------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
NO radioactive waste dumps
Urgent Info request @ DU and new recruits
Musharraf says nuclear installation under threat
Indian-Pakistani nuclear arsenal chills South Asia
The nuclear threat
US considers helping Pakistan
TERRORISTS WOULD LOVE THE IMPORT OF NUCLEAR WASTE
Public can shape U.S. radioactive scrap metals policy
MILITARY
OAS Nations Activate Mutual Defense Treaty
Bush rejects clerics' proposal
Afghan Clerics Urge bin Laden to Leave
Some Press for New Attack on Iraq
Saddam Says Iraqis Could Have Saved People at WTC
Pakistani president affirms U.S. alliance
Pakistan fundamentalists call strike
For Pakistani Poor, Islamic Activism Fills Void
Moscow backs away from military action
U.S. deploys forces
Bush to Seek Nation's Support
U.S. Sends 'Big Stick'
Warplanes Begin Deploying to Gulf,
Army ready for full-scale land combat
OTHER
Chinese Working Overtime to Sew U.S. Flags
Auspine, AusPower eye biomass power plant
I.M.F. Bankers Get Ready to Give Pakistan a Loan
Saudis and Indians Cast Doubts on Identities of Accused
5-Year-Old Boy Mistaken For Terrorist
Surge of New Technologies Erodes U.S. Edge in Spying
Ashcroft vows crackdown
Terrorists network in cyberspace
Ashcroft Presents Anti-Terrorism Plan to Congress
Terrorism Threat Is Long-Term
Terror In 'Unconventional' Forms
ACTIVISTS
Leftist coalition opposes war, rips 'imperialist' U.S.
Peace Groups Are Urging Restraint Students,
Voices of Experience Call for Caution and Tolerance
MAJOR VICTORY PERMITS ISSUED
Congresswoman Lee Calls For Peace
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
NO radioactive waste dumps would be set up in SA under a federal Labor government.
By Chief Political Reporter PHILLIP COOREY
21sep01
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,2905364%255E2682,00.html
Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and his environment spokesman, Nick Bolkus, yesterday withdrew Labor's support for a national low-level waste dump to be built near Woomera.
Labor already opposes siting a separate medium-level dump in SA.
"South Australia and its people have had more than their share of unsafe and ill-considered nuclear experimentation," the pair said in a statement.
"The lack of scientific certainty on critical management issues means that now is not the time for construction of new nuclear waste facilities."
They accused Industry Minister Nick Minchin of arrogance, saying he was obsessed with establishing the dump against the will of the SA community.
"The silence of SA's federal Coalition members and candidates on this matter has been equally remarkable," they said. Senator Minchin, who has pushed establishment of both dumps well into next year and beyond the election, accused Labor of hypocrisy.
Moves to establish a low-level waste dump began under the Keating government when Opposition treasurer Simon Crean was primary industries and energy minister.
"The timing of this announcement says it all. It is nothing more than a typical Labor political stunt aimed at stirring up community concern," Senator Minchin said.
"What does Kim Beazley intend to do with waste sitting in hospital basements in capital cities around the country?" Plans are well advanced for the underground low-level dump, which would take waste, including that from industry and hospitals, and contaminated soil shifted from Victoria to Woomera by the Keating government.
The Government has selected a desert site at Evetts Field, west of the Woomera-Roxby Downs road, and environmental assessments are under way.
It is expected to be operational next year but, if Labor wins the election, another site outside SA would have to be found. The medium-level dump is a more contentious issue. It would take more dangerous waste such as reprocessed fuel rods from the Lucas Heights reactor.
In February, Senator Minchin announced the above-ground medium-level dump would be built on Commonwealth land and take Commonwealth waste only.
The states could build their own dumps or pay to use the Commonwealth facility, he said. Senator Minchin ruled out locating the medium-level dump alongside the low-level dump but it could still be built elsewhere in SA.
A search is under way for the medium-level dump site and no announcement will be made until late next year.
-------- depleted uranium
Urgent Info request @ DU and new recruits
From: Pat Birnie <birnie@gci-net.com>
Tuesday, September 18, 2001 7:36 AM
Because recruitment into the armed services is in high gear, we are trying to strategize ways to advise potential recruits, young men and women, about depleted uranium and also the adverse health effects of some of the immunization given them.
We sent out an alert to our networks, urging folks to contact government officials and congressional officials, demanding that DU weapons NOT be used in the impending "retaliation". This message needs to be amplified and repeated over and over. Can you help us spread this word?
But we also feel the need to warn our young recruits about the dangers they will face, and what (if any) choices they may have. Do you have any ideas? We will call you later today to talk with you.
Thanks, Betty Schroeder, Chair, BANDU (Ban Depleted Uranium)
5349 W. Bar X Street, Tucson, AZ 85713, Phone 520-908-9269
-------- india / pakistan
Musharraf says nuclear installation under threat
Kyodo News,
September 20, 2001
http://home.kyodo.co.jp/all/display.jsp?an=20010920025
ISLAMABAD, Sept. 19, Kyodo - Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Pakistan's failure to cooperate with United States in a military attack against Afghanistan would damage its strategic assets, including its nuclear capability and a fledgling missile program.
Addressing the nation on television, Musharaf said Pakistan's survival was at stake and Pakistan was faced with very worst crisis of its history since the separation of East Pakistan in 1971.
He said the U.S. determination to find Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, who was fingered by the U.S. as the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New and Washington, does not target Islam or the people of Afghanistan. The U.S. has requested Pakistan provide intelligence data on Afghanistan, logistical support for its forces and allow access to Pakistani airspace, he said.
Reading a prepared speech in a military uniform, Musharraf called on Pakistanis to support his decision to help the U.S. find those responsible for the terrorist attacks.
''Our decisions at this time in history could have grave and far-reaching consequences. Our survival could be endangered,'' he said.
He said Pakistan's failure to cooperate with Washington would have led to serious setbacks to Pakistan's ''critical concerns'' and ''strategic assets'' -- its nuclear capability, the missile program and the territorial dispute with India over Kashmir.
''A wrong decision could lead to unbearable loss,'' he said, noting that Pakistan was faced with a choice between evil and lesser evil.
''We have opted for the lesser evil'' he said
Musharraf said while Pakistan's decision to help the U.S. could put his country in danger if it produces bad results, Pakistan could emerge as a powerful nation if it succeeds.
----
Indian-Pakistani nuclear arsenal chills South Asia
Environmental News Network
Thursday, September 20, 2001
By Kamil Zaheer, Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/09/09202001/reu_45031.asp
NEW DELHI, India - The mere thought of putting the words "nuclear arsenal" into the same sentence as "first war of the 21st century" is scary enough; add in half a century of enmity between India and Pakistan, and it becomes truly chilling.
But as fears grow that the countries could become embroiled in any U.S. action in what it calls its war against terrorism, analysts say their nuclear arsenals are unlikely to be drawn in. "I think the Indian and Pakistani governments are as responsible as governments of Western nuclear powers, and I don't see anyone rushing for the nuclear button in South Asia," said Chris Smith, deputy director of the International Policy Institute at King's College, London.
India and Pakistan conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests three years ago, earning worldwide opprobrium but, according to them, setting up an effective deterrent against each other. They could end up on opposite sides in a war.
New Delhi supports Washington, while Islamabad - though now helping the United States - has close ties with Afghanistan, home to Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in last week's attacks on New York and Washington.
But defense experts believe there is nothing in South Asia comparable to the warheads mounted on U.S. and Russian missiles. The bombs are generally thought to be stored away rather than loaded on airplanes or missiles, acting as a deterrent of last resort rather than a first line of attack.
'BOMB IN THE BASEMENT'
A former head of the Pakistan armed forces, Mirza Aslam Beg, has described the country's approach to nuclear devices as a "bomb-in-the-basement policy.... And then it is many miles away from the delivery system, that is, the missiles and the aircraft," Beg, who now heads an independent think tank, told Reuters in an interview in June.
Pakistan is believed to have between a dozen and 30 nuclear devices, according to a range of estimates from defense experts, while India may have 40 to 100. "They are difficult and expensive to create, so there are not going to be hundreds," said Andrew Brookes at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Worries about militant groups grabbing a bomb, stuffing it in a suitcase, and blowing up a city are also far-fetched. Weighing up to a ton, these are sophisticated bombs. "It's a heavy piece of engineering we are talking about," said Brookes. "They are not suitcase-type things. Similarly with a missile: There are lots of safety brakes, so one lunatic cannot come and fire it off," he added. "No one man or woman can launch these things."
Defense experts say the bigger concern is that Pakistan and India do not have extensive mechanisms to talk to each other in a crisis and head off nuclear confrontation. "What is of concern is how aware each side is of when the other side would go in for use of nuclear weapons," Smith said. "In the case of NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War, there was an awareness of when the other would go nuclear. This is not clear in the case of India and Pakistan."
In the unlikely event the two countries did start using their nuclear devices, they would have to load these onto planes or missiles for use on battlefields or attacks on cities.
PLANES AND MISSILES
"It's probably safe to say they have some bombs to put on planes and some bombs to put on warheads, said Brookes.
While manned planes still offer precision, they risk being shot down in the long flight to either Delhi or Islamabad, and because of that, defense experts devote much of their attention to working out how well developed each country's missiles are.
Experts believe Pakistan may be ahead of India in "weaponization" - marrying a warhead to a delivery system like a missile - thanks to its close ties with China. "China could have given them tips on the guidance systems for such (nuclear) weapons," said Kanti Bajpai, strategic affairs analyst at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Pakistan's nuclear-capable Ghauri missile, with a range of 1,250 miles, can reach almost any city in India.
New Delhi is also fast developing delivery systems and is pushing ahead with production of the intermediate-range Agni (Fire) ballistic missile, which it says has been fully tested. The Agni II, also with a 1,250-mile range, is due to become part of New Delhi's military arsenal by early 2002. India has also developed the nuclear-capable short-range ballistic missile, Prithvi (Earth), which experts say is a "Pakistan-specific" weapon.
"There are capabilities on both sides: There are warheads and there are aircraft configured to carry nuclear weapons. Both have and are developing missiles; some of them have entered production stage," said former Indian army lieutenant-general V. R. Raghvan.
But he said he did not foresee a nuclear conflict, and the events of the past week had done nothing to change that. "I don't see any situation arising at the moment where India and Pakistan confront each other with nuclear weapons."
(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani)
--------
The nuclear threat - Pakistan could lose control of its arsenal
West's worst scenario
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 20 2001
Times of London
BY NIGEL HAWKES
A LEADING authority on Pakistan's nuclear programme has given warning of a "nightmare scenario" in which a destabilised Pakistan lost control of its nuclear weapons to supporters of the Taleban.
Any military action against Muslim terrorists within Afghanistan will have to take account of that, said George Perkovich, a nuclear weapons expert at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, who has specialised in the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.
He dismissed any prospect that the present Government of Pakistan would use its nuclear armoury, but said that questions about the security of the weapons should be high on the agenda of the military planners.
"My guess would be that the US and the UK are thinking about that now," Mr Perkovich said. "If things go wrong, what do we do? Do we send commandos in to get the weapons and take them out in helicopters, like the last days in Saigon? Has this even been discussed with the Pakistanis?" Militarily, Pakistan's nuclear weapons are its "crown jewels", but valuable as they may be for asserting national pride in the rivalry with India, they are of little use in the awkward diplomatic situation the Pakistani Government now faces.
Mr Perkovich said that Pakistan has about two to three dozen potential nuclear weapons, all based on highly enriched uranium. Tests carried out in 1998 demonstrated that they work. Pakistan also has medium-range missiles capable of reaching targets in India, if no farther afield.
"In normal times, they keep the warheads separate from the missiles," he said, "and the fissile uranium ‹ the core of the weapon ‹ is not kept in the warhead, which consists of electronics and high explosives, but doesn't have the fissile core in it. It's all dressed up and nowhere to go."
Assuming this is still true, it would make it much harder for those unfamiliar with the system to assemble the weapon and make it work.
The fissile core, about the size of a melon and weighing up to 66lb, can be sub-divided into segments that can be stored separately. So the entire weapon can be split into components that in themselves are innocuous.
"So what we have are a range of different components, with different groups controlling them," he said. "Each part is well guarded and they have taken great care to assess the reliability and security of the storage."
In addition to having the weapons disassembled and safely stored, he said that the Pakistanis will have given thought to how they would be evacuated in an emergency.
"The most worrisome thing is the fissile core. That's easily moveable, which is both good and bad. It's bad because Saddam Hussein could make a bid for it, good because it means it could be put on a helicopter and taken out of harm's way."
He believes that changes in organisation this year make it clear that "grown-ups" in Pakistan are trying to make the whole system orderly and under control. The integration of two competing teams, "both run by egomaniacs", into a single organisation, he says, is a good sign.
