.

Key figures in 21 terrorist groups outlawed in March by Jack Straw, the then British home secretary, under the provisions of the new Prevention of Terrorism Act, have gone into hiding since they were banned.

The ban is supposed to prevent them from raising funds, recruiting or in any way supporting terrorist operations abroad. Sixteen of the banned groups are Islamic organizations led by bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

--------

Bin Laden: Architect of New Global Terrorism
Evolving Movement Combines Old Theology and Modern Technology in Mission Without Borders

By Karen DeYoung and Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 16, 2001; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38213-2001Sep15?language=printer

What President Bush last week called "the first war of the 21st century" began nearly a decade ago, when terrorists converged on New York City with a plan to blow up the World Trade Center.

The February 1993 explosion in the center's parking garage, which killed six people, sketched the first rough outlines of a new kind of terrorism that emerged as a finished portrait on Tuesday with the annihilation of the New York landmark and the deaths of thousands.

As the United States moves to retaliate for the horrific assault, and fight a war different from any in its history, it faces an enemy that over the past eight years has grown in confidence, experience and ability. Learning from mistakes and adapting to the West's incomplete successes against it, the new terrorism has evolved to match flexible means with uncompromising goals.

A defining characteristic of the movement's development has been its success in combining two seemingly incompatible sources of strength: a conservative interpretation of Islam and a comfort with aspects of the modern world that have given birth to a highly mobile, popular, wealthy, technologically savvy transnational enterprise.

Today, these elements are focused on an overriding mission, expressed concisely in 1998 by Osama bin Laden, the Saudi expatriate who has come to personify the movement. "To kill Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it," he said.

Bin Laden, who U.S. officials have said is the prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is widely considered the architect of the new terrorism. With followers around the world, he is believed to draw on what James B. Steinberg, who was deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, called "a network of more or less affiliated organizations, some loosely, some very close."

The groups that form this network allied with bin Laden's organization, known as al Qaeda ("the base"), are concentrated in the Middle East, but include members in the Balkans, Chechnya, Southeast and Central Asia, Africa and the United States. They share resources and expertise, lending operatives for particular operations. They have become, in a sense, models of globalization.

"The geographic side, the information technology, the infrastructure, the travel," said Paul R. Pillar, CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia and former deputy director of the agency's counterterrorism office. "That is the main story of how these groups have evolved over the last few years."

No Compromise

One of the most striking innovations of bin Laden's brand of international terrorism has been a vision of a holy war, or jihad, that excludes any possibility of compromise. Its goal is not to negotiate with the West, as was the case for Palestinian extremists in the 1970s and '80s, but to destroy it.

Bin Laden and his followers do not seek political advantage in a negotiating process. According to Daniel Benjamin, director of the office of transnational threats in the Clinton White House, "They want change that is so radical as to defy any concept of negotiations. . . . They are conducting a war, not seeking entrance into the status quo.

"These guys want to roll back 1,300 years of history," said Benjamin, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They believe that their violence is divinely justified, and that great goals require dramatic means, and the dramatic means is mass bloodshed."

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert for the Rand Corp., said that because the new terrorists do not respond to political constituencies in the traditional sense, they are "freed from ordinary constraints of morality. . . . There is less inhibition to kill in quantity, and a greater willingness to die in the process."

While developing an absolutist view of the struggle with the West, bin Laden has tailored his message in recent years to reach a broader audience of disgruntled and dispossessed people across the Islamic world. No longer does he concentrate only on his founding aim of expelling U.S. forces from the Arabian peninsula, where he believes they defile holy sites of Islam. Instead, he reaches out to Muslims with grievances from Bosnia to Indonesia.

This broader message has complemented the development of a wider geographic network. Elements in the pan-Islamic coalition range from the Taliban Islamic fundamentalists now ruling most of Afghanistan, where bin Laden has been headquartered since 1996, to Chechens fighting against Russia to Palestinians fighting for an independent homeland.

