------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Pentagon recommends use of nuclear weapons
Nuclear plants at risk from airborne suicide bombers: IAEA
Global atomic agency
Nuclear Aspirations
Nuclear vs Renewables in UK Energy Review
Korean pacts inspired by attacks in U.S.
Levin Agrees to Cut Missile Test Curbs From Defense Bill
Shields up!
U.S. and Russia Make Progress on Storage of Nuclear Materials
Come, friendly Bomb
SWEDEN: NUCLEAR PLANT TO CLOSE
Pentagon recommends use of nuclear weapons
Hijacked Plane Targeted Nuke Complex

MILITARY
The Diplomatic Offensive Intensifies
A Look at Armed Forces in Afghanistan
Taliban Refuses to Surrender Bin Laden
Taliban issues call for Muslim holy war
Afghans flee to Pakistan as tension mounts
Scarcity of Afghan Targets Leads U.S. to Revise Strategy
The Terror of Germ Warfare
China Also Wants U.S. Help Against 'Separatists'
Paramilitary Army Seeks Political Role in Colombia
Hijacker met with Iraqi official
Palestinians, Israelis agree to stop fighting
Vieques Bombing Exercises to Begin
Soviet Generals Warn Of 'Sea of Bloodshed'
Tense Tajikistan Braces for Instability
China, Iran seek U.N. role in retaliation
Mission is clear: Fight terrorism
Dellums backs Lee vote against armed force
Time to lead, George, not follow
U.S. Develops Options for Military Action
Pentagon orders combat aircraft to Persian Gulf

OTHER
Santa Cruz Mulls Expanding of Anti-Homeless Restrictions
Lawmakers vow to protect liberties
Justice Drafts New Rules for Deportation
Afghanistan facing humanitarian disaster
FBI Targets Arab-Americans for Recruitment
Experts See a High-Security America
The New World Order
Terrorists with 'loose nukes' the worst nightmare
Crimes against humanity

ACTIVISTS
ANTI-WAR PROTEST
Groups Rally Near Capitol
War: Metaphor into Reality,
The Anti-Globalization Movement Alters Its Strategy
"No More Victims Anywhere" - Alert #2
The roots of terrorism



-------- NUCLEAR

Pentagon recommends use of nuclear weapons

Japan Today
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=78870

WASHINGTON The Defense Department has recommended to President George W Bush the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a military option to retaliate for last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, diplomatic sources said Tuesday.

It is unknown whether Bush has made any decision. But military analysts said the president is unlikely to opt for the use of nuclear weapons because doing so would generate rebuke from the international community and could even trigger revenge from the enemy involving weapons of mass destruction.

But the Pentagon's suggestion shows the determination of U.S. officials to retaliate for the first massive terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland, the analysts said.

The recommendation appears intended to deter terrorists, they said.

On ABC television's THIS WEEK program Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons. He avoided clearly answering a simple question on whether their use can be ruled out. To a similar question, a Pentagon official also replied, "We will not discuss operational and intelligence matters."

According to the diplomatic sources, the Pentagon recommended using tactical nuclear weapons shortly after it became known that an unprecedented number of civilian casualties resulted from the terrorist attacks.

On Sept 11, hijackers seized four commercial U.S. aircraft. Two of the planes slammed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, while a third hit the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh. More than 5,000 people were left dead or missing in the attacks.

Tactical nuclear weapons have been developed to attack very specific targets. The military analysts said Pentagon officials are apparently thinking of using weapons that can reach and destroy terrorists hiding in an underground shelter, limiting damage to non-targets.

In 1986, the U.S. conducted an air raid on Libya, attempting to target Col. Muammar Qaddafi. In 1998, Washington fired a cruise missile into Afghanistan in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. sees as behind last week's terrorist attacks.

The analysts said that since these attempts failed, it may be assumed that U.S. officials are mulling the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which can cause much greater destruction.

Declassified official documents show that since the mid-1990s, the U.S. has indicated that it does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons if a country attacks the U.S., its allies, or its forces with chemical or biological weapons. (Kyodo News)

----

Nuclear plants at risk from airborne suicide bombers: IAEA

Wednesday, September 19
AFP
http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/afp/article.html?s=asia/headlines/010919/world/afp/Nuclear_plants_at_risk_from_airborne_suicide_bombers__IAEA.html

VIENNA, Sept 19 - Nuclear plants across the world are at risk from airborne suicide attacks similar to those which rocked the United States last week, International Atomic Energy Agency experts said.

There are dozens of different types of nuclear reactor in more than 400 plants worldwide, making them, as well as huge numbers of other targets, very difficult to protect.

That difficulty means the annual general assembly of the IAEA, being held in Vienna until Friday, is focused on the threat of nuclear proliferation rather than that of hypothetical terrorist attacks on nuclear plants.

"Electricity is a key element to the functioning of western societies. The West's reliance on electricity, much of it from nuclear sources, is such that a nuclear plant would be a potential weak point for terrorists to pick out," IAEA spokesman David Kyd said Tuesday.

The combination of the impact of a large jet of 200 tons or more with the detonation of the fuel, if it were tanked up like the planes which attacked New York and Washington last week, could damage a containment dome and a reactor to the extent of a nuclear catastrophe, according to Kyd.

But reactors are low bumps on the landscape which are difficult to find or reach between immense cooling towers which stand out, he said.

The impact of an attack on a nuclear plant would not be bigger than the bombing of an oil refinery, a chemical factory or a standard electricity plant, Kyd went on.

"But nuclear installations have a special mystique attached to them," he said.

All American nuclear plants, as well as reactors dedicated to research, have been put on maximum alert since the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But the 438 active nuclear plants throughout the world are difficult to protect, Kyd said.

There are dozens of different types of them. The United States, home to a quarter of the world's nuclear plants, has more than 20 models. Great Britain has half a dozen.

"I don't know what kind of reinforcement could give you a guarantee to withstand the impact," Kyd said.

During the Cold War, Germany built reinforced plants to protect against possible collisions with fighter planes because of the large number of NATO training flights that took place in its airspace. But while these reinforcements were deemed safe in the face of unarmed aircraft, their usefulness against fighter planes carrying live ammunition was questionable, a former NATO expert explained.

In spite of disaster scenarios, the American government has focused its reaction on the risks of proliferation and the hijacking of fissile materials, at the time of the IAEA general assembly's opening.

"We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we have just experienced," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

He asked the IAEA to increase its efforts to stop nuclear proliferation and the illicit trade in nuclear materials, which is seeing an upsurge.

Following a lull between 1995 and 1998, the IAEA has seized six loads of 0.4 to six grammes of uranium or enriched plutonium since the beginning of 1999 in the former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

It takes at least eight kilogrammes of plutonium or 25 kilogrammes of highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb, according to experts.

---

Global atomic agency confesses little can be done to safeguard nuclear plants

Environmental News Network
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
By William J. Kole,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/09/09192001/ap_45005.asp

VIENNA, Austria - Security is being tightened at the world's nuclear power plants, an international watchdog agency said Monday, but it conceded that little can be done to shield a nuclear facility from a direct hit by an airliner.

Most nuclear power plants were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and like the World Trade Center, they were designed to withstand only accidental impacts from the smaller aircraft widely used at the time, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said as it opened its annual conference. "If you postulate the risk of a jumbo jet full of fuel, it is clear that their design was not conceived to withstand such an impact," spokesman David Kyd said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was among delegates from 132 nations who opened the conference with calls to better safeguard nuclear plants and to keep nuclear materials out of terrorists' hands.

Abraham brought a message from President George W. Bush to the Vienna-based IAEA, urging the agency to keep pace with "the real and growing threat of nuclear proliferation." The world "must ensure that nuclear materials are never used as weapons of terror," Abraham said. "We cannot assume that tomorrow's terrorist acts will mirror those we've just experienced."

In the wake of last week's attacks in New York and Washington, governments have tightened security outside nuclear power and radioactive waste facilities worldwide.

But Japan, which is heavily dependent on nuclear energy and has 52 nuclear plants, warned Monday that although tighter security is needed, nothing can shield the plants from attacks by missiles or aircraft.

Conference delegates, who began Monday with a minute of silence and a song from the Vienna Boy's Choir in memory of the victims of the U.S. attacks, met behind closed doors Monday and Tuesday on ways to improve plant security.

In the West, nuclear power plants were designed more with ground vehicle attacks in mind, Kyd said. Although many were designed to withstand a glancing blow from a small commercial jetliner, a direct hit at high speed by a modern jumbo jet "could create a Chernobyl situation," said an American official who declined to be identified. However, the buildings that house nuclear reactors themselves are far smaller targets than the Pentagon posed, and it would be extremely difficult for a terrorist to mount a direct hit at an angle that could unleash a catastrophic chain of events, Kyd said.

If a nuclear power plant were hit by an airliner, the reactor would not explode, but such a strike could destroy the plant's cooling systems. That could cause the nuclear fuel rods to overheat and produce a steam explosion that could release lethal radioactivity into the atmosphere.

The IAEA said it would work more closely with Interpol and other police agencies to minimize the risk of nuclear materials falling into terrorists' hands. Over the past 12 months, there have been 13 known interceptions of trafficked nuclear material worldwide, the agency said.

Officials said it takes at least eight kilograms (17 1/2 pounds) of plutonium or 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of enriched uranium to produce a single nuclear weapon, but that only miniscule amounts of those metals are known to have been smuggled in recent years.

"A nuclear weapon requires tremendous expertise. We have no indications that any terrorist group is that advanced," Kyd said.

Although nuclear waste potentially could be used to produce a "radiological" weapon, it would take months or years to kill, and it is far cheaper to obtain compounds that could be used to create lethal chemical weapons, he said.

-------- afghanistan

Nuclear Aspirations? Bin Laden tried to obtain enriched uranium

By Earl Lane and Knut Royce
September 19, 2001
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-uslade19.story?coll=ny%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines

Washington -- Long before last week's suicide airliner attacks, security specialists had seen evidence that Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has been trying to acquire material for even more disastrous weapons, including enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

There have been several efforts by bin Laden operatives to acquire nuclear materials in recent years, according to intelligence sources, official testimony and news accounts. There is no evidence that bin Laden ever actually has obtained such materials.

Still, there seems little doubt about bin Laden's intentions. "Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on enriched uranium for seven or eight years," R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said yesterday.

Russian intelligence sources also confirm bin Laden's interest in nuclear materials. A former Russian intelligence official, in a memorandum to a U.S. counterpart provided to Newsday, said Russian security forces halted an attempt in 1998 to sell an unspecified amount of Soviet-origin, bomb-grade uranium to a Pakistani company controlled by bin Laden. A U.S. intelligence source declined to comment on the incident or to say whether American intelligence agencies have any verification. "There is evidence that bin Laden has been shopping around" for nuclear materials, the source said, as well as components for chemical and biological weapons.

During testimony earlier this year in New York at the trial of four men accused of participating in the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, a defector from bin Laden's network said he had served as a go-between in a 1993 effort to acquire a cylinder containing uranium (described by several sources as enriched uranium-235.)

The defector, Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, said he had been ordered by one of bin Laden's lieutenants to buy the uranium from former Sudanese military officer Salah Abdel Mobruk for $1.5 million. But Fadl said he was removed from the negotiations and never learned whether the deal went through.

That material was allegedly of South African origin, but much of the concern during the past decade -- particularly in the early 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union -- has been the possible trafficking of nuclear materials from Russian facilities with insufficient controls and safeguards over them. There were reports bin Laden's organization was the victim of a German sting operation when it tried to buy highly enriched uranium on the Soviet black market in 1993 and again a year later. In neither case was any nuclear material transferred.

But analysts say it is likely bin Laden's network is continuing to seek nuclear materials. A U.S. intelligence official said there remains concern bin Laden is interested in obtaining radioactive material for a "dirty bomb." Rather than being used in an atomic weapon, the material would be dispersed in a way that would seriously contaminate a small area.

While non-government specialists caution that bin Laden may have had little success in acquiring nuclear materials, they say it is impossible to say for sure. "We've seen no confirmed or reliable reports of significant quantities [of nuclear materials] going to bin Laden," said Jon Wolfsthal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Osama bin Laden's agents seem to be operating by stealth," said David Albright of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security. "Will they succeed? We'll never know ... The more serious offers are the ones you are not going to hear about. They are going to try to find insiders who have more direct access to the materials."

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University, said last week's terrorist attacks, for which bin Laden has been called a prime suspect by U.S. authorities, suggest bin Laden's network is very well organized and capable of pursuing nuclear materials.

"These events call for dramatically increased political leadership and funding for efforts to secure nuclear materials worldwide," Bunn said. He noted that the Bush administration had proposed cutting the funding for a program to help safeguard nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. He said the Bush budget for 2002 would cut funding for the program from $170 million to $140 million, although there have been efforts in Congress to restore some of the money.

Earl Lane is a reporter for Newsday's Washington Bureau. Knut Royce, a former Washington correspondent for Newsday, reports for The Center for Public Integrity.

-------- britain

Nuclear vs Renewables in UK Energy Review

September 19, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-19-03.html

LONDON, United Kingdom, A choice between nuclear or renewables based energy futures for the UK is emerging in responses to a government policy review announced in June. Recent submissions from Greenpeace and the British Nuclear Industry Forum (BNIF) typify the debate.

Echoing similar statements from other nuclear interests, BNIF urges maintanance of nuclear's share of electricity generation at about one-quarter. The industry group recommends fiscal measures to "recognize and reward the strategic and environmental benefits of nuclear energy," particularly its low carbon emissions.

To maintain nuclear output at current levels will require new power station construction, BNIF acknowledges. Unless the government enables this, it warns, Britain faces becoming a major net importer of oil and natural gas by 2020, endangering national energy security.

Blyth Harbour Wind Farm, Blyth, Northumberland (Photo by Ian Britton courtesy Freefoto.com)

Greenpeace rejects all these arguments, offering a choice between renewables or nuclear as "a step into the future or one foot in the past."

"It is deeply depressing that all the debate has been about a nuclear revival," commented Greenpeace UK director Stephen Tindale. "To endorse that would be to look backwards to an industry that has had its chance and failed."

The government should phase out nuclear power, Greenpeace urges, while setting a target to meet half of electricity needs from renewables within 20 years.

A 50 percent reduction in final energy use should be targeted over 50 years, Greenpeace says, and diversity and security of supply should be achieved through investment in many different renewable energy technologies.

Prime Minister Tony Blair asked the Performance and Innovation Unit to carry out a review of the strategic issues surrounding energy policy for Great Britain. The review is set within the context of meeting the challenge of global warming, while ensuring secure, diverse and reliable energy supplies at a competitive price.

-------- korea

Korean pacts inspired by attacks in U.S.

September 19, 2001
By Christopher Torchia
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010919-76890234.htm

SEOUL - President Kim Dae-jung said agreements reached yesterday by South and North Korean negotiators had "special meaning" because of the terrorist attacks in the United States.

The first talks between the two Koreas after six months of suspended contacts yielded plans for another reunion of separated family members, many of whom have not seen each other since the 1950-53 Korean War.

The deal marked the revival of reconciliation efforts that offer the best hope yet for peace after a half-century of conflict. The fragile process had come to a virtual standstill because of tension between North Korea and the United States.

"I endow special meaning to this," presidential spokesman Oh Hong-keun quoted Mr. Kim as saying after the talks. "We have upheld peace and showed cooperation and exchanges on the Korean Peninsula, which is most sensitive to security issues, at a time when the world is being drawn into war."

South Korea, where 37,000 American troops are deployed as a deterrent against North Korea, has pledged support for any U.S. plans to retaliate against suspected terrorists.

North Korea condemned the attacks in New York and Washington, but apparently did not agree to Mr. Kim's appeal to issue a joint statement against terrorism at the talks in Seoul.

North Korea is on a U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism, although it has not been implicated in a terrorist act since the 1987 bombing of a South Korean jetliner near Burma that killed all 115 persons on board.

The North's KCNA news agency yesterday reiterated the communist country's demand that U.S. troops withdraw from South Korea, citing "U.S. imperialists' ambition for world domination."

North and South negotiators said the next round of family reunions would be held Oct. 16-18. The meetings were expected to involve about 100 people from each side.

After a historic summit last year, the Koreas staged three rounds of temporary reunions for 300 separated family members from each side.

The inter-Korean border is sealed and there is no mail, telephone and other direct means of communications for ordinary people on both sides.

Cabinet-level negotiators also said the Koreas would work to reconnect a cross-border railway after their armed forces agree on construction operations inside the Demilitarized Zone. It said the work would be done "at the earliest possible date."

-------- missile defense

Levin Agrees to Cut Missile Test Curbs From Defense Bill

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52709-2001Sep18?language=printer

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) yesterday agreed to drop a controversial provision on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty from the fiscal 2002 defense authorization bill so that Democrats and Republicans can stand united behind the measure in the aftermath of last week's terrorist attacks.

Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee split along partisan lines earlier this month over a Democratic proposal that would have prohibited the Bush administration from conducting missile defense tests that would violate the ABM Treaty without congressional consent.

But Levin, the committee's chairman, agreed after lengthy meetings with Sen. John W. Warner (Va.), the committee's ranking Republican, to remove the provision to avoid a potentially divisive floor debate over the Bush administration's $8.3 billion missile defense budget, according to both senators.

"This is a major step forward, and I am greatly appreciative of that," Warner said last night in an interview.

While Levin and many Senate Democrats strongly favor maintaining the ABM Treaty as a cornerstone of security relations between the United States and Russia, administration officials have said that their ambitious missile defense plans could violate the treaty by the end of the new fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

As part of the Levin-Warner deal, Levin will introduce separate legislation containing the ABM Treaty provision to be considered at a later date. The provision would require President Bush to notify Congress before spending money on any type of test that would violate the treaty. The treaty permits some forms of missile defense testing and research but prohibits deployment of a national missile defense system.

Levin's bill, however, will still contain a provision cutting $1.3 billion from the administration's $8.3 billion missile defense budget. Under the provision, those funds would be transferred to pay for various conventional weapons systems, counterterrorism programs and "transformational" new technologies.

Warner said that he would propose on amendment on the Senate floor to restore full missile defense funding, which would leave Republicans and Democrats debating spending priorities -- not language on the ABM Treaty, which would almost certainly guarantee a presidential veto.

The legislation authorizes the administration's full $328.9 billion request for defense in fiscal 2002, the largest defense increase since the mid-1980s. The total represents a 7 percent increase over this year's budget in real terms, after inflation.

But that total is expected to go higher still once supplemental spending is added during the fiscal year to pay for what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described yesterday as a "very broadly based campaign" against terrorists and the countries supporting them.

The Pentagon has announced that it is calling up 35,500 reserves to assist in cleanup efforts in New York and Washington and to carry out other missions related to homeland defense.

--------

Shields up!
A missile defense system couldn't have stopped the terrorist attacks, but so what? Star Wars is suddenly more popular than ever.

Salon
By Damien Cave
Sept. 19, 2001
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/19/missile_defense/index.html

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, liberal pundits stepped up their opposition to national missile defense. A high-tech shield would not have prevented the disasters, they noted: Instead, funding priorities should be placed on so-called "human intelligence," international alliances, and attention to the root causes of terrorism. "Star Wars" thinking is a relic of the Cold War era; it doesn't "fit the times," wrote Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. The enemy, she concluded, is "too shadowy to be stopped by a shield."

But the political ground has shifted under the commentators' feet. On Monday, Senate Democrats -- who had been holding up Bush's missile defense appropriation until the White House could prove that it didn't contradict the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) with Russia -- dropped their opposition. A House bipartisan coalition went even further, proposing a bill that would add $2 billion more to the already-generous $8.2 billion total President Bush was requesting before the terrorist attack.

Some legislators are claiming that they haven't caved in completely. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., say that they are merely "postponing" debate in order to quickly pass the White House's $343 billion defense bill at a time of greet need. Daschle's spokeswoman, Anita Dunn, told the Associated Press, "There will be an appropriate time to bring this up for debate; this week is not the appropriate time."

But for now, Congress has given missile defense a large check and a green light that may be difficult to rescind later. Even though most experts concede that no missile defense system, no matter how sophisticated, could have prevented knife-wielding hijackers from taking over commercial airliners, that hasn't stopped them from expressing increasing levels of support for a missile shield.

One argument being made is that the WTC attack is proof positive of terrorism's escalation. The threat of long-range missiles bearing nuclear warheads seems suddenly much more realistic. A less obvious corollary is the likely effect of U.S. retaliation against such states as Afghanistan. A further polarization between the West and Islam could destabilize nuclear-empowered Pakistan and encourage other potential "rogue" states to redouble their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

"We're now in the midst of a potentially long, uncertain conflict that may put these countries -- Algeria, Iran, Sudan and others -- on the opposite side," says Dan Goure, a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a defense-focused think tank. "We haven't been able to deter, therefore we must seek to defend. It's a general strategic principle that we have to follow."

Pakistan doesn't have long-range missiles. In fact, says Dan Smith, a retired colonel at the Center for Defense Information, "Pakistan is so far away from having the means to develop an ICBM that they do not pose a threat for which [nuclear missile defense] would be useful." But, missile defense supporters contend, that doesn't mean that Pakistan won't find a way to get missiles in the future. And if it does, it will be in the context of increasing tensions between Muslims outraged at U.S. attempts to punish states that ostensibly support terrorism, such as Afghanistan. "It's likely that Pakistan will be a less stable place in coming years," says Michael Byers, an international law and politics expert at Duke University.

There's a serious possibility that "armed action against Afghanistan might also promote instability elsewhere, perhaps in Egypt, Algeria, even Saudi Arabia," Byers says. Extreme military action against one Muslim-controlled country could motivate others to ramp up calls for American attacks. Already, argues Jeffrey Tiel, a military philosopher at Ashland University in Ohio, Americans have been forced to acknowledge that terrorists are capable of acts previously unimagined. If they can turn passenger jets into missiles at the cost of their own lives, what's to stop them from firing nuclear warheads from their own countries?

"Because suddenly our enemy may choose to use these weapons [both nuclear and biological]," says Byers, "the present war situation aggravates the timetable on the deployment of a defense of this kind." In other words, now is the time to start investing in a missile shield. There's no time to lose.

It's impossible to know which of these countries would be most willing to support terrorism, says Jack Spencer, defense analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "But one thing we've learned over the past 10 years is that the terrorism -- from hijackings to the first World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole -- get increasingly ugly. It's simply a matter of escalation. The choice is to do nothing and wait for biological and nuclear weapons, or we can do something now."

The proposed national missile defense system -- which optimistic experts say could be 80 percent functional in five years -- wouldn't be the only solution, if these hawkish experts get their way. There's no reason to stop investing in other forms of security. But a missile shield should be a major part of the U.S. defense strategy because ballistic missiles -- short, medium and long-range -- are proliferating all over the world, says Richard H. Kohn, a military policy expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Politically, a missile shield looks better now than ever before, "but it's always been a good idea," he says. Theater range ballistic missiles, which can be fired from about 600 miles away and which have become easier to build and obtain, pose a near-term threat. If Iran obtained and chose to use them on say, American troops in Afghanistan, "concentrations of American forces could be decimated," he says.

Given the danger, says Kohn, the Bush administration should be pursuing the most promising forms of technology that remove the threat of short- and medium-range missiles.