Until then, both and missile development were split between the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) ‹ named after Abdul Qadeer Khan, self-proclaimed father of the Pakistani bomb ‹ and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Organisation (PAEC), led by Asfad Ahmad Khan.
When both were retired in March, the move was attacked by Narwaz Sharif, the former Prime Minister, as a hideous conspiracy designed to roll back the nuclear programme and weaken the country. He called on people to rise up and thwart the conspiracy. In fact, there was little public reaction.
On Tuesday Dr Khan went out of his way to reassure people about the weapons' security. "Thousands of people are involved in the supervision who discharge their duty as a sacred mission and the masses should not worry about the security of the nuclear installation," he told reporters after assuming the duties of "patron-in-chief" of his old laboratory.
While rivalry existed between the two men and their respective laboratories, Pakistan had an internal "arms race", which accelerated its acquisition of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, though at enormous cost.
By retiring both men, President Musharraf demonstrated his intention to control nuclear development more tightly, but there are others in the Pakistani military who are closer to the fundamentalists, and the danger of overstretching Pakistani goodwill is that it will hand the initiative to them.
For General Musharraf, the opportunity to help the Americans carries opportunities as well as dangers. He may be able to use it to reduce or remove the sanctions Washington imposed after the nuclear tests.
"The United States is going to have to show the people in Pakistan that it's good to be in a good relationship with the United States," Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said.
The last time that was true was in the 1980s, when Pakistani help was vital in helping the Afghans to evict the Russians from their country. Now the wheel has turned and American aid could start flowing towards Islamabad again.
--------
US considers helping Pakistan
By Bryan Bender,
Boston Globe Correspondent,
9/20/2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/263/nation/US_considers_helping_Pakistan+.shtml
WASHINGTON - Concerned about the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, the Bush administration is considering providing Islamabad with perimeter security and other assistance to prevent unauthorized access to its nuclear facilities during what could be a destabilizing conflict in neighboring Afghanistan, according to current and former government officials.
In the near term, the United States could assist Pakistan by providing such things as blast-proof doors at its nuclear facilities. Other safety measures under consideration are Permissive Action Links, or PALs, high-tech devices applied to warheads to prevent an outsider from detonating a nuclear weapon.
Aid to Pakistan's nuclear program, however, would be a stark reversal of American policy. Washington has used a variety of economic and diplomatic levers to punish Pakistan for its recent nuclear tests and refusal to sign the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Pakistan is believed to have as many as three dozen nuclear weapons, and its president, General Pervez Musharaff, said in an address to his nation yesterday that the ''safety of nuclear missiles'' is one of his priorities as a potential US military campaign in Afghanistan gets underway. US and Pakistani officials say that Islamabad has yet to mount nuclear weapons on missiles or fully develop other means of delivering them to a target.
The United States has been helping to strengthen nuclear security in Russia and the former states of the Soviet Union since the mid-1990s under a Department of Defense program known as Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Last year Pakistan requested foreign help, including from the United States, to improve what it calls the ''custodial safeguard'' of its nuclear weapons, a system considered primitive by US, European, Russian, and Chinese standards. But the Clinton administration, which leveled sanctions against Pakistan and India after they detonated five nuclear devices in 1998, declined to help Pakistan, so as not to legitimize its nuclear capability.
The Bush administration, however, has been reviewing the nuclear policy toward India and Pakistan since taking office. Administration officials have recently said they plan to lift the sanctions against India, but have not indicated plans to do the same for Pakistan.
Pakistan's critical role in supporting any US-led military operation against exiled Saudi and suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan, however, has changed Washington's calculus on the nuclear issue.
''Pakistani President Musharaff is embarked on a course of action that could lead to his undoing,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and foreign policy organization in Alexandria, Va. Bin Laden and the Taliban enjoy support among the largely Muslim population of Pakistan.
Musharaff said yesterday that as much as 15 percent of the population is opposed to his decision to give the United States full support in its war on terrorism. Public opinion samples suggest the real figure is much higher.
Asked on NBC's ''Meet the Press'' on Sunday about concerns over Pakistan's nuclear forces, Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged that: ''You could have a change of government in relatively short notice, and we're well aware of that.''
It is possible that bin Laden and his network, Pike said, ''could steal [a nuclear weapon] or part of the arsenal could go missing.''
A US State Department official said it is unclear to what extent Pakistan would allow the United States to help on nuclear security should it decide to make such a proposal; Islamabad would be effectively giving the United States an inside look at some of its nuclear capability just as Washington is strengthening military ties with India, its mortal enemy.
However, Brigadier General Feroz Hassan Khan, director of Pakistan's arms control and disarmament affairs, said during a visit to Washington last December: ''We look up to the experience of others ... to make sure that no matter how safe we are, we should be surer. And this is the area where I think the West ... should help with their experience.''
He specifically cited a need for ''improved electronic locks and better software and communication reliability so that it is foolproof.''
Should the United States decide to move ahead, it may not be able to move quickly, according to specialists. Because Pakistan has not signed the Nonproliferation Treaty, the United States is prohibited by law from participating in nuclear weapons-related activities. The negotiations on how to proceed could also get bogged down.
''This is not something that would happen overnight,'' said David Rigby, chief spokesman for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which oversees nuclear security assistance in the former Soviet Union.
A Pakistani diplomat in Washington this week stressed that Islamabad's nuclear arsenal remains under the ''positive control'' of the military and remains safe. ''The nuclear weapons are not laying in an outhouse somewhere,'' the diplomat said. ''Loose nukes in the hands of the mullahs makes good fiction.''
-------- russia
TERRORISTS WOULD LOVE THE IMPORT OF NUCLEAR WASTE
PRESS-RELEASE Moscow,
September 20, 2001
From: "Vladimir Slivyak" <ecodefense@online.ru>
Nuclear transports and big storages for nuclear waste are convenient targets for world terrorists
The plan to import high-level nuclear waste, or spent nuclear fuel, from across the world approved by Russian authorities earlier in 2001 can not sustain criticism over anti-terror protection, Russian environmental groups said TODAY in the statement.
The weakest parts of the plan are two: large number of nuclear transports across Russia during next decade that extremely vulnerable to terrorists' attack and the organizing of central storage/repository for waste on Russian territory.
According to estimates of Ministry of atomic power (Minatom), there will be approximately 20,000 ton of nuclear waste imported to Russia during next 10 years, that would bring about US$ 20 billion to Russian nuclear industry. Country uses its only train to transport spent nuclear fuel internationally, this train is capable of about 30 ton of the spent fuel roads. Last time it was used in September of 1998 to bring spent fuel from Bulgarian Kozloduy nuclear plant to Russia. As a result of the import of nuclear waste to Russia there will be about 670 nuclear transports happening, additionally to national transports. In day-to-day life it will be 1-2 trains crossing the country each week during 10 years.
"Undoubtedly, nobody is going to supply nuclear transports with military jets for protection - it would make transportation too expensive for Minatom", said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman for ECODEFENSE!, environmental group calling for suspension of nuclear transportation. "No doubt that containers for spent fuel would never sustain terrorist' attack, especially of the airstrike' kind. Containers tested only for the cases such as when it falling down to ground from several meters and sustainability under high temperature for several hours. This is ideal opportunity for Chernobyl' style terrorism when transport of spent fuel is rolling."
Earlier in 2001, ECODEFENSE! and Anti-nuclear campaign of the Socio-Ecological Union released the report based on nuclear transportation' statistics in Russia over last 10 years. Results of this study concluded that many of Russian railroads are not safe according to national standards; coordination between responsible safety agencies is inadequate. It's unclear whether emergency plan for the railroad accidents involving radioactive materials ever existed - there was not a single official answer from Russian authorities to respond numerous calls from environmental groups on that subject. (Report in Russian can be obtained at: http://www.ecoline.ru/antinuclear/rus/dokl2/index. htm)
Russian plan to import nuclear waste includes the building of new storage for nuclear waste and improving old storage facilities. From the economic point of view, it's cheaper to build just one large storage or repository for nuclear waste instead of many small facilities. One of the studies on this issue, conducted by US Department of Energy and Livermore National Laboratory, suggested to build only one "central" storage in Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. (For more info in Russian please visit: http://www.ecoline.ru/antinuclear/rus/waste/pr0220 vers.htm)
"It's unwise to put large quantity of nuclear waste in one place after airstrike terror appeared as possible: more waste located in one place means larger negative consequence of possible terrorist attack", said Alisa Nikulina, anti-nuclear campaigner for the Socio-Ecological Union. "Even in Soviet times it was forbidden to build dangerous facilities in the territory close to borders where potential enemy can defeat it. Now it appears that whole country is close to the enemy - accessible to terrorists attack".
ECODEFENSE! and Socio-Ecological Union are calling for urgent suspension of nuclear transports, like it was done in USA immediately after terrorists' attack. Before any other action, Minatom should publicly announce the plan of additional measures to protect trains carrying radioactive substances. Ministry must introduce new element into assessment process for new projects - complex analysis on stability of facilities in relation to possible terror acts including the attack in form of the airstrike. Already existing facilities that can not sustain attacks must be immediately shut down.
For more info call: 2784642, 7766546 - Vladimir Slivyak, Alisa Nikulina, ecodefense@online.ru
ECODEFENSE! Socio-Ecological Union' Anti-Nuclear Campaign
-------- us nuc waste
Public can shape U.S. radioactive scrap metals policy
Thursday, September 20, 2001
By Environmental News Network
http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/09/09202001/s_45019.asp
Radioactive scrap metal from federal weapons-production facilities amounts to thousands of tons of materials, and the government must figure out what to do with it. There have been perennial plans to recycle it, but opponents of recycling fear the contaminated metal would end up in pots, pans, silverware, zippers, and children's dental braces.
Between now and Nov. 9, the public can send comments to the Department of Energy (DOE) on the scope of policy options for managing these scrap metals on DOE sites.
The comments were to be due Sept. 10, but the DOE has extended by 60 days the public comment period for a programmatic environmental impact Statement (PEIS) on the disposition of these scrap metals.
In January 2000, the Energy Department retreated from plans to sell thousands of tons of these radioactive metals as scrap, saying the potential health concerns needed to be more clearly examined.
Then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson blocked plans to sell 6,000 tons of nickel taken from a defunct uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., keeping it out of the civilian marketplace.
But in January 2001, Dr. Richard Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), asked the National Academy of Sciences to examine the practice of releasing radioactively contaminated solid waste materials with an eye to finding ways to deal with the growing stockpiles.
The amount of scrap metal potentially available for recycling is about 171,000 metric ton, the DOE estimated in 1997.
The primary metals to be considered in the analysis are carbon steel and stainless steel. Other metals such as copper, aluminum, lead, silver, gold, and platinum, which exist in smaller quantities, will also be addressed in the impact statement.
In its notice of the intention to prepare a PEIS, the DOE expressed its own concerns about the impact of these radioactive metals. Steven Cary, acting assistant secretary in the DOE Office of Environment, Safety, and Health, said, "The recycling of materials that have residual radioactivity could affect workers involved in the recycling of those materials and also the general public, because products manufactured from recycled materials may have many exposure pathways to the public."
The Energy Department is proposing to examine four alternatives for disposing of the metals. First, the department might take no action and continue the existing ban on the release of scrap metals from DOE radiological areas for unrestricted use in recycling. Second, the release of scrap metals for recycling might be allowed either under existing DOE requirements or under alternative requirements. And finally, the DOE might determine that there should be no release for recycling scrap metals with any potential for residual surface radioactivity.
Environmental groups across the United States have been fighting against the recycling of these radioactive metals for years. They are alarmed at statements such as this one from the executive summary of a DOE Preliminary Technical Support Document, dated March 11, 1997:
"The U.S. commercial nuclear power industry includes 123 reactor plants. At present, eight of these reactors have been shutdown. In the next two to three decades, most of the reactors currently in operation will have reached their projected 40-year lifetime.... Quantities of both carbon steel and stainless steel will potentially be available for recycling from decommissioned commercial nuclear power plants."
The department held six public scoping meetings in July and August 2001. During these meetings, DOE received requests for additional meetings as well as an extension of the scoping period. In response, the department has extended the scoping period by 60 days to Nov. 9 and has scheduled four additional public meetings.
These include:
Oct. 8, 2001, 8-10 p.m. Ken Edwards Community Center 1527 Fourth St. Santa Monica, CA 90401
Oct. 9, 2001, 8-10 p.m. Simi Valley City Hall 2929 Tapo Canyon Road Simi Valley, CA 93063
Oct. 16, 2001, 2-5 p.m. and 8-10 p.m. Zuhrah Shrine Center 2540 Park Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55404
Oct. 18, 2001, 2-5 p.m. and 8-10 p.m. American Conference Centers 780 Third Ave., C2 New York, NY 10017
All deadline dates connected with the DOE's consideration of radioactive metals recycling have also been put forward 60 days. Completion of the draft PEIS is now due in March 2002. The final PEIS will be ready for presentation to the public in August 2002.