Groups identified with al Qaeda now operate in about three dozen countries. Alleged participants in bin Laden-inspired plots -- from the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 to plans to disrupt millennium celebrations in the United States in the first hours of 2000 -- have included citizens from dozens of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, Malaysia and the United States.

Even the emphasis on America as a common enemy is a unifying principle for this far-flung association. In bin Laden's view, the United States "heads the list of aggressors against Muslims."

In a 1998 interview with ABC News reporter John Miller, bin Laden compared his war against America to the struggle to expel Soviet invaders from Afghanistan during the 1980s, which was a seminal experience for him and many of his followers. "Our battle against the Americans is far greater than our battle was against the Russians," he said. "We anticipate a black future for America. Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America."

Plentiful Financing

Even as al Qaeda has grown and come under increasing pressure from the United States and its allies, it has demonstrated resilience stemming from bin Laden's growing stature in the Islamic world, his inherited fortune -- estimated at as much as $300 million -- and a broad base of support.

Wealthy individual sympathizers and clandestinely supportive governments channel money into what Stephen Phillip Cohen, a South Asia expert and former State Department official, described as an international fund for Islamic terrorists.

"The money comes from a lot of countries," Cohen said, "often under pretext of helping freedom fighters in Palestine and Kashmir . . . and some of it goes to bin Laden. He's sort of the Ford Foundation of terrorists," providing support for projects he considers worthy.

Some operations in recent years linked to bin Laden have appeared to need little outside financing, relying on credit card fraud and other criminal activities.

Whatever the source, financing of important operations appears to have been plentiful. During the recently completed trials into the East Africa bombings in 1998, evidence emerged that al Qaeda was paying Egyptians between $1,200 and $1,500 a month to run various support operations in Sudan, a large sum by Egyptian standards.

Several of the terrorist hijackers who U.S. officials say piloted the doomed commercial aircraft in Tuesday's attacks appear to have been well-funded, paying $10,000 each for flight school, living in middle-class neighborhoods, and spending significant amounts on apartment and automobile rentals, restaurants and clothes.

For some terrorism experts, the high level of funding is even less notable than the accomplished profiles of the suicide bombers in Tuesday's attacks. While classic suicide bombers have tended to be uneducated and inserted into a plot at the last moment by their handlers, the terrorists in Tuesday's attack were in some cases university-educated people who spoke English well and who had prepared for their mission for many months, even years.

"The assumption [among Western terrorism experts] was that the average suicide bomber was a psychologically damaged 19-year-old with a limited education," said Jenkins, the Rand expert. "What is extraordinary about this episode is that these people were preparing for their mission for months, leading normal lives with wives, taking the garbage out, taking kids to McDonalds, taking flying lessons, living in comparatively pleasant places, all the while knowing that on some date they were going to kill themselves and thousands of people."

Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, "Our profile of the suicide bomber never included pilots, highly educated people."

According to Steven Emerson, who has looked at Islamic groups in the United States for the Washington-based Investigative Project, al Qaeda has demonstrated a repeated ability over the past decade to recruit U.S. citizens, and use them for specific missions. He says that the organization has been active in the United States since the early 1990s, growing out of fundraising efforts for Afghan and Pakistani refugees.

Typical of al Qaeda agents recruited in the United States is Wadih El Hage, a tire store manager from Texas, who was convicted earlier this year of playing a key role in the August 1998 embassy bombings. The evidence showed that El Hage came into contact with al Qaeda by running refugee centers, first in New York and later in Pakistan.

Some of the people who took part in last week's plot appeared to have been living in the United States for at least two decades, with Social Security numbers dating back to the early 1980s, according to public databases. The fact that educated, well-traveled people are attracted to bin Laden is not surprising, says Witley Bruner, a former CIA official who spent much of his career in Algeria and the Middle East. "It's probably easier for people who have had the experience [of living a few years in a Western country] to be alienated from the West than somebody who has never been out of the Afghan countryside. The Afghan peasant may hate the U.S., but he has no idea what it is. He has not been personally humiliated by America."

'Non-State Terrorism'

The transnational, borderless nature of al Qaeda is a radical departure from the state-sponsored terrorist groups that preceded it.