The current congressional climate appears to be one in which the Bush administration can get anything it wants, simply by invoking the magic word "terrorism." But should missile defense research get a completely blank check? Some supporters of missile defense demur. Kohn, along with former military men like retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, author of "Fighting for the Future," a collection of strategic and military essays, argues that the plan should be funded only in proportion to its success.

"Those of us who have been thinking about missile defense for years support the idea -- but only if it's going to work, and if it's going to increase American defense," Kohn says. "There are dangers. First, there's the possibility that you're going to waste a tremendous amount of money on a system that doesn't work. And the second danger is that you're going to provoke other countries to increase their stock of nuclear weapons. It's potentially very destabilizing."

Opponents of missile defense deployment cite Kohn's points as reasons to put Star Wars research on the back burner, or even kill it off altogether. But Kohn and other moderate supporters are using the WTC tragedy as evidence that any potential difficulties shouldn't dissuade defense system advocates. Instead, they advocate "controlled support," meaning heavy funding and a return to the defense shield strategy popular in the 1960s that consisted of research but not necessarily deployment.

"As someone who worked in government for a long time, I know that you need to dangle the carrot rather than just handing out the money," says Peters. "I think we should move ahead cautiously with the research and development. But the idea of breaking ground for radar sites doesn't make sense."

Missile defense is a great concept, he adds, "but only if it works."

But in the current post-attack climate, even the moderate pro-missile defense stance seems increasingly out of favor. Never mind that the technology itself has yet to be proven -- the national sense of security appears to demand a quick fix. And that attitude is playing into the hands of the more dogmatic supporters of missile defense, such as the Heritage Foundation's Spencer, who says that any opposition to missile defense "sickens me." Their position is that we must keep funding missile-intercepting technology not to see if it works, but rather until it works.

The White House echoes that sentiment. When asked by NBC's Tim Russert Sunday on "Meet the Press" if missile defense was a waste of money, Vice President Dick Cheney responded quickly.

"I don't see, Tim, how anybody can argue that we cannot afford to defend America," said Cheney. "And I think for public officials to argue because we got hit with a terrorist assault, we should ignore the ballistic missile threat out there strikes me as irresponsible."

About the writer Damien Cave is a staff writer for Salon Technology.

-------- russia

U.S. and Russia Make Progress on Storage of Nuclear Materials

September 19, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-19-04.html

VIENNA, Austria, The development of a system to verify the location and status of nuclear weapons material released from defense programs in the United States and Russia has passed its annual review at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) conference in Vienna this week.

The agency's 45th General Conference opened on a somber note with a moment of silence followed by a performance by the Vienna Boys Choir to honor the victims of the tragedy in the United States.

The IAEA General Conference approved by acclamation the reappointment of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, incumbent director general. (Photos courtesy IAEA)

IAEA verification of Russian and American nuclear material is intended to promote international confidence that fissile material made subject by either of the two nations to agency verification "remains irreversibly removed from nuclear weapon programs," the agency said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, together with Minister of the Russian Federation on Atomic Energy Alexander Rumyantsev, and Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei met in Vienna Tuesday to review progress.

The three leaders said "significant progress was made" in the development of a model for the Subsidiary Arrangements that provide details for the implementation of the new agreements. These arrangements include facility-specific information, reporting requirements, the technical criteria for verification and the inspection procedures to be applied.

Specific storage facilities being considered under the agreement are the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility in the Russian Federation, and the Savannah River K-Area Material Storage Facility, and the Lynchburg Babcock and Wilcox Uranium Downblending Facility in the United States.

"The removal of weapon origin fissile material from the defense programs of the Russian Federation and the United States is in furtherance of the commitment to disarmament undertaken by the two States pursuant to Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)." the IAEA said.

Technically, the three parties are collaborating in developing and testing special verification equipment for use with classified forms of plutonium. This equipment will incorporate neutron and gamma ray measurement systems operating within a system of "information barriers" designed to allow the inspectors to derive sufficient information for the verification to be credible and independent, while preventing access to classified information.

A prototype of this equipment has been demonstrated in the United States. The U.S. and Russia are developing contracts to support the design, construction and testing of such a measurement system in the Russian Federation.

IAEA safeguards seals are verified with laser disk recording.

The three parties are also collaborating on an inventory monitoring system that will assure the IAEA has continuity of knowledge once an item of material is verified and placed in storage to assure the material remains in storage as declared by either nation.

A number of technical workshops were conducted in the past year. A technical workshop was held in the United States at the Sandia National Laboratories in November 2000 to consider appropriate inventory monitoring techniques.

A second technical workshop was held at the Plutonium Fuel Production Facility of the Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute in April 2001 to consider how state-of-the-art safeguards systems employed for non-proliferation purposes could be adapted for disarmament verification.

In addition, a technical visit was made in March 2001 to British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. in Sellafield, United Kingdom to observe measurement and monitoring activities in a large plutonium storage facility.

Secretary Abraham, Minister Rumyantsev, and Director General ElBaradei committed their respective organizations to a work program aimed at the completion of a new verification agreement, the Subsidiary Arrangements, the specific verification arrangements for the facilities identified by both countries and the development of specialized verification and inventory monitoring systems.

They agreed that the parties would meet again in September 2002 to oversee the implementation of the initiative.

--------

Come, friendly Bomb
The West's spies, essential to Russia's nuclear ambitions, may on balance have done us a favour

Peter Millar
September 19 1999
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/99/09/19/stirevnws01010.html?

On December 24, 1945, the first Christmas Eve of the atomic age, an attaché at the American embassy in Moscow reported back to Washington firm evidence that the Soviet Union was on the way to developing a nuclear bomb.

The reaction back home was described by the American physicist Herbert York: "To most of us, Russia was as mysterious and remote as the other side of the moon and not much more productive when it came to really new ideas or inventions. A common joke at the time said that the Russians could not surreptitiously introduce nuclear bombs in suitcases into the United States because they had not yet been able to perfect a suitcase."

The joke was nearer the mark than anyone knew. Throughout the cold war there was to be a symbiotic relationship between science, industry and politics on the Soviet side and developments in the West. It was fuelled by paranoia, but the active agents which made it work - and arguably held it in check - were the spies. From atomic secrets to aircraft design, whole chunks of western technology were stolen to enable the Soviets, hampered by bureaucratic centralism and Stalin's distrust of intellectuals, to leapfrog back into the Great Game.

The KGB archives of defector Vasili Mitrokhin reveal how far Stalin and his successors relied on the West's convinced communists, gullible fools and embittered turncoats to maintain the superpower equilibrium for 45 years.

People such as Melita Norwood, the Bexleyheath granny spy, believed they were doing the right thing. To what extent did their treachery actually benefit the world by assuring a nuclear standoff rather than nuclear war?

The idea that atomic secrets should be given to the Russians was first raised among scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Chief among them was Niels Bohr, the Danish Jewish Nobel laureate physicist who was spirited out of Nazi-occupied Copenhagen via Stockholm to Britain via boat and the bomb-bay of a Mosquito.

Taken to Los Alamos as an adviser to the atomic project, Bohr was convinced that the bomb could be a way to make future world wars impossible. He formulated the theory which later became known as MAD: mutual assured destruction. Equilibrium in the post-war world meant sharing the secret with Moscow. Bohr managed to convince US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, as well as Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to Washington, and Ernest Bevin, soon to become British foreign secretary. His influence got him into Downing Street to see Winston Churchill - who promptly threw him out.

Churchill was sufficiently worried that he considered having Bohr "confined". Yet by 1954 - five years after the first Soviet nuclear test - Churchill had come round to thinking that it would have been better if the bomb had been shared with Moscow from the start. It might have lessened Stalin's mistrust of his wartime allies.

The politicians, driven by national interests, failed to understand the internationality of the scientific community. Bohr was a close friend of the Russian physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, in turn a protégé of Lord Rutherford, the British-New Zealand atomic pioneer. At Cambridge in the 1920s Kapitsa met several future stars of the Manhattan Project. By 1944 he was working on a Soviet nuclear bomb under Igor Kurchatov, the prime recipient of secrets stolen by Norwood and, far more importantly, Klaus Fuchs.

One of the problems of British intelligence in the middle of this century was that they still had the mindset of the preceding one: their world was defined by concepts of empire and nation state. When war broke out, Fuchs, a young anti-Nazi who had studied at Bristol, taken a doctorate at Edinburgh and the previous month applied for British citizenship, was sent to a detention camp on the St Lawrence River in Canada.

He was sent there simply because he was German, but his detention accidentally abetted his espionage because it was there that he met other communists. Eventually, he was accepted into Los Alamos after MI5 vetting, despite reservations by the Americans. In the United States, suspicions on the ideological front were so intense that they even investigated their own people. J Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge of the project, was tailed by the FBI because he once had a communist girlfriend.

Fuchs gave the Russians crucial details. The technology to make a Hiroshima-type uranium bomb was relatively simple, but Earth has only minute quantities of the essential U-235 isotope. The Nagasaki-type plutonium bomb was the one that mattered: it could be mass-produced. But getting it to explode was not so easy.

Fuchs gave Moscow the vital "implosion" design, details of the explosive "lenses" and the core detonator that started the chain reaction. Much of what took place was the stuff of spy fiction. Fuchs was to recognise his contact in New York by carrying a tennis ball in one hand; the other man would have two pairs of gloves. On his return to Britain after the war, Fuchs planned to meet his Soviet controller at London's Mornington Crescent Tube station, carrying a copy of Life magazine.

This was later changed to the Nag's Head pub in Wood Green, north London. The contact carried a red book, Fuchs held a copy of the New York City Tribune. It was at this time that the young Norwood, working for the Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, a cover name for nuclear weaponry, was given access to confidential material. Whatever she passed to Moscow can only have complemented the information supplied by Fuchs, who had helped patent the hydrogen bomb and was by then head of theoretical physics at Harwell, Britain's atomic weapons research centre.

The spy trade by its nature, however, worked both ways. The defection of Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa in 1945 revealed that Alan Nunn-May, a British physicist in Montreal, loosely connected to the Los Alamos project, was working for Moscow centre. That not only put the wind up Fuchs but also alarmed Kim Philby who, as head of Soviet counter-intelligence in MI6, had a challenging time appearing to use Gouzenko's information while really trying to protect as many KGB agents as he could.

Philby's treachery was based on his own enormous personal conceit, plus rebellion against his father and the British social system. For some, espionage was an honourable profession performed on behalf of one's own country. The most despicable did it for money. Many did not. Fuchs was mortally offended when his Soviet controller offered him cash. Norwood hardly made herself a fortune.

There was also a category of "traitor" who did it for political conviction or moral belief. Whether we call them fools or heroes depends on your point of view but Philby, Maclean, Mitrokhin and Gordievsky all believed their own state had come to represent iniquitous imperialism. The good that has come out of the espionage game has been accidental: a levelling of the playing field produced by the interaction of two sides each trying to tilt it their own way. Spies' inside information often acted as correctives to the fantasies of paranoid politicians, although Mikhail Gorbachev complained that the KGB too often told the Soviet leadership what it wanted to hear.

Western intelligence has not had to suffer the Mitrokhin effect of seeing its archives paraded in public. The haste with which MI6 has acted against Richard Tomlinson, now believed to be the man who brought the archives out of Russia, indicates that it has no intention of allowing similar disclosures. Those trickle-fed to the public are carefully chosen and timed.

A few people know much more than they will ever say. One of them is a near-contemporary of Norwood, a highly intelligent woman living near Oxford and the inspiration for one of the characters in the book I have written about the atomic spy ring, Stealing Thunder (Bloomsbury, £16.99). As the official historian of the British nuclear arms project, she had access to government papers that tell more of the story than anyone else knows. She does not expect her work to be published in her lifetime - or possibly ever.

The doctrine of mutual assured destruction was mad in many senses of the word. But not all. On many occasions, from the Korean war through the Cuban missile crisis to the Afghan conflict, overwhelming superiority of one superpower could have led to the globally damaging use of nuclear weapons.

The pragmatically cynical division of the world into spheres of influence assured a form of peace, although it was paid for by those who lived under Soviet domination.

Back in 1986, Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, wrote: "The superpowers confront each other today totally vulnerable, totally dependent for their continued survival on mutual and reasonable restraint." That is less true now, but is still not wholly invalid. We have grown up with the threat of nuclear holocaust and so far have managed to avoid stampeding into it. For what it is worth, we owe that to the spies.

-------- sweden

SWEDEN: NUCLEAR PLANT TO CLOSE

New York Times
September 19, 2001
World Briefing
Agence France-Presse
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/international/19BRIE.html

Sweden will close a second nuclear reactor by 2003 as part of its plan to phase out nuclear energy by 2010, Prime Minister Goran Persson said as he opened the autumn session of Parliament. He said the government expects the conditions laid down by Parliament for closing Barsebaeck 2, in southwestern Sweden, to be met "by 2003 at the latest." Sweden voted in a referendum in 1980 to shut its 12 nuclear reactors by 2010. So far, only the smallest reactor, Barseback 1's 600- megawatt plant, has been closed, in 1999. Nuclear energy provides about half the national electricity supply, and Parliament has stipulated that Barseback 2 can be shut only after its output has been replaced by renewable energy or conservation.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Pentagon recommends use of nuclear weapons

Japan Today
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=8&id=78870

WASHINGTON - The Defense Department has recommended to President George W Bush the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a military option to retaliate for last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, diplomatic sources said Tuesday.

It is unknown whether Bush has made any decision. But military analysts said the president is unlikely to opt for the use of nuclear weapons because doing so would generate rebuke from the international community and could even trigger revenge from the enemy involving weapons of mass destruction.

But the Pentagon's suggestion shows the determination of U.S. officials to retaliate for the first massive terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland, the analysts said.

The recommendation appears intended to deter terrorists, they said.

On ABC television's THIS WEEK program Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons. He avoided clearly answering a simple question on whether their use can be ruled out. To a similar question, a Pentagon official also replied, "We will not discuss operational and intelligence matters."

According to the diplomatic sources, the Pentagon recommended using tactical nuclear weapons shortly after it became known that an unprecedented number of civilian casualties resulted from the terrorist attacks.

On Sept 11, hijackers seized four commercial U.S. aircraft. Two of the planes slammed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, while a third hit the Pentagon near Washington. The fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh. More than 5,000 people were left dead or missing in the attacks.

Tactical nuclear weapons have been developed to attack very specific targets. The military analysts said Pentagon officials are apparently thinking of using weapons that can reach and destroy terrorists hiding in an underground shelter, limiting damage to non-targets.

In 1986, the U.S. conducted an air raid on Libya, attempting to target Col. Muammar Qaddafi. In 1998, Washington fired a cruise missile into Afghanistan in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. sees as behind last week's terrorist attacks.

The analysts said that since these attempts failed, it may be assumed that U.S. officials are mulling the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which can cause much greater destruction.

Declassified official documents show that since the mid-1990s, the U.S. has indicated that it does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons if a country attacks the U.S., its allies, or its forces with chemical or biological weapons. (Kyodo News)

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

-------- tennessee

Hijacked Plane Targeted Nuke Complex

September 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Oak-Ridge.html?searchpv=aponline

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Twenty-nine years ago, hijackers took over an airliner with 27 passengers and four crew aboard and threatened to crash into the government's nuclear weapons production complex in Oak Ridge.

``They let us know that if we didn't have the money by X hour then we were going to dive into Oak Ridge,'' co-pilot Harold Johnson recalled in an interview last week from his Memphis home. ``And there was no doubt in my mind that we would have done just that.''

Johnson would be threatened with his life and shot in the arm before the 32-hour ordeal finally ended Nov. 12, 1972, in Havana.

Airline hijackings to Cuba were common in those days. The commandeering of the Southern Airways DC9 with its '70ish smiley face on the nose was one of about 30 hijackings that year.

But this was one of the few times in American aviation history -- before last week's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- in which hijackers threatened to use an airplane as a weapon.

Johnson, who retired in 1983, said domestic security measures were increased after his flight. But he said the government didn't go far enough.

``For a long, long time, it was something that I thought could happen someday, but had just hoped and prayed that it never would,'' he said.

Unlike the recent hijackers, the three Americans who took control of Johnson's Memphis-to-Miami-flight had little training and virtually no plan. They did have guns, a hand grenade and a grudge against Detroit, where two of them had been charged with rape.

Hijacker Melvin Cale grew up in nearby Knoxville and worked in Oak Ridge before moving to Detroit with his half brother Louis Moore, another hijacker. Henry Jackson of Detroit completed the trio.

They commandeered the plane about 10 minutes after a stopover in Birmingham, Ala., crashing through the cockpit door with an arm around a flight attendant's throat and a gun to her head.

They wanted a $10 million ransom, 10 parachutes and 10 bulletproof vests. The plane eventually reached Knoxville and began circling Oak Ridge, site of the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant and their specific target -- a nuclear research reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

``It was surreal in a sense,'' said Jim Alexander, a former government spokesman at Oak Ridge. ``We would look up in the sky and see this jet airliner circling. It was high, but it never left.''

In his book, ``Odyssey of Terror,'' the plane's captain, William Haas, wrote that the hijackers became enraged when their demands received a lukewarm response. They forced Haas to begin a steep descent on Oak Ridge, pulling out only when the airline said it would comply.

Johnson, however, said the plane never got below 8,000 to 10,000 feet and that was only so the hijackers could identify Oak Ridge.

The airline finally came up with $2 million for the hijackers, who then forced the pilots to fly to Havana. They shot Johnson in the arm during a shootout with FBI agents when the plane stopped to refuel in Orlando, Fla.

The hijackers were arrested in Cuba and imprisoned for eight years. The trio returned in 1980 to Birmingham, where they were sentenced to 20- to 25-year terms.

Haas retired in 1988 and died earlier this year. His widow said he never would have crashed the DC9 into Oak Ridge.

``There is not a pilot in the United States that flies commercially that would do anything like that,'' Ann Haas said. ``He might make the hijackers think that was what he was going to do, but never, never would they use it as a target.''


-------- MILITARY

The Diplomatic Offensive Intensifies
President Meets With Chirac, Signs Hill Resolution Authorizing Force

By Dan Balz and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52829-2001Sep18?language=printer

Pausing to mark the terrorist attacks of a week earlier with a moment of silence, President Bush engaged yesterday in an intensive round of diplomacy designed "to rally the world" for the war he has promised against those responsible for the attacks.

At a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said he is determined to build an international coalition for the long and difficult war against terrorism, and said this is a moment for other nations to stand and be counted. "If you love freedom, you must join with us," Bush said.

Chirac stopped short of calling the campaign against terrorism a "war," as Bush and many U.S. officials have described it. But Chirac said France stands "in total solidarity" with the United States and added that he was prepared to discuss with Bush "all means to fight and eradicate this evil." He added after a working dinner with Bush that France is determined to fight terrorism and wants to participate in the international effort.

Last night, Bush signed the joint House-Senate resolution authorizing the use of force to respond to the terrorist attacks, as well as the $40 billion emergency supplemental bill approved by Congress last week.

Bush's meeting with Chirac last night was the first of a series of face-to-face meetings with world leaders this week. They include a dinner Thursday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and sessions today with President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, and with the foreign ministers of Russia and Germany.

The diplomatic effort includes reaching out to such countries as Cuba and Sudan, with which the United States has had adversarial relationships.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will meet with top officials from other countries as the administration continues its private preparations for a response to last week's attacks, using what administration officials called a "carrot-and-stick" approach to encourage support from other nations.

U.S. efforts to assemble an international coalition for a campaign against Osama bin Laden and other terrorists received a boost yesterday when Palestinians and Israelis announced steps to enforce a cease-fire after a year of escalating violence and bloodshed. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East had threatened to undermine U.S. efforts to build momentum for the antiterrorism campaign with many Arab and Muslim countries.

In what officials described as a long and tough conversation Monday night, Powell implored Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon not to squander an opportunity to renew cooperation with the Palestinians and warned that Israel would be ceding the moral high ground to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat if it refused.

Amid the uncertainty and disruption caused by the terrorist attacks and the coming response by the United States and other nations, Bush administration officials and congressional leaders moved forward to help bolster the weakened economy and pledged their support to the beleaguered airline industry.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta met with airline executives yesterday and said the industry must be "made whole." As aircraft maker Boeing Co. announced plans for as many as 30,000 layoffs, the airline executives came seeking $24 billion in assistance. Congressional leaders last night were working on a $17.5 billion rescue package.

On their second day of operation since the attacks, the financial markets stabilized, briefly rebounding before ending the day in negative terrority. The Dow Jones industrial average fell about 17 points after posting a 685-point loss in Monday's huge sell-off. The Nasdaq fell 24 points after Monday's 116-point loss.

Presidential counselor Karen P. Hughes said the White House had established a task force to oversee the domestic response to the terrorist attacks, much as the National Security Council is coordinating the war on terrorism.

"We are moving from a week where we dealt with rescue efforts to dealing with the broader responsibilities of the long-term effects on the economy," Hughes said.

Today Bush will meet with the bipartisan leadership of Congress to discuss the economy and other issues after those leaders solicit recommendations for an economic stimulus package from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey and former treasury secretary Robert Rubin.

Bush joined in a moment of silence with Vice President Cheney and members of their staffs on the South Lawn at the White House at 8:48 a.m., the precise moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center's North Tower seven days before. At the same moment, radio stations around the country played patriotic music to commemorate the victims of the attacks.

Later, at a Rose Garden ceremony, Bush paid tribute to the rescue workers and the charities that have rushed to help in the recovery efforts. "Last week was a really horrible week for America," Bush said. "But out of our tears and sadness, we saw the best of America as well."

Bush's words of encouragement came as New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani offered a grim assessment of the massive rescue effort underway around the Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

"The overwhelming reality of the chance of recovering anyone is very, very small," he said. "We don't have a substantial amount of hope that we can offer anyone that we're going to find someone alive. But we're still trying."

So far, 5,422 people have been reported missing and 218 have been confirmed dead, with 115 bodies identified. Sanitation workers have hauled away 49,553 tons of debris, city officials said.

Giuliani toured the area with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and members of Congress. "It's very important for them to view it directly," Giuliani said. "I do believe there is something very, very different that happens when you actually get to see it."

The diplomatic activity signaled the quickening pace of preparations here and in other capitals. As the administration continues to press Afghanistan to turn over bin Laden, officials are seeking assistance from countries around the world.

Yesterday, Powell met with Foreign Minister Han Seung Soo of South Korea, which holds the rotating presidency of the U.N. General Assembly. Han promised South Korea's full participation in any international coalition to tackle terrorism.

Today's meetings will include sessions with foreign ministers from several countries crucial to a worldwide campaign. At a long-scheduled meeting between Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, a key topic will be cooperation in confronting terrorism, U.S. officials said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the international community should punish "evil," such as the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks, but warned that any response must be based on solid evidence linking the targets to the crime.

Powell is also set to meet today with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and could also see his Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud Faisal, who is scheduled to arrive in Washington.

Administration officials said they plan to press him for information about the terrorist conspiracy -- as many as two-thirds of the hijackers had some link to the desert kingdom -- and ask for full cooperation in providing intelligence and cutting off the financial support wealthy Saudis have given bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia is the most important U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf, and it could lend a degree of legitimacy among Muslim countries to U.S. efforts confronting bin Laden and his network.

Before meeting with Chirac, Bush spoke by telephone with Annan, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Today he will try to enlist support from Indonesia's Megawati.