Written comments may be mailed to:
Kenneth G. Picha Jr. Office of Technical Program Integration, EM-22 Attn: Metals Disposition PEIS Office of Environmental Management U.S. Department of Energy 1000 Independence Ave., S.W. Washington, DC 20585-0113
Comments can be faxed to Metals Disposition PEIS at: (301) 903-9770 or emailed to: Metals.Disposition.PEIS@em.doe.gov.
-------- MILITARY
OAS Nations Activate Mutual Defense Treaty
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A18
The Organization of American States agreed yesterday to activate a hemispheric mutual defense treaty in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Activation of the treaty was agreed by acclamation in a special meeting of OAS ambassadors in Washington despite reservations by some members, including Mexico. The 1947 accord obligates signatories to consider an attack from outside the region against any member nation to be an attack against all, and to come to one another's defense.
A separate resolution called for foreign ministers of the 34 member nations to meet here Friday to consider new anti-terrorism measures. Within that meeting, the 23 pact signatories will discuss the form their defense cooperation will take.
Formally known as the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, the pact is commonly called the Rio Treaty. Its collective security commitment is nearly identical to that in a NATO defense agreement invoked last week. A similar provision has also been activated in a defense treaty among the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
The Bush administration has not yet revealed its plans for striking back at those it will ultimately hold responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But administration officials said that Rio Treaty members would not be asked for military assistance.
"This is a gesture of solidarity, not a fighting coalition," said one U.S. official. Instead, the United States is likely to ask for increased intelligence-sharing and closer cooperation in border control.
Yesterday's agreement headed off a brewing diplomatic battle between the United States and Mexico, which was in the forefront of a minority group with reservations about activating the accord.
During a visit here in early September, Mexican President Vicente Fox said the treaty, originally designed to defend against communist threats to the hemisphere, was "obsolete and useless" and that his nation was likely to withdraw from it. The Bush administration agreed the accord needed revamping to address current security threats, including drug trafficking and corrosive effects of poverty.
But the events of Sept. 11 brought an immediate change of administration position about the treaty's utility. Seeking worldwide condemnation of the terrorist attacks, unlimited cooperation in finding the perpetrators and support for retaliation, the U.S. government moved to activate all existing defense agreements.
In Mexico, where long-standing foreign policy and public opinion oppose any engagement outside its borders, that posed a dilemma for Fox. Mexican press commentary over the last week has ridiculed the possibility he would now agree to activation of an accord he had previously trashed.
On Tuesday night, as OAS ambassadors prepared for yesterday's meeting, the administration was "absolutely stunned," according to one senior official, when Fox issued a statement saying the treaty was "not the ideal mechanism" to confront the current threat. Mexico has noted that most Caribbean nations, which became independent years after the treaty was drawn up, are not signatories. Neither is Canada, a NATO member.
Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda said yesterday that he had assured Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last Saturday that "If this [treaty] is important to you, despite the fact that we do not like it, and we do not think it is the proper way to go, we will go along with it."
In his statement yesterday thanking OAS members for their solidarity, U.S. Ambassador Roger Noriega did not mention Mexico. Instead, he congratulated Brazil, which introduced the treaty resolution and promoted it behind the scenes, for its "bold and visionary leadership" and said it had shown "that a genuine global power and moral leader demonstrates what it is by what it does."
Correspondent Kevin Sullivan contributed to this report from Mexico City.
-------- afghanistan
Bush rejects clerics' proposal
September 20, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/nobyline-200192012033.htm
The White House rejected a proposal by Islamic clerics today that Osama bin Laden be allowed to leave Afghanistan voluntarily. As President Bush prepared to address Congress, the Army's civilian leader said the military was bracing for ``sustained land combat operations.''
The clerics' suggestion that bin Laden be allowed to leave on his own volition ``does not meet America's requirements,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. ``It's time for action and not words.''
Nine days after the suicide hijacking attacks that left more than an estimated 5,000 dead or missing in New York and Washington, Mr. Bush planned a 9 p.m. EDT address to Congress and the nation to unite Americans for a long battle.
With U.S. military forces on the move, Army Secretary Thomas E. White told reporters a deployment order signed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld includes Army as well as Air Force troops.
``We are ready to deliver it across the whole array of force structure - heavy, light, airmobile, airborne, special operations,'' Mr. White said.
Stocks fell sharply yet again on fears of adverse economic fallout. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledged that economic activity virtually ground to a halt after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But, he told a congressional panel that the country's long-term prospects remained strong.
``An enormous effort will be required on the part of many to cope with the human and physical destruction,'' Mr. Greenspan said in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee.
In his speech, Mr. Bush will make the case against No. 1 suspect bin Laden and his al-Qaida network, officials said.
With the speech in the Capitol taking place under exceptionally tight security, Mr. Fleischer said that Vice President Dick Cheney will not attend but will remain in a secret, secure location in recognition of ``the continuation of important government issues'' should terrorists strike again. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will attend.
In the Afghan capital of Kabul, Islamic clerics today urged bin Laden to leave Afghanistan voluntarily, but set no deadline for him to decide, according to the news agency of the ruling Taliban militia.
The clerics said they are prepared to call for a holy war against the United States if U.S. troops attack Afghanistan in an attempt to capture him and members of his al-Qaida terrorist organization.
Conveying Mr. Bush's rejection, Mr. Fleischer said, ``This is about much more than any one man being allowed to leave - presumably from one safe harbor to another safe harbor, if what he's doing is voluntary.''
``The president has demanded that the key figures of the al-Qaida terrorist organization, including Osama bin Laden, be turned over to responsible authorities and that the Taliban close terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The United States stands behind those demands,'' Mr. Fleischer said.
Previewing the speech to Congress, the second of Mr. Bush's presidency, Mr. Fleischer said Mr. Bush would say the nation is engaged in a ``battle between freedom and fear and freedom will prevail.'' The speech will last at least 30 minutes, he said.
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Afghan Clerics Urge bin Laden to Leave; White House Says Unacceptable
New York Times
September 20, 2001
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/international/20CND-PAK.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 20 - Afghanistan's top clerics recommended today that the accused terrorist Osama bin Laden should be persuaded to leave the country, a development that the leader of Pakistan's largest Islamic party described as "a ray of hope."
The ruling, which ministers said is binding on the Taliban government, could almost certainly have been reached only with the agreement of the Taliban's spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.
But the White House said this morning that the clerics' edict "doesn't meet America's requirements" and again demanded that Mr. bin Laden be turned over to "responsible authorities" and that the Taliban close terrorist camps in Afghanistan.
"It's time for action not words," Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said.
"This is about much more than one man being allowed to leave voluntarily, presumably from one safe harbor to another safe harbor," Mr. Fleischer continued.
Mr. bin Laden, who the United States has accused of being behind the terrorist attacks in the United States last week, has been given refuge in Afghanistan since he was expelled from Sudan under American pressure in 1996. President Bush has declared that he wants Mr. bin Laden brought to justice, "dead or alive."
The United States has been gathering its forces for a possible military thrust into Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden is known to have set up terrorist training camps and multiple hidouts in the country's remote deserts and mountains. Washington had asked Pakistan for permission to use its air space and intelligence about Mr. bin Laden to aid in any attack.
"To avoid the current tumult and also future similar suspicions," the 700 members of the high council of clerics said in the edict, or fatwa, they had recommended that Mr. bin Laden leave Afghanistan whenever possible.
Mr. bin Laden should find another place to live, said the shura, which met for two days before reaching its decision.
The council said Muslims should start a holy war if attacks were made against the Taliban's fighters, many of whom are only lightly armed.
"If in the time of an American attack, any Muslims, be they Afghans or non-Afghans, cooperate with the infidels, accomplices or spy, that person also is punishable to death like the foreign invaders," the edict said.
A possible sign of how the shura would act came Wednesday when Mullah Omar said he was ready for the Taliban to hold talks with the United States, a recommendation that was rejected by Mr. Bush.
"This can save the situation," the leader of the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami party, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, told reporters after hearing of the edict. Mr. Ahmed's party is the leading member of the 35-group Pakistan and Afghanistan Defense Council, which has called for a nationwide strike on Friday to protest possible strikes by the United States against Afghanistan.
Mr. bin Laden has not been seen since the terrorist attacks in the United States, although messages in his name that have denied his involvement have been delivered to pro-Islamic newspapers in Pakistan.
Specialists on Afghanistan have said that his options in the wake of the clerics' recommendation that he leave the country include taking refuge with his own fighters at numerous camps around the cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad, or slipping across the border into remote regions of northwestern Pakistan.
The specialists say that Mr. bin Laden's Arab followers inside Afghanistan alone number at least 3,000, many of them trained fighters, and that they might resist the clerics' decision with force. The most feared of Mr. bin Laden's units, known as the 055 Brigade, has a reputation for brutality that have made them the most feared of all the units fighting under the Taliban banner inside Afghanistan.
If Mr. bin Laden and his top associates, several of whom are also on the F.B.I.'s wanted list, were to slip into Pakistan, tracking them down might be even more difficult than finding them in Afghanistan.
The terrain in parts of Pakistan's Baluchistan and North-West Frontier provinces includes some of the most inaccessible regions in central Asia, an area of deep valleys and high mountains, with deserts to the southwest. For centuries they have been the strongholds of tribal leaders who obey no law but their own. Many of these tribal leaders have links to the Taliban and to Mr. bin Laden.
On Wednesday night Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, went on nationwide television to offer a tense, sometimes emotional defense of his decision to join the United States in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden. General Musharraf said the situation presented this volatile Muslim nation of 140 million people with its gravest crisis in the 30 years since it lost its last major war, with India.
"Trust me," he said in a 20-minute speech.
He made no mention of United States ground troops or special forces' using air bases in Pakistan, a possibility widely discussed here as close to 100 American bombers, fighters and other war planes moved toward the Middle East with their final destination unknown.
"I have fought in two wars, and by the grace of God, I have never shown any timidity," the general said, answering opponents who have accused him of weakness for bowing to intense American pressure for Pakistan to be used in any American military operation.
The speech had nervous Pakistanis stopping in bazaars, airports and hotel lobbies to crowd around television sets, eager to hear the general explain why he had promised President Bush "full support" for an American military operation.
That support has already carried a high political price. Islamic militant groups linked to Mr. bin Laden and some political parties have promised to do everything possible to disrupt an American military venture involving Pakistan.
Militants have held noisy protests in dozens of cities and towns, burning Mr. Bush in effigy and promising a "holy war" against any American troops setting foot here. The possibility that American pressure could destabilize Pakistan or even throw the country into chaos appeared real.
The speech appeared intended to buy time by suggesting that American action was not imminent and to rally support by stating that if Pakistan did not back the United States, its rival, India, would exploit the situation. Speaking of India, a country with which Pakistan has a deep conflict over Kashmir, General Musharraf said, "They want to enter into any alliance with the United States and get Pakistan declared a terrorist state."
Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 1,500-mile border of deserts and mountains. Some of Pakistan's major air bases lie 10 or 15 minutes' flying time from possible targets around major Afghan cities.
Even as the Pentagon moved additional combat aircraft and ships into the region, it was unclear how far off any American assault might be.
General Musharraf, evidently marked out as a major partner in any strike, said that based on what Pakistan knew, "the American plans are not ready" and had not reached the point where details of Pakistan's involvement have been discussed.
The general, who took power in a coup less than two years ago, said that for him "Pakistan comes first, and everything else second." It was that approach, he added, that had led him to choose cooperation with the Americans, with its risks of domestic upheaval, over defiance that might have made a pariah of Pakistan.
Pakistan has sought to have sanctions against it erased, and the United States plans to make its case for lifting sanctions this week, congressional officials in Washington said.
General Musharraf's assertion that his air force had been put on its highest state of alert to guard against a possible Indian attack on nuclear sites appeared to alarm Mr. Bush. In two hours, Mr. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office that in the diplomacy surrounding the terrorist attacks "we will work with Pakistan and India to make sure that that part of the world is as safe as we can possibly make it."
General Musharraf said his military delegation to Afghanistan returned from talks with Mullah Omar and others on Tuesday night with a rejection of the American demand that they surrender Mr. bin Laden to face trial for terror acts and interrogation as Washington's "prime suspect" in the attacks last week.
-------- iraq
Some Press for New Attack on Iraq
September 20, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tempted to strike at longtime U.S. enemy Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration is weighing whether it should include Iraq sooner rather than later in a wide-ranging battle against terrorists and their sponsors.
Iraq has for years been on the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism. It has plenty of targets for U.S. attention, including weapons factories Saddam is suspected of rebuilding after the Gulf War ended.
His warplanes increasingly shoot at U.S. and British aircraft patrolling 'no-fly' zones designed to prevent him from attacking his neighbors and own people.