"The larger trend has been away from state sponsorship, toward non-state terrorism, of which bin Laden and al Qaeda have been for the last several years the personification," said Pillar. "If you consider what we were worried about even 15 years ago -- Libya, Syria -- that's just not the same kind of factor anymore."

This wasn't always the case for bin Laden, nor is it entirely true today. Throughout his 20-year career as a jihadist, bin Laden has always depended on a certain degree of state support, or at the very least state tolerance, starting with his membership in the anti-Soviet rebel force in Afghanistan -- a movement that received about $2 billion in convert U.S. funds.

"We created the first international jihad in recent history," says Jessica Stern, a Harvard university professor who worked on terrorism issues in the Clinton White House, referring to U.S. support for the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviet Union.

During the early 1990s, bin Laden enjoyed the protection of the Islamic government of Sudan. Since his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, he has relied on support from the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, where he lives. In return for sanctuary, bin Laden has given the Taliban funds and fighters to consolidate its hold over the country. He has also formally sworn allegiance to the Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar, whom he has described as "commander of the faithful."

According to Stern, bin Laden has also received indirect support from Pakistan, whose secret services have used the Taliban and Islamic jihadists as proxies for carrying out a guerrilla struggle against India in Kashmir. There are training camps for jihadists in Pakistan, as well as in Afghanistan, training students from places as far apart as Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Kuwait and Bangladesh.

More controversial are allegations of links between bin Laden and Middle Eastern states such as Iraq and Iran. The 1998 indictment of bin Laden by a federal grand jury in New York alleged that al Qaeda "reached an understanding" with the Baghdad government to work cooperatively on certain projects, such as weapons development, but this was never proved. The most that could be demonstrated was that at least one bin Laden sympathizer in the 1993 plot to blow up the World Trade Center had traveled on Kuwaiti passports that disappeared during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait two years earlier.

To some analysts, this suggests that the Iraqi secret services may have provided logistical support to al Qaeda, at least in the early 1990s. Bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein share one obvious goal in common: the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Middle East, and particularly from Saudi Arabia. But the trial evidence also revealed that some al Qaeda operatives were deeply mistrustful of Hussein, whom they considered "a bad Muslim."

"Saddam Hussein may be nuts, but he is not totally crazy," said Sprinzak, the terrorism expert at Hebrew University. "He knows that he would be a dead man, and Baghdad would be a flattened city, if he took part in a plot like this. Saddam wants to survive. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is ready to go to heaven to join Allah."

In Setbacks, New Strength

Much of what U.S. intelligence knows about how bin Laden and al Qaeda operate has come from documents captured during successful anti-terrorist operations, or from arrested terrorists looking for sentencing leniency or witness protection.

Jamal al Fadl, an al Qaeda defector who testified in the trial of four men convicted in the 1998 embassy bombings, illuminated an organization structured with bin Laden and his consultative council at the top, surrounded by committees to handle business enterprises, military training, religious policy and even publicity.

Other testimony from insiders revealed that al Qaeda communicated with embassy plot participants via a satellite telephone purchased in New York, and subpoenaed phone records helped tie bin Laden to the bombings. An al Qaeda training manual captured in a raid in California revealed other secrets about the group.

Yet this knowledge, much of it revealed in open court, has had an ironic effect over the last decade of strengthening the terrorist movement, specialists said. From each setback represented by an arrest and trial, bin Laden and his associates have been granted an inside view of how U.S. authorities are pursuing al Qaeda.

"Every success contributes to the next failure," Steinberg said. "We've had to blow every investigative and intelligence technique. . . . Every time you have to go to court and do it, it's like handing over the investigation manual to the other guys. They see every place where they screwed up."

Al Qaeda has a proven talent for knowing when to move on. Since Tuesday, the whole world has learned that some of the participants in last week's attack had been receiving pilot training at U.S. flight schools for much of the last two years. Plotters of any future operation are unlikely to choose the same path.