Powell spoke by telephone late Monday with Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail in the highest-level conversation held by the two countries in years. Though the United States considers Sudan to be a state sponsor of terrorism and has accused it of providing a haven to militants from bin Laden's network, State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said Powell and his Sudanese counterpart held a "good beginning discussion."

He said U.S. officials had also visited Cuba's interest section in Washington and asked for any assistance Havana could provide. Cuba, which is also on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, has denounced the attacks on New York and Washington.

One of the most significant meetings will be that with Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, scheduled for Friday, which will be followed by a visit to Washington by Chinese counterterrorism experts. Boucher said those discussions will focus on ways of enhancing cooperation between the two countries. This would mark a notable step in improving U.S.-China ties after they were strained during the first months of the Bush administration.

At a news conference yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hinted that the government has evidence showing there was state sponsorship of last week's attacks. He said that the campaign against terrorism "will not be quick and it will not be easy" and that the goal is "to drain the swamp they live in." He added: "We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter."

Rumsfeld said the legal ban on government-sponsored assassinations restricts what the government can do in its pursuit of bin Laden, who is described as the prime suspect in the attacks. But former president Bill Clinton, in an interview with NBC News, said the ban should pose no hurdle. The ban applies only to heads of state, not terrorists, he said. "I can assure you we've been trying to get Osama bin Laden for the last several years."

Staff writers Keith L. Alexander, Mike Allen, Helen Dewar, Sally Jenkins, Glenn Kessler and Elaine Rivera contributed to this report.

-------- afghanistan

A Look at Armed Forces in Afghanistan

September 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Afghan-Forces.html

Forces of the Taliban: 50,000 troops.

-- Small arms: AK assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles.

-- Armored forces (650 vehicles total): T-62, T-54, T-55 main battle tanks, BMP infantry fighting vehicles, BTR troop carriers, BRDM-2 scout cars.

-- Artillery: 76mm mountain gun, 122mm and 152mm towed guns, 107mm and 122 mm multiple-rocket launch systems, 82 mm and 120 mm mortars.

-- Air Defenses: 23 mm ZU-23-2 automatic cannons, 100 mm anti-aircraft guns, possibly U.S.-made Stinger surface-to-air missiles.

-- Air Force: 10 Su-22 fighter-bombers, 5 MiG-21 fighters, 10 transport helicopters, 40 cargo airplanes.

Forces of the Northern Alliance: 12,000-15,000 troops.

-- Small arms: AK assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, recoilless rifles.

-- Armored forces (60-70 vehicles total): T-62, T-54, T-55 main battle tanks, BMP infantry fighting vehicles, BTR troop carriers, BRDM-2 scout cars.

-- Artillery: 107mm, 122mm, 140mm, 220mm multiple launch rocket systems, 82mm, 120mm mortars, 100mm, 122mm, 152mm towed guns, 76mm mountain guns.

-- Air Defenses: One ZSU-23-4 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun, ZU-23-2 truck-mounted automatic cannons, Stinger surface-to-air missiles.

-- Missiles: FROG-7 surface-to-surface missiles, Scud-B short-range ballistic missiles (25-30 missiles at most).

-- Air Force: Eight transport helicopters, 3-4 cargo airplanes.

Source: Jane's Information Group

--------

Taliban Refuses to Surrender Bin Laden
Afghan People Are Urged to Prepare For a Holy War

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52802-2001Sep18?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 18 -- The leader of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia rebuffed a demand by Pakistani officials to surrender alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden to avert a U.S. military attack, government sources here said today.

The Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar, has formally shifted responsibility for deciding bin Laden's fate to a council of senior Islamic clerics. But a source familiar with the talks in Afghanistan between a Pakistani delegation and the Taliban leadership said Omar told Pakistan's intelligence chief, Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, "Osama will be the last person to leave Afghanistan." The Pakistani delegation left this evening.

The clerical council was supposed to convene today, but reports from the Afghan capital, Kabul, said the meeting was delayed because of challenges in assembling the several hundred men who will decide the fate of bin Laden, identified as the prime suspect behind last week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Taliban officials said the meeting could be held Wednesday or Thursday.

As the clerics converged on Kabul, the Taliban urged Afghans to prepare for a holy war, and residents fearing U.S. military strikes fled the capital for the Pakistani border and mountainous rural areas. U.N. refugee officials estimated that tens of thousands of people have left Afghan cities in recent days. Reports of disturbances along the 1,500-mile frontier prompted Pakistan to attempt to close all border crossings today.

Though the council still has formal responsibility for deciding bin Laden's fate, Omar has been the Taliban's undisputed leader since its formation seven years ago. Bin Laden, who has been living in Afghanistan since 1996, has provided money and troops to help the Taliban, earning him substantial support within the radical Islamic militia. Analysts suggested it was unlikely that Omar would surrender him voluntarily.

The Taliban has called bin Laden a "guest" and said that handing him over to the United States would betray a tenet of Islam. And even if a narrow majority of clerics decided to surrender bin Laden, officials and analysts said, he is believed to have as many as 3,000 well-armed fighters under his command inside Afghanistan, as well as the support of many of the Taliban's soldiers.

"It would not occur without a fight," said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and analyst. "If the moderates were to try to get him handed over, it would lead to a civil war."

Some Taliban officials repeated suggestions today that bin Laden could be transferred to another Islamic nation to face trial in exchange for international recognition of the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government and a lifting of U.N. sanctions, Pakistani officials said. U.S. officials, who have demanded bin Laden's unconditional surrender, have said such an offer would be unacceptable.

Pakistani officials said their delegation bluntly told the Taliban that if it did not turn over bin Laden, it would face certain attack by a multinational force led by the United States. "Our delegation conveyed in stark terms the gravity of the situation and what the international community expects from the Afghan leadership," said Riaz Mohammad Khan, a spokesman for Pakistan's Foreign Ministry.

Before leaving Kabul, the Pakistani delegation met with eight foreign aid workers being tried on charges of illegally preaching Christianity, a Pakistani official told the Associated Press. Pakistan asked Taliban authorities to release the aid workers -- two Americans, four Germans and two Australians -- and the authorities promised to consider the request, he said.

With a U.S.-led attack appearing increasingly likely, Taliban leaders called on Afghans to prepare for a holy war against the United States, the official Bakhtar News Agency reported today.

"If America attacks our homes, it is necessary for all Muslims, especially for Afghans, to wage a holy war," state-run Voice of Shariat radio reported Mohammed Hasan Akhund, the deputy Taliban leader, as saying. "God is on our side, and if the world's people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us."

Widespread expectations of a U.S. strike have led to panic buying in Kabul's markets and a steady exodus of residents. Residents reported that shops are running low on supplies, and international aid workers, who pulled out of the country last week, said donated food supplies, on which thousands of residents rely, will run out in a few weeks.

"People are very nervous here," one resident said, speaking by satellite telephone. "Those who have the resources to leave are on the run. Those who must stay behind are relying on Allah to protect them."

Thousands of people have been heading toward Pakistan, where more than 2 million Afghan refugees already are living in camps near the border. U.N. officials reported that about 5,000 refugees have massed at the Chaman border crossing between Kandahar, the Taliban's headquarters, and the Pakistani provincial capital of Quetta, where police fired warning shots to force back surging crowds. Thousands of others attempting to flee Kabul and other large cities, however, have been prevented from nearing the border by Taliban fighters, the United Nations said.

But Pakistani authorities said they nevertheless feared an onslaught of refugees. "The major worry that we have at the present is that hundreds of thousands of Afghans are leaving cities and heading toward the border," said Khan, the Foreign Ministry spokesman.

In Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, about 5,000 people staged a boisterous demonstration to protest possible U.S. military action against Afghanistan. The rally, the biggest in Pakistan since the terrorist attacks, underscored the deep divisions that exist in this overwhelmingly Muslim country about cooperating with the United States in efforts to target terrorist activities in Afghanistan.

The protesters, chanting "Osama is our brother" and "An attack on Afghanistan is an attack on Pakistan," attempted to march toward the U.S. Consulate but were turned away by police and soldiers. The demonstrators later burned an effigy of President Bush.

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said today that the State Department had authorized nonessential embassy and consulate staff members and their families to evacuate Pakistan because of fears of possible violence and terrorist strikes against Americans. Several other Western embassies and multinational companies have taken similar actions.

Correspondents Pamela Constable and Molly Moore in Islamabad and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi contributed to this report.

--------

Taliban issues call for Muslim holy war

September 19, 2001
By Amir Shah
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010919-15007940.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan - The hard-line Taliban, in comments broadcast yesterday, called on all Muslims to wage holy war on the United States if it attacks Afghanistan in retaliation for sheltering terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden.

Hundreds of Islamic clerics gathered in the Afghan capital to discuss conditions for extraditing bin Laden to a country other than the United States, a Pakistani government official said. The clerics are expected to meet today, said Hamdullah Nomani, the mayor of Kabul and host of the gathering.

The conditions, including international recognition of the Taliban government and the lifting of U.N. sanctions, were discussed Monday in Kandahar, headquarters of the Islamic militia that rules most of Afghanistan, the Pakistani official said on the condition of anonymity.

It seemed unlikely the United States would agree to have bin Laden extradited to another country. A delegation sent by Pakistan to try to convince the Taliban to surrender the terrorist leader went home yesterday without reaching an agreement, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf scheduled a televised address to his people today.

Before leaving Kabul, the Pakistani delegation met with eight detained aid workers being tried on charges of illegally preaching Christianity, the official said. Pakistan asked the Taliban to release the aid workers - two Americans, four Germans and two Australians - and the rulers promised to consider the request, he said.

The Taliban, which says bin Laden was wrongly implicated in the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States, urged the people of Afghanistan to prepare for a jihad, or holy war, against America, the official Bakhtar News Agency reported yesterday.

"If America attacks our homes, it is necessary for all Muslims, especially for Afghans, to wage a holy war," Mullah Mohammed Hasan Akhund, the deputy Taliban leader, said Monday, according to state-run Radio Shariat. "God is on our side, and if the world's people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us."

Since taking control of most of Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban has declared holy wars against the northern-based anti-Taliban alliance, Russia and Iran, but never the United States.

The Taliban government is officially recognized by three countries: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Taliban's foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, condemned the violence within hours of the attacks in New York and Washington but said it would have been impossible for bin Laden to carry out the assaults. Bin Laden lacks the facilities for such an elaborate operation, he said.

Since then, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who has declared himself head of all Muslims, has defended bin Laden and accused the United States of pointing the finger in his direction because its investigators have been unable to come up with a real suspect.

Reuters news agency reported that Taliban Information Minister Qudrutullah Jamal, in a shift from past statements, did not rule out in a telephone interview that bin Laden could be to blame for the attacks. But, he said, bin Laden could not be handed over without proof.

"Anyone who is responsible for this act, Osama or not, we will not side with him," Mr. Jamal said. The Taliban previously has insisted bin Laden could not have been involved.

Asked about the visit by the Pakistani delegation, Mr. Jamal said, "We told them to give us proof that he did it, because without that how can we give him up?"

Many Pakistanis living along the 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan promised to join the jihad against America, and perhaps their own government, in case of retaliatory strikes.

"America is putting a gun on Pakistan's shoulder to fire at Afghanistan. The Pakistani people cannot accept this," said Haji Abdul Razzaq, a mechanic in the western city of Peshawar, near the Afghan border.

Yesterday, some 3,000 people in the Pakistani city of Karachi demonstrated near a mosque that runs a religious school many Taliban leaders attended, warning of more attacks. Many carried posters of bin Laden portrayed as a hero.

"Until now, only one World Trade Center has been destroyed," demonstrators shouted in unison in English. "But we will destroy all of America. We will die for Taliban. We will die for Islam. We will die for Osama."

Bin Laden and his suspected network of Islamic militants are the prime suspects in last week's airborne assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The United States believes bin Laden has played a role in several devastating attacks, including the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in which 231 persons were killed.

Bin Laden, who was stripped of Saudi citizenship and has been living in Afghanistan since 1996, is accused by Washington of running a global terrorist network from his bases inside the war-ruined Central Asian nation.

The Taliban, the hard-line Islamic militia that rules according to a strict interpretation of the Quran, has been placed under economic sanctions twice by the United Nations to press earlier U.S. demands to hand over bin Laden for trial.

The Taliban has consistently refused, calling bin Laden a "guest" and saying that to hand him over to non-Muslims would betray a tenet of Islam.

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad said yesterday that the U.S. government has authorized its nonessential embassy staff members and their families to evacuate Pakistan amid fears of violence and terrorist strikes against Americans. Several multinational companies also have evacuated their international staff.

However, the U.S. Embassy and its consulates in Pakistan, an Islamic nation of 140 million people, were to continue their normal operations.

--------

Afghans flee to Pakistan as tension mounts

September 19, 2001
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010919-27557943.htm

TORKHAM, Pakistan - The road that links Pakistan and Afghanistan through the historic Khyber Pass remained open yesterday for supply trucks moving into Taliban territory and for trucks returning empty.

But the road was closed to thousands of Afghan refugees seeking refuge in Pakistan, fearful of a U.S. retaliatory strike.

Pakistani diplomats have been recalled from Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as Jalalabad and Kandahar, the nation's spiritual capital and home of Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Tens of thousands of Afghans are now bypassing the border crossing and infiltrating into Pakistan through unpatrolled mountain passes.

The unmarked border, known as the Durand Line, is porous, with the same Pathan tribesmen living on both sides of the frontier. The new arrivals are swelling the ranks of some 2 million Afghan refugees already in Pakistan.

Asked about conditions inside Afghanistan, one Afghan refugee stalled behind a fence at Torkham was evasive. "We can neither tell you the truth nor can we tell you a lie," he replied cryptically.

The Taliban - the Islamic fundamentalist group that controls more than 95 percent of Afghanistan - has set up roadblocks on all major routes out of its cities.

A check at other border posts on the main road between the two countries showed truck traffic flowing normally with supplies moving into Afghanistan. The Taliban regime is entirely dependent on Pakistan for everything from wheat flour to oil.

A Pakistani customs officer said the border traffic will remain open until the authorities in Islamabad decide otherwise.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, this week send a delegation headed by Inter-Services Intelligence Chief Gen. Mahmood Ahmed to Kabul to try to persuade the Taliban to hand over to another country Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi named by the Bush administration as the mastermind of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Mullah Omar subsequently decided to leave the fate of bin Laden in the hands of the Afghan clergy. Some 1,000 clerics from every province are convening in Kabul and are expected to debate the issue today.

The Pakistani delegation carried a letter from Gen. Musharraf to Mullah Omar in which the Taliban was urged to "act with prudence because the life of the Afghan people is at stake."

Gen. Musharraf could have added in his letter that the life of the Pakistani people is also at stake. Pakistan's fundamentalist clergy is, for the most part, pro-Taliban and anti-American. Mullahs and muftis - the ulema - have been agitating the masses with vitriolic disinformation.

Citing the Quran, some mullahs are saying that a Christian or a Jew can never be a Muslim's true friend. "President Musharraf would be considered a traitor to Islamic norms of life if he joins hands with the Americans and the Jewish lobby," said one cleric.

Qari Abdul Rasheed, a prominent cleric, eyeing reporters present, said in English: "We are not gathered here to communicate that we are encouraging terrorism. In fact, Islam is the religion of peace and humanity.

"We are simply here to communicate that the Jewish lobby was behind the attack [on New York and the Pentagon] and Osama bin Laden should not be victimized on mere vague allegations."

Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad, tells visiting journalists that Afghan militiamen will wage war on any country that allows either its air or ground to be used for attacks on Afghanistan. He does not mention Pakistan by name.

Mr. Zaeef said in an interview that U.S. reprisals against Afghanistan would trigger explosions in every Muslim city in the world. "There are 2 billion Muslims out of 6 billion people," he said, "and Osama bin Laden is a hero to most of them."

Knowledgeable observers do not believe Gen. Musharraf could be overthrown by extremists. The army, they say, will remain loyal to the general under any circumstances.

The imponderable is ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. One of Gen. Musharraf's Cabinet ministers said, not for attribution: "ISI continues to support the Taliban to this day. After all, ISI created the Taliban."

The ISI, backed by the CIA, organized and trained the Muslim fundamentalist movement as an anti-Soviet guerrilla force following Moscow's December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

• Distributed by United Press International

--------

THE MILITARY
Scarcity of Afghan Targets Leads U.S. to Revise Strategy

September 19, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Michael R. Gordon, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/international/19MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld bluntly acknowledged today that the difficulty in identifying bombing targets in Afghanistan was leading the Pentagon to develop a broader, more unconventional type of campaign - leaving the door open to ground troops, including commando units.

"Several countries have exhausted themselves pounding that country," said Mr. Rumsfeld, referring to Afghanistan. "There are not great things of value that are easy to deal with. And what we'll have to do is exactly what I said: use the full spectrum of our capabilities."

Mr. Rumsfeld did not commit the United States to sending ground forces into Afghanistan, but he has talked about the importance of using special operations forces in the fight against international terrorism.

On Sunday, Mr. Rumsfeld said that the fight against terrorism would require a broad effort and that "a lot of it will be special operations."

The administration's consideration of military action beyond a classic air campaign like the ones the United States mounted in Iraq and Serbia reflects a recognition that the terrorists themselves are elusive, and that Afghanistan, which shelters them, is so impoverished that it offers a scarce set of targets.

Critical to the administration's planning, therefore, are economic, political, diplomatic and intelligence measures, as well as possible ground forces, all of which would deprive Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant suspected of masterminding the attacks on Sept. 11, of his sanctuary - or as Mr. Rumsfeld put it today, "drain the swamp they live in."

President Bush met today with top national security advisers to review military options and diplomatic overtures, as Pentagon officials said the first of 35,000 reservists could be mobilized as early as Wednesday.

Mr. Bush and his top advisers have raised expectations of killing or capturing terrorists. The president went so far as to indicate that he wanted Mr. bin Laden "dead or alive."

While the administration's stated goals, including going after all terrorist networks, are very ambitious, the mission presents a whole new range of military challenges. Bombing alone is unlikely to work for several reasons.

Terrorists in Afghanistan have abandoned their training camps since last week's attacks in New York and Washington, making them hard to find. Intelligence officials also say that in recent years Mr. bin Laden and his operatives have relied more on couriers and face-to-face meetings than on cellphones, whose communication can be intercepted by spy satellites and ground sensors.

In a private Oval Office meeting with four senators last Thursday, even Mr. Bush belittled the idea of eliminating his nemesis, Mr. bin Laden, with Tomahawk cruise missiles alone, the military's weapon of choice in most operations since the Persian Gulf war.

"What's the sense of sending $2 million missiles to hit a $10 tent that's empty?" Mr. Bush told the senators.

And, as Mr. Rumsfeld indicated today, the Taliban's fixed targets are not all of great value, and smashing their interior or defense ministries or disrupting their energy grid might do little to force the government in Kabul, which hardly relies on modern command and control systems, to deliver Mr. bin Laden as Mr. Bush has demanded.

The United States could stage commando raids in Afghanistan from Pakistan or perhaps from valleys held by the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban force that still controls about 10 percent of Afghan territory. The administration could also reach unprecedented agreements with former Soviet republics in Central Asia, like Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, to mount operations from their territory.

The military has two missions: getting the terrorists and punishing any government that shelters or sponsors them. The goal of ground troops presumably would not be a full-scale invasion and occupation, but raids by special forces to kidnap or kill terrorism suspects or to disrupt the ability of the Taliban to control Afghanistan.

But getting terrorists requires timely, accurate intelligence - and luck. Before this crisis, the Clinton administration had classified plans to use missile strikes or to dispatch commandos to snatch Mr. bin Laden. Those special forces have been stationed in the Middle East ready to move on a moment's notice. "The gun has been cocked," a former official said. "We were waiting for the intelligence and never had it."

Even with hard intelligence, the window for action is frustratingly brief, as the Clinton administration learned in August 1998 when it fired more than 70 cruise missiles at terrorist training centers - the Zhawar Kili Al-Badr training camp and its support complex.

The strike took place on a day that United States intelligence knew Mr. bin Laden was meeting with his chief operatives and the leadership of other terror organizations. But the meeting broke up several hours before the missiles smashed into the camps.

"If you took every terrorist in Afghanistan, you could not make a light brigade," said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who until a year ago headed the United States Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. "They are spread all over. They hide in mountains and caves. They do not lend themselves to being targeted."

All those problems were confronted by the Clinton administration. "When we looked at Afghanistan before, the sense was we were going to bomb them up to the stone age," said one former Clinton administration official familiar with the planning of past military strikes against Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. "There is just so little to attack. It is the most target-impoverished environment conceivable."

There are other military options, but they are complicated and entail risk to American fighters and could well result in casualties.

The United States could use the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance as a proxy ground force, but the group is not widely supported throughout Afghanistan, and has no more than 12,000 fighters under a command that is in flux.

Its leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was gravely wounded by suicide assassins just days before the attacks in America and died on Saturday. It is not clear whether his killing had any link to the attacks on the United States that followed.

Faced with such difficulties, attacks on the terrorists and the Taliban themselves would have to be accompanied by efforts to cut off financing to the terrorists, including any revenue they derived from the sale of drugs.

"You need to go after the network that is collecting money, his investments in legitimate companies, the laundering of money, and the banks that look the other way," General Zinni said.

Afghanistan is unlikely to be the only target in the war against those nations who support terrorism. Mr. Rumsfeld said today that Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that Mr. bin Laden heads, may have activities in 50 to 60 countries, and that network is just one of many that President Bush has vowed to vanquish.

In Afghanistan, one hope is that the movement of American forces into the region could force Mr. bin Laden to come out of hiding and seek another haven - creating a target.

Punishing the Afghan government that harbors the terrorists presents a completely different challenge than planners faced during the Persian Gulf war. In that conflict, the first Bush administration picked hundreds of bombing targets in Iraq that successfully carved away at what Air Force planners dubbed Saddam Hussein's "centers of gravity."

Military planners already have coordinates for a large number of targets across Afghanistan and in the capital, Kabul. They know the exact location of government ministries, of its police posts and army bases and airfields, of its power grids and communications lines.

"Clearly, the Taliban have an organizational structure," said a Pentagon official. "They have a leadership. And there is some infrastructure that enables them to operate. But they are not like a nation state. It is not like going after Baghdad or Belgrade."

-------- biological weapons

Take a Deep Breath: The Terror of Germ Warfare
The Worst That Could Happen

by Willy Stern
Week of September 19 - 25, 2001
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0138/stern.php

As a primer for digesting the news in the wake of last Tuesday's suicide bombings, here are some thoughts worth pondering: Airplanes and airports are safe. The good news is that the problem in the skies is being fixed. The bad news is that much of the rest of the country is vulnerable. According to several antiterrorism experts, last Tuesday's events took five-plus years to plan. Intelligence analysts assume that the next terrorist attacks are already three to four years into the planning stages. These future attacks are being developed under the assumption that U.S. security efforts will focus on protecting airports and airplanes; hence, the next wave of terror will almost certainly hit elsewhere.

The greatest terrorist threats today are biological agents.

Biological agents are easily accessible, almost impossible to detect, and extremely deadly. Listen to the words of terrorism expert Peter Probst, from a mid-1990s speech: "Only a few grams of pulmonary anthrax, which has something on the order of a 95 percent lethality rate, could take out a major government complex. Similarly, a vial of such an agent dropped from the Senate gallery could take out much of this country's leadership."