And many in Washington have regretted for a decade that the first Bush administration left the regime in place at the end of the 1991 war, which expelled the invading Iraqi army from Kuwait.
``Anyone who is not concerned ... it seems to me would not fully understand the situation,'' Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon press conference Thursday.
Some senior administration officials, including Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, want Baghdad to be among early targets in the campaign against the network of Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in last week's terrorist attacks on America, officials said.
Conservatives inside and outside the government are urging that U.S. military forces now being assembled in the region for the anti-terrorism campaign move against Iraq regardless of whether it was involved in the Sept. 11 hijackings.
Many Arab nations friendly to the United States are worried the administration will seize the opportunity to strike at Baghdad, said Clovis Maksoud, a former Arab League ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, and now an international law professor at American University in Washington.
Arab countries already face criticism from their own citizens that the U.N. sanctions against Iraq since the Gulf War have hurt innocent people and children without affecting Saddam. That criticism probably intensify if the United States once again directly attacked Iraq, Maksoud said.
He said Arab nations hope the administration will keep its sights on building a case against bin Laden.
``They hope that this effort would be focused, that the Americans have convincing evidence and that this does not become something to settle accounts with Saddam,'' Maksoud said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell declined to say whether Iraq will be targeted and noted the president was to speak to the nation Thursday night.
``The president has a clear idea in his mind and has given us our instructions as to how we will begin this campaign, and what the focus of our efforts will be initially,'' he told a press conference.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraq is not being targeted at this time.
Others stressed that Bush has put the entire world on notice that after striking at the terrorist network responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington, he will seek to root out terrorism elsewhere in a campaign that could take months or years.
Iraq has denied it had anything to do with the Sept. 11 attack.
And in what was billed as an open letter to Americans, Saddam himself accused the U.S. government of using the attacks as a pretext to settle old scores with Muslim countries.
He charged the United States is using ``sheer terrorism and blackmail'' against several countries to win their support for the war on terrorism.
Tuesday, a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that one of the hijackers aboard one of the planes that slammed into New York's World Trade Center met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent. But the information was unconfirmed.
Seven countries have been designated by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism, meaning they are barred from receiving economic assistance, arms-related exports and U.S. support for their loan requests in the World Bank and other international lending institutions.
The others are Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
Iraq was deleted from the list in the early 1980's, not because Saddam renounced terrorism but because of a U.S. tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq was reinstated as a sponsor of terrorism after invading Kuwait.
In trying to form a coalition for its new campaign, the administration has approached others on the terrorism list -- Cuba, Sudan and Syria. They have singled out Iraq as a nation going against the international tide as a wave of other countries offered their sympathy and support.
--------
Saddam Says Iraqis Could Have Saved People at WTC
Updated: Thu, Sep 20 3:55 PM EDT
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010920/15/international-attack-iraq-saddam-dc
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein criticized U.S. rescue efforts at the devastated World Trade Center site in New York Thursday, saying more experienced Iraqis would have found survivors in the rubble.
"America has let down its people. Many who could have been saved died. They could have been saved if the mission had been given to Iraqis trained by the tragedies America inflicted on Iraq," Saddam told a group of officers.
Saddam was referring to the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent Western air raids on Iraq, in which he said 200,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on the country.
"They (the U.S. authorities) should have saved the living from day one and rescue work should have been carried out by ordinary people and not limited to rescue workers," Saddam said.
U.S. officials say the chances of finding any more survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center buildings are remote. Two aircraft commandeered by suicide hijackers crashed into the twin towers last week, killing thousands.
"If this (attack) happened to Iraq then the residents of the area would be the first to save the living, remove the bodies and put out the fire before the firemen arrive," Saddam said in remarks carried by the Iraqi News Agency.
He said American authorities should also have asked Iraq to help repair the devastating damage.
"The Americans should have used Iraqi help to restore water, power and telephones to the area," Saddam said, citing what he described as the swift rehabilitation of infrastructure in Iraq after the U.S.-led bombardment during the 1991 Gulf War.
The Iraqi president, who has already issued two long commentaries advising Washington to react wisely to the attacks on New York and Washington, said Iraq would have helped the U.S. rescue effort if it had been asked.
"The Iraqis would have agreed for humanitarian reasons and not for the sake of the American government," he said.
The military journal Jane's has reported that Israeli intelligence believes Iraq was a sponsor of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Iraq has denied separate reports that one of the hijackers of the first jet that crashed into the twin towers had met Iraqi intelligence agents.
Iraqi officials have described the attacks as a consequence of U.S. foreign policy and cast doubt that those behind them were foreign, saying they could have been Americans outraged at rising "poverty and discrimination" in their country.
-------- pakistan
Pakistani president affirms U.S. alliance
September 20, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010920-15056910.htm
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told his people on national television yesterday that Pakistan stood with the United States, providing a key link in U.S. plans for an anti-terrorist coalition.
"America is asking for our intelligence and information exchange to use our airspace and logistic support," he said.
"Our whole country could be put into danger if we made the wrong move," said Gen. Musharraf, the military ruler who named himself president of Pakistan's 140 million people in June.
Gen. Musharraf's address, in which he stood up to his nation's noisy anti-American lobby, was welcomed immediately by the United States.
"We found Musharraf to be resolute, very supportive and very explicit - he made it clear he made his choice that they are in this anti-terrorist fight with the United States," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
The address came as a slew of foreign dignitaries trooped through Washington, offering condolences for the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 and some form of support.
France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries sent leaders and senior officials to pledge help.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday, after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, that some countries have pledged military support in an expected attack to wrest suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan, where he remains under protection of the Taliban government. He declined to name those countries.
In addition, 58 nations have offered to assist the rescue efforts in New York and Washington, with "everything from dogs to thermal equipment to search for victims to psychiatrists," said a State Department official.
In his speech, Gen. Musharraf emphasized that the anti-terrorism campaign was not against Islam, as some of his anti-American critics claimed.
"Some elements want to take advantage of this [crisis] to pursue personal or party agendas. They want to create anarchy and damage the country," he said.
"I appeal to the people of Pakistan to show unity and solidarity against these elements and not let them succeed. Pakistan is a fort of Islam, and God forbid this fort is damaged." He also said, in an apparent reference to Pakistan's nuclear weapons arsenal:
"Our nuclear facilities would have been in jeopardy and the economy would be completely down the drain" if Pakistan had not cooperated with the United States in the fight against terrorism.
Gen. Musharraf's appeal for national unity faces a test with Pakistan's fundamentalist religious leaders calling for a nationwide strike tomorrow.
"There is no legal or moral justification for the U.S. attack, which we call terrorism," said Sami Haq, the turbaned cleric who heads Pakistan's Jamiyat Ulemai Islam party.
Gen. Musharraf said: "Whatever America wants, they've got the support of the United Nations and the General Assembly and quite a few Islamic countries have given their support as well."
He said "the vast majority of our population is in favor of what we are deciding."
French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday started a parade of foreign leaders to Washington to offer support.
In Europe, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was due to meet German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder yesterday evening before flying to Washington for talks with President Bush.
Mr. Bush met yesterday with Mr. Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
He also met Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, leader of the world's most populous Muslim nation.
Mr. Powell met with Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, whose country holds the European Union's rotating presidency, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Mr. Michel voiced a cautious note, saying the fight against those who sent the hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was not a "war" - the term used by the Bush administration.
European allies and Canada have voted to invoke for the first time Article 5 in the NATO charter authorizing mutual defense against an attack on a member state.
But some NATO nations subsequently expressed reservations about joining the United States in a military mission.
Mr. Schroeder, for example, told the German parliament yesterday that last week's attacks were not a "clash of civilizations" and urged Washington to consider political as well as military responses.
--------
Pakistan fundamentalists call strike
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
September 20, 2001
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010920-32776304.htm
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - Pakistan's fundamentalist religious leaders, in an attempt to whip up sentiments against the government's decision to support the U.S. campaign against terrorism, urged their followers to observe a nationwide strike tomorrow.
"There is no legal or moral justification for the U.S. attack, which we call terrorism," Sami Haq, the turbaned cleric who heads Pakistan's Jamiyat Ulemai Islam party, said yesterday. "This attack will destabilize the whole region. The American attack is simply a pretext, as the United States did in the [Persian] Gulf 10 years ago, to conquer all of central Asia, including China."
The Jamiyat Ulemai Islam party has strong links with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, accused by the Bush administration of sheltering the terrorists behind the strikes in New York and Washington last week. Several Taliban leaders have studied at Islamic seminaries run by Mr. Haq.
He said the country's religious parties were initiating a major campaign tomorrow to "mobilize and organize the masses against the U.S. attack because it will lead to an unending war in Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Addressing a news conference at the Rawalpindi Press Club near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, the cleric said the Pakistani government was "responsible for all this by accommodating the United States."
Another fundamentalist leader, Kazi Hussain Ahmad, head of the Jamaat-I-Islami party, said Pakistanis should "bring the country to a complete halt on September 21 to show the government that they oppose its decision to cooperate with the United States."
"Our army has become a tributary force of the United States. They now follow orders from Washington, not from God," said Mr. Ahmad, referring to Pakistan's military government.
The call for a strike was seen as a move to pre-empt President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's appeal to the Pakistani nation to support his decision to back the United States. Gen. Musharraf made the appeal in an emotional, nationally televised address soon after the religious leaders spoke.
Mr. Haq, who is seen as the closest ally of the Taliban in Pakistan, said the United States wants to destroy the ailing Pakistani economy.
"The Pakistani armed forces must defend us against the U.S. attack. Otherwise, there will be a direct confrontation between the masses and the armed forces," he said.
While talking to Pakistani intellectuals in Islamabad on Tuesday, Mr. Musharraf said he agreed to accept the U.S. demands to save Pakistan's economy and its nuclear weapons.
Addressing about 100 reporters and photographers in a 30-by-20-foot room, Mr. Haq, sporting a dyed red beard, rejected the president's claim.
"America's real target is the nuclear facilities of Pakistan," he said.
Exploiting anti-Israeli sentiments among his followers, Mr. Haq said, "Israel was clearly behind the terrorist attacks in New York and in Washington, and the proof is that 4,000 Jews, normally working in the [World Trade Center] towers, did not report for work on the morning of Sept. 11."
Surrounded by friendly Pakistani journalists who took turns interpreting him, Mr. Haq warned: "The U.S. attack will generate hatred in the whole world against the United States, which will lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy."
Suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, he said, was not the real target, but the Islamic government of Afghanistan. Even if bin Laden is captured, he said, "the [holy war] will continue against the United States."
• Distributed by United Press International
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For Pakistani Poor, Islamic Activism Fills Void Left by State Religious Groups Offer Social Services That Help Spread Beliefs
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59220-2001Sep19?language=printer
LAHORE, Pakistan -- At a small urban hospital, popular with poor patients because it charges only 10 cents for any prescribed medicine, doctors and orderlies rush to the lobby five times a day, push stray wheelchairs aside and spread out rugs to pray.
Across the city at a large state university, members of an Islamic student union help newcomers sign up for courses and remind them that no Western-style diversions, such as watching movies and listening to music, are permitted on campus.
The hospital staff and the student guides both are affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami, a nationwide religious party of Sunni Muslims. For them, the concepts of public service, education and conservative Islamic values are closely intertwined, and their mission is to promote their religion through good works.
Now, with the imminent threat of a U.S. military attack on neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistan's religious parties have found a new, more strident political mission. A coalition of 35 such groups, including Jamaat-e-Islami and more radical Islamic organizations, has formed to defend both Pakistan and Afghanistan against what they see as an international assault on Islam. If the United States does attack, they have said, they will call for a "holy war" against it.
Pakistan was founded 54 years ago as a parliamentary democracy and a moderate Muslim state. For most of the past two decades, its public life has been dominated by two mainstream, secular-based political parties, and no religious group has won a major election. The current military government, led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, pays strong deference to Islam but does not enforce strict religious values or laws.
In recent years, however, a number of religious parties and groups have been rapidly gaining influence throughout Pakistani society. Based in thousands of mosques and Islamic academies called madrassas, they spread their message in part by offering services, especially low-cost education, that millions of poor Pakistani families cannot obtain any other way.
Their followers, according to analysts, are drawn to them by a combination of desperate poverty, frustration at official corruption and inadequate state services, discomfort with the moral laxity of modern life and Western culture, and increasing exposure to the sufferings of Muslims in other parts of the world.
"So many students are impressed by Western culture, and there are so many opportunities for them to deviate from an Islamic way of life. We are here to protect and preserve it," said Kalim Imdad, 21, an active member of the Islamic student union at Punjab State University.
Jamaat-e-Islami, a sophisticated and highly organized party, is the largest of these groups, claiming nearly 5 million followers. But several dozen smaller groups, less polished and more overtly radical, have established formidable pockets of power in cities and towns across the country.