"The terrorists will go elsewhere," said James M. Lindsay, a former National Security Council director of global issues and multilateral affairs. "They look for the places where you are vulnerable and attack you there, when they can catch you flat-footed. They are always looking for the places where you're not looking. They study you."

"There is a conscious effort to vary tactics as a way of trying to overcome defenses," Pillar said of the terrorists. "For that very reason the next big attack, even if it's by the same organization, might use a whole different M.O."

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Why They Attack Us by Samuel Francis

September 15, 2001
AntiWar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/francis1.html

"We're at war," the young waitress, her voice catching, informed me when I first heard of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon this week. She was hardly the only one. "America at war," the Washington Times' lead editorial pronounced the next day. "It's WAR," screamed its editorial cartoon. A "new kind of war has been declared on the world's democracies," the Wall Street Journal's editorial pontificated.

"The War Against America" was the subject of the New York Times editorial. "A state of war," the Washington Post called it. "This is war," pronounced columnist Charles Krauthammer. "They were acts of war," confirmed the President of the United States.

Well, it probably is - except that, even as everyone from waitresses to the president was declaring war or howling for it, nobody was exactly sure who we were at war with. The usual suspect was the shadowy Osama bin Laden, though some experts said the attacks didn't fit his profile, and even if we were sure, no one seemed able to say how we should wage the war, how we could win it, or what would constitute victory.

Mainly, what most Americans wanted to do - entirely understandably - was to blow the hell out of somebody or something. No doubt, in time, we will.

But the blunt truth is that the United States has been at war for years - at least a decade, since we launched a war against Iraq in 1991, even though Iraq had done absolutely nothing to harm the United States or any American. Our bombing attacks on Iraq certainly caused civilian casualties, and if they were not deliberate, nobody beating the war drums at the time felt much regret for them. For ten years, we have maintained economic sanctions on Iraq that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and we have repeatedly bombed it whenever it failed to abide by standards we imposed on it.

Under Bill Clinton, we again launched bombing raids against civilians - once against so-called "terrorist training camps" supposedly under bin Laden's control in Afghanistan and at the same time against a purported "chemical weapons factory" in Sudan that almost certainly was no such thing. The attacks just happened to occur on the same day as Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony that she had engaged in sex with the president. "This is unfortunately the war of the future," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in justifying the U.S. raids, officially launched in retaliation for terrorist attacks on American embassies.

Later the same year, Mr. Clinton ordered (but later countermanded) yet more missile attacks on Iraq - the day after the Paula Jones sex scandal was settled in court. Later, yet again, Mr. Clinton ordered more bombings in Iraq the day before Congress was scheduled to vote on his impeachment. Then there are the Balkans, where the United States has waddled forth to war for no compelling reason, and where it has also slaughtered civilians with its unprovoked bombings.

In all the buckets of media gabble about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, not once have I heard any journalist ask any expert the simple question, "Why did the terrorists attack us?"

There is, of course, an implicit answer to the unasked question: It's because the terrorists are "evil"; they "hate democracy"; they are "fanatics," "barbarians" and "cowards." Those, of course, are answers that can satisfy only children. Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we started.

Let us hear no more about how the "terrorists" have "declared war on America." Any nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his own personal political purposes can expect whatever the "terrorists" dish out to it. If, as President Bush told us this week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power and the criminal himself.

The blunt and quite ugly truth is that the United States has been at war for years - that it started the war in the name of "spreading democracy," "building nations," "waging peace," "stopping aggression," "enforcing human rights," and all the other pious lies that warmongers always invoke to mask the truth, and that it continued the war simply to save a crook from political ruin. What is new is merely that this week, for the first time, the war we started came home - and all of a sudden, Americans don't seem to care for it so much.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. He can be contacted at Samfrancis.net.

----------

1998 bin Laden Directive OK'd

September 16, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bin-Laden-Clinton.html

WASHINGTON (AP)-- President Clinton signed a secret directive in 1998 authorizing U.S. efforts to capture or disrupt Osama bin Laden and his terrorism network, and several unsuccessful attempts were made, a person familiar with the effort said Sunday.