Probst, an ex-CIA employee who has spent more than two decades developing antiterrorism plans for the U.S. Department of Defense and others, says that "the terrorist weapon of the future could, at first glance, appear to be an ordinary light bulb, which, in turn, is a preferred covert delivery method for biological agents. Terrorists could take several such devices filled with pulmonary anthrax and toss them onto the tracks of the Washington Metro. The bulbs would shatter, and lethal spores would be carried throughout the system by the convection currents of passing trains. They would cling to the clothing and shoes of the subway commuters who would track it into their homes and offices. Thousands would aspirate the deadly spores. Thousands would die."

The U.S. is extremely vulnerable in the event of germ warfare.

According to Dr. Ken Alibek, the first deputy chief of the secret Soviet germ-warfare program from 1988 to 1992, nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Yemen have lured away and hired Soviet scientists who are knowledgeable in biological weapons. Alibek, who defected to the U.S. in 1992, says it's "highly probable" that terrorists already have obtained Soviet chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. And the things they have procured are awful in their magnitude. According to Alibek, the Soviet Union has developed strains of anthrax, plague, and other infectious and deadly diseases-including tularemia and glanders-that can't be treated with antibiotics.

If you're in the market for germs, just place an order.

White supremacist Larry Wayne Harris recently had some official-looking letterheads made, and then ordered three vials of bubonic plague from a Rockville, Maryland, laboratory. The plague samples were delivered by Federal Express. Interestingly, it's not illegal to possess bubonic plague. Harris was nonetheless caught by law enforcement officials and convicted of mail fraud for ordering the samples with fake stationery. His sentence? Eighteen months' probation. If you don't want to order the stuff already made, you can get various recipes from easily obtainable sources. When the white supremacist group known as the "Patriot's Council" wanted to get the formula for recin, another deadly biological agent, it reportedly found what it needed in a Soldier of Fortune magazine advertisement. A Soldier of Fortune spokesman, however, does not recall the incident.

Numerous experts were predicting an event similar to the suicide bombings. But you won't hear that from the Pentagon.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996, another terrorism expert, Steve Emerson, predicted last Tuesday's events with deadly accuracy. "The United States will, in my opinion, increasingly serve as a lightning rod for international terrorists who perceive the U.S. as an enemy that must be destroyed because of its inherent evil nature," Emerson testified. He also told the senators that "terrorists will attempt to carry out attacks that will generate mass casualties and fatalities." He predicted that the terrorists "will most likely target office buildings or arenas housing large civilian populations." Owing in large measures to his views, Emerson has been branded a racist and an alarmist who relies on questionable sources and shoddy research techniques. Before the September 11 bombings, he was so hard up for cash that he was cold-calling would-be donors in an effort to keep open his antiterrorism outfit, Investigative Project on Religious Extremism. But now, because of the bombings, Emerson is so much in demand that he's lucky to get two hours' sleep a night.

In the early 1990s, terrorism expert Probst coauthored an extraordinary Pentagon report, "Terror 2000: The Future Face of Terrorism," which outlined and predicted the events of last week with alarming accuracy, according to those who've obtained copies. But you can't read the report. The Pentagon never released it to the public.

As the nation mourns, there is a natural tendency to want to figure out precisely what happened. Unfortunately, this often leads to fighting yesterday's war. Vanderbilt University political science professor Jim Ray, a specialist in international conflict, rightly points out that, as a nation, we'd be well served to focus on "less obvious" sources of potential trouble.

Nashville Scene senior writer Willy Stern is a former staff writer at Forbes and Business Week magazines. For a complete version of this story see www.nashscene.com.

The Village Voice's ongoing coverage of the World Trade Center attack, the victims, and the aftermath.

Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com

-------- china

China Also Wants U.S. Help Against 'Separatists'

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52725-2001Sep18?language=printer

BEIJING, Sept. 18 -- China sought today to link its backing for a U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign to a demand that the United States support China's own fight against separatists in Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said China is willing to discuss proposals to combat terrorism around the world, but in the context of the U.N. Security Council. He added that any U.S. military retaliation for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington should have "concrete evidence," adhere to international law and not hurt innocent civilians.

The statements from Zhu, at a news briefing, provided the most clear indications to date that China hopes to wrest policy changes from the United States in exchange for its support for a war on terrorism. China wants changes in America's long-term support for Taiwan and arms sales to the island, its moral support for Tibet's exiled Dalai Lama and its plans to create a national missile defense system, according to Chu Shulong, an expert in security affairs at Qinghua University.

"The United States has asked China to provide assistance in the fight against terrorism," government spokesman Zhu said. "China, by the same token, has reasons to ask the United States to give its support and understanding in the fight against terrorism and separatists. We should not have double standards."

Asked, however, if China had set specific conditions in exchange for its support, Zhu demurred. "The fight against terrorism is a different issue," he said. "We are not making bargains here."

Beijing arguably has the closest relations of any country with Pakistan, which has emerged as a key nation in Washington's plans. Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi headed to Islamabad today, and China's reaction to the crisis will be the key topic during the visit to Washington this week of Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan.

-------- colombia

Paramilitary Army Seeks Political Role in Colombia
AUC Wants Recognition, Vows 'More Civilized' Fight

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52731-2001Sep18?language=printer

APARTADO, Colombia -- Colombia's fast-growing paramilitary army has begun a push for political recognition and a role in peace talks designed to end the country's decades-old civil war.

The obstacles standing between the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and its political goals are significant, perhaps insurmountable. But the right-wing group, which combats a leftist rebellion in tandem with the army, has recently reorganized itself around a political agenda and pledged to respect international human rights standards it has long ignored.

None of these moves prevented Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from designating the group a terrorist organization earlier this month. But many diplomats here privately agree with senior AUC leaders who say that, as an increasingly powerful player in Colombia's four-sided civil conflict, the paramilitary army is destined to become a legitimate party in the country's peace process.

In a recent interview in this paramilitary stronghold 280 miles northwest of the capital, Bogota, a senior AUC leader characterized the new tack as a way "to continue the war but in a more civilized way." He acknowledged that reforms designed to hold regional paramilitary commanders more responsible for civilian deaths were designed in part to convince foreign governments that the AUC is ready to become a more responsible player in peace efforts. The group even tried to hire a Washington lobbying firm to carry its cause to Congress and the State Department, although the idea was dropped when the cost was estimated at $100,000 a month.

"We believe there have been enough deaths," said the AUC leader, a member of the group's ruling directorate known inside the organization as "Samuel." "In a war, deaths are inevitable. But we are trying as best we can to avoid them as much as possible. A negotiated peace is our objective."

Coalescing from a ragtag collection of armed groups formed to protect drug dealers and rich farmers from the leftist guerrillas, the AUC has emerged as a national military presence that its leaders say exercises some influence in as much as 40 percent of the country. The group's enemies are two Marxist-oriented rebel armies -- the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the more powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) -- that emerged in the 1960s to overthrow the government.

The Colombian military is also charged with fighting the AUC. But the two groups share a common enemy in the guerrillas and in many regions appear to work hand in glove to fight them. Samuel said 20 percent of the paramilitary group's members are former members of the Colombian military.

The AUC's tactics have drawn sharp criticism from international human rights groups, foreign governments and President Andres Pastrana as he holds peace negotiations with the FARC, which enjoys political recognition. Colombian authorities say the AUC killed almost 1,000 civilians last year, most of them in massacres designed to deprive the guerrillas of rural support.

Pastrana has shown little inclination to recognize the AUC, which would give the group's leaders a more central place in the peace process and, as important to paramilitary leaders, a chance at amnesty. Increasingly, however, the presidential candidates running to replace Pastrana next year have signaled that a new, more inclusive approach may be needed.

That reassessment has been prompted by the AUC's dramatic growth over the past year, rooted partly in rising lower- and middle-class support after four decades of civil war. Samuel said paramilitary ranks have swelled from 8,000 to 14,000 armed members over the past year. Another 2,000 civilian supporters provide intelligence, financing and other support, he said, adding that "this growth is not good for us or for the state" because it has led to a corresponding surge in human rights abuses.

Those figures may be high, but some analysts here say they are not implausible. Samuel said the AUC now costs $40 million a month to operate, admitting that a large source of its financing comes from ties to the drug trade in northern Bolivar province and in southern Putumayo province, where the U.S.-backed anti-drug strategy known as Plan Colombia is underway. The FARC also profits enormously from the drug trade.

"One thing we will have to take into account if we achieve political recognition is what to do about the criminals within our organization," Samuel said. "We will handle that on a case-by-case base. But right now we need anyone willing to fight and the money to pay for it."

The AUC's internal changes followed a wave of particularly large paramilitary massacres this year. The AUC's leader, Carlos Castano, threatened to leave unless commanders agreed to a reorganization that would make regional military fronts responsible for their own actions.

As its most visible and charismatic face, Castano has borne the brunt of the blame for AUC actions. The son of a farmer killed by the FARC, Castano faces numerous arrest warrants, including one for his role in a January massacre that left 26 civilians dead in the northern village of Chengue.

The reorganization made Castano the political leader of the AUC and placed more military authority -- as well as responsibility -- in the hands of regional commanders. Castano retained the military leadership of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba, a paramilitary army that operates here in the vast banana fields of the country's northwest. But he sees his new role as something like that of Gerry Adams, head of the Irish Republican Army's political arm, Sinn Fein.

"It was impossible to have a military group of this size under the direction of one person," said Samuel, who serves as Castano's political adviser. He said that although the roughly 10 regional commanders who make up the AUC's ruling directorate accepted the restructuring, a deep divide still exists.

A hard-line wing, headed by a rancher from Cordoba province named Salvatore Mancuso who runs the AUC's northern bloc and now serves as its military commander in chief, favors continuing attacks on civilians identified as guerrilla supporters. Another faction believes that the massacres must stop in order to achieve political recognition, the best way to end what Samuel calls "this absurd war."

So far, though, the restructuring has shown little sign of reducing violence. After weeks of relatively few AUC attacks on civilian populations, 11 farmers were killed Saturday in the town of Frias in the central province of Tolima. The attack has been attributed to the AUC, which left graffiti on many of the town's buildings.

"Militarily, the massacres are highly effective," Samuel said. "Politically, they are fatal."

Castano recently pledged to adhere to international human rights standards as commander of the front he still controls. Under the new organization, regional military commanders must answer for civilian massacres before the AUC's ruling directorate, which can then ask for a resignation or demand "more severe punishment." It can also endorse the action.

To carry the AUC's push for recognition, Castano this month launched the National and Democratic Movement, a quasi-political party that Samuel said will begin trying to elect mayors, municipal council members and governors in regions where the AUC is strong. Help will consist of endorsements and AUC money when the group believes it can make a difference.

The movement will remain largely clandestine, unless AUC leaders gain political recognition. Samuel said the AUC's political philosophy endorses redistribution of the country's unevenly disbursed wealth through a more efficient tax system, more money to stimulate the rural economy and more public investment in education.

Here in Uraba, a region valued for its vast banana orchards and strategic position near the Panamanian border, the AUC's political project has been greeted with enthusiasm. Three years ago, the AUC concluded a campaign of massacres and forced displacement here that uprooted a decades-old guerrilla presence.

Now the cattle ranches and banana farms are inhabitable again with the end of guerrilla kidnappings, and vast overgrown pastures are slowly being groomed back into shape after years of abandonment during guerrilla reign. Meanwhile, just over nearby mountains covered in a thick curtain of haze, the FARC is waging a pitched battle against paramilitary forces to retake Uraba.

"Without them [the AUC], the guerrillas would be back within two hours," said Gonzalo Echeverri, a 59-year-old cattle rancher whose 300-acre farm was abandoned throughout much of the 1990s. "They are heroes here, people of glory. I will help them in any way I can."

-------- iraq

Hijacker met with Iraqi official

September 19, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010919-25452726.htm

An Iraqi intelligence official met secretly with one of the airline hijackers a year ago, raising the likelihood of Iraqi government involvement in last week's terrorist attacks in the United States, officials said yesterday.

The unidentified Iraqi intelligence official met with Mohamed Atta, whom U.S. officials believe to have been the leader of a terrorist cell linked to Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden. Atta traveled regularly between the United States and several countries, including Germany and Spain.

Atta is believed to have been aboard the first commercial airliner that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

Intelligence officials said information about the meeting was obtained within the past several days. It indicated Mr. Atta had met secretly about a year ago with an official of the Iraqi intelligence service.

A meeting between Atta and the head of Iraq's intelligence service was first disclosed by CBS News.

Atta traveled on an Egyptian passport but was believed to have been a United Arab Emirates national. At one point, he was registered as a student at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany.

Vice President Richard B. Cheney said on Sunday that no evidence of Iraqi state sponsorship had emerged. Yesterday, however, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested that a foreign government may have aided the terrorists who conducted the suicide attacks, which killed up to 6,000 people at the Pentagon and in New York City.

"I know a lot, and what I have said as clearly as I know how is that states are supporting these people," Mr. Rumsfeld said when asked about evidence of state sponsorship.

Pressed for further details, Mr. Rumsfeld paused several seconds and then said: "I think I will leave that to the Department of Justice - they and the FBI and the intelligence-gathering agencies."

He noted that he was "in a different business" from intelligence and law- enforcement agencies that gather evidence.

The disclosure of Atta's meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official comes amid reports that Iraq and Iran have begun to disperse their military forces in anticipation of U.S. military attacks.

The militaries in both countries were observed last week sending ground forces out of known bases as a precaution against attack.

U.S. intelligence has received other reports that associates of bin Laden are linked to foreign intelligence services.

A classified CIA report from the late 1990s, obtained by The Washington Times, showed that bin Laden met secretly with an Iranian intelligence official at a residence in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

The CIA viewed the meeting as an indication that Iran was at least exploring some type of support for bin Laden's terrorist activities.

Some officials sought to play down the Atta-Iraqi intelligence meeting.

"There's lots of little bits and threads and hints and nuggets out there. However, is there some compelling evidence of state sponsorship? Not at this time. Are we looking at that? Sure, among a thousand different things," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, said the Iraqi government's motive in helping bin Laden's organization is that it would be an indirect way for Saddam Hussein to attack the United States. "It's 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend,'" Mr. Cannistraro said.

Mr. Cannistraro said that if the meeting is confirmed, "it's the first footprint" indicating Iraqi involvement in last week's terrorist attacks

"This could mean that bin Laden had some state sponsorship," Mr. Cannistraro said. He noted that the October 2000 terrorist attack on the guided missile destroyer USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, also may have had a foreign state sponsor.

Iraq is one of the nations on the State Department's list of "state sponsors" of international terrorism. Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has said the sophistication of the attacks on American soil indicates potential Iraqi support.

-------- israel

Palestinians, Israelis agree to stop fighting

September 19, 2001
By Dan Ephron
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010919-68231340.htm

JERUSALEM - Israelis and Palestinians agreed yesterday to stop shooting and start talking, in a development precipitated largely by last week's hijack attacks on the United States.

The Israeli army began pulling back from Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip seized during 12 months of fighting, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ordered his troops not to shoot at Israelis, even in self-defense.

While each side voiced skepticism about the motives and intentions of the other, the move appeared to offer more hope than any recent attempts to broker an end to a year of fighting that has killed around 700 people.

Washington welcomed the truce.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said if the cease-fire holds for 48 hours, he would meet Mr. Arafat in the region this week.

"The indication I have until now - I just spoke with our defense minister - is that in fact fire has stopped and I am very gratified by it," Mr. Peres told CNN in an interview late yesterday.

Mr. Arafat, speaking to reporters in Gaza after meeting a group of diplomats, said he had instructed his security chiefs to make sure the cease-fire does not go the way of previous truce agreements - into the regional dustbin.

"We Palestinians and Israelis have to work together to break the vicious cycle of violence," Mr. Arafat said.

Since the suicide bombings on New York and the Pentagon last week, Israeli and Palestinian leaders had come under intense pressure from the United States and Europe to put down their guns, officials here said.

U.S. officials especially were concerned that fighting in the West Bank and Gaza would hamper Washington's ability to pull together a broad coalition for combatting international terrorism.

Arab countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be critical partners in that coalition but anger in these countries has been brewing for months over what many Arabs perceive as a pro-Israel bias in Washington.

For the coalition to work, fighting in the West Bank and Gaza would have to stop, Israelis and Palestinians were told.

"I think it was made clear to them that this was very important for the United States and that getting in the way would make Washington unhappy," one Western diplomat said.

While world attention was focused on the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks last week, European mediators were quietly sounding out both sides with the details of a truce, the diplomat said.

Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent his son to meet Mr. Arafat at the Erez border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. He was accompanied by Avi Gil, the director-general of the Foreign Ministry and a close adviser to Mr. Peres.

The result was a cease-fire announcement made by Mr. Arafat yesterday in Arabic. Israelis had long demanded that he make the order clear to his own people in their language - and a message of peace to the Israelis, timed to coincide with the start of the Jewish New Year yesterday.

"This morning, I again instructed all leaders of the security forces to work intensively on a cease-fire and to abstain even in self-defense in response to Israeli attacks," Mr. Arafat said in Gaza.

Hours later, the Israeli army issued a statement saying it had been ordered to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and Gaza that had been under full Palestinian control, including Jenin, which had been surrounded by tanks. The statement said soldiers were instructed to "avoid any offensive activities."

Military analysts, interpreting the orders on Israeli media, said they meant the army would also cease its "targeted killing" of suspected Palestinian militants.

In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he was encouraging Israelis and Palestinians to renew meetings between top security officials along with CIA operatives.

"We have some promise this morning and let's hope that we can see some developments that will continue this sense of promise," Mr. Powell told reporters, after speaking to both Mr. Arafat and Mr. Sharon by phone.

While Mr. Peres was buoyant about the truce, other Israeli officials doubted Mr. Arafat's motives. At least three previous cease-fires have collapsed days after being reached.

Raanan Gissin, a top adviser to Mr. Sharon, said Mr. Arafat was eager to please Washington and avoid being grouped with Osama bin Laden - the Saudi-born millionaire suspected of masterminding the U.S. attacks - as an international rogue.

"It's definitely a tactical move by Arafat," Mr. Gissin said. "If it's going to develop into a strategic move, that I don't know. It depends how much pressure continues to be placed on him."

Palestinians offered a similar interpretation of the Israeli move. One official close to Mr. Arafat said Mr. Powell had told Mr. Sharon he could either ease his conditions for a cease-fire or take responsibility for any failure by Washington to cobble together a viable coalition against terrorism.

"He had no choice but to back down," said the Palestinian official, who refused to be named.

Hamas, the Islamic group behind a spate a suicide bombings against Israelis, said it would be heresy for Palestinians to assist the United States in a war on Muslims.

-------- puerto rico

Vieques Bombing Exercises to Begin

September 19, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The U.S. Navy has notified the Puerto Rican government that it plans to resume bombing exercises on the island of Vieques as early as Monday, an official said.

Vieques Commissioner Juan Fernandez said on Tuesday that the Navy's top official in Puerto Rico, Rear Adm. Kevin Green, sent him a letter asking him to be present on Vieques for the first day of maneuvers Monday.

Fernandez monitors the bombing for the Puerto Rican government from an observation post overlooking the firing range.

The Navy had previously notified the Puerto Rican government of its plans. But there had been uncertainty about whether the exercises would go forward as planned after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last week.

The exercises could last as long as 23 days, Fernandez said.

Opposition to Navy training on the Puerto Rican island surged after a civilian security guard was killed on the Vieques range by off-target bombs in 1999. Protesters argue that the bombing causes environmental and health problems on the island of 9,100 people -- charges the Navy denies. The Navy has used inert bombs since the accident.

Well-known figures previously arrested for trespassing in Vieques protests include civil rights leader the Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Edward James Olmos and environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

-------- russia

Soviet Generals Warn Of 'Sea of Bloodshed'
Veterans Recall Failure in Afghanistan

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52702-2001Sep18?language=printer

MOSCOW, Sept. 18 -- Boris Gromov was the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan. The commanding general's lonely retreat on foot across the Friendship Bridge spanning the Amu Daria river on Feb. 15, 1989, was the symbol of a superpower humbled.

"I felt that a huge burden had lifted when I crossed that border," he recalled in an interview today.

As the United States threatens to go to war in the same rugged land that defied its would-be Soviet conquerors, Gromov and many other veterans of the decade-long war in Afghanistan, which has been called the Soviets' Vietnam, can think only of "the sea of bloodshed" it would take to win.

Now the governor of the Moscow region, Gromov denounced the terrorists who carried out last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as "animals," and -- like much of Russia -- he said that "powerful strikes" must be delivered in retaliation. But he also remembered the first time his column was ambushed, deep in a gorge, back in 1980 -- and the daily pointlessness of hunting down mujaheddin leaders who could not be caught -- and the 1 million Afghans and 15,000 Soviet soldiers who died because of what Gromov once famously called "a political mistake."

"For the Americans, introducing land forces would not lead to anything good," he said. "It would not bring anyone laurels."

As Russia wavers on whether and how to support the United States in fighting what President Vladimir Putin has called a "common enemy," Gromov's story is a reminder that Russia's ambivalence is not just the lingering mistrust of a former Cold War rival. Neither is its hesitation due only to concerns about the United States getting involved militarily with the Central Asian countries in Russia's traditional sphere of influence on its southern border.

Instead, Russia's reluctance reflects the country's conviction that Afghanistan is a place where a war cannot be won, where high mountain gorges still hold the terrifying memories of a thousand ambushes and where controlling the cities never meant subduing the land. In interviews over the past few days, several of the top Soviet commanders from the Afghan war agreed that a U.S. ground war there would be "useless," as retired Gen. Makmut Goryeev put it, and "inexpedient," as former Gen. Valentin Varennikov said.

"The American army will meet with fanatical resistance," said Ruslan Aushev, who commanded a motorized infantry battalion in Afghanistan and is now president of Ingushetia, an internal Russian republic.

"The Americans can launch an attack that will look really dramatic and effective on television, but I don't think the result will be the expected one. Even with all the power of the American army, it will not reach success," he said.

The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan began at Christmas 1979 as an effort to block the ouster by Islamic rebels of a recently installed, Moscow-backed government in Kabul. Hundreds of Soviet special forces, disguised as Afghan troops, conducted a raid on the presidential palace in which the president, Hafizullah Amin, was killed. Two days later, thousands of Soviet troops poured across the border from Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

More than 100,000 Soviet troops were stationed there at any one time during the war. It became a brutal, asymmetrical struggle in which Russians often resorted to overwhelming force in unsuccessful efforts against elusive targets, a strategy similar to that conducted more recently inside their own borders, in Chechnya.

"The Soviet Union had a bloody, bad experience in Afghanistan," said Aleksandr Golts, a military analyst who covered the war. "Afghanistan is a tough country for any intruder. The culture, the geographical environment -- everything gives a lot of opportunities for guerrilla war in which modern army methods are more or less useless. Our armed forces came prepared for the Cold War, for general battle, and they were completely ineffective."

Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called it a "bleeding wound," and ordered the pullout in 1988. By the time Gromov retreated across the bridge alone and embraced his teenage son in February 1989, the war's fallout was already hastening the breakup of the Soviet Union that would come two years later.

"The way they sent the Soviet army into Afghanistan was simply a crime," general-turned-politician Alexander Lebed said in a 1994 interview. "They had no idea of what they were getting us into, they knew nothing of the country or its people. It seems to me that they didn't even have a strategic plan."