Several of the more vocal groups affiliated with the Sunni branch of Islam are staunch supporters of the Taliban, the strict Islamic militia that controls most of Afghanistan and harbors Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. officials have named as the top suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
During the 1980s, some radical Sunni groups in Pakistan sent young men to fight in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation, and many members of the Taliban graduated from their madrassas. More recently, a smaller number of Islamic students have been sent to fight against Indian troops in Kashmir, the border region that is claimed by both India and Pakistan.
As U.S. pressure mounts on Pakistan to support a possible military assault on Afghanistan if Taliban leaders refuse to turn over bin Laden, Islamic students in a half-dozen cities have held angry protests, pouring out of mosques to call for a holy war against the United States. The coalition of 35 religious groups have called for a nationwide strike on Friday.
It is not clear whether these groups will follow through on their threats of violence, or whether they are simply venting religious emotion and capitalizing on a crisis to attract support. Most Pakistanis are wary of the religious parties, none of which has ever won major electoral support. But to their impassioned followers, the U.S. threat to Afghanistan has provided an unprecedented opportunity to beat the drum of militant Islam.
"We are ready to do whatever our leaders decide," said Yar Muhammad, 22, a religious student demonstrating with about 1,000 others today outside the Madani Mosque in Peshawar, a city near the Afghan border. "If the Americans attack Afghanistan," he vowed with a deadly grin, "we will not spare the life of a single American here in Pakistan."
Like many students at this mosque, Muhammad was born in Afghanistan but raised in Pakistani refugee camps. His parents were too poor to send him to school, but he was offered free tuition, room and board at the Madani Mosque madrassa, run by the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Party. He spent his youth memorizing the Koran, learning to read and write, and imbibing a radical version of Islam.
There are hundreds of thousands of Muhammads across Pakistan, young men whose principal loyalty is to a religion they now believe is under siege, whose knowledge of modern political systems and values is extremely limited and whose emotions are easy to exploit.
In the past year, Musharraf's military government has tried to gain control of the madrassas, urging their leaders to introduce modern curriculums and computers instead of focusing on strict Islamic studies. Some have complied but others have objected, saying they will not tolerate state intrusion into their activities. The government has also become increasingly alarmed by sectarian violence between mosques controlled by Sunni and Shiite Muslim factions.
Last night Musharraf, clearly worried about the religious violence that could erupt in the coming days, warned in a speech to the nation that some "minority groups" are taking advantage of the current crisis to "create chaos" and further their political ambitions. "I appeal to the people of Pakistan to unite against these elements that are trying to damage Pakistan," he said.
But leaders of the major Sunni Muslim parties, including both Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat-ul-Ulema, assert their goals are purely religious.
While expressing varying degrees of support for the Taliban's strict version of Islam, they insist they do not seek to replicate it in Pakistan, a more modern and diverse nation that cannot afford to isolate itself from the world.
"We believe in democracy as well as Islam," said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the religious chief of Jamaat-e-Islami, in an interview at his Lahore headquarters this week. "The Taliban are not immoral, but ignorance has made them harsh. We want an Islamic government that is based on humanity, where people are morally trained and organized to serve mankind."
In support of that goal, Jamaat has spent three decades training followers in Islamic principles and sending them into society to work as teachers, doctors and administrators. The party operates a wide network of social service and anti-poverty programs, from blood banks and literacy classes to irrigation projects.
But the teachings of Jamaat call for adherence to a deeply conservative way of life, not so different from that espoused by the Taliban.
"Our values are different from those of America and Europe, where the family system has been destroyed because there is nakedness and women and men are allowed to mix freely," said Awais Khan, 25, an Islamic student leader at Punjab State University, whose student union has been crusading for separate campuses for men and women. "Our society is strong because its religion and its family system are strong. That is the kind of system we stand for."
Muslim academics here say the growing appeal of Jamaat and similar groups is partly based on their offer of moral certitude, social order and spiritual guidance in a world that seems increasingly fraught with temptation and injustice. The government, they assert, has failed to provide basic services to the population, while violent crime has become rampant and a succession of Pakistani political leaders have proven corrupt and callous.
At the same time, they add, growing awareness of Muslims' problems elsewhere in the world, such as in Bosnia and Chechnya, has added to a sense of collective insecurity among Pakistanis.
"Within Pakistan, there is a growing feeling that all structures have deteriorated and the state has not delivered what the people need," said Khalid Rahman, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Muslim-oriented think tank based in Islamabad. "There is a growing perception that the world's powers are against all Muslims and portray them unfairly. More and more, Pakistanis feel they should stand up for their religion."
-------- russia
Moscow backs away from military action
September 20, 2001
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010920-7348456.htm
Russia will back a U.S.-led coalition against terrorism without linking its support to progress on bilateral disputes over missile defense or Chechnya, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told U.S. officials yesterday.
"Russia, which has suffered all the atrocities of terror, is in full solidarity with the American people at this particular moment," Mr. Ivanov told reporters after a meeting yesterday with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
He also met with President Bush during a visit hastily arranged after last week's attacks in New York and Washington
While saying U.S. officials have not proposed any "concrete actions," Mr. Ivanov added: "I have said that in combating international terrorism, no means can be excluded, including the use of force. "
But Moscow has been backing away in recent days from the unconditional support it offered in the first days after the Sept. 11 attack. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered strong words of support, and many in Russia argued that the United States was battling the same Islamic fundamentalist forces Russia has fought in its campaign in Chechnya.
But the post-attack focus on a military action against Afghanistan - and the discussion of using ex-Soviet Central Asian states on Russia's border as a staging ground for U.S. forces - has caused alarm in Moscow.
Russian military chief of staff Anatoly Kvashnin told reporters on a visit to Tajikistan that Russia "is not participating in the military action [against Afghanistan] and has no plans to do so."
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has ruled out any NATO operation against Afghanistan from the Central Asian states, which Moscow considers part of its zone of influence.
Mr. Putin also dispatched his top security aide on a tour of the region this week to make Moscow's case against support for any unilateral U.S. strike.
"You may fight just those carrying out terrorist acts for as long as you want, but you won't solve the problem this way," said Vladimir Rushailo, Mr. Putin's security adviser, after a meeting with Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov yesterday.
Uzbekistan, which is battling its own armed Islamic insurgency with links to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, had suggested last week it would accept a U.S. force on its soil.
But after his meeting with Mr. Rushailo yesterday, Mr. Karimov told reporters, "We have not given any commitment to allow the use of our territory and airspace."
With Russia potentially one of the most valuable allies in the global war on terrorism, Bush administration officials preferred yesterday to focus on the positive.
Mr. Powell said he and Mr. Ivanov had discussed potential areas of cooperation including "law enforcement, military activity, legal actions, financial actions - anything that can be used to get at these terrorist organizations."
He also thanked his Russian counterpart for the expressions of sympathy for victims of last week's attack from both the government and from ordinary Russians.
Mr. Powell said Mr. Ivanov had not tried to condition Russia's support for the U.S. anti-terrorism effort on concessions in ongoing disputes over U.S. plans for a missile defense shield or American criticism of Russia's campaign in Chechnya.
"They presented no linkages," Mr. Powell said. "They were very forthcoming, they want to be helpful, and they didn't put any requests with links on the table."
A senior State Department official went further, saying Mr. Ivanov in his talks did not "link or express any reservations about any kind of cooperation with Central Asian states we might want to have on terrorism."
The official said the question also did not come up in talks now under way between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and officials in Moscow.
But Mr. Ivanov, following his meeting with President Bush, told reporters that the issues of Russian military assistance and the use of bases in Central Asia for U.S. forces had not come up in his talks.
While repeating past U.S. urgings for a political settlement in Chechnya, Mr. Powell appeared to soft-pedal past U.S. rhetoric against the campaign. Russian officials believe that the Chechen forces have close links to exiled Saudi financier Osama bin Laden, who is now in Afghanistan and has been fingered as the prime suspect in the U.S. attacks.
The Russians are "facing a difficult challenge in Chechnya," Mr. Powell said, "and we know it is a challenge they must respond to."
A clear subtext of Mr. Ivanov's remarks was message that the United States should avoid unilateral action.
The Bush administration has resisted appeals from Russia and a number of states that it give the United Nations a leading role in assembling the global coalition against terrorism and approving any retaliatory measures.
"Russia has always proposed an enhanced and wider international cooperation in the fight against international terrorism, for no single state, no matter how mighty and powerful it is, can cope with such an international phenomenon and scourge," Mr. Ivanov said.
-------- u.s.
U.S. deploys forces
September 20, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010920-7491712.htm
President Bush dispatched America's answer to terrorist infamy yesterday.
"Operation Infinite Justice" was set loose with the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the ordered deployment of more than 100 warplanes, possibly including B-1 bombers.
The Roosevelt and its 80 aircraft will join warplanes stationed in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait. They will stand by for the president's order to attack terrorists in Afghanistan responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the assault on the Pentagon.
The carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Enterprise are already patrolling the Arabian Sea near the coast of Pakistan, together with cruisers, destroyers and submarines in the battle group. The Roosevelt, which left Norfolk yesterday, is scheduled to go to the Mediterranean Sea, but will likely be diverted to join the Vinson and Enterprise.
The inclusion of the B-1 bombers would suggest Mr. Bush will order an extensive bombing campaign aimed not just at targets in Afghanistan but also in Iran, which harbors terrorists' training camps. The B-1 carries a satellite-guided bomb called the Joint Direct Attack Munition, used effectively against Yugoslavia in 1999.
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers have refused U.S. demands to turn over terrorist Osama bin Laden, the man Mr. Bush wants "dead or alive" for orchestrating attacks on New York and the Pentagon that killed more than 5,000 people.
A Pentagon official said the deployment will include F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, and possibly the B-1B bomber. The warplanes would join fighter-bombers, AWACS early-warning aircraft and airborne electronic jammers stationed in Gulf countries. The United States began rotating the planes to the Gulf on a permanent basis after the 1991 Persian Gulf war to enforce a no-fly zone in southern Iraq and to deter Baghdad from menacing its neighbors.
Mr. Bush's new deployment order substantially tightens the pressure on the radical Taliban rulers, who learned earlier this week from Pakistani emissaries that they face an all-out U.S. attack unless they turn over bin Laden.
Three carriers off the coast of Pakistan would provide more than 200 warplanes for an attack, plus hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles on surface ships and attack submarines.
The Enterprise had completed its tour in the region, but was kept in place after terrorists hijacked four airliners, flying two into New York's World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.
The air armada assembling in the region could be further reinforced by two types of heavy bomber: the B-2 based at Whitman Air Force Base, Mo., and B-52s, which could be prepositioned on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. The B-2, made of radar-absorbing materials, carries satellite-guided bombs. The B-52 drops gravity bombs and fires the precise Air Launched Cruise Missile.
Pakistan has agreed to a U.S. request to let the military use its airspace for possible attacks on Afghanistan. It is also favorably disposed to letting warplanes use its airfields, a luxury that would cut down on mission time and the need to constantly refuel fighter-bombers.
When President Clinton authorized Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on a bin Laden hideout in 1998, he did not seek permission to use Pakistani airspace beforehand.
But this time, the Bush administration is planning for a more sustained attack on the Taliban regime. Afghanistan is, in may ways, a desolate place with few high-value targets. But the Taliban's militia-style army does hold MiG fighters, surface-to-air missiles, radars, tanks, helicopters and airfields - all of which could be attacked. The Pentagon could also target bin Laden's homes, hideouts and training camps.
A Pentagon spokesman told reporters, "The United States is repositioning some of its military forces where required to prepare for and support the president's campaign against terrorism and to support efforts to identify, locate and hold accountable terrorists and those who support and harbor them."
Mr. Bush has declared war on international terrorists in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack. He said in recent days that part of his strategy for catching perpetrators such as bin Laden is to smoke them out of hiding places so they can be caught.
Military officials say a sustained bombing campaign against Afghanistan may force bin Laden and his operatives to move. Someone might spot them and relay his location to the United States via Pakistan's intelligence ties.
Special operations forces on the Pakistani border could then spring into action to try to find the fugitive. Bin Laden already stands indicted by a federal grand jury for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Military officials say it is likely that commandos from Fort Bragg, N.C., home to the Delta Force insertion team, already have deployed overseas.
Mr. Rumsfeld is restricting public information on planned troop deployments. The Navy has refused to give the exact location of the Carl Vinson or Enterprise. Yesterday's announcement did not specify where the added warplanes will deploy.
"There are movements, and you will see more movements," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told reporters. "I hope everyone understands, I'm sure the American people understand, why we do not want to reveal the details of those movements to people who may be trying to figure out what we're about to do next."
He added, "I think we're going into a campaign and, with the enormous will and resources of the American people behind it, we will win."