Non-Americans in Afghanistan, promised a bounty if they succeeded, had an ``active, constant and unsuccessful effort to capture bin Laden or take him out,'' the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ``There were several attempts.''

The CIA and other U.S. agencies monitored the efforts, the source said, stressing that no Americans were involved directly in the activity.

CBS News reported Sunday night that in one such attempt, non-Americans hired by the CIA launched rocket-propelled grenades at a bin Laden convoy but hit the wrong vehicle.

A second source, a government official also speaking on condition of anonymity, would say only that the U.S. government was informed of a failed attempt on bin Laden last year.

The CIA had no comment on the report.

President Ford signed an order prohibiting foreign assassinations 25 years ago, but that could be countermanded by any subsequent presidential order

A number of members of Congress have said recently the presidential ban on assassinations should be lifted.

Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian exile living in hiding in Afghanistan, has been identified by President Bush as the prime suspect in Tuesday's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon and the crash of an airliner in Pennsylvania.

U.S. officials have long accused bin Laden of running a global terrorist network, a charge he and the ruling Taliban government have denied.

It was reported last week that during Clinton's final days in office, senior officials weighed a military strike against bin Laden after receiving intelligence on his whereabouts. The plan was rejected over concerns the information was stale and could result in a miss or civilian casualties.

The information spurred high-level discussion inside the White House in December 2000.

``There were a couple of points, including in December, where there was intelligence indicative of bin Laden's whereabouts,'' former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger told The Associated Press. ``But I can categorically tell you that at no point was it ripe enough to act.''

Some in Congress have expressed anger that the United States has not been able to get to bin Laden after years of intelligence linking him to global acts of terrorism against Americans.

--------

America widens 'crusade' on terror
US preparations for military strikes are increasing

Sunday, 16 September, 2001, 20:49 GMT 21:49 UK
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1547000/1547561.stm

President Bush and his senior officials aim to uproot perceived terrorist networks spanning 60 countries in America's war against those who carried out Tuesday's suicide plane attacks in New York and Washington.

"I want to remind the American people that the prime suspect's [Osama Bin Laden] organisation is in a lot of countries," Mr Bush told reporters on the White House lawn.

He was speaking after returning from discussions with top advisers at the Camp David presidential retreat on plans for a military response to the attacks, in which more than 5,000 people are believed to have died.

Mr Bush and his officials again stressed that any state harbouring terrorists would face what Vice-President Dick Cheney called the "full wrath" of American military might.

Earlier Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the US was engaged in "a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries, including the United States".

In other developments:

US Attorney-General John Ashcroft says he will ask Congress for stronger anti-terrorism laws, including wider phone-tapping powers

Pakistan is sending a delegation to Afghanistan to persuade the Taleban to hand over Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born dissident who has been their guest since 1996

Mr Bin Laden issues his first direct denial of involvement in the attacks Afghan citizens flee built-up areas fearing imminent US air attacks

A man is arrested in New Jersey in connection with the attacks - the second confirmed arrest in a massive investigation involving 4,000 FBI agents

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reports that 180 bodies have now been recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, while 5,097 people remain missing

US Vice-President Dick Cheney says that after Tuesday's attacks, orders were given to shoot down any further unauthorised passenger flights over New York and Washington

Resilient economy

On his return to the White House, Mr Bush emphasised that America would show the world its resilience when it returned to work on Monday.

"No question about it, this incident affected our economy but the markets open tomorrow, people go back to work and we'll show the world.

"People will be amazed at how quickly we rebuild New York, how quickly people come together."

Officials have made it clear that, apart from air or missile strikes, the use of ground troops may be under consideration, to destroy the network behind last Tuesday's attacks, and then try to eradicate state-sponsored terrorism.

Mr Bush praised Pakistan for its offer to help the US and said he was pleased by the "very positive" response from other countries such as India and Saudi Arabia.

The BBC Washington correspondent says the US would like to build a firm coalition of states supporting its action before launching any retaliation, even if that means some delay.