This week, Lebed said the United States also would find Afghanistan unconquerable. "All of the stockpiles of bombs in both the United States and Russia would not be enough to solve this problem," he said in a telephone interview from Krasnoyarsk, where he is governor.

Asked to recall his impressions of the war, he listed "lice, dirt, blood." The Soviets' tactics of destroying villages made clear the danger of retaliatory strikes, Lebed said. For every town annihilated, "perhaps one mujaheddin was killed. The rest were innocent. The survivors hated us and lived with only one idea -- revenge. They are wolves, these people."

Such tactics, Lebed said, created today's Afghanistan, "a miserable and destroyed country. We left because we came to realize that the whole country had begun to hate us."

One consequence of the Soviet involvement was the arrival of Osama bin Laden, now the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks, and thousands of otherArab Islamic militants who joined the U.S.-supported Afghan resistance.

Goryeev recalled his first encounter with bin Laden and his men during the battle for Jalalabad in early 1989. Officially, the Soviets had already withdrawn their troops, but Goryeev had stayed behind to oversee the effort to help prop up Moscow's puppet government.

"Bin Laden fought with money and he fought with terror. He paid the fighters $200 a day to fight against the Soviet troops. And he prepared a whole range of subversive acts -- every day there were explosions at marketplaces, offices, against troops. He paid very generously for all terrorist acts," Goryeev said.

Today, bin Laden is once more operating out of Afghanistan, his enemy no longer a Soviet Union that has ceased to exist but the United States that once funded the holy war against Moscow's Communist leadership.

Many former Soviet generals like Goryeev cannot forgive that. "Let us not forget," he said, "that he was created by your special services to fight against our Soviet troops. But he got out of their control."

-------- tajikistan

Tense Tajikistan Braces for Instability
Ex-Soviet Republic Has Crucial but 'Very Vulnerable Position' in Central Asia

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53287-2001Sep18?language=printer

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, Sept. 18 -- The intruding aircraft showed up on the wrong side of the border at 5 p.m. local time a week ago today, almost exactly the same moment that four commercial airliners were taking off in the United States en route to the country's worst terrorist attack in history.

Russian troops noticed three aircraft skirting the Afghan border at 9,000 feet suddenly crossing into Tajik airspace.

They left almost as quickly as they arrived and nothing came of the incident, except that it happened again the next day and then again an hour after that.

The timing may have been a coincidence, but the three incursions in 24 hours give a taste of the tensions rippling through Central Asian nations north of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as the United States contemplates a military response to the suicide strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, drug-running and guerrilla raids tied to Islamic extremists operating out of Afghanistan over the last two years had the former Soviet republics in this region on edge even before President Bush declared a new war against terrorism. Harboring no illusions about where the front lines of that war will fall, Central Asia now is bracing for a new period of instability. A U.S. assault on the Taliban could lead to more refugees spilling across the borders, reprisals from rebels affiliated with Osama bin Laden and new tensions involving the great powers in Moscow and Washington.

"Tajikistan is in a very vulnerable position," said Mamadsho Ilolov, a leading lawmaker from the parliamentary majority. "We're in great danger of difficulties -- a large amount of refugees. And what guarantee is there that the bombs will hit what they're supposed to? For us, this is a very complicated question."

More so than its neighbors, Tajikistan already feels like a country on a war footing. The armed forces have been put on high alert and soldiers toting machine guns appear on many streets of this capital. Border crossings have been restricted and the road from the Uzbek line to Khudjand in the north is filled with one checkpoint after another. Tajik television tonight was showing military parades, a rerun of the country's 10th anniversary independence celebration on Sept. 9.

Among those in camouflage here are thousands of Russian troops who for years have been guarding the border with Afghanistan and whose presence is a powerful political statement about Moscow's continued determination to play a role in the region. While Tajikistan has long permitted the Russians on its border, Uzbekistan has refused.

The U.S. Embassy here was evacuated in 1998 following the embassy bombings in Africa; the U.S. ambassador is now based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and visits periodically.

The government of President Imamali Rakhmonov has sent confusing signals about its willingness to assist any U.S. assault on Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Talbak Nazarov told reporters here today that Tajikistan was ready to cooperate with the United States to fight international terrorism, but it was not clear if that would include permission to use airspace or ground bases.

Russia has asserted that the United States should not use Central Asia as a staging area for attacks. The chief of the Kremlin security council, Vladimir Rushailo, who was in the region today meeting with officials, announced in Almaty that hot lines would be set up connecting Central Asian leaders with Moscow. "Certainly we've come to mutual agreement that we need to react to terrorist acts," he said, "but this reaction must be within the framework of international law."

Ilolov, the parliamentary leader, said he believes Tajikistan ultimately will find a way to help the United States. "For the sake of the goal, I think everything might be done, including providing a corridor," he said.

But an independent analyst said the public remains skeptical of U.S. intentions and understands that Tajikistan must still live in this neighborhood even after Bush's forces go home. "America is a temporary factor, but Afghanistan is permanent," said the analyst, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities. "Maybe not for the Uzbeks or the Russians, but for us, it's very sensitive -- very, very sensitive."

A mountainous country of 6 million, Tajikistan remains the poorest of the former Soviet republics. A civil war wrecked its economy and divided its people after the Soviet collapse. When the conflict ended in 1997, Rakhmonov formed a coalition government with Islamic rebels, leaving the country's leadership decidedly ambivalent about a new war against the Taliban.

Long before the World Trade Center's twin towers were destroyed in New York, Tajikistan felt the effects of Afghanistan's wars and the Taliban's harsh Islamic rule. About 12,000 Afghan refugees camped out for months at the border, refused entry by Tajik authorities, who are ill-equipped to care for them and suspicious that they included armed extremists.

The authorities also believe terrorists maintain bases in craggy Tajik hideaways beyond the government's reach. An uprising by dissatisfied Islamic opposition forces just outside of Dushanbe this summer led to a violent confrontation and the death of their leader. On Sept. 9, Tajik independence day, the country's culture minister was assassinated.

Tajikistan is not the only country to continue to face violence. This summer, reports of fighting emerged from Kyrgyzstan to the north. Uzbekistan has enjoyed a relatively quiet season after two summers of rebel outbreaks. Authorities in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, attribute that in part to their aggressive efforts to stamp out extremists, a campaign that included laying land mines along the borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to stop incursions. The mines have been blamed for at least two dozen civilian deaths.

Tajikistan has long been regarded both by Russia and the West as the bulwark between Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia. In addition to stationing troops in Tajikistan, Russia has extended support to the Northern Alliance, a loose collection of ethnic militias fighting the Taliban from bases in northern Afghanistan.

In congressional testimony last June, a senior U.S. State Department official, Clifford G. Bond, said: "Tajikistan's fate is particularly important to the future of the region. While success in any single Central Asian state will not necessarily help the others, Tajikistan's collapse could easily lead to the spread of the radical Islamic, narco-terrorist system in Afghanistan north through Tajikistan to other states in the region."

-------- u.n.

China, Iran seek U.N. role in retaliation

September 19, 2001
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010919-843544.htm

China and Iran led an effort yesterday to push the United States into obtaining United Nations approval for any military activity against Afghanistan for harboring terrorists.

The United States brushed aside such suggestions.

China made such U.N. approval a condition of its help to the United States, as did Iran.

Those nations, as well as Afghanistan itself, also urged the United States to submit evidence of terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden's involvement in attacks last week on the United States.

Over the weekend, Pakistan and Italy also suggested a leading role for the United Nations.

Despite U.S. dismissals of U.N. approval, Bush administration officials said yesterday the United Nations had a role to play in forming a broad coalition against terrorism.

A U.N. resolution "makes clear already that, because of the attacks in East Africa, bin Laden needs to be brought to justice, and the Taliban has to end its practice of harboring terrorist groups," said State Department spokesman Rich-ard Boucher.

He was referring to 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that were blamed on bin Laden followers.

"It is necessary for the U.N. Security Council to play its due role," Chinese President Jiang Zemin told British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a telephone conversation, Chinese news reports said.

Mr. Jiang also insisted that Washington provide "irrefut-able evidence" of Osama bin Laden's involvement before any attacks against the suspected terrorist mastermind.

Afghanistan's Taliban government, which has sheltered bin Laden for years, for the first time yesterday did not rule out bin Laden's involvement.

But it also demanded proof.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the United States would not share its intelligence because it would reveal methods that would be needed to fight terrorists in the future.

The United States, meanwhile, intensified its diplomatic offensive against bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda, which is believed responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington and New York.

In the Middle East, a major obstacle to the recruitment of Arab nations into an anti-terrorist coalition was cleared away when Israel and the Palestinians announced a cease-fire intended to halt more than a year of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Following a telephone call yesterday morning from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat announced he had told his followers to stop all shooting, "even in self-defense."

Hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to halt attacks and withdraw from Palestinian-ruled territory.

Mr. Powell called the news "an encouraging development" and urged both sides to "take advantage" of it and hold "additional meetings."

"We have also encouraged commanders on both sides to talk to one another and we are looking at the beginning of Security Committee dialogue once again," he told reporters at the State Department.

Mr. Powell spoke after a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Han Song-su, who is also serving as the new president of the U.N. General Assembly.

They discussed, among other things, postponing the U.N. General Assembly session, scheduled for next week, until mid- to late October. Leaders from most U.N. member-states are expected to attend the event in New York, which is still recovering from attacks that demolished the World Trade Center.

"The decision is really in the hands of the United Nations," Mr. Boucher said. "Everybody agrees we should look first and foremost to the wishes of the city."

Mr. Boucher said the United States wants to "work closely" with both the Security Council and General Assembly in a global effort against terrorism. He praised U.N. resolutions last week that condemned the attacks on America.

Mr. Powell had "offered to continue coordinating with the United Nations in various ways" during both his meeting with Mr. Han and telephone conversations in the past several days with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

China's leader, Mr. Jiang, said: "The Chinese people stand side by side with the American and British people as well as the international community on the issue of terrorism," the official Xinhua news agency reported.

But he demanded "irrefutable evidence" of bin Laden's involvement in the attacks and "clear targets, so as to avoid casualties to innocent people" in case of military action.

"Any military action must comply with the objectives and principles of the U.N. Charter as well as widely recognized norms in international law," Mr. Jiang said.

China also asked for U.S. support in its own fight against "terrorism and separatism," referring to Muslim separatists in the northwestern region of Xinjiang and Taiwanese independence activists.

Iran, which shares a border with Afghanistan, also said yesterday it would support a U.N.-led international coalition against terrorism, but warned against a U.S. military strike on Afghanistan.

"To prevent a new catastrophe in Afghanistan, we must keep every action within the framework of the United Nations and under its supervision," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told his Canadian counterpart, John Manley, according to Iran's IRNA news agency.

In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Information Minister Qudrutullah Jamal told Reuters news agency the Taliban would need proof of bin Laden's role in the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon before it handed him over.

As the administration prepared for a marathon of coalition-building talks with allies and other major powers this week, officials said U.S. requests will become much more specific than the general measures Washington asked them to implement in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States. Those measures, Mr. Boucher said, include information sharing, disrupting financial flows, border closings and preventing transits of groups.

French President Jacques Chirac met with President Bush in the Oval Office last night, where he pledged to work with the United States in its fight against terrorism.But he said: "I don't know whether we should use the word 'war.'"

Foreign leaders flying to Washington this week include Mr. Blair, the foreign ministers of Russia, Italy and Saudi Arabia, as well as three top European Union officials.

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

Mission is clear: Fight terrorism

September 19, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010919-25477280.htm

After 10 years of debate over the U.S. military's role in the post-Soviet world, Sept. 11, 2001, has handed the armed forces an overriding purpose: Go to war against international terrorists.

Suddenly, a large segment of the American population is looking to the military for justice, just as the World War II generation did after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Interviews with active duty officers yesterday reveal a belief that they have been given a long-term mission comparable to fighting communism.

"Now is our time to change things in the world," said an Army officer. "We've been given a clear task."

Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry, Texas Republican and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the military must transform in order to counteract several new threats, including terrorism.

"We still have to change our space assets. We still have to worry about cyber-attacks," he said.

As for fighting terrorism, the congressman said, the nation needs a lighter, more lethal Army.

During the 1990s, as the military lost its main foe in the rubble of the old Soviet empire, the all-volunteer force was tugged in many different directions. Some on Capitol Hill wanted a smaller military geared more toward peacekeeping. Others argued to keep big chunks of the heavy, Cold War force to fight potential great land battles.

The Pentagon devised a two-war requirement, but the prospects of fighting regional wars in Korea or the Persian Gulf did not capture the American public's imagination.

Today, the military has a predominate mission for which it has been searching since the fall of the Berlin Wall: international terrorism with the face of Saudi-exile Osama bin Laden and his far-flung network of terror cells.

Unlike the Persian Gulf war or air campaigns in the Balkans, American citizens were attacked on their own soil when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers and the Pentagon. The death toll from the attacks likely will exceed 5,000. A CNN-Gallup poll found that 88 percent of Americans backed a military response.

The ramifications for the military are just starting to appear. The attacks may mean larger defense budgets, easier recruiting, and increased public and political support for the men and women in uniform.

"It's certainly going to help recruiting," said John Hillen, a defense adviser in the 2000 Bush campaign. "The combination of the lousy economy and the groundswell of patriotism is sure to fill recruiting stations, and that can't be anything but good."

The first war of the 21st century, as the Bush administration calls it, also will help Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld carry out the president's order to transform the military for tomorrow's enemies.

"It helps us take a considerable portion of the force and get them focused away from fighting the Gulf war all over again and get them focused on finally developing new strategies, new tactics, new forms of organization and new weapon systems," said Mr. Hillen, who served on the staff of a U.S. commission that studied future threats, including terrorism.

The new systems won't be tanks, but night-fighting gear, aircraft that can ferry special operations forces long distances, and portable communications.

Added Mr. Thornberry, "The secretary was getting beat up for even modest efforts at reform. My sense now is the country is ready to stand behind the president in what he thinks needs to be done, certainly with any reforms of the military. This gives us the opportunity to move faster."

Mr. Rumsfeld said yesterday that capturing bin Laden is only a first step. The military also must help take down his al-Qaeda organization and its scores of terror cells operating around the world, including in the United States.

"Bin Laden is one person who is unambiguously a terrorist," Mr. Rumsfeld told CBS. "The al-Qaeda network is a broad, multiheaded organization. If bin Laden were not there, the organization would continue doing what it's been doing. So clearly the problem is much bigger than bin Laden.

"One of the ways to deal with that network is to drain the swamp. These terrorists don't function in a vacuum. They function in a country. And countries foster and facilitate and tolerate their behavior, and that's got to stop."

--------

Dellums backs Lee vote against armed force

By Lisa Friedman
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Oakland Tribune
Tuesday September 18 2001

From: "Andrew Lichterman" <alichterman@worldnet.att.net>

WASHINGTON -- Former Oakland congressman Ron Dellums was watching television with his wife, witnessing endless footage of the attacks Sept. 11 at the Pentagon and World Trade Center and its aftermath of grief and twisted metal, when he learned Congress would be asked to approve a declaration of war.

"How would you vote on that?" Dellums said his wife asked.

"I looked at her and I said, 'I would vote no,'" he answered.

It was a gut response, born out of a lifetime of conviction that war is a statement of desperation. Yet days later, after long hours of introspection, Dellums said he believes his instinct was right, and that that his faith in nonviolence is as strong now as it ever was.

"It's during these moments of fear and anxiety and pain that your belief system is tested to the limit," Dellums said during a 75-minute telephone conversation Sunday. But, he said, "The peace movement is not just something you name yourself. It's a way of thinking.

"It is not an accident that the Gandhis and the Kings and the Mandelas of the world are a very small group. It takes courage to find another way to deal with these problems."

For many in Oakland and the Bay Area, the name Ron Dellums is synonymous with opposition to war. His election to the U.S. House as an East Bay representative in 1970 came on an anti-Vietnam platform. National news reports screamed, "Afro-topped, bell-bottomed radical black man from Berkeley wins election!"

He left office nearly 30 years later, an expert in national security, having earned the respect of his ideological foes, and having voted against every use of military force from Vietnam to Operation Desert Storm.

Dellums retired from public life in 1998 and now runs Healthcare International Management Co., a company that provides health services in poor countries. Never one to court media attention even while in office, Dellums is these days more guarded than ever of his privacy. He spoke to The Oakland Tribune this weekend because, he said, "now the drums of war are beating very loudly."

Ever since the first hijacked airplane struck the World Trade Center at 12 minutes before 9 a.m. Tuesday, Dellums said he has been trying to sort out his own conflicting feelings.

"Here we are as a people having experienced this incredibly awful thing, and we simultaneously feel pain, we feel sorrow, we feel anger ... and, if the truth be told, high anxiety and a great amount of fear," he said.

"Suddenly any act of violence is very possible any time and anywhere. In many ways, America has been changed forever." That, Dellums said, is precisely why he believes the president and Congress should not rush to vengeance.

"I have to hope, and I've been hoping every day, that what happened on Tuesday has not already set in motion events that will send us down the spiral of darkness.

"The American people need to feel, mourn the pain," Dellums said. "This is a very frightening and dangerous moment. This is not the time for us to make a decision about war and vengeance. We live in a society of immediateness and quickness and 'let's block out these feelings.' Rational thought is not the order of the day.

"This is not the end. It's frightening to even contemplate where this can go. So, it behooves us to pause. ... I'm not sure if we as a people have grappled with what it means to go to war in the 21st Century," he said.

He may be right. Yet according to the latest CBS/New York Times poll, 85 percent of Americans are willing to find out. According to the same poll, 68 percent of the country wants to take military action against those responsible for the attacks even if it means innocent people will be killed, and 60 percent said the United States should go to war even if "thousands" of innocent civilians are killed.

President Bush has spent the past few days preparing America for war in no uncertain terms, declaring, "My message is for everybody who wears the uniform: Get ready."

Dellums said he is still praying that the country can find another way.

"War is just a statement that we have lost control. It's a statement of desperation. We've got to reach in and figure out, 'How do we overcome the desperation?'

"There has to be a better way than killing and dying and more killing and more dying," he said. "It's not going to bring back this incredible loss of life that we've had."

Congress did vote on the war resolution, a bill that authorized President Bush to use whatever military force necessary to respond to Tuesday's terrorist attacks. The House passed the resolution late Friday by a vote of 420-1.

The lone dissenting vote belonged to Dellum's successor, Rep. Barbara Lee.

Lee, Dellums said, came to her decision by her own path. He said he is troubled by some of the visceral reactions to her decision, the callers to talk shows who call Lee a "national embarrassment," "un-American" and worse.

"What are we defending if we're not defending the principle of honest dissent in the marketplace of ideas?" Dellums asked. "I think people need to applaud courage in a moment when someone is willing to stand up against the tide. We have to care about the fact that

few people along the way have a different perspective. ... What could be more American?"

----

Time to lead, George, not follow

Joe Bennett
Christchurch Press
19 September 2001
From: Rob Green <robwcpuk@chch.planet.org.nz>

Steady, George, steady. Five thousand people are dead and nothing you can do can bring them back.

But you can cause more to die. Steady, boy, steady.

Don't wear a bomber jacket and don't talk of war. This is not war, not yet. You can prevent it becoming war. So, steady.

Ninety per cent of your citizens want you to retaliate with instant venom. Stall, George, stall. A week from now it will be 60 per cent. Watch the numbers fall. You cannot bring back the dead.

You are a political man who has been voted into office but now is not the time for you to act like a political man. Now you must act like a wise man.

Votes don't matter. If you do right the votes will come, but votes don't matter. Don't follow, George. Lead.

There is talk of a holy war, George, talk on both sides. Don't listen to it. No holy wars exist. Holy people of any creed don't choose to fight.

Nor do ordinary people choose to fight. Most ordinary people everywhere want the same good things. Go gently, George.

Yours is a Christian country, George. Your churches are packed. You yourself have quoted from the Bible. Your church, George, was founded by a man who preached peace. He said to turn the other cheek.

Perhaps you cannot turn the other cheek when 5000 people lie dead, but do not act swiftly for revenge. Revenge perpetrates hatred. Hatred kills more people. Go slow, George.

Your enemy is not Islam, George, and don't let people tell you that it is. Your enemy is the people who have learned to hate your country.

What they have done is indefensible but if you find out why they have done it, why they think as they do, you will be on the right path. Take time to walk in their shoes.

You will learn what it is that they have learned to hate. You will learn that no-one, not even the USA, has a monopoly on virtue.

Your predecessors in office have done clumsy things. People far away from Texas have died because of those clumsy things. The USA has fought wars on other people's land.

Sometimes the USA has had good intentions, at other times it has served its own interests, but even if you look only at what your country has done in Afghanistan you will begin to see why there are people there who have been brought up to hate you.

Be brave. Go to Afghanistan yourself. Talk to the leaders there. To hell with security. Take the risk. Lead the way.

Some people can't be threatened, George. You can't threaten the people who stole the planes and killed 5000 of your countrymen, because those murderers are dead. You can't theaten their accomplices because they have nothing to lose except their lives and they are not afraid to lose their lives.

In time you will have to act, but if you go after these people hastily and clumsily, and if, as foolish Clinton did, you kill innocent people as you go, you will make more people hate you. You will make a bad thing worse. You are faced with the Hydra, George, and I don't think you are Hercules.

You have felt horror. Your citizens have felt horror. You and they are unused to horror. Fear has followed horror and anger has followed fear. That is how it is bound to be.

But to act out of anger would be unwise. You must think. You are vulnerable. You are on the same planet as your enemy and because of your technology the planet is small for both of you and for all of us. Slow down.

Listen to your grandmother. Grandmother's cliches became cliches because they are true, true in the nursery, true in the wide world.

What's done is done, George. The milk is spilt. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Listen to the wisest people in your council, the people who are telling you to go placidly amid the noise and haste. Such platitudes are always hardest to follow when you most need to follow them. Rise above the clamour.

Failing all else, George, listen not to the living but to the dead. Ask the dead in the rubble what they want you to do.

Listen and you will hear in their silence that they want you to do nothing that will bring more danger to their mothers and their fathers, their husbands and their wives, their sons and their daughters who are still alive.

Do that, George. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes, but please, go steady, real steady.

--------

U.S. Develops Options for Military Action
Troops Could Be Sent Overseas Within Weeks

By Thomas E. Ricks, Kamran Khan and Molly Moore
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52744-2001Sep18?language=printer

The Pentagon intensified preparations yesterday for a possible overseas deployment of U.S. troops that could begin within weeks as U.S. and Pakistani officials drafted plans for using bases in Pakistan as staging grounds for raids into neighboring Afghanistan, according to officials in Washington and Islamabad.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, alluding to the planning in both countries, said the United States is preparing "a very broadly based campaign to go after the terrorist problem where it exists." And in an indication of the breadth of military action being contemplated by the administration in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Rumsfeld told reporters that the U.S. military would "use the full spectrum of our capabilities."

"I think of it in the sense of self-defense, and there is nothing that inhibits the United States of America from defending itself," Rumsfeld said.

While Pentagon officials stressed no decisions have been made, sources said Rumsfeld and other senior officials are considering a wide range of options for attacking suspected terrorists and their supporters in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia has been harboring Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who the U.S. government says is its prime suspect in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The options range from small-scale raids using Special Forces troops to airstrikes and cruise missile barrages, officials said. In addition to direct military action, the administration is considering a variety of intelligence, economic and diplomatic actions to disrupt terrorist networks and the governments that support or tolerate them, officials said.