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Bush to Seek Nation's Support Tonight Battle Called 'A War of Will and Mind'
By Steven Mufson and Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59319-2001Sep19?language=printer
President Bush will seek to rally domestic support for a battle on terrorism in a televised speech to Congress at 9 p.m. today in which he is expected to detail the threat posed by alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden while seeking to reassure an anxious public.
Bush aides said the president will describe efforts the administration will make to stimulate the economy, stabilize the airline industry, improve airline safety and head off future attacks. But national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said he will also underscore the potential sacrifices that will be necessary in "a very long campaign" that could be as much "a war of will and mind" as of armies and beachheads.
After meeting with congressional leaders yesterday, Bush said he would use his second speech to Congress since becoming president to "urge our fellow Americans to go back to work and to work hard." But he said he would also emphasize that "we must be on alert" while the government works hard to "run down every lead, every opportunity to find someone who would want to hurt any American."
Bush and senior administration officials spent another day lining up international support for military, financial and economic actions that the president said would be designed to locate terrorist leaders, "get them out of their caves, get them moving, cut off their finances." Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri and the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Germany and Russia were in Washington for consultations.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said that "in combating international terrorism, no means can be excluded, including the use of force." But he said Russia had not discussed with the Bush administration any specific military actions.
Ivanov told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that Russia would not object if the United States sought to enlist former Soviet republics in Central Asia for the campaign against bin Laden despite some recent opposition from leaders in Moscow, according to a senior State Department official. Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan could provide important bases and logistical support for any military campaign in neighboring Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage met with Russian officials in Moscow to discuss joint efforts and intelligence-sharing against Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which has harbored bin Laden for five years. Ivanov said the two countries had already exchanged information.
On other diplomatic fronts, the administration sought to bolster support from India and Pakistan and took steps designed to combat money-laundering by terrorist organizations. The action against terrorist financial transactions came as U.S. financial regulators and market officials confirmed they are looking into the possibility that the groups that launched last week's attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center sought to profit from their crimes by placing bets against stocks they knew would drop as a result of the attacks.
Cementing Pakistan's cooperation in the campaign against bin Laden is a key goal of U.S. policymakers, and to that end, the State Department is considering easing sanctions on the Islamabad government. The House will hold a classified hearing on the subject today and meet with senators tomorrow.
Although Bush has not yet made a decision, administration officials favor waiving three sets of sanctions imposed on Pakistan because of its development and testing of nuclear weapons. U.S. officials support at the same time lifting sanctions placed on India in 1998 after its nuclear weapons tests.
The Bush administration was already moving toward easing the restrictions on Pakistan and India this fall, but a senior administration official said the process assumed an "added urgency" after U.S. officials began charting a response to the terrorist attacks last week.
"It's a no-brainer," a State Department official said. "It's pretty obvious. If we want Pakistan to help us, they're going to have to have certain things."
Bush yesterday praised Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for taking a "bold position" by agreeing to assist the United States in efforts to strike at bin Laden. Although many officials doubt Pakistan's determination to follow through on its promises, Bush said, "We'll give the president a chance to perform."
A formal decision on lifting sanctions on Pakistan will come after Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman consults key members of Congress, including those serving on intelligence and international affairs committees, and reports to the White House and Powell.
Once the sanctions are lifted, Pakistan would be allowed to buy weapons and other military equipment from U.S. companies. That would help address Pakistan's need to obtain spare parts for its arsenal, much of which is American-made. Before the restrictions were tightened in 1998 after Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, Islamabad bought $40 million to $80 million of U.S. equipment each year, according to the State Department.
A presidential waiver of a law enacted by Congress to punish countries that contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons would also allow the United States to support aid to Pakistan from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
But Pakistan would still be subject to yet another set of sanctions, triggered when Musharraf ousted Nawaz Sharif, the democratically elected president, in 1999. The Foreign Assistance Act includes restrictions on economic aid to Pakistan and U.S. government financing of its military purchases. State Department and congressional officials expect those sanctions to remain in place until Pakistan holds new elections, scheduled for next year.
Administration and congressional officials continue to express concerns about Pakistan's involvement in weapons proliferation, but Capitol Hill sources say the calculations change significantly after the terrorist attacks. "We're expecting an imminent waiving of sanctions," a House staffer said.
"This is a campaign in which nations will contribute in a variety of ways," Bush said. "Some nations will be willing to join in a very overt way. Other nations will be willing to join by sharing information."
Meetings with foreign leaders will continue today when British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrives at the White House. One after another yesterday, the visitors expressed their solidarity with the United States.
"We share the pain, and we also share the burden now in fighting against this terrible danger," said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who met with both Bush and Powell yesterday. "We do not rule out any option."
After a helicopter tour yesterday of the World Trade Center site with New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, French President Jacques Chirac declared that France would "not stand aside" from the United States in its struggle. "Today, it was New York that was tragically struck," Chirac told reporters at the United Nations. "But tomorrow it may be Paris, Berlin or London."
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Faisal vowed to help in ridding the world of "the scourge of terrorism," and sources said that on Monday, Saudi Arabia delivered background reports requested by the FBI. But while he said the United States and its allies should "identify the guilty and pursue them mercilessly," he also cautioned that "it is not vengeance that the world wants. It is justice."
Some American conservatives fretted that the administration's eagerness to assemble a coalition might dampen its appetite for military action. The Project for the New American Century, a conservative group, sent Bush a letter urging him to make the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein part of the campaign against terrorism.
"Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism," said the letter, which was signed by commentators William Kristol and Robert Kagan, as well as William Bennett and Richard Perle, head of Bush's advisory defense policy board.
Staff writer Mike Allen and special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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U.S. Sends 'Big Stick' From Norfolk Carrier Roosevelt Sails With Overwhelming Firepower -- and an Unclear Mission
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59622-2001Sep19?language=printer
ABOARD THE USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, Sept. 19 -- This aircraft carrier, built during the Cold War, headed today into a new kind of war against a far more elusive foe.
Thousands of sailors lined the decks in their dress whites as the ship pulled away from the pier at Naval Station Norfolk. Loved ones wept and the loudspeakers played "New York, New York" in homage to one of the cities attacked last week.
But in an address shortly before the 10 a.m. departure, Navy Secretary Gordon R. England made clear that this mission, though long scheduled, has taken on a new and terrible urgency in the aftermath of last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
"We are learning once again that freedom, liberty and the American way of life are not a birthright," England said. "It is time for us to pick up the mantle to destroy terrorism and remove this cancer."
The Roosevelt led a parade of land, sea and air power into the Atlantic Ocean. The group's 12 surface ships and two attack submarines that are scheduled to travel together over the next six months would stretch more than 1 1/2 miles if set end to end.
About 5,500 sailors, Marines and fliers are aboard the Roosevelt, nicknamed "The Big Stick" for the famous quote from the ship's namesake: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." The battle group is headed to the Mediterranean, then the Persian Gulf -- or so goes the plan now. But the real destination is into America's war on terrorism, wherever that takes them.
"If you're a terrorist, you should stand by, because the TR battle group is on its way," said Lt. j.g. John Lynch, 28, who flies an F-14 Tomcat. "Start digging a deeper hole."
Amid the bravado of the first day of deployment is a palpable undercurrent of anxiety. It's hard to fight a war, even the most gung-ho warriors here say, if you don't know who the enemy is.
Included in today's deployment are the Roosevelt, the amphibious attack ship USS Bataan, two cruisers, a destroyer, a frigate, two attack subs and more. Three more destroyers are following later, bringing the battle group to 14 vessels capable of carrying more than 150 planes and helicopters.
Many of those aircraft rumbled on and off the deck of the Roosevelt today with a terrific roar and blast of heat and exhaust.
Yet the firepower will matter little if the nation's leaders can't draw a bull's-eye on an appropriate target. The Roosevelt, for all its enormous destructive force, is something of a holdover from an age when the nation's enemies also had navies and fighter planes and military installations to bomb.
"It's absolutely different," said Rear Adm. Mark P. Fitzgerald, commander of the battle group. "The war we're fighting is not necessarily a military war."
It will be fought, he said, through politics and economics and, perhaps most of all, through shrewd intelligence-gathering. Only then will the Roosevelt's job be clear. "We're still trying to sift through this information and see who's the guilty bastards here," said Fitzgerald.
Fear ran deep among the families who said goodbye to the crew of the Roosevelt this morning. Hundreds gathered at the pier for a final hug, a kiss on the cheek, a wrenching, teary farewell.
"They say carriers are protected, but airplanes flew into buildings. Who's to say one's not going to fly into the deck?" said Shelly Mills, 29, who came with her two children to see her husband off.
But many also said that however painful it was, they were proud to see them go. Some had a nagging sense that the nation didn't respond with enough force after previous terrorist attacks, particularly the bombing of the USS Cole, also based here. Seventeen people died in that attack in Yemen last year.
"I'm very worried something might happen, but I'm willing to risk that," said Kara Burkholder, 20, whose husband, an electrician, was leaving today. "I see these missing people and the firefighters who have died. At least they didn't die in vain. Maybe if we did more for the Cole, this wouldn't have happened."
Once the ship was underway, life fell into the rhythms of a carrier at sea. There were duties to attend to, lunch to eat, gadgets to buy, e-mail to send.
Teams of sailors in brightly colored shirts and vests moved in a martial ballet, helping F-14s and F-18s touch down on the rolling 4 1/2-acre deck, then take off again. And again. And again.
"Our main worry is getting aircraft on the deck. Get 'em out there, and let them fight," said Master Chief Jose Barba, 40.
His purple shirt signified his role: refueling craft. Every task -- manning the catapult, handling the ordnance, directing the planes -- had a color.
In bright green was Cmdr. Robert A. Willen, 45, the air wing maintenance officer, who has seen action from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf.
Even after 28 years in the Navy, he was a little scared. "I don't think this is going to be a little, simple thing like Desert Storm or Grenada," Willen said. "I'm more scared for the uncertainty in our country. When you see close air support flying around our nation's capital and New York City, you really wonder what you're up against."
Despite that fear -- or perhaps because of it -- there was an unmistakable sense of purpose about today's deployment that ran up and down the ranks. The average age of the sailors and Marines aboard ship is 21. It is the first deployment for many. But they say they are ready for whatever duty calls.
"I don't hope for the killing or anything," said Marine Pvt. Anthony Wilson, 22. "I just hope for justice. If that means war, war it is."
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Warplanes Begin Deploying to Gulf,
Central Asia Air Power To Team With Special Forces
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59306-2001Sep19?language=printer
American warplanes began flying overseas from U.S. bases yesterday as the Pentagon ordered dozens of fighters, bombers and other aircraft to the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and -- in an unprecedented move -- the two former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Defense Department officials said.
In the military's first concrete steps toward war, the aircraft being deployed under what the Pentagon dubbed "Operation Infinite Justice" include F-15E fighter-bombers, F-16 fighters, B-1 long-range bombers, E-3 AWACS airborne command-and-control aircraft, refuelers and other support aircraft, officials said.
Several additional waves of deployments are expected as the buildup continues, according to Pentagon planners. "There are movements, and you will see more movements," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters. "It's going to be big," added an Air Force officer. "The president has to decide how big."
The movement of the U.S. warplanes is the first step in fleshing out the rhetoric that President Bush and his senior officials have used in recent days to describe the scope and duration of their planned counterattack on terrorism.
Between the Air Force and the Navy, the United States already has enough air power in the Persian Gulf region to carry out what the Pentagon calls a major theater war. The additional forces now being deployed will mean that it can attack any country in the Eastern Hemisphere, while still continuing its patrols of the "no-fly" zones over Iraq's north and south imposed at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Pentagon planners said the aircraft will provide cover for U.S. Special Forces missions out of Pakistan against alleged terrorists and countries that support them, beginning with Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington who is believed to be living in Afghanistan. The aircraft will also be in position to conduct airstrikes against the militaries and government infrastructures of countries believed to harbor or support terrorists, they said.
Bush has not issued orders on how to use the aircraft, but the planes have already begun to move overseas to provide him flexibility, officials said. "The whole thing is complex," said one officer. "It's still evolving." But, he added, the basic plan is "a mix of Special Forces and air power . . . with a lot of forces in position to do a lot of different operations over an extended period."
The president appeared to allude to the two-step nature of the offensive being contemplated when he told reporters at the White House yesterday, "One of our focuses is to get people out of their caves -- smoke 'em out, and get 'em moving, and get 'em."
According to Pentagon officials, Special Forces would stage attacks against suspected terrorist hideouts -- in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere -- and then airstrikes would be used against the terrorists as they moved to more vulnerable locations.
Pentagon officials have hinted repeatedly that they are contemplating military action against locations other than Afghanistan. "This is about more than just one country," Wolfowitz said. In the same vein, Bush said, "Anybody who houses a terrorist, encourages terrorism, will be held accountable."