Opinion polls show strong support among Americans for the use of military force against whoever was responsible for last Tuesday's attacks.

Mr Bush has singled out Osama Bin Laden as the prime suspect.

But his top officials stressed on Sunday that the problem was much wider than just one man.

Vice-President Cheney singled out the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad on NBC's Meet the Press programme.

Threat to Taleban

Mr Bin Laden issued a statement on Sunday denying any involvement in the attacks.

"The US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not done this," he was quoted as saying by the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has meanwhile welcomed Pakistan's decision to allow the US full co-operation, possibly including the use of its airspace.

Mr Bush has backed this up by telephoning Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to thank him for his government's support. The Taleban has warned Pakistan that it faces war if it allows the US to launch an attack from its territory.

Noble Eagle

At the same time, the president's military advisers are concerned that the immediate threat of attacks on US civilian targets is not over and a plan - Operation Noble Eagle - has been launched to improve defences.

Warplanes are patrolling the skies above major US cities and military installations, warship battle groups are on guard off the country's east and west coasts, and tens of thousands of reservists have been called up to protect the homeland.

Throughout New York memorial services are being held on Sunday, with thousands expected to attend the main ceremony at St Patrick's cathedral.

The message from White House aides is that Mr Bush wants ordinary Americans to defy those who carried out the attacks by returning to the normal course of their lives as soon as possible.

New York's Stock Exchange, which has been closed since the attack on the heart of the city's financial district, is due to reopen on Monday - as is the US baseball season, suspended as a mark of respect.


-------- activists

Protesters ask Bush to resist force

September 16, 2001
Around the Nation
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010916-11575302.htm

ATLANTA -- Anti-war activists in Atlanta demanded yesterday that President Bush rule out military retaliation for the terrorist attacks this week that left thousands of Americans dead or missing.

Carrying signs that read "Stop The U.S. War Machine" and "No More War," about 100 protesters said the blood of innocent people would be on the U.S. government if it launched military strikes on Afghanistan and other countries believed to harbor suspected terrorist networks.

--------

Anti-war groups urge restraint, introspection

USA TODAY
09/16/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/16/anti-war-activists.htm

NEW YORK (AP) - When Americans flew Old Glory last week, Joanne Sheehan reached for her dove-of-peace banner. Given U.S. resolve to retaliate militarily against Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the East Coast anti-war activist saw the banner as a purer symbol of peace.

Sheehan, who chairs the London-based War Resisters International, said the United States cannot wipe out terrorism by bombing it away: It's both impractical and morally appalling.

"Our response should not be to kill more innocent people," she said. "Calls from the Bush administration would do just that."

Pleas for restraint and justice by other, nonviolent means such as diplomacy or an international war crimes trial, are echoed by pacifist demonstrators and world leaders - Pope John Paul II, former South African president Nelson Mandela, and Cuban President Fidel Castro among them.

It is a minority view: Recent polls show most Americans believe the United States should retaliate, even if innocent people die in the process.

Those in the U.S. who are against retaliation are even urging national introspection into why the country was targeted for terrorism.

"It's not good and evil, us and them, it's more complex than that," said Larry Leaman-Miller, Colorado director of the Quaker group, American Friends Service Committee.

Years of U.S. economic and military domination, and U.S. foreign policy have hurt and exploited people, and left them feeling helpless to respond except by terrorism, Leaman-Miller said.

Additionally, Arab resentment has been building over U.N. sanctions and bombing in Iraq, military support for Israel, and U.S. refusal to criticize the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he said.

Filmmaker and social critic Michael Moore, in an e-mail circulated widely last week, wrote of thousands of children orphaned around the world with "our taxpayer-funded terrorism" in Chile, Vietnam, Gaza, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

In an essay in The New Yorker magazine, American writer Susan Sontag criticizes U.S. public officials and media commentators for trying to "infantilize" the public in the wake of the attacks.

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" Sontag wrote in the Sept. 24 issue of the magazine, due out Monday.

In small ways around the country last week, some U.S. citizens pressed for nonviolent solutions to the cause of the nation's heartache.