"We intend to put them on the defensive, to disrupt terrorist networks and remove their sanctuaries and their support systems," Rumsfeld said. "This will take a long, sustained effort."

The Pentagon's planning reflects some of the political and geographic difficulties confronting the administration as it contemplates what President Bush has called a new kind of war against a shadowy, stateless enemy. The plans are a radical departure from operations such as the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which involved a massive buildup of troops and heavy weapons, and will rely instead on smaller, more mobile units.

Pakistani military officials said the Bush administration has not asked to station large numbers of ground troops in the country, a request that would be politically difficult for the Pakistan government to meet and logistically difficult for U.S. forces to carry out. Sensitive to the problems of having U.S. troops operate in a conservative Muslim nation, especially in an area of Pakistan where Afghans are considered ethnic brothers, Pentagon planners are aiming to minimize the number of U.S. troops that would be based there, officials said.

One possible course of action calls for Special Forces to conduct raids on suspected terrorists in Afghanistan from Pakistan. The countries share a 1,500-mile border. But the plan calls for stationing most of the assault troops outside Pakistan and flying them to Pakistan at the last minute to stage the raids, officials said. Pentagon officials are discussing basing some forces aboard Navy ships in the Arabian Sea and having them use helicopters to move into Afghanistan. U.S. troops might also be based in friendly Persian Gulf nations, such as Oman and Kuwait.

The Navy has two aircraft carriers in the area, the Carl Vinson and the Enterprise, and soon will have a third, the Theodore Roosevelt.

Asked to comment on the military planning, Victoria Clarke, the top Pentagon spokeswoman, said, "We don't have any comment on operational details."

A delegation of U.S. officials is scheduled to arrive in Pakistan this week to discuss details of ground support requirements. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has promised to cooperate with U.S. efforts to dislodge bin Laden.

Musharraf, a veteran of Pakistani special forces, already has agreed to give the United States overflight rights for missile and aerial bombing raids in Afghanistan.

Military planners say a limited ground presence will be necessary to command any operation run out of Pakistan, including operating a headquarters and basing the Special Operations helicopters that would be used for the short trip over the border into Afghanistan. Officials said they are planning to keep the deployment as "austere" as possible, with troops living in tents, and as many support functions as possible, such as intelligence analysis, being carried out elsewhere.

"You can run a limited war with the facilities that the U.S. Navy has in the Arabian Sea," a senior Pakistan naval official said. "But they are no substitute to a solid support paraphernalia on the ground."

For example, the U.S. base in Pakistan would need to have on hand a fairly large quick reaction force, perhaps a regiment of U.S. Army Rangers, in case a Special Forces raid went awry, officials said. Most of the helicopter pilots and their maintenance crews would need to live on the base.

U.S. and Pakistani military officials also are discussing upgrading Pakistani medical facilities in border areas to accommodate emergencies. In addition, they are making plans to use the major port of Karachi for large shipments of supplies to support operations, officials familiar with discussions said.

U.S. and Pakistani military officials are assessing use of other air fields across the country, particularly at the large Karachi airport, for use in supporting operations into Afghanistan.

While there has been some talk of having U.S. forces operate from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan just north of Afghanistan, military planners said Pakistan's bases would provide support much closer to the most likely targets in Taliban-controlled eastern Afghanistan areas near the Pakistan border.

Because of its long history of military relations with Pakistan during the Cold War, the U.S. military is familiar with Pakistan's military infrastructure. One base near Peshawar was built by the United States. The base was used to fly U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union, and was the origin of the doomed espionage flight of Francis Gary Powers, whose plane was downed by the Soviets in May 1960.

U.S. and Pakistan special forces units conducted joint operations in the rugged hills of the North West Frontier Province, where Peshawar is located, in 1998, the same year the United States launched missile attacks into Afghanistan in retribution for bin Laden's alleged role in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Pakistani officials are already preparing medical facilities in Peshawar and Quetta for a possible attack, sources said. In the 1998 U.S. attack, Pakistani hospitals treated victims injured when at least one cruise missile fell astray in Pakistan.

Even though U.S. military cooperation with Pakistan has declined dramatically in recent years, U.S. Navy ships have made three port calls in Karachi in the last six years, allowing naval officers and personnel to become familiar with operations at the port, which would be a key staging area for fuel, supplies and troop movements into Pakistan.

Ricks reported from Washington; Khan and Moore from Islamabad. Staff writer Vernon Loeb in Washington contributed to this report.

--------

Pentagon orders combat aircraft to Persian Gulf

USA TODAY
09/19/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/hlead.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon on Wednesday ordered fighter and bombers to begin moving to the Persian Gulf area, the first concrete sign of preparations to retaliate for last week's terrorist attacks, a senior defense official said. The combat aircraft will be preceded by teams of Air Force airlift control teams to coordinate the refueling of the fighters and bombers as they deploy from the United States to the Gulf, the official said. The deployment has been dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice," the official said. Asked by a reporter whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had signed a deployment order, his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz said, "There are movements and we will see more movements." He would not elaborate.

Separate from the order to send Air Force planes to the Persian Gulf area, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the ships in its battle group left their home port at Norfolk, Va., on Wednesday for a scheduled six-month deployment to the Mediterranean.

The Navy already has one carrier battle group in the Gulf and a second in the Arabian Sea to the south.

The defense official, who discussed Wednesday's deployment order on condition he not be identified, said no aircraft had yet moved. First to move would be the airlift control teams, which must establish ground communications at various places along the air route in order to coordinate refueling operations.

The airlift control teams are designed to deploy in support of cargo and tanker planes, vital to the support network set up for any long-term air operation. The team are able to set up under very austere conditions, and include men and women who can run control tower operations, load and unload aircraft, and fuel planes.

Teams that conduct such operations are located at Travis Air Force Base in California and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. It was not immediately clear which units would deploy.

Likely to be included in the force of combat aircraft are F-16s, F-15s and possibly B-1 bombers, the official said.

The United States already has a sizable and well-developed military presence in the Persian Gulf, with combat aircraft stationed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and elsewhere. It appeared likely that many of the extra combat aircraft to be deployed in the next several days would go to Kuwait and Bahrain, the official said.

Earlier Wednesday, Rumsfeld said America's war on terrorism must go beyond Osama bin Laden and hunt down associated networks of terrorists in dozens of countries.

"We have a lot of evidence about a number of countries harboring terrorists that are working across the globe," Rumsfeld told CNN.

"This is not a problem of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. It is a problem of a number of networks of terrorists that have been active across the globe," Rumsfeld said. Bin Laden, considered by the Bush administration to be the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and his associates have activities in 50 or 60 countries, including the United States, the secretary said.

While the USS Theodore Roosevelt was beginning its deployment, the USS Enterprise was to have returned home from the Persian Gulf this month after the USS Carl Vinson arrived to relieve it. But the orders were changed and the Enterprise remained in the region. This could put three carrier battle groups in the area within weeks.

The Defense Department is moving to a war footing in the wake of last weeks attacks in which hijackers commandeered four commercial jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon and a field in southern Pennsylvania. The attack killed thousands.


-------- OTHER

-------- human rights

Santa Cruz Mulls Expanding of Anti-Homeless Restrictions

by "Becky Johnson" <wmnofstl54@hotmail.com>
Sept. 16, 2001

Santa Cruz, Ca. -- In this picturesque seaside tourist town of 54,000, City leaders are considering voting for parking restrictions which would only affect homeless people.

Unable to afford the high housing costs in the City, hundreds have been forced by economic neccessity to use their vehicles as their homes. For years, the two industrial areas of Santa Cruz have been unofficial "home" for both long-distance truckers who need to park and sleep, and for homeless people who do not want to bother residents or businesses, and choose to park away from them. In May of 2000, the council voted to establish safe sleeping zones there, before abandoning the effort in June.

On July 24th, President Don L. Hubbard of the Harvey West Area Business Association contacted the Public Works department and asked that problems involving littering be dealt with. The subsequent discussion involved discussion that either the City install porto-potties and a dumpster in the Harvey West area, or put up signs preventing nighttime parking.

City Manager Dick Wilson favors the 5AM to 7AM parking restrictions which would be in effect 7 nights a week. The stated reason in the staff recommendation is "street sweeping." When Director of Public Works, Matt Farrell was contacted by HUFF activist, Robert Norse, he acknowledged that no public hearings had been held. When asked whether any other street in the City has 5 AM to 7 AM restrictions, he admitted that there were none. When asked whether Pacific Ave. is swept daily, he said "no." Yet the four streets in the industrial zone which are neither in front of businesses or residents, are slated to have these restrictions imposed in item #12 on the afternoon calendar's consent agenda. Moreover this item was prepared without discussions with homeless advocates, social service providers, and was prepared over the summer while council was on vacation.

In March of 1999, a resolution initiated by Councilmember Christopher Krohn, and passed by council recommended the installation of porto-potties and dumpsters in areas traditionally used by homeless campers and those who are vehicularly-housed. No such facilities have been installed despite repeated efforts by activists. When asked why, Matt Farrell stated that the staff had been taken up with working on the Master Transportation Study. Ironically City Council comment at a December 2000 Council meeting rejecting similar signs on Almar Ave. noted that no such signs would be put in until the Master Transportation Study was done.

The streets on which the parking restrictions are being proposed are the exact same streets that the council was considering as a safe sleeping zone for homeless people in May of 2000.

The likely impact of the parking restrictions will be to disturb the already fragile sleep of those forced to live in their vehicles. Sleeping between the hours of 11PM and 8:30AM out of doors or in a vehicle is already prohibited. The parking restriction being proposed will, if passed, be in effect 7 days a week and threaten those vehicles whose drivers don't wake up and move with expensive tickets and with towing. Since the vehicles of homeless people typically contain the sum of those people's worldly belongings, such towing effects their ability to survive at all.

Santa Cruz documented 1273 homeless people in a single night head count in the City of Santa Cruz. 30% of which live in their vehicles. It has shelter space for only 39.

Despite three shelter emergency declarations by the Santa Cruz City Council, none of which have been revoked, City Manager Dick Wilson, Parks and Recreation director Jim Lang, Police Chief Steven Belcher, and Public Works director Matt Farrell, and Ron Marquez have teamed up to recommend to City Council that the city streets in the weedy, and dusty industrial section of the City need to have parking prohibited from 5AM to 7AM on the four streets most used by homeless people at night.

No restrictions are imposed in front of large businesses located in the area 3 unpaid tickets will result in the "booting" of the vehicle. Lack of prompt payment will result in the towing of their vehicle. To get the vehicle back, they must pay the $116 tow charge and $25 per day North County Towing charges, as well as paying the tickets.

The item seems so innocuous. Yet is it insidious. In the codewords of the staff report they talk about area residents and businesses concerns which are "echoed by the Police Department and the Parks and Recreation Department to address the issue of long term parking on Sylvania Street and on Coral Street from Limekiln Street to Harvey West Boulevard. This parking results in health and sanitation concerns as well as traffic safety issues."

But the "health" of homeless people is not considered. This tiny staff-inspired banishment of the vehicularly-housed will not drive them from the area. Just into another area, and it will probably be in front of a residence or a business.

The report goes on to say that "Staff proposes to sweep the streets regularly in this area to address the health and sanitation issues and to paint several curbs in this area red to insure adequate sight distance at the adjoining intersections. In order to provide effective sweeping, parking would be prohibited from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. daily.

Sweep the homeless away. That is what this item is all about. When Ed, a man who lives in his RV, was asked what he thought of the restrictions he blurted out "Hell, if they have a problem with keeping the curbs clean, I'll sweep them myself every day." But no one ever asked him.

If Santa Cruz votes in favor of these restrictions, it will be moving away from what other cities have been doing. Santa Barbara has recently moved in the opposite direction, approving in concept a vehicular parking lot in the County and a Eugene-style, or series of smaller, legal parking areas throughout the city.

Santa Cruz City Council can be contacted at (831) 420-5020
To Contact HUFF, Homeless United for Friendship & Freedom call (831) 423-4833
To contact Becky Johnson, call (831)429-8529 or e-mail at wmnofstl@cruzio.com

--------

Lawmakers vow to protect liberties

September 19, 2001
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010919-14794881.htm

Protecting the twin towers of personal liberties and domestic security is the most challenging task the nation faces, lawmakers and others across the ideological spectrum say.

"It is key balancing act we have to engage in as a nation right now," said Rep. Bob Barr, Georgia Republican. "It would be very easy to forget about personal liberties and worry only about the national security. I don't want to do that."

Rep. Brad Carson, Oklahoma Democrat, warned against making the Constitution "the first casualty" of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

As part of the unfolding war on terrorism that President Bush has declared, Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft yesterday made public several proposed changes in laws that protect personal freedoms but that also may inhibit the government's ability to keep tabs on terrorism suspects.

One proposal would give the government power to seek legal permission for eavesdropping on phone calls made by an individual on any telephone he may be using at any moment and in any jurisdiction.

Other Ashcroft proposals would eliminate the statute of limitations on terrorism, increase penalties for harboring terrorists and punish the financing of terrorists under money-laundering statutes.

But some conservatives immediately expressed reservations.

"Allowing wiretaps on any phone is a significant extension of wiretap authority," said Gary Kreep, executive director of the California-based U.S. Justice Foundation, a conservative legal action organization.

"The argument is that everyone has cell phones and can switch to anyone of a dozen or more. There is a logic to that, but I would be concerned unless there are some restrictions and restraints," Mr. Kreep said.

"They want to completely restructure our criminal laws, give themselves further prosecutorial tools - we don't even know what they are - and they want to ram this all through without even having hearings," Mr. Barr, himself a former federal prosecutor, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Kreep warned that law enforcers, under intense pressure to head off future attacks, can name anyone as a suspect. "We all want to find the perpetrators of this tragedy and prevent any future tragedies, but we do have to be concerned about what new laws might do to infringe on our freedoms."

Getting the right balance between the freedoms that make America great and easing the way for federal and state authorities to nail enemies of those freedoms has always been difficult, particularly in the aftermath of terrorist incidents. Sometimes the government, pressured to respond, does things that ordinary citizens and common sense regard as just plain stupid.

"We have to watch out for the governmental bureaucratic illogic that says, 'We have to do something, this is something, so we have to do this," former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker said in an interview.

Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, has said some post-Oklahoma bombing measures fell into that category. "I just don't think making traffic tougher in D.C. is going to help," he said.

"If we were going to be absolutely safe," Rep. Frank D. Lucas, Oklahoma Republican, "we'd have to restrict people's freedoms to the point that it wouldn't be America anymore."

Mr. Bush, his Cabinet officers, most members of Congress and elected officials at state and local levels have been careful since Tuesday's terrorist attack to affirm a need to preserve liberty while enhancing security.

In announcing the recommendations of a congressionally chartered anti-terrorism commission Monday, Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, stressed "the paramount importance of preserving our citizens' constitutional rights and civil liberties."

"We can meet this terrorist threat without trampling the Constitution, here or at home," said Mr. Gilmore, the chairman of the commission. "In fact, the goal of the enemy would have us trample our constitutional rights. We don't have to do that."

Mr. Gilmore emphasized that the elected leaders or the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement leaders "should never ask the people of the United States to give up their freedoms because of an attack like this."

--------

Justice Drafts New Rules for Deportation
Terrorist Suspects Would Be Removed

By Dan Eggen and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52767-2001Sep18?language=printer

The Justice Department has drafted legislation allowing the U.S. attorney general to lock up foreigners deemed to be terrorist suspects and order them deported without presenting any evidence.

The only chance for an appeal would occur when a suspect was facing removal from the country, according to the draft, which has prompted alarm among immigration advocates and civil libertarians. Some said they feared the government was responding to a national tragedy by infringing on constitutional rights.

The proposed anti-terrorism legislation came as investigators raced to hunt down suspected accomplices in last week's suicide assaults on New York and Washington, and as Cabinet members warned that more attacks are possible in the days ahead.

A U.S. government official said yesterday that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was seen meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official in Europe earlier this year -- the first hint of possible Iraqi involvement in the plot.

Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees also were told by White House officials in a classified briefing that there is reason to believe that further terrorist acts are being planned, a congressional source said. However, the government does not have specific information about targets or dates, according to law enforcement officials.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft confirmed that the FBI was investigating whether other airplanes had been targeted for hijackings, in addition to the four that crashed Sept. 11 into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside.

Earlier this week, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said terrorists could try to contaminate water supplies or destroy bridges. Last week's attacks were "part of a larger plan with other terrorism acts, not necessarily hijacking of airplanes," he said.

As part of a "concerted national assault" on terrorism, Ashcroft announced yesterday that he has created an anti-terrorism task force with representatives from every U.S. attorney's office in the country. He said he also has revised internal rules allowing the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain suspected illegal immigrants for 48 hours, instead of one day, before deciding whether to charge them.

INS rules already allow any person who does not have legal permission to be in the United States to be detained for an unlimited time in "extraordinary circumstances," which Justice officials said would apply to the terrorism probe.

Ashcroft said the INS has detained 75 people in connection with the investigation on suspected immigration violations. In addition, the FBI has assembled a list of more than 190 people it wants to question. At least six people have been arrested as material witnesses, and a federal grand jury has been convened in White Plains, N.Y., to hear evidence in the investigation, sources said.

Immigration advocates said the large number of detentions and the proposed legislation being drafted by Ashcroft were troubling. According to the draft, provided by immigration advocates, the director of the INS could recommend to the attorney general that a foreigner here be "certified" as someone who might facilitate acts of terrorism. The person could then be detained indefinitely and deported.

The measure would apply both to visitors and to permanent legal residents holding so-called green cards.

Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the proposed deportation rules were more severe than legislation passed in 1996 allowing expanded use of "secret evidence" that does not have to be shown to the suspect. The proposed legislation would not require any evidence to be submitted to a court.

"This proposed legislation is basically making a doormat of the Constitution," said Mike Maggio, an immigration lawyer. "It would permit the INS to serve as prosecutor, judge and jury with no judicial review."

Although there appears to be broad support on Capitol Hill for Ashcroft's overall package of anti-terrorism proposals, congressional aides cautioned that constitutional concerns would play a role in the debate. "The last thing we want to do is rashly pass something that could be tossed out by the courts," said David Carle, spokesman for Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).

Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson declined to discuss the proposed legislation, which could be sent to Congress as early as today.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that one or more nations provided support for last week's attacks, but he declined to specify the evidence for that conclusion. "I know a lot, and what I have said as clearly as I know how is that states are supporting these people," Rumsfeld said.

Senior Bush administration officials have said repeatedly that the prime suspect behind the attacks is exiled Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, who has been given refuge by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban. The administration is not sure what significance to attach to the meeting between Atta -- who is believed to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center -- and an Iraqi intelligence officer, a government official said.

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey said there is substantial evidence suggesting that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a foiled 1994 plot to blow up a dozen U.S. jetliners over the Pacific, was an Iraqi agent, not merely a Pakistani student. If that is the case, Woolsey said, last week's attacks could have been a continuation of Yousef's earlier assaults sponsored by Iraq.

Atta's father told reporters in Cairo yesterday that his son was not a killer. "My son is innocent," Mohammed Amir Atta, 65, a lawyer, said at his home in the Cairo suburb of Giza.

In other developments related to the investigation:

• Officials at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio said FBI agents have visited the campus three times to copy files and seize computers used by Badr Mohammed H. Hazmi, a radiologist who has been arrested as a material witness.

• The FBI said it was examining hundreds of e-mails obtained from Internet providers and personal computers believed to have been used by the hijackers. Some of the 19 suspected hijackers used computers in public libraries to communicate 30 to 45 days before the attacks, a senior FBI official said.

• FBI agents searched a Toms River, N.J., gas station where one of the hijackers had worked for several years and where he received numerous packages in the mail for various people, a law enforcement source said.

• Detroit authorities arrested three men -- Karim Koubriti, 23, Ahmed Hannan, 33, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 21 -- on charges of identity fraud and misuse of visas. The FBI seized documents suggesting the men worked in food preparation for airlines at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and collected information about a U.S. military base in Turkey, an airport in Jordan and a U.S. secretary of state.

Staff writers Paul Duggan, Scott Higham, Vernon Loeb, Lois Romano, Susan Schmidt and Lena H. Sun, and special correspondent Pamela Ferdinand, contributed to this report.

-------

Afghanistan facing humanitarian disaster
Famine Hunger and disease could kill millions, aid agencies warn

Steven Morris and Felicity Lawrence
Wednesday September 19, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2C3604%2C554306%2C00.html

Aid workers forced to flee Afghanistan warned yesterday that the country would be pushed into catastrophe unless the US threat of retaliation for last week's terror attacks is withdrawn.

Even before the attacks, aid agencies issued dire warnings that Afghanistan was heading for disaster. A three year drought on top of two decades of war and Soviet occupation has left more than 5m people - a quarter of the population - threatened by starvation.

Remote villages will soon be cut off by snow without the stockpiles of supplies from international agencies that might have carried them through the winter. In the cities there have been crippling increases in the price of food, and epidemics are threatening to take hold in the packed and filthy refugee camps.

Dominic Nutt, emergency officer for Christian Aid, said: "It's as if a mass grave has been dug behind millions of people. We can drag them back from it or push them in. We could be looking at millions of deaths."

Mr Nutt recently travelled from the city of Herat to a village in the hills of the Ghor province called Barkhol, a 200 mile journey which took two days on rutted tracks. He found a community in crisis.

"As we came over the mountain pass we looked down on a scene of devastation," he said. "The area looked as if it had been scorched. What should have been wheat fields was nothing more than stubble."

Villagers told Mr Nutt they had got through almost all their food supplies and had even eaten seeds which should have been planted for next year's crop. Large families were sharing one piece of bread a day. They could not leave because there was no transport. Aid agencies had hoped to get supplies to villages like Barkhol before they were cut off but the US threat means that this will almost certainly be impossible.

Mr Nutt also visited the bleak Maslakh camp near Herat. There it is estimated that up to 40 people are dying every day, many because they arrive too weak to survive after trying to hold out in their villages.

They have food but conditions are harsh. Most have to dig a hole in the sandy soil and try to suspend what ever cloth they have over it as a makeshift shelter. Water is scarce and in some cases contaminated. Sanitation is basic.

The picture is just as severe in other parts of the country. In the central parts, the UN's world food programme has heard reports of Afghans driven to eat poisonous grass which causes paralysis, while those in the north have been eating meals of locusts mixed with animal feed.

The world food programme says that as many as 20% of children in some regions are dying before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 40. But it has been forced to suspend its $150m (£102m) feeding programme.

The picture is further complicated by the mass movement of people within Afghanistan and across its borders. More than 2m people have been driven from their homes by the wars and drought. The UN High Commission for Refugees said at least another million could flee if the US attacked.

Aid agencies point out that many of those who may be hurt are unlikely to have any idea about what has been happening in America.

-------- police / prisoners

FBI Targets Arab-Americans for Recruitment

September 19, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/national/19WIRE-ARAB.html

DEARBORN, Mich., Sept 18 (Reuters) - ``Is this going to be, you know, like a 007 mission?''

Waleed Mohamed asked that question on Tuesday when told that the FBI wanted to engage people like him -- fluent English-speakers also proficient in Arabic -- in what U.S. President George W. Bush is calling the ``fight against terrorism on all fronts.''