The first aircraft left yesterday for bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in addition to the two Central Asian nations. They will join several hundred U.S. aircraft already based in the Gulf region. Since the war against Iraq, the United States has kept about 20,000 troops in the region, with 5,000 in Saudia Arabia, about that number in Kuwait, and about 10,000 aboard Navy ships. It has dozens of fighters and other aircraft in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and keeps enough tanks, artillery pieces and trucks in Kuwait to outfit an Army brigade.
The deployment of U.S. warplanes to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where Russia still has thousands of troops, is unprecedented and is likely to be logistically difficult, given their remote location just to the north of Afghanistan. It underscores how last week's attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are reshaping America's relations with nations across the globe.
It also could have important effects in the Central Asia region. The willingness of the former Soviet republics to accept U.S. forces will increase the pressure on Pakistan, Afghanistan's southern neighbor, to follow suit and also permit the U.S. military to operate from its soil.
In a speech yesterday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf indicated that the cooperation of other nations has made it more difficult for him to refuse to have a U.S. military presence in Pakistan. "Some countries have very happily offered their military facilities to America," Musharraf said. Singling out India, Pakistan's historic enemy, he added, "They have happily offered all their resources, and they are happy for Pakistan to be declared a terrorist state."
The presence of F-15 fighter-bombers in predominantly Muslim Central Asia will likely reduce political pressure on Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Air Force is planning to run its end of the war from Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The Air Force opened the world's most advanced air operations center at the base this summer. It can control the movements of hundreds of aircraft over an area of thousands of miles. One of bin Laden's major objections to U.S. foreign policy is the presence of the American military in Saudi Arabia, which is home to two of Islam's holiest sites.
Russia is not opposed to the cooperation of the former Soviet states, a State Department official said yesterday after talks between senior U.S. and Russian officials in the Washington and Moscow.
Air Force officials said operating out of Uzbekistan would have other advantages, such as allowing the military to tighten what it calls "operational security" by flying from remote bases where the media won't be allowed. "We can put aircraft there where CNN can't film them taking off," said one officer.
Air Force officials were irate during the 1999 Kosovo war when television networks broadcast live images of aircraft taking off from the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy. One officer denounced the television networks as "forward observers for the Serbs."
Meanwhile, additional U.S. forces began to move toward the Mideast yesterday as the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt sailed from Norfolk, carrying about 75 aircraft. It is expected to join the two other U.S. carriers already in the region.
In addition, about 1,500 Marines with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit are scheduled to depart Camp Lejeune, N.C., today for a regularly scheduled mission in the Arabian Sea.
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Army ready for full-scale land combat
USA TODAY
09/20/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/20/army-ready.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army is ready to conduct "sustained land combat operations" as part of President Bush's promised war against terrorism, the Army's top civilian official said Thursday. Army Secretary Thomas E. White told reporters at the Pentagon that a troop deployment order signed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Wednesday includes Army as well as Air Force troops. He said it was only the first step in a broader military plan that would unfold in the weeks ahead. "A lot more will come," he said.
White declined to say which Army forces are included in the initial deployment, but he made clear that his service is gearing up for a lengthy war that would involve every aspect of the Army's combat power.
"We are ready to conduct sustained land combat operations as determined by the secretary of defense and the president," White said.
"We are ready to deliver it across the whole array of force structure - heavy, light, airmobile, airborne, special operations. All of the combat capabilities."
On Wednesday, officials disclosed that the Air Force is taking the first steps to dispatch dozens of warplanes to the Persian Gulf area, setting in motion "Operation Infinite Justice" for the promised war on terrorism.
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Wednesday, "The United States is repositioning some of its forces to support the president's goal." She would not elaborate.
Senior defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said combat aircraft, including F-16 Fighting Falcons and F-15 Eagles, will be preceded by Air Force airlift control teams from bases in California and New Jersey.
The airlift control teams will establish what the Air Force calls an "air bridge," coordinating ground communications to match up refueling aircraft with fighters and, later, bombers crossing the Atlantic.
It probably will take about a week to get the combat planes in position, one official said.
In the interview Thursday, White said Army special operations forces, such as Rangers and Green Berets, almost certainly will play an important role in the war on terrorism, although he declined to be specific.
"I am sure that this campaign will involve them, and they are ready to go," he said.
Some officials involved in the military planning want Bush to target Iraq, but advisers close to the president say Saddam Hussein is not an initial target. Bush wants to strike Osama bin Laden and his alleged terrorist network, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
However, the Bush administration has put the world on notice that any nation - including Iraq - harboring terrorists could be the focus of U.S. strikes down the line.
The Sept. 11 terror strikes that demolished the World Trade Center towers and one side of the Pentagon were direct attacks on the United States, Rumsfeld said Thursday on NBC's "Today."
"The only way to deal with that kind of attack is in self-defense to go after the terrorists that are perpetrating those crimes and we must also go after the nations that are harboring and financing and supporting and facilitating and tolerating these terrorists," Rumsfeld said.
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.
Just before the carrier left Norfolk Naval Station, the Navy secretary, Gordon England, gave the sailors a pep talk.
"We're learning once again that freedom and liberty and the American way of life are not a birthright," he said. "It is time for us to pick up the mantle to destroy terrorism and remove this cancer."
The deployment from Norfolk includes more than 15,000 sailors and Marines, including 2,100 Marines aboard a battle-ready unit known as an Amphibious Ready Group, led by the assault ship USS Bataan.
The Theodore Roosevelt battle group includes two attack submarines, the USS Hartford and the USS Springfield, both capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The Navy already has one carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf - the USS Carl Vinson - and a second, the USS Enterprise, is in the Arabian Sea to the south.
Sending land-based Air Force jet fighters to the Gulf would give the Pentagon leeway to move the Carl Vinson into the Arabian Sea, closer to Afghanistan, while maintaining enough aircraft to continue enforcing the "no fly" zone over southern Iraq. Airplanes aboard the Vinson have been making those patrols.
The United States is welcoming offers of military support from allies and friendly nations. Britain already has substantial forces in the Persian Gulf area as part of a long-planned joint exercise with Oman. This includes an aircraft carrier, four frigates, two destroyers, other ships and group troops. The Ministry of Defense says it is Britain's largest naval deployment since the 1982 Falklands War.
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Chinese Working Overtime to Sew U.S. Flags
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59580-2001Sep19?language=printer
SHANGHAI -- As America wraps its wounds in red, white and blue, flag factories in China are running nonstop to feed the overwhelming demand in the United States for the Stars and Stripes.
At the Shanghai Mei Li Hua Flags Co., office director Wu Guomin has received orders for more than 500,000 flags from customers in the United States in the week since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. "I guess because we make so many of these things you could say we feel a little closer to the situation there," Wu said as he fingered an American flag. "We're working day and night."
The Jin Teng Flag Co. in neighboring Zhejiang province reported orders of 600,000. "It's crazy and very, very sad," said Jin Teng, the factory owner. "Everyone is on overtime trying to satisfy demand."
Jin and Wu said that even with China's National Day fast approaching on Oct. 1, they have stopped making Chinese flags so that they can fill U.S. orders.
"We've been presented with an opportunity to make a lot more money than we usually do making these flags," said Wu, whose factory sells medium-size flags to U.S. distributors for about $1 apiece. "But we won't take it. We really didn't want to make too much of a profit on other people's sadness."
At the Shanghai plant, Fei Xiaohua, a laborer, was sewing a 6-by-9-foot flag. "This is my 50th so far today," she said, her fingers working nimbly. "Sometimes I don't like this job. But this time, what I'm doing seems worth it."
It is unclear what percentage of U.S. flags are made in China, but as with all textiles, the numbers have boomed in recent years. China produces more shoes and clothes for the U.S. market than any other country. In a few years, China will become the biggest producer of computer parts for the U.S. market as well.
The flag business illustrates the increasingly close trade ties between China and the United States, valued last year at more than $100 billion. Those ties are expected to expand with China's imminent accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). China moved a giant step forward toward that goal last weekend when the organization generally agreed on its conditions for entry.
"WTO should provide a great opportunity for us," said Wu, a suave 44-year-old manager. "Right now, no one around the world can really compete with us flag makers. We have good machines and rock-bottom labor costs."
Wu and Jin said they hoped Americans would not mind that Chinese were making their flags. The manufacture of such patriotic symbols has caused trouble in the past. Following the April 1 collision of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese jet fighter off China's southern coast, the Pentagon canceled contracts to outfit Army soldiers with a "Made in China" black beret.
China, too, has used trade as a lever in relations with Washington, expressing occasional discontent with U.S. policies by cozying up to Europe's Airbus Industries instead of Boeing Co. But this time, in the days following the disaster, as the global airline market crashed, China repeated its commitment to buy 30 Boeing 737s, making it one of the world's bright spots for aviation firms.
"We are living in a really global world right now," said Wu. "It's natural that China manufactures simple things for the whole world. We have a manufacturing economy."
But Sun Zhenyu, a top trade official, warned today that China's export growth, a key element in China's economy, will likely face a serious threat for the remainder of the year, according to the official New China News Agency. Already, Chinese travel agents are reporting hundreds of cancellations.
"The U.S. economy is already bad, surely this will affect the global economy, including China," Sun said.
-------- energy
Auspine, AusPower eye biomass power plant
AUSTRALIA: September 20, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12466/newsDate/20-Sep-2001/story.htm
MELBOURNE - Forestry group Auspine Ltd and electricity retailer AusPower said yesterday they would jointly fund a due diligence study on a A$110 million biomass-fueled power generator in south-east South Australia.
AusPower is the retail business of Yallourn Energy, which is majority owned by CLP Power International .
Auspine managing director Adrian de Bruin said the project was expected to produce 60 megawatts of electricity using forestry and sawmilling residues as the main source of fuel.
"While our feasibility studies have indicated this is a viable project, the due diligence process will closely examine the engineering and commercial aspects," he said.
CLP Power Australia has been named as Auspine's preferred joint venture partner, with a joint venture to be finalised if the due diligence is successful.
Auspine said it hoped to begin construction early next year, with first power targeted for summer 2003. Under the proposal AusPower would purchase the electricity from the plant to meet its renewable energy needs.
The federal government earlier this year introduced legislation requiring electricity retailers to source an extra 9,500 gigawatt hours of renewable energy by 2010.
Auspine general manager green energy Michael Young said the proposed plant would be entitled to earn renewable energy certificates that would become increasingly valuable due to the rising demand for renewable energy.
The plant, planned for Tarpeena near Mount Gambier, would burn about 600,000 tonnes of biomass a year, most of it sourced from Auspine plantation forestry and sawmill operation residues.
Young said talks were also underway to source waste material discarded from state government-owned pine forests.
Auspine shares closed up 15 cents at A$2.35, while the broader market was up 0.82 percent.
-------- imf / world bank
GLOBAL DOLLARS
I.M.F. Bankers Get Ready to Give Pakistan a Loan
New York Times
September 20, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/international/asia/20FUND.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - The International Monetary Fund is prepared to go ahead with a sizable loan for Pakistan and is closely monitoring the financial situation in Turkey as it seeks to counter a world economic slowdown and support front- line states in the battle against terrorism, officials said today.
"We have reviewed the situation and agreed" with the United States "that we need to closely monitor the situation and discuss what could be done if things get worse," said Horst Köhler, the managing director of the Washington-based lending agency.
Fund officials often resist providing aid for political reasons, and Mr. Köhler said today that the decision was not a response to last week's terrorist attacks. But the United States is the fund's single largest shareholder, with Europe and Japan close behind, so the fund tends to make loans to support their top diplomatic priorities.
Along with its sister agency, the World Bank, the I.M.F. has far more money available - about $93 billion - than the United States or other wealthy countries to lend to poor countries and help finance its aid programs.
Pakistan has become crucial to the American campaign to root out Osama bin Laden, the leading suspect is the terrorist attacks. Turkey is a NATO ally that straddles Europe and the Middle East and joined the United States during the Persian Gulf war.
I.M.F. officials acknowledge that Pakistan, which has had unstable governments and a deep-rooted corruption problem, has often failed to meet goals set when the I.M.F. lends it money. Poor performance often causes the fund to reject a new round of aid.
But Mr. Köhler said today that Pakistan had recently begun performing better under an existing loan package, making it likely that discussion about a new antipoverty loan would prove fruitful. A Pakistani delegation is expected to visit Washington to discuss the matter shortly.
Officials said it was too early to say how much money Pakistan might receive. But in 1997 Pakistan received a multiyear loan designed to alleviate poverty that totaled nearly $900 million.
In recent months, Turkey has received emergency aid packages from the I.M.F. to shore up its troubled economy. Mr. Köhler said that he still hoped that aid would prove sufficient, but that a recent spike in interest rates there "signals that the problem is not yet solved." He said a mission to that country would assess whether new aid was necessary.