In Brooklyn, a sign urged residents to lobby Congress for a peaceful resolution.

At a prayer service in Plainfield, N.J., Presbyterian minister Bob Hillenbrand warned of the high cost of inflicting yet more violence, a tack anathema to all faith traditions, he said.

Dave Robinson, national director for Pax Christi, USA, a Catholic peace movement that began after World War II, said once the nation has stopped grieving, it must look within itself.

"This is a time when America can be a light to the world," Robinson said. "It's a moment for conversion from a sea of weapons and escalating violence ... letting God's way show us the direction, not our basest fears and emotional reactions."

--------

THE LONE VOICE
In One Vote, a Call for Restraint

New York Times
September 16, 2001
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/national/16LEE.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - Even though she is described as the most committed pacifist in Congress, Representative Barbara Lee of California said that the day may come soon when she will support a war against the terrorists who struck New York and Washington and any nation that supported them.

But not yet, Ms. Lee said today, explaining why hers was the sole vote in either the House or Senate opposing a resolution authorizing military action against the terrorists who sent hijacked jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The House vote was 420 to 1.

"I agonized over that vote," said Ms. Lee, 55, a Democrat from a liberal, even leftist district that includes Oakland and Berkeley. "We've got to bring these perpetrators to justice. But I'm saying that I have not yet seen the evidence. And until then, in Congress, we must show restraint."

She said she decided only a few hours before the vote on Friday, when she attended a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington for the victims and listened closely to one of the prayers.

"One of the clergy members said that as we act, we should not become the evil that we deplore," she said. "And at that moment, I knew what I had to do."

Her commitment to nonviolence has often left her a lonely voice and vote on the House floor. In 1998, hers was one of only five votes against renewed bombing against Iraq over its refusal to allow weapons inspections by the United Nations. In 1999, hers was the only vote against a resolution authorizing the Clinton administration's plans to bomb Yugoslavia over the conflict in Kosovo.

Ms. Lee said she resisted any simple labels of her voting record, including that of pacifist. "I don't subscribe to any kinds of labels," she said.

Ms. Lee, who received a degree in social welfare from the University of California in 1975, started in politics as an aide to Representative Ron Dellums, whose seat she now holds.

----

Please lend your support to this petition.

From: "M.W. Stowell" <mwstowell@hotmail.com>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 19:45:50 -0700

Copy the body of the message and all the names below into the text of a new message. Add your name to the list and forward to as many people as you know.

If you are person 150 on the list, please forward the entire email to president@whitehouse.gov and then forward a new copy of the email to your friends with your name as number 1. Thanks

Dear Mr. President,

Dear Mr. Vice President,

We the undersigned are writing to you at this moment to express our profound sadness at the events of September 11th, and to plead with you and those making the very difficult decisions which have to be made at this time for calm and a non-retaliatory stance.

We have all been deeply affected by this tragedy and our hearts and sympathies go to all those who died and to the loved ones they left behind. In the wake of this event there is shock and sadness, and emotions run very high. It is human to want to respond quickly, to find those responsible and ensure that this cannot happen again anywhere. However, retaliating with more violence only breeds more violence and ensures that future generations will live in fear with mistrust and suffering. We urge you and our fellow citizens to remember that vengeance offers no relief, that retaliation can never guarantee healing and that to meet violence with violence breeds more rage and more senseless deaths. Only love leads to peace with justice.

We believe it is our duty as a civilized nation to rise above the desire for retaliation and to find a way of dealing with this tragedy that is peaceful and good. We do not ask that we ignore that this happened or that those who are responsible not be held accountable. Rather we ask that we lead the world as an example of another way, a better way for all mankind. Further violence and the deaths of more innocent people will not resolve this situation or ensure the safety of future generations. This is truly an opportunity to show the world that leadership is earned, not imposed through violence and bullying tactics. Please Mr. President, give us all hope for a future where good will truly prevail over evil, and where violence has no place. Our goal should be to build bridges of love, respect and understanding among all people. This is the only way to ensure that the tragedy of September 11th and similar tragedies around the world do not happen again.