``This war ain't gonna be no quick, in and out in one-month thing. It's going to be a long-term war,'' said Mohamed. ``I need time to think,'' he said, after sharing fleeting thoughts about becoming a James Bond-style secret agent.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the recruitment drive at a news conference in Washington on Monday. He said the FBI was seeking candidates who speak Arabic to help crush what U.S. authorities are calling an international terror network linked to Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden.

The National Security Agency and the Army are also shopping around for Arabic speakers, government sources said.

An FBI spokeswoman in Washington said the initial response to Mueller's call had been ``very encouraging.'' She said no numbers of applicants or recruits were available on the first day of the enlistment campaign.

Those who join the FBI, even as contract workers, must be U.S. citizens who have been permanent residents for at least three of the last five years and pass a background check and language test.

MIXED SIGNALS

``I'm all for supporting my country. I was born and raised here,'' said Mohamed, a 23-year-old auto worker who spoke outside a mosque in this Detroit suburb before midday prayers.

``I'm all for getting these terrorists,'' he added, referring to those responsible for last week's airborne assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. ``These guys are barbarians, animals.''

Mohamed, whose parents emigrated from Yemen, said he did not rule out joining the FBI. But in light of hate crimes targeting members of the Arab-American community since last week, he admitted he was confused by the government call for help.

``I don't even go anywhere outside this community unless I have to,'' said Mohamed, explaining that he and his family had only felt safe in the teeming Arab-American enclaves of Dearborn since last week.

Dearborn, whose 100,000 residents include an estimated 30,000 people of Arabic descent, has the largest concentration of Arabs of any city outside the Middle East.

Mohamed Musa, an Egyptian cleric and leader of the Islamic Center Mosque where the younger Mohamed worships, said he favors Arab-Americans working for the FBI.

``This is an honor to share in this special effort,'' Musa told Reuters. ``They will prove they are doing something with others to defend our country, the United States of America, and to protect it from the evils and from the terrorism.''

He was joined by Youssef Beydoun, a Dearborn mayoral assistant of Lebanese descent, who said the local recruitment drive was likely to be highly successful.

``There's a lot of people here who are dedicated to this country and they feel that this is their homeland,'' said Beydoun. ``They're going to do whatever it takes to protect this country.''

A Reuters/Zogby poll released on Monday showed that 38 percent of American voters believe Islam is a religion that encourages fanaticism.

Outbreaks of anti-Arab violence, in reprisal for crimes Arab leaders have condemned across the United States, have left many people like Waleed Mohamed, in his white robe, beard and dark brown skin, saying they feel alienated.

COMMUNITY UNDER PRESSURE

Rep. John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat who was in Dearborn on Tuesday spreading the word about the FBI's recruitment drive, said that bigotry against Arab-Americans was a serious problem.

``I heard somebody say the other day, 'not all Arabs are terrorists but all terrorists are Arabs' and clearly that's the wrong conclusion,'' Dingell said in a telephone interview. ``The community is feeling enormous sensitivity on this.''

Still, Dingell and Henry ``Skip'' Brandon, a former FBI chief of counter-terrorism, said they expect many Dearborn-based Arab-Americans to answer the FBI's call for help.

``Arab-Americans are Americans first, I think they will be willing to help. I really do,'' said Brandon.

``We have a very high population of Arab Americans,'' added Dingell, who estimates the number across southeast Michigan alone at 300,000. ``They're good citizens and patriotic and they're interested in working for their government.''

Brandon, who left the FBI after helping to solve the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000, said, ``That chapter was resolved but the book was much larger.''

He added that the FBI's apparently critical lack of fluent Arabic speakers was a factor that could hamper its investigation into last week's attacks in the near term.

But more importantly, he said it highlighted one of the key shortcomings of the U.S. intelligence community.

``The lack of language capability, and the lack of studying parts of the world in great depth, to me is indicative of the fact that we move from crisis to crisis,'' Brandon said. ``It's a lack of a full commitment, on a long-term basis.''

--------

Experts See a High-Security America of Surveillance and Seizures
Congress Set to Ease Taps on Computers

International Herald Tribune
William Glaberson
New York Times Service
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
http://www.iht.com/articles/32991.htm

NEW YORK Security experts in the United States are describing a new kind of country that could emerge, where electronic identification might become the norm, immigrants might be tracked far more closely and the airspace over cities like New York and Washington might be off-limits to all civilian aircraft.

Attorney General John Ashcroft outlined several proposals Monday, saying, "We should strengthen our laws to increase the ability of the Department of Justice and its component agencies to identify, prevent and punish terrorism."

The proposals he described included measures that would give law enforcement officials expanded electronic surveillance powers and new powers to seize the assets of suspected terrorists.

Since the attacks, Congress has been acting on proposals to make wiretapping of computers easier, and a flood of measures is expected that will loosen restrictions on what effectively is domestic spying.

Legal experts say that the courts are unlikely to impose many restrictions on Congress's security decisions.

As a result, they say, the country can adopt security measures as stringent as its people will tolerate politically or will support financially.

Experts say that technology has presented almost limitless possibilities. "Each American could be given a 'smart card,' so, as they go into an airport or anywhere, we know exactly who they are," said Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc. consultants.

"The technology is here," Mr. Cherkasky said, noting that it can be readily expanded.

Such cards, with computer chips, would have detailed information about their owners and leave a computer record when they are used. The cards could be coordinated with fingerprints or, in a few years, facial characteristics, and be programmed to permit or to limit access to areas or entire buildings. They could track someone's location, financial transactions, criminal history and even driving speed on a particular highway on a given night.

Critics said that electronic identification cards, combined with other measures, could usher in an era of surveillance and suspicion. And civil libertarians note that an anxious public may be willing to trade freedoms for greater safety in the aftermath of the attacks last week.

It is not clear, said Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale University, whether that acceptance will continue if people are discomforted.

"It is a profound affront to be metered and measured," he said.

"And that is, I think, the debate of the future."

Legal experts said the civil libertarians will find little sympathy in the courts.

In World War II, they noted, the Supreme Court approved the internment of Japanese-Americans, a decision that constitutional scholars now widely consider to have been wrong.

"If history suggests anything," said David Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago, "it suggests the courts will allow the government to get away with a lot.

"Not quite everything, but a lot more than you would expect."

In interviews, experts on security and terrorism outlined some choices.

Immigration could be more sharply controlled, with some immigrants required to report periodically on their activities.

Video surveillance, already growing, could be sharply increased in stores, offices and public places and at public events.

Law enforcement officials could expand the use of personality profiles, possibly including racial descriptions, to identify potential terrorists.

Terry F. Lenzner, chairman of Investigative Group International, a corporate security concern, said that, if the flow of money was being monitored before the attacks last week, authorities might have realized that people were receiving money from Osama bin Laden or other terrorists.

Airport security is likely to be just one area for debate. Armed sky marshals, stronger cockpit doors and new technology for luggage searches are likely to be accepted widely. But some experts suggested that the country could also adopt a system like Israel's, where security people often interrogate passengers about their travel plans and rifle through their baggage.

John Horn, vice president of IPSA International, a security consulting concern, said he favored declaring the airspace over some cities off limits to commercial flights.

But he and other experts said that the public, which already generally balks at the prospect of airport construction, might balk at the cost and inconvenience of building new runways or airports to avoid cities.

Partly because of limits of normal security systems, some experts said, computer technology will be harnessed to make the country safer.

Even if opposition makes a national identity card unrealistic, experts say the attacks will sharply increase adoption of security technology.

"Over a period of time, these technologies will slowly be becoming part of our life," said Martin Pollner, a New York lawyer at Loeb Loeb, who was director of law enforcement at the Treasury Department in the 1970s. "You will no longer be able to just come and go."

--------
The New World Order
Terrorist Attacks Redraw the Global Map

by James Ridgeway with Camelia E. Fard,
Week of September 19 - 25, 2001
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0138/ridgeway.php

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Whether or not the U.S. knocks off Osama bin Laden, the attack on New York and the capital provides Washington with an extraordinary opportunity to project power for the long term in Central Asia by setting up a pro-Western government in Afghanistan. The U.S. could then oversee a pipeline across that nation from the rich Caspian oil fields to ports in Pakistan, and would be perched to react to political changes in volatile Iran. An outpost in Afghanistan would also give America added leverage with Europe and with Russia, which has always had a heavy hand in the region.

In one fell swoop, the attacks and the American response realign the politics of the world on a scale not seen since the height of the Cold War.

The wild card is Pakistan, a veritable university for fundamentalist terrorists. Early in the week it denied the U.S. rights to base ground troops there, but permitted air rights for planes and perhaps will end up letting some of its territory be used as a staging area for commando raids.

But Pakistan is far from trustworthy. As Ahmed Rashid of the Far Eastern Economic Review reported on the Web site EurasiaNet.org early this week, "After having spent the past seven years providing every conceivable form of military, political, and financial support to the Taliban, Pakistan is essentially now being asked by Washington to help the U.S. bomb the Taliban leadership and their guest Osama bin Laden and topple the Taliban regime." [See sidebar.]

Almost unnoticed amid the rumors of war was what looked to be a real, if temporary, ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All this comes at a time when the U.S. is waking from decades of having no policy in Central Asia. We ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew. Meanwhile, Bin Laden-run camps and hundreds of other fundamentalist schools in northwest Pakistan transformed the poor, war-torn dregs of Afghan and Pakistani societies into Muslim holy warriors who are now on the loose.

An attack on Afghanistan at this point may drive the Taliban into the mountains, but it won't touch their power base in Pakistan. Even if we were to pressure Pakistan to shut down the schools, President Pervez Musharaf might not be able to do so, and the entire country could break out in civil war-leaving America smack in the middle of an uncontrollable mess. Our best bet would be to mend fences with Iran, which hates the Taliban, but whose isolation we have been committed to since the days of Jimmy Carter's botched hostage mission.

Meanwhile, within the U.S. military, there's already a debate over what to do. The prospect of war in Central Asia revives the internecine political battles of the Reagan era, with the proponents of low-intensity (read: guerrilla) warfare pitting themselves against those who advocate conventional military forces, including planes, missiles, and airborne troops. Guerrilla backers want to take out Muslim extremists with pinpoint operations using commando units such as the Special Forces, Navy Seals, and Rangers, who could be dropped close to their targets from great heights, then settle down and wait for the opportune moment to strike. They would aim to kill someone like Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein with a 50-caliber sniper rifle (a weapon fine-tuned by the IRA against the British). There would be no raping of women, killing of civilians, or long-term engagement. Just in and out. Most important politically, since there are so few commandos involved, American casualties would be small in number. The main brunt of this sort of effort would be placed on the Special Operations section of the military, and especially the elite but small Delta Force, whose size is classified.

Already, though, military sources are salivating over Bush's decision to pour tens of billions into an antiterrorist effort, which they say would prime the economic pump. It would also lead to more of the same for the military, with cruise missiles, high-level bombing by B2s, and drop-ins by units such as the 82nd Airborne, all grinding on in a protracted and inconclusive military campaign that could last a decade.

By bombing Afghanistan, the U.S. stands to alienate the war-weary destitute who hate the Taliban and might otherwise support an American overthrow of the government. What's likely to happen is that we'll try a heavy bombing campaign, attempt to drive out the Taliban, and work to set up a replacement regime. The country could then be ruled by a combo of the U.S., NATO, and local Western-minded Afghans.

That would require the landing of substantial numbers of ground troops. Afghanistan undoubtedly would be hard hit to make it an example, but the real goal would be to project American military power in the region. Afghanistan could be our Fire Base Charlie amid the quarreling warlords of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Such a campaign might see NATO troops in Azerbaijan on the western side of the Caspian Sea. Uzbekistan, which runs across the top of the Caspian, has also indicated it would accept U.S. troops.

This might look like victory, but it's really a trap. Far from strengthening NATO, a large U.S. presence would drive a wedge between Central Asia and Europe, probably the main reason European nations like Germany and Italy were backing away from the U.S. early this week. By the same token, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan will try to use U.S. support as a lever against Russia.

It's always possible that this sort of makeshift intervention would benefit U.S. oil interests in the Caspian Sea. While oil reserves there are probably not as large as originally projected, they nonetheless are of considerable size, with the natural gas especially important because western Europe has become so dependent on it. U.S. control of Afghanistan might encourage the building of a pipeline from there to Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent. The problem would be that fundamentalists in Pakistan could just blow it up from time to time.

The lasting effect of trying to transform Afghanistan into a Western proxy is probably counterproductive. Last week, a Moscow paper, Komosomolskaya Pravda, published this interesting take on the situation: "Possibly, the [terrorists'] leadership is deliberately 'exposing' certain Islamic countries, such as Libya, Iran, or Iraq, which are suspected of sympathizing with, or supporting, Muslim extremists, but which nevertheless are inclined to have normal relations with the West. The probable acts of retribution against such countries by the Americans will destabilize the situation in them and lead to a change of the regimes there in favor of more radical ones."

The only bright spot on the horizon is the very dim prospect of a rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran. People there wore black in mourning for the New York attack, signed books of condolences, and left flowers at makeshift shrines. The mood was grim and sorrowful. Religious police unsuccessfully tried to break up a vigil for New York victims. Soccer fans at a stadium for a major game in World Cup competition stopped for a moment of silence. A government official close to President Khatami told the Voice over the weekend, "There is a unique consensus in the world because of this tragedy. Islamic and non-Islamic countries have found an unprecedented will to fight terrorism. The official position of the Iranian government is that it welcomes NATO's call for collective action on this problem."

With research and translation by Ed Korasani and Ariston-Lizabeth Anderson.

The Village Voice's ongoing coverage of the World Trade Center attack, the victims, and the aftermath.

Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com

-------- terrorism

Terrorists with 'loose nukes' the worst nightmare

IRISH INDEPENDENT,
19 September 2001
by Lawrence Freedman
From: Magnu96196@aol.com

THE smoke rising over lower Manhattan last week might not have quite reached the proportions of a mushroom cloud. But the casualty reports pushed the numbers to a level not inconsistent with a small nuclear explosion.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has already warned that at some future time we might find ourselves facing a nuclear-armed terrorist threat.

Yesterday, in the Times of London, it was even claimed that the threat is with us now that stored away in some Afghan bunker are spare "suitcase bombs", convenient nuclear devices left over from Soviet days that only need the appropriate code for activation.

This is the sort of rumour that circulates when times are tense. Fortunately it appears to be wholly without foundation.

Nuclear weapons are not the sort of things that can be packaged or handled so easily but that does not mean to say that Osama Bin Laden would not like to get hold of weapons of mass destruction.

It was also reported yesterday that the FBI was aware of attempts by Bin Laden's followers to buy weapons-grade plutonium for the manufacture of nuclear bombs. He has already tried to acquire chemical weapons in 1998 President Clinton authorised a strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in the mistaken belief that it was manufacturing chemical weapons for Bin Laden.

With chemical weapons the technical difficulties are less acute. A Japanese group famously tried to pour Sarin gas into the Tokyo underground in 1995 and, although 12 were killed and 5,000 injured, they did not quite achieve the impact they intended.

This group had already tried to use anthrax unsuccessfully and had visited the site of an ebola virus outbreak in Africa to try to collect a sample.

The fact is that, until recently, it was assumed that terrorist groups would not be interested in weapons of this sort. Traditionally, terrorists have always claimed that their strategies of attacking civilians are justified as a means of achieving their goal because they can't take on a regular army on equal terms.

The new terrorism has the killing of civilians as an end in itself. Moreoever, greater attention is being paid to what the Bush administration has called the "rogue states" North Korea, Iran and Iraq in particular.

These countries are supposed to be sufficiently sophisticated to build nuclear weapons and more importantly the missiles to deliver them over long distances. They are also said to be sufficiently rash to be prepared to use them, even knowing they could face the full blast of American retaliation. This is the threat that President Bush has used to justify his missile defence programme.

Here a sort of rationality is still assumed, as these regimes might want to use the nuclear threat to persuade the US and other western countries to leave them alone when they try to intimidate their neighbours.

It is by no means clear that such long-range capabilities could ever be developed by these rogue states and, if they could, whether the proposed defences could stop them. Last Tuesday's audacious attacks on New York and Washington demonstrated that it is possible, simply by using knives, to turn a commercial airliner packed with fuel into a lethal Cruise missile.

Even more frightening is the evidence of the mindset behind these acts. This is not an enemy that can be appeased in that it will never be satisfied so long as the US continues to exist at all, and has no problem in contemplating the destruction of whole societies or even the deaths of its own followers.

The terrifying prospect is not, as with the rogue states, that nuclear weapons could be used to coerce the rest of the world but that they might be used to implement some devilish, apocalyptical vision.

This adds to the need to prevent any leakage of weapons, technologies and material from the established nuclear powers. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has been trying to achieve this in a country where the infrastructure is in a mess and many key personnel who know the nuclear secrets are disillusioned and poor.

The Clinton administration put substantial resources into this "loose nukes" problem. So far the Bush administration has shown less enthusiasm.

Hopefully it will now think again. This "loose nukes" problem could, however, now take on a new dimension as a result of the current crisis. Pakistan, which finds itself in an uncomfortable role as a neighbour of Afghanistan and past sponsor of the Taliban regime, became a declared nuclear power in 1998, as did India.

Many people have warned of the danger of putting excessive pressure on Pakistan to comply with western demands to help get at the Bin Laden group.

If the instability being generated already by this crisis engulfed Pakistan then the safety of its nuclear assets would soon become a major issue.

More specifically, if fundamentalists took over the country there would be enormous concern at who controlled the nuclear arsenal.

As we have seen with the attack on the United States, focusing on the worst case may leave you unprepared for more likely cases.

Bin Laden is playing for very high stakes already and if he is forced to resort to a quick threat of escalation, he will rely on methods that do not necessarily require exceptional resources as long as the results are horrific enough.

-Lawerence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King's College, London.

--------

Crimes against humanity
An interview with Benjamin Ferencz
[Ferencz is a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial]

By Katy Clark,
September 19, 2001
http://www.transnational.org/features/2001/BenFerencz_Legality.html

Ferencz: Perhaps some of the tears have dried and people can begin to think rationally about the horrors of the past week and what we can do to prevent the recurrence of such tragedies.

Katy Clark: Ben Ferencz has spent most of his 82 years doing just that. He was a prosecutor for the United States during the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders. Ferencz's response to the Vietnam War was to withdraw from his private law practice and spend the rest of his life studying and writing about world peace. He founded the Pace Peace Center at Pace University, where he is Adjunct Professor of International Law. Ben Ferencz lives in New Rochelle, New York. You wrote this letter because you believe that we have a choice between whether our country chooses to resolve disputes on the battlefield or in the courtroom. In other words, law versus war. Is that correct?

Ferencz: Yes. I prefer law to war under all circumstances.

Clark: And so how does that apply to this particular case in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks?

Ferencz: What has happened here is not war in its traditional sense. This is clearly a crime against humanity. War crimes are crimes which happen in war time. There is a confusion there. This is a crime against humanity because it is deliberate and intentional killing of large numbers of civilians for political or other purposes. That is not tolerable under the international systems. And it should be prosecuted pursuant to the existing laws.

Clark: So I want to get into that prosecution in just one moment. But first, do you think that the talk of retaliation is not a legitimate response to the death of 5,000 people?

Ferencz: It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done.

Clark: No one is saying we're going to punish those who are not responsible.

Ferencz: We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don't believe in what has happened, who don't approve of what has happened.

Clark: So you are saying that you see no appropriate role for the military in this.

Ferencz: I wouldn't say there is no appropriate role, but the role should be consistent with our ideals. We shouldn't let them kill our principles at the same time they kill our people. And our principles are respect for the rule of law. Not charging in blindly and killing people because we are blinded by our tears and our rage.

Clark: So how would a legal process possibly work? Since there is no permanent international criminal court yet; the U.S. has opposed such a court. Where would terrorists be tried?

Ferencz: We must first draw up an indictment of the crime and specify what the crimes were, listing all the names of the related organizations. Not merely the direct perpetrators are responsible but all those who aided and abetted them before or after the crime. These should be listed and described. And then a demand made pursuant to existing United Nations resolutions, calling upon all states to arrest and detain the persons named in the indictment so they can be interrogated by U.S. examiners.

Clark: As you know a federal court, a grand jury, indicted Osama bin Laden almost three years ago in the two U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. That was 1998 and we still haven't brought him to trial.

Ferencz: What I'm suggesting is that the Security Council of the United Nations can immediately call up -- as they have done in connection with the crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where over half a million people were butchered -- create an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal to try these criminals on the charges which are applicable under the existing international laws.

Clark: So you're saying something that would be akin to an international war crimes court.

Ferencz: It would be an international criminal court. Don't use the word "war" crimes because that suggests that there is a war going on and it's a violation of the rules of war. This is not in that category. We are getting confused with our terminology in our determination to put a stop to these terrible crimes.

Clark: So what do you say to skeptics who believe the judicial process is inadequate because it is very slow and very cumbersome?

Ferencz: I realize that it is slow and cumbersome but it is not inadequate. I say to the skeptics, Follow your procedure and you'll find out what happens. You have seen what happens. We will have more fanatics and more zealots deciding to come and kill the evil, the United States. We don't want to do that. We want to uphold our principles. The United States was the moving party behind the Nuremberg Trials and behind insisting upon the rule of law.

Clark: So do you believe that because of the fact that we're dealing with terrorists, we are re-writing the rules to a proper response?

Ferencz: We're not re-writing any rules. We don't have to re-write any rules. We have to apply the existing rules. To call them "terrorists" is also a misleading term. There's no agreement on what terrorism is. One man's terrorism is another man's heroism. I'm sure that bin Laden considers himself a saint and so do many of his followers. We try them for mass murder. That's a crime under every jurisdiction and that's what's happened here and that is a crime against humanity.

Clark: So Ben Ferencz you were an enlisted man under General Patton, you fought in every campaign in Europe, you've written in your letter in fact about flashbacks that you've had of Normandy, of seeing corpses at Buchenwald, the remorseless Nuremberg defendants who murdered about 100,000 mostly Jewish men, women, and children at Babi Yar near Kiev; now there you are in New York, witnessing this. Yet you close this letter by saying that you have not given up hope. Why not?

Ferencz: Of course I have not given up hope. You must never give up hope. Because hope is the engine that drives human endeavor. We have to change the way people think and that can't be done quickly. We must teach them compassion and tolerance and understanding and a willingness to compromise, if necessary. These are all essential things that take generations to develop. And until we do that I'm afraid we'll suffer the consequences. And we see it in what has happened in New York.

Clark: Ben Ferencz lives in New Rochelle, New York. He is the author of, among other books, New Legal Foundations for Global Survival. Nice to speak with you.

Ferencz: A pleasure.

Benjamin B. Ferencz: former prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, particularly Chief Prosecutor of Einsatzgruppen (22 defendants charged with murdering over a million people, called by the Associated Press the biggest murder trial in history). A graduate of Harvard Law School, he served in the Army under General Patton in every campaign in Europe and helped liberate Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dachau.

Mr. Ferencz is an Adjunct Professor of International Law at Pace University and founder of the Pace Peace Center, and a Trustee of The Center For United Nations Reform Education.