More broadly, Mr. Köhler said that the fund, which will release its detailed World Economic Outlook next week, still expects the United States economy will turn up by the end of this year. He also said he expects that the world economy will avoid slipping into recession. The fund considers overall world growth of 2.5 percent or less to be a recession.
His forecast is far more optimistic than that of many private-sector economists, many of whom say they believe that the United States has already slipped into recession and that output will decline sharply in the fourth quarter.
Allen Sinai of Decision Economics said he did not see "how you avoid the conclusion that both the United States and the world are headed for - and area probably already in - a full recession."
While he declined to provide specific projections, Mr. Köhler said his optimistic forecast was based on his conclusion that the economic fundamentals in the United States and many other nations are more resilient than they have been in past crises.
Few leading economies now have large budget deficits or high inflation, for example, while most world currencies float freely, all of which the I.M.F. considers vital to sustaining economic growth.
He warned, however, that both Europe and Japan should take fresh steps to stimulate their economies and not wait for the United States to pull them out of their downturns.
Japan, Mr. Köhler said, must be more aggressive about combating deflation by buying back government debt and injecting more money into the economy. He said the Japanese authorities also must demonstrate that they intend to tackle their nonperforming loan problem aggressively.
-------- police / prisoners
THE SUSPECTS
Saudis and Indians Cast Doubts on Identities of Accused
September 20, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/20WIRE-SUSPECTS.html
Officials in both Saudi Arabia and India are saying that some of the men detained in connection with the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York were traveling under false passports, casting doubts on the indentities reported American law enforcement.
Saudis say their nation has been unfairly accused because their compatriots' names have been broadcast around the world as suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York.
``I wouldn't be surprised if I see my picture (on television) or my name on the FBI list tomorrow,'' Majed al-Jehani, a former Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot who said he trained in Florida, said Thursday.
U.S investigators have said several of the suspected hijackers who crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had learned to fly in Florida. The FBI identified 19 men as suspected hijackers on a list that has been widely reported.
Saudi government officials and media are on the defensive, arguing that suspects are being publicly accused without sufficient proof, that some of those fingered may have had their passports or other identification stolen by the real culprits, or that the names being publicized are so common that many innocent people are coming under suspicion.
``Until now we haven't seen any proof whatsoever that can tell us who is actually responsible,'' an Information Ministry official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Attempts by The Associated Press to interview Saudis who say they were named as suicide hijackers have failed, reportedly because they have been instructed by Saudi authorities not to talk to the press. But that prohibition apparently does not apply to the Saudi press, which is closely monitored by the government.
The Saudi paper al-Medina quoted Saudi pilot Waleed Alshehri, who is currently abroad on a training course, as saying that he will file a case against CNN for slandering him.
Alshehri's father, a Saudi Foreign Ministry diplomat, Ahmed Alshehri, complained to al-Medina of an ``obvious American haphazardness in throwing accusations at innocent people,'' saying that ``many of those mentioned as suspects appeared to be still around and there was no truth in what was spread about them.''
The FBI list includes both a Wail Alshehri, about whom little information has been divulged, and a Waleed M. Alshehri, said to be a pilot from Saudi Arabia. The FBI said both were on American Airlines Flight 11, one of two planes that crashed into New York's World Trade Center in the series of attacks on Sept. 11.
Al-Medina also said an Abdulaziz Alomari, an employee of Saudi Telecom, also planned to file a case against CNN ``for not verifying what it airs.''
Alomari said he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
The FBI named an Abdulaziz Alomari as a hijacker on Flight 11.
Al Sharq al-Awsat newspaper reported that Saeed Alghamdi, a Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot currently in Tunisia for training, saw his photo aired and heard himself identified as a possible hijacker on CNN. He said CNN cautioned that the picture might not be of the prime suspect.
``For sure they got (the photograph) from the flight safety school in Florida'' where Saudi Arabian Airlines sent him for training between 1998-1999, Alghamdi told the newspaper in a telephone interview from Tunisia.
The FBI said an Ahmed Alghamdi was on United Airlines Flight 175, which also crashed into the World Trade Center.
Saudi media are responding to a campaign of ``false information,'' said Turki al-Saudairi, editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language daily Al Riyadh.
``If in the end some of our countrymen are found responsible, we will not stand by them, but if they are innocent then we will back them until the end,'' the editor said.
Meanwhile police in southern India said that two Indian Muslims arrested in Texas as material witnesses had obtained passports with false information, and one of them was traveling under an alias.
Mohammed Jaweed Azmat and Ayub Ali Khan were detained a day after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI said they were found with $5,000 in cash, hair dye and box cutters of the type used by hijackers of at least one of the planes crashed in the attacks.
Indian police investigating the suspects' backgrounds said Khan's real name was Gul Mohammed Shah and that both men were actually 32 years old. U.S. officials had reported, based on the false passports, that Khan was 51, and Azmat, 47.
Gul Mohammed Shah obtained a passport with his real name in 1981 but in December 1992 applied for a new one under the name of Ayub Ali Khan. In both passports, he gave different names for his parents and different addresses.
Azmat had two passports, issued in 1984 and 1991, giving false names for his parents and different dates of birth, police said. U.S. officials have given the spelling of his name as Azmath.
Police in Hyderabad, capital of India's southern Andhra Pradesh state, have filed fraud charges against the two men, said S. Umapathy, deputy police commissioner.
Azmat and Khan had tried to fly from New Jersey to Texas on the day of the attacks and, when their plane was grounded in Missouri, continued by train. They were arrested in Fort Worth, on their way to San Antonio, where another man has also been detained in the case.
They were declared material witnesses and have since been taken to New York, where a federal grand jury has been convened to weigh evidence and issue subpoenas.
Gul Mohammed Khan, a younger brother of Ayub Ali Khan, said the two had left for the United States nine years ago with Indian passports and valid U.S. work permits.
Meanwhile, the U.S. ambassador in India, Robert Blackwill, called off a meeting Thursday with New Delhi's chief Muslim cleric after the cleric described the terrorist strikes against the United States as ``divine wrath'' for ``tyrannical'' U.S. policies.
In the two-page statement, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, head cleric of New Delhi's Jama Masjid mosque, also warned of a backlash if the United States avenges the attacks and said India could also face consequences for its offer to help Washington.
Blackwill met a group of Muslim leaders Thursday, but Bukhari was dropped from the list of those invited, embassy officials said.
--------
5-Year-Old Boy Mistaken For Terrorist
Local Boy Has Same Name As One Of Attack Suspects
September 20, 2001
NewsNet5
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/966728/detail.html
AKRON, Ohio, FBI agents went to a local family's home Tuesday in hopes of finding a terrorist connected with last week's attacks.
NewsChannel5's Jonathan Costen reports that it was a case of mistaken identity.
About 10 a.m. Tuesday, Ribhi Kahook's wife said that she got a visit from the FBI.
The agents were looking for Mohammad Atta, a suspect in the World Trade Center terrorism.
"And when she asked them what she could do to help, they asked for Mohammad Atta," Kahook said. "That's when she laughed; she knew what they were looking for."
A woman who lives in the house, Yusera Atta, said that a Mohammad Atta did live in the house -- he's her son (pictured, above). But he's only 5 years old, and just started kindergarten this year.
"Obviously, you're surprised when the FBI comes to your house, but I thought they were the government. I thought they would know he's 5 years old," his mother said.
The family said that the agents wouldn't leave until they saw the boy's birth certificate and papers on his father.
A robber had gunned down the boy's father, Abdul Atta, about a year ago inside an Akron store.
The FBI wouldn't deny or confirm going to their home, but an agent said that they're looking into every credible lead. The Atta family doesn't blame them.
"We understand the government -- they need to check everything out, because what happened was a big deal, and it wasn't something small," Yusera said. "So obviously they have to check everything to make sure everything is accurate."
The family said that the 5-year-old boy wasn't home when the agents arrived and that he doesn't seem to be fazed by the attention.
-------- spying
THE ESPIONAGE BUSINESS
Surge of New Technologies Erodes U.S. Edge in Spying
New York Times
September 20, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/national/20SPY.html
For decades, the United States used its technical expertise to gather electronic signals and eavesdrop on the intimate conversations of its adversaries, including Kremlin leaders in their limousines. Fleets of satellites blanketed the globe, overhearing all manner of signals, messages and conversations, day and night.
But the experts say the rapid growth of commercially available technologies is fast eroding the government's edge. New computer power gives wide access to unbreakable or virtually unbreakable codes. Fiber-optic lines give off no electronic emanations that can be gathered. Even radio waves, the spy's best friend, are evading capture as radios hop frequencies almost randomly to outwit eavesdroppers.
The nation's declining ability to listen surreptitiously to global communications may turn out to have been a major reason there was little or no warning of hijackers intent on turning commercial jets into flying bombs, security experts say.
To be sure, they add, the communications revolution also offers new opportunities for spying, like snooping on cellphones. And Washington has embarked on an aggressive if quiet campaign to research, design and acquire equipment to sharpen its espionage edge.
But on balance, experts say, the intelligence losses outweigh the gains and will for some time.
"The government is trying to close the barn door," said Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University who was on the staff of the Senate intelligence committee for eight years. "The horse left a long time ago. And it's not coming back."
A longtime federal official whose work relies on the fruits of technical espionage agreed.
"It's getting harder each year to pick up what we need," the official said. "Our potential adversaries are on the verge of denying access."
Moreover, intelligence experts say, the government is short of seasoned analysts and new ones lack such essential skills as knowledge of foreign languages. Also, they say, while infiltration is theoretically the best approach to terrorist cells, in practice it is often impossible to achieve, especially among zealots intent on martyrdom.
In the last few years, federal officials have pleaded on Capitol Hill for legislative and financial aid to confront the new challenges.
For example, in testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Louis J. Freeh, who was then the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cited encryption technology used by Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who was captured in 1995. Mr. Freeh said that when the authorities seized Mr. Yousef's laptop computer, they found that it held information on a terrorist plot to blow up 11 American-owned airliners and that some of the files were encrypted.
This year, the push for more money produced a surge in federal spending, especially for the National Security Agency, which runs Washington's efforts to gather and decrypt global signals, though no figures have been made public.
But some experts say money, even large amounts, will not be enough.
"It seems improbable that the N.S.A. would ever recover the full margin of technology advantage," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington.
There are also privacy and civil rights issues. Michael P. Harden, a security expert who teaches computer ethics at the University of Maryland, said that the horror of last week's attacks would fuel public support for more government intrusion but that that would be difficult.
Judy Emmel, director of public affairs for the National Security Agency, said the agency would not comment on its intelligence capabilities or their bearing on the terror attacks, beyond saying that Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, the agency's director, has said it is as good as ever.
The United States military and national security agencies pioneered the fundamental computer science and electronic technology behind the government's cold war spy efforts. They made and lofted satellites that orbit 22,300 miles above the Equator, moving along with the rotating Earth to remain motionless relative to the ground. These "ears" scoop up electronic signals, including those from radar, radio, walkie-talkies and long- distance telephones.
But their targets are vanishing. Relay stations on the ground for commercial communication satellites and terrestrial microwave links have increasingly been replaced by fiber-optic lines, which are impossible to tap without a physical linkup.
Commercially available cryptography software often makes obtainable signals unreadable, or greatly increases the time it takes to decipher them. For a time, Washington fought the spread of such technology, refusing to grant export licenses. But in 1999, as companies abroad made cryptography strides and American industry pressured Washington, the Clinton administration announced plans to relax restrictions on exports of data-scrambling software.
A final barrier is the rising sophistication of radios. Those that hop frequencies,a technique known as spread spectrum developed by the military to dodge jamming, are nearly impossible to track and are now available in many models.
"You and I can buy the equipment very easily," said Steve F. Russell, an electrical engineer at Iowa State University who specializes in communications security. "Many companies market it around the world."
On Sept. 10, the day before the terror strikes, Federal Computer Week, an industry publication, reported that the National Security Agency was on a 15-year multibillion-dollar effort "to modernize the nation's cryptographic systems."
Now, though, some experts endorse old-fashioned methods. Robert Morris, a former chief scientist at the security agency, argues that intelligence agencies can make more use of of the three B's method: burglary, bribery and blackmail.
-------- terrorism
Ashcroft vows crackdown
September 20, 2001
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010920-1351924.htm
Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday said the terrorists who attacked America last week likely were "harbored, supported, sustained and protected" by unnamed foreign governments, and he vowed to "identify and punish" those involved.
Grim-faced following a tour of the heavily damaged Pentagon, Mr. Ashcroft said it was time governments who support terrorism "understand with crystal clarity" that the United States will not tolerate it.
"We will take every possible action to make sure that this kind of injury and assault on America and on its freedom does not happen again," he said.
Mr. Ashcroft did not identify any foreign governments as being involved. The State Department this year named Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, North Korea and Cuba as state sponsors of terrorism.
Yesterday, Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, said it suspected Iraqi terrorists