1. Maura Duignan, San Francisco, CA 94110
2. Sarah Ellison, San Francisco, CA 94110
3. Katie Bonier, San Francisco, CA 94114
4. Jane Cote, Somerville, MA 02144
5. Cynthia Pratt, Wellesley, MA 02481
6. Hermine Makman, Cambridge, MA 02138
7. Dorothy Burlage, Newton, MA 02458
8. Emmie Adams, St. Johnsbury, VT 05819
9. Joan C. Browning, Ronceverte WV 24970
10. Gonzalo Santos, Bakersfield CA 93304
11. John Travis Eureka, CA 55503
12. Melanie Williams Arcata, CA 95521
13. Michael W. Stowell, Arcata, CA 95521
14. Ellen Thomas, Washington, DC 20038

--------
The Deeper Wound: Words From Deepak Chopra

Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001
From: "Julie Benson" <benson_jb@hotmail.com>

As fate would have it, I was leaving New York on a jet flight that took off 45 minutes before the unthinkable happened. By the time we landed in Detroit, chaos had broken out. When I grasped the fact that American security had broken down so tragically, I couldn't respond at first. My wife and son were also in the air on separate flights, one to Los Angeles, one to San Diego. My body went absolutely rigid with fear. All I could think about was their safety, and it took several hours before I found out that their flights had been diverted and both were safe.

Strangely, when the good news came, my body still felt that it had been hit by a truck. Of its own accord it seemed to feel a far greater trauma that reached out to the thousands who would not survive and the tens of thousands who would survive only to live through months and years of hell. And I asked myself, Why didn't I feel this way last week? Why didn't my body go stiff during the bombing of Iraq or Bosnia? Around the world my horror and worry are experienced every day. Mothers weep over horrendous loss, civilians are bombed mercilessly, refugees are ripped from any sense of home or homeland. Why did I not feel their anguish enough to call a halt to it?

As we hear the calls for tightened American security and a fierce military response to terrorism, it is obvious that none of us has any answers. However, we feel compelled to ask some questions. Everything has a cause, so we have to ask, What was the root cause of this evil?

We must find out not superficially but at the deepest level. There is no doubt that such evil is alive all around the world and is even celebrated. Does this evil grow from the suffering and anguish felt by people we don't know and therefore ignore? Have they lived in this condition for a long time?

One assumes that whoever did this attack feels implacable hatred for America. Why were we selected to be the focus of suffering around the world? All this hatred and anguish seems to have religion at its basis.

Isn't something terribly wrong when jihads and wars develop in the name of God? Isn't God invoked with hatred in Ireland, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, and even among the intolerant sects of America? Can any military response make the slightest difference in the underlying cause? Is there not a deep wound at the heart of humanity? If there is a deep wound, doesn't it affect everyone?

When generations of suffering respond with bombs, suicidal attacks, and biological warfare, who first developed these weapons? Who sells them? Who gave birth to the satanic technologies now being turned against us?

If all of us are wounded, will revenge work? Will punishment in any form toward anyone solve the wound or aggravate it? Will an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and limb for a limb, leave us all blind, toothless and crippled? Tribal warfare has been going on for two thousand years and has now been magnified globally. Can tribal warfare be brought to an end? Is patriotism and nationalism even relevant anymore, or is this another form of tribalism?

What are you and I as persons going to do about what is happening? Can we afford to let the deeper wound fester any longer? Everyone is calling this an attack on America, but is it not a rift in our collective soul?

Isn't this an attack on civilization from without that is also from within? When we have secured our safety once more and cared for the wounded, after the period of shock and mourning is over, it will be time for soul searching. I only hope that these questions are confronted with the deepest spiritual intent. None of us will feel safe again behind the shield of military might and stockpiled arsenals. There can be no safety until the root cause is faced. In this moment of shock I don't think anyone of us has the answers. It is imperative that we pray and offer solace and help to each other.

But if you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

Love, Deepak"


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