See other articles, letters and analyses by Benjamin Ferencz at http://www.benferencz.org


-------- activists

ANTI-WAR PROTEST: Quakers, others in NH decry rush to battle

By JOHN DiSTASO Senior Political Reporter
September 19, 2001 From: "wtinker" <wtinker@metrocast.net>

Bringing terrorists to justice appears to be a universally shared desire in New Hampshire and the country. But not everyone in the Granite State is eager for war, particularly if it costs the lives of innocent people. "We would be out front and active against war, but also out front and active for justice under the law for the people who committed violence against humanity," said Arnie Alpert, program coordinator of the New Hampshire chapter of the American Friends Services Committee and a longtime social activist in the state.

AFSC is a self-described Quaker organization that includes people of all faiths "committed to social justice, peace and humanitarian service." AFSC has "an 84-year record of opposing war and trying to help the victims of war," and has been counseling conscientious objectors since World War I, Alpert said yesterday.

Alpert said he backs bringing the terrorists to justice for their Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but said, "the harboring part and the wrath part is different than the justice part." Alpert said that before Sept. 11, President George W. Bush "was known for unilateralism, for not worrying much about building international alliances. That's now changed and we believe that if we have any hope of pulling justice out of this wreckage, it needs to be done with an international consensus."

A Granite State Quaker leader agreed.

"This is a criminal investigation," said Elizabeth Cazden, a Manchester attorney who is also a former presiding clerk of the New England Meeting of Friends (Quakers). She said there are approximately 400 Friends in New Hampshire.

Even if Osama bin Laden is found and apprehended, he should not be executed, said Cazden.

"Friends have been against the death penalty for several hundred years and have not wavered, whether it's Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh," she said.

Cazden said that while politicians in Washington "are personally threatened by this and are engaged in inexcusable war-mongering, that's not what I'm hearing on the streets of New Hampshire.

"I believe that people want to make sure we bring the people responsible to justice, but, regarding war, I think the politicians are not reading the country correctly," Cazden said.

Cazden said the "religious challenge" for Quakers and all who believe in God is to "forgive those who have trespassed against you. People have been reciting those words for a week, but how do you do it when it's something this unforgivable? That is the challenge."

New Hampshire Peace Action, meanwhile, released a statement this week urging against "rash and misguided actions that, seeking to achieve justice, would instead result in more innocent suffering." The group said this would place the U.S. "dangerously close to falling into the same moral category as the terrorists."

The national Libertarian Party holds much the same view.

Its Web site condemns the terrorist attacks but urges the United States "to be sure that any response is appropriate and measured. "Action should not be taken that will cause innocent people in other countri es to be killed because of the action of terrorists. Such a response would only continue the cycle of violence and revenge."

In New Hampshire, Howard Wilson, the party's political director, said he backs "sending a small-scale force to do a seek-and-destroy mission, but a large-scale force would generate so much ill will nationally that we would be better off not doing it."

But John Babiarz, a Libertarian candidate for governor, sees the situation differently and parts ways with his party.

"Even though Libertarians don't believe in the initiation of force, we do believe in defending ourselves, and, unfortunately, our government, with its lack of security, failed to defend us here," Babiarz said.

Babiarz, an Air Force veteran, said he considers the U.S. now in a war. "In a war, unfortunately, there is collateral damage," he said. "After all, we had 6,000 people wiped out."

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Groups Rally Near Capitol

September 19, 2001
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Backlash.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- South Asian, Arab and Muslim Americans rallied near the Capitol Wednesday, imploring an angry nation to stop avenging last week's terrorist attacks on those who merely ``looked like the enemy.''

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said hate crimes only add to the long list of victims created when suicidal hijackers crashed jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

``Maybe 5,000 have died. We don't know, the numbers may grow higher,'' Zogby told about 200 people gathered under a brilliant midday sky. ``Enough death. Enough hate. Enough violence. Enough. As Americans, we must say it should end.''

Federal authorities are focused on exiled Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden as their prime suspect. They also have presented evidence that the suspected hijackers lived in U.S. communities, sometimes for years, while preparing for the attacks.

Apparently as a result, reports are growing of verbal assaults, vandalism, and physical attacks aimed at people who, with dark skin, turbans or veils, appear to be Arab or Muslim. Organizations representing various ethnic groups say they have documented hundreds of incidents, including threats, fire bombing, beatings, graffiti, damage to mosques and temples, even killings.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened at least 40 hate crime investigations, including into two killings -- of a Pakistani grocer in Texas and a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona -- possibly motivated by anti-Arab sentiment.

Standing in a memorial to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, over 75 leaders of South Asian, Arab and Muslim American groups urged the nation not to repeat that era's mistakes.

``Let us take to heart the lessons of World War II when ... hundreds of Japanese-American families were herded behind barbed wire simply because they looked like the enemy,'' Karen Narasaki, with the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans.

``No one should be presumed to be any less loyal to our country just because of the color of their skin, their national origin, their immigration status or the religion that they follow.''

Event organizers said many people are now afraid to speak their native languages in public, wear traditional garb or even leave their homes for fear of assaults.

``A turban does not signify a terrorist,'' said Tejpal Singh Chawla, with the Sikh Mediawatch and Research Task Force.

Zogby spoke of a ``double fear'' -- an apprehension about the future shared by many Americans that is being exacerbated by worry of racially motivated retaliatory attacks.

``We are afraid as Americans that we might be victims of the next (terrorist) attack,'' he said. ``We're afraid as well of the punks and the bigots, the guys who draw swastikas on synagogues one day and torture a gay person the next day and go after an African-American the next day -- that they're turning on us too.''

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War: Metaphor into Reality, by Peter Weiss

September 19, 2001,
Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
http://lcnp.org/disarmament/metaphor%20into%20reality.htm

Inter arma silent leges. When force speaks, the laws are silent. And the more brutal the force, the more complete the silence of law. This is what most people believe, and after the events of September 11 it is hard to blame them. But law, particularly the law of war and peace, does not march solely to the drumbeat of daily life. If it cannot keep pace with extraordinary events in the worst of times, it loses its capacity to govern, to provide the order that is associated with law. Lawyers must therefore, at times, swim against the tide of public opinion and remind an outraged populace that even "a war to rid the world of evil" is subject to the laws of war, both ius ad bellum, which governs the right to go to war, and ius in bello, which governs the conduct of war.

The first question, then, is, what is war? According to Lassa Oppenheim, one of the giants of international law, "War is a contention between two or more States through their armed forces, for the purpose of overpowering each other, and imposing such conditions of peace as the victor pleases". A terrorist attack, no matter how heinous, committed by non-state actors, is not a casus belli, an "act of war", except in a metaphorical sense. It therefore cannot justify a state resorting to war against another state in response to the attack, unless the other state's responsibility for the attack has been unambiguously established.

But, as is clear from the statements of the President and other high officials, no such responsibility has been proved, except again in a metaphorical sense. They speak of making war against countries that "support", "tolerate" or "harbor" terrorists. Saudi Arabia refuses to this day to extradite the eleven men indicted in the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers, in which 19 US airmen were killed and 370 injured. Does this mean that Saudi Arabia is supporting terrorists and that we are or will be at war with Saudi Arabia? A recent study by the Congressional Research Service alleges that Osama Bin Laden's organization has bases or tentacles in 37 countries. Are we, or will we be, at war with all of them?

Nor is it possible to declare war against an unidentified enemy, which is essentially what the President and the Congress have done in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Yet, both psychologically and legally, the use of war terminology has grave consequences. Psychologically, as shown by the WAR banner headlines in the days following September 11, it creates a mood of "follow the leader, wherever he may lead" and makes bloodthirsty monsters out of normally decent citizens. As one correspondent said in the Letters column of the New York Times on September 18, "It is not enough to wipe out Afghanistan ... I will be satisfied with nothing short of a sweeping and devastating assault on all those countries that train, finance and protect those whose stated goal is the slaughter of Americans."

Legally, a state of war triggers all sorts of undesirable consequences. At the level of international law, the proclamation of a state of emergency, which is normally less than a state of war, allows a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, such as the United States, to "derogate" from its obligations under the Covenant in respect of several basic human rights, including freedom from forced labor, the right to bring habeas corpus proceedings, freedom of movement, equality before the law and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

A de facto, or functionally equivalent, declaration of war, followed by acts of war, naturally triggers the right of self-defense by any state affected. The Taliban has already prepared the Afghan people to fight a holy war against the United States, once the US makes good on its promise to "end" that state. Every other state against which military action is taken by the global antiterrorist coalition in the making will consider itself entitled to respond with armed force against any member of the coalition. The US, with its farflung global outposts, military and otherwise, and its long list of potential target states, is particularly vulnerable in this respect. Thus, conducting the impending - and necessary - antiterrorist operation under the banner of war legitimates the cycle of violence, which it is sure to spark.

Proceeding under a flag of war will of course also have, indeed has already had, grave consequences in terms of domestic constitutional law. While President Bush has not formally invoked the War Powers Act - Presidents hardly ever do - Congress has made it unnecessary for him to do so and has approved in advance the uncharted voyage on which he and the armed forces are about to embark.. Thus, while a few courageous members of Congress may be heard to say that the joint resolution they passed on September 14 does not give the President a blank check for any type of military operation, it does in fact do so for at least sixty days and, judging from past experience, as well as the ambiguous language of the resolution, well beyond that time. To the extent that the resolution authorizes "the use of United States armed forces" against "nations" (as well as "organizations or persons") it is a green light for war. Its only saving grace is that it is limited to the use of force against those nations, organizations or persons which the President "determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist acts that occurred on September 11, 2001." Thus it is not - not yet - an authorization to use force for the extirpation of every kind of terrorism from every part of the globe.

It remains to be seen what emergency powers the administration will seek to arrogate to itself and to what extent these will impinge on the very democratic freedoms in whose name this "war" is going to be fought.

In one respect the President has already exceeded his powers. His call for "Osama Bin Laden dead or alive" violates Section 2.11 of Executive Order 12333, which states in plain English: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." No doubt the vast majority of Americans would like to see Osama bin Laden dead, but that is not the point. The point is that if the prohibition against assassination, enacted at the request of Congress in 1981 by none other than President Reagan is to be ignored, it must first be repealed by this President in consultation with this Congress. Repeal by Presidential speechwriters is not in the best American tradition and sets a most dangerous precedent.

A crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions has been committed on our territory. The perpetrators of this crime, and those who may be planning similar atrocities, must be hunted down and brought to justice with every resource of the world community - short of war. To embark on a course leading to what Thomas Friedman has already called World War III would be compounding the tragedy and giving the Osama Bin Ladens and their ilk exactly what they want: A holy war, with vastly greater numbers of innocent victims than those who suffered horrible deaths in New York and Washington on September11, and, if not the end of democracy as we know it, at least its diminution. Civil society must not allow this to happen.

September 19, 2001

Peter Weiss is President of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms

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The Anti-Globalization Movement Alters Its Strategy
The Perils of Protest

by Lenora Todaro,
Village Voice,
Week of September 19 - 25, 2001
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0138/todaro.php

A teach-in about the IMF and World Bank protests morphs into a candlelight vigil. (photo: Michael Kamber)

As American flags draped across rubble and debris at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, anti-globalization activists named a few things they now fear: a crackdown on dissent; the branding as a terrorist anyone who challenges U.S. foreign policy; world war.

Because of terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., activists' plans to demonstrate en masse against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on September 29 and 30 are in flux. The World Bank and IMF have canceled the meetings, citing security concerns. Some activists groups, including the International Action Center, still plan to go to D.C. and march for peace, calling for justice not vengeance. Others have pulled out, like the Mobilization for Global Justice, an umbrella organization for 100-plus groups. They will proceed, however, with plans to cosponsor the People's Summit, an educational forum, scheduled for September 26-28.

"This event changes everything in terms of police response and how the public will receive the idea of large demonstrations," says Stephen Duncombe, an organizer with Reclaim the Streets and a professor at New York University. "The D.C. police's plan to erect a huge nine-foot fence was great PR for us because it showed them literally walling off democracy. Now in light of the events at the World Trade Center, it may seem like nine feet is not high enough."

Before the September 11 attack, estimates of how many protesters would show up in D.C. ranged from 25,000 to 100,000. More important than numbers, however, was the sense among activists that their movement against corporate globalization was gaining legitimacy as more organizations pledged to hit the streets-from the National Action Network to the AFL-CIO and UNITE. Moral high ground was being steadily won as people grasped the message that World Bank and IMF policies, designed to eradicate poverty, have, in many cases, worsened it.

Then came the attacks.

Although their convictions haven't been changed by the events of the past week, activists are carefully evaluating their next steps and reassessing their priorities. Thorny questions are being raised: Is it wise to say you are disturbed by the U.S. government's promotion of IMF and World Bank policies when the nation has been attacked? Is it a duty or an impertinence to claim that these global financial institutions' policies are killing people through exploitation and neglect when several thousand people (not all of them Americans) lay dead beneath the rubble of the twin towers? Is it possible to mourn and to feel loyalty to one's country and at the same time question why America was the target-why the American government might have engendered such rage?

Meredith Kolodner, an activist with the Committee for Global Justice, thinks it's not only legitimate but necessary to raise questions if there's to be real dialogue. "This event," she says, "can be used by the Bush administration and the media to stoke up a nationalistic 'Let's not be divided' mentality to support George Bush as he goes off to find enemies and blow them up," she says.

Kolodner was riding a subway train on the Manhattan Bridge when she saw the burning towers. A woman beside her said, "The U.S. has made too many enemies. If you bomb little people enough, they eventually bomb back." Kolodner says the woman was referring, in part, to the U.S. and Britain's perpetual bombing campaign against Iraq, which, along with economic sanctions, has made Baghdad a war zone and devastated the lives of thousands of civilians. "There is no justification for what happened [at the World Trade Center]," says Kolodner, "but if government policies create poverty throughout the world, you put your own people in danger. The U.S. is the biggest funder of IMF and World Bank programs, which put countries into debt and can cause environmental destruction, all in the name of U.S. profit." The suicide bombers appear to be middle-class men, not the stereotypical poor, angry youths. But anti-American sentiment runs broad and deep, and no one yet knows if we are dealing with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, or something larger, perhaps the government of Iraq.

A month ago, the ability to mobilize tens of thousands of disparate people against corporate globalization seemed impressive. Today, it may be seen as a threat to public safety. "People will think twice about going to large demonstrations because of fear about being outside in a crowd," says Julie Carlson, codirector of the human rights project at the Urban Justice Center.

The Mobilization for Global Justice is meeting to talk about what's next, but says it's too soon to offer a specific plan. Neil Watkins, an organizer of their World Bank Bonds Boycott, points out, "Mass demonstrations are just one way that those of us in the global-justice movement are working for a more equitable and sustainable global economy. We will continue to educate people in the U.S. about the effects of globalization and work within the Congress to get changes in the harmful policies promoted by the IMF and World Bank." The New York Times reported that in return for his nation's support, Pakistan's General Musharraf's demands included that Washington "encourage generous treatment by the IMF and World Bank."

Kolodner helped organize IMF and World Bank teach-ins scheduled to take place last week on 14 college campuses and community centers throughout New York City. Most were either canceled or morphed into peace vigils. At Columbia University last Wednesday evening, Laura Durkey, a 19-year-old sophomore from Baltimore, said she'd been scrambling since the start of the semester to get the word out about the teach-in. But when five or six campus progressive groups met the night of the attack, they decided a vigil for the dead and missing would be more appropriate.

Since the World Trade Center attack, there is a lot of pressure, activists say, to avoid criticizing the U.S. government or the global financial institutions it supports. Some argue that now is not the time to protest structural adjustment programs. Rather, it's the time to urge the president not to wage war on innocent people.

"It's important to remember that our movement is a movement against violence," says Durkey. "We don't want the U.S. government to exploit this situation by increasing military spending and cracking down on our movement because they think we're terrorists or something. I don't want to be paranoid, but I want to take this seriously."

As the daylight dimmed and the acrid fumes from downtown roused coughs from throats of onlookers, more than 100 students gathered around the sundial in the center of Columbia's campus. Some stood alert; others slouched against its steps. Durkey climbed up onto the center of the dial and invited each person to speak about ways to move forward with the movement or about their feelings after the attack.

Many of the students were terrified about the prospect of war and about further loss of innocent life-some defined themselves as activists, others did not. Someone called for forgiveness and peace rather than retaliation ("There are ways to bring people to justice without violence. We have an international court and we can use it"). Others debated the meaning of freedom: "People want to live as free human beings, but I don't hear that in the rhetoric of 'hunt and destroy.' " Another student countered that American freedom has always been secured by force: "We have our freedom because a certain amount of necessary violence has taken place. The Revolutionary War was not about tea."

An Arab American activist recalled living through the 1979 Iran-hostage crisis in New York, when she was three years old: "Our car was vandalized and I cried to my mother to put the car in a garage. Today my cousin was attacked with pepper spray in his grocery store. We fear we may never be able to stand up for justice in the American streets because we are the enemy."

A balding man stepped forward and announced that he'd protested the Vietnam War at that very sundial 30 years ago. He warned the students to learn from his generation's mistakes: "Stop trying to find the enemy. Assert pride in being American, but offer a different definition of being American. Recognize that there's been progress. You live better than your grandparents."

Issues surrounding the IMF and World Bank retreated from the conversation, which seemed appropriate for the moment. Nonetheless, activists realize that the "attack on America" was also an attack on global capitalism in the most symbolic and literal ways, with the wealth represented by jumbo jets slicing through the towers that hosted hundreds of international trade companies, from Morgan Stanley to Cantor Fitzgerald. Not one activist argued that this act was justified, but there was a sense among them that American arrogance and hubris had come home to roost.

"Nobody deserves this type of violence," says Carlson, "but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There is a lot of history that led up to this moment. This is an attack on U.S. foreign policy and to see it any other way is myopic. Violence begets violence and we need to find a peaceable solution."

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"No More Victims Anywhere" - Alert #2

Vigils for Peace
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
From: "Martha Yager" MYager@afsc.org

In the wake of the September 11 violence, people of conscience are trying to figure out how to react. Among the most heartening events have been the vigils and religious services which have taken place throughout New Hampshire. By and large these vigils have communicated both grief over the loss of life and a desire for peace. A common message expressed by religious leaders and others is that we should reject hatred, violence, and vengeance.

As the Bush administration gears up for war, it is urgent that the spirit of these vigils and services continue. While most people are rightfully distressed and outraged at the September 11 attacks, many people are reluctant to go to war, especially if it would put innocent people at risk. It is urgent that we provide a focus for such concerns and that we break the illusion of consensus in favor of military retaliation.

The American Friends Service Committee and NH Peace Action encourage you to join an existing peace vigil or to organize your own.

Already there are four groups in the state conducting weekly vigils or leafleting actions:

KEENE - Saturdays, from 11 am to noon, at Central Square. Contact: Kurt Konietzko, kurttm@earthlink.net.

PLYMOUTH - Saturdays at noon, at the Town Common. Contact: Lynn Chong, chonglyn@coopresources.net.

CONCORD - Wednesdays at noon, State House Plaza. Contact: Ruth McKay, ruthmc13@hotmail.com, or NH Peace Action at 603.228.0559.

DOVER - Fridays at 6 pm. For details and location, contact: David Diamond, ddiam@ttlc.net.

If you decide to organize a vigil in your town, please let us know so we can inform others.

Tips on vigils:

1. Stand silently or quietly in a line, facing traffic or pedestrians. Space yourselves evenly. Use candles at twilight or after dark.

2. Have at least one sign or banner that informs people as to your purpose. Appropriate messages include "War Is Not the Answer" and "No More Victims Anywhere."

3. Have a leaflet or reprints of articles that you can pass out to interested people. Leaflets should communicate basic information and also recommend actions, e.g. contacts with elected officials. AFSC and NH Peace Action will have such materials soon.

4. Talk to local police to let them know what you are doing. Get a permit from local officials if they recommend it.

5. Send a news release to your local paper and local radio stations to let them know what you are doing.

For more information, contact

Sean Donahue and Patrick Carkin, NH Peace Action at: info@nhpeaceaction.org, or 603.228.0559. www.nhpeaceaction.org

Arnie Alpert, American Friends Service Committee, aalpert@afsc.org, or (603) 224.2407. www.afsc.org

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The roots of terrorism
An interview with historian Howard Zinn.

By A.C. Thompson
September 19, 2001
http://www.sfbg.com/News/35/51/51zinn.html

AS IF THE Bush presidency wasn't scary enough before, it's becoming, well, terrifying. In the wake of the Day Everything Changed, Bush is doing his best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. He's spitting out a constant stream of manly though grammatically challenged rhetoric. He's hitting up Congress for $40 billion and unlimited war powers. His deputies are hinting at a protracted battle in some far off and as of yet undetermined land. And for the most part, the American populace is cheering W. on. With images of World War III stuck in my head, I called up a man with a very different perspective, historian Howard Zinn. Zinn is a Boston University professor, the author of A People's History of the United States, and a longtime icon of the left.

Bay Guardian: What would you do if you were president?

Howard Zinn: The president should first call on the American people to be calm, not to react in the spirit of revenge, anger, to understand that the roots of terrorism are long-range and cannot be dealt with by immediate military responses. As president I would remind the American people that the use of military force against terrorist acts in the past has only resulted in more terrorist acts. I would point to the experiences of Clinton and Reagan and their bombings how that did not produce any end to terrorism. I'd point to the Israeli situation. I would also make a statement to the world and say the United States is going to reconsider its position in the world, reconsider its foreign policy. We know that our station of military troops abroad, naval vessels all over the world has resulted in a lot of resentment against the United States. We are going to pull back from trying to be a military superpower and try to be a peaceful nation. I would announce that we're going to cut down our military budget, and we're going to use that money to give economic aid to people abroad with no strings attached, no IMF and World Bank requirements. We would use that saved money to help the countries of Africa to combat AIDS and tuberculosis. I would put pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times today by Amos Oz, who is an Israeli, and he made the point: Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories. If an Israeli citizen, a prominent one, a writer, can urge that, the United States certainly can do that. Our policy towards Israel must make very drastic change.

BG: The left has been nearly invisible in the media.

HZ: That's not because the left hasn't spoken but because the media has made the left invisible. That's one of the terrible things about the situation: by keeping out dissident voices, the media presents nothing but a kind of slavish agreement with our political leaders. Mainstream media are just doing their usual thing. The major media are huge corporate conglomerates, and they're tied to the most powerful political and economic entities in the country. They're doing what they've always done. They've always gone along with U.S. foreign policy. They've always fallen in line and supported military actions abroad. Look at the newspapers during the Gulf War. Look at them during the war against Panama, the invasion of Grenada.

BG: You're a historian. What do you think about the comparisons to Pearl Harbor?

HZ: It's a poor comparison. Pearl Harbor was part of a world war, and this action is the work of a small group of fanatical militants who don't represent a nation. One of the advantages for the establishment of comparing it to Pearl Harbor is that after Pearl Harbor we could strike back against a nation, Japan. By comparing it to Pearl Harbor we can find a nation to strike against, in this case probably Afghanistan. The comparison with Pearl Harbor is intended to get the country ready to accept war.

BG: The likely back story to the attacks, the conflict in Palestine and Israel, has been glossed over as well.

HZ: Yeah. There's just no recognition of the amount of animosity that's been created in the Arab world by the American support of Israel, [sending] American military supplies to Israel. This has been years building up, this resentment against American support of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The United States has incurred an enormous amount of anger in the Arab world because of that policy, and while most of the people who are angry about it are not going to resort to terrorism, a small number may well do it, and that's what happened in this case.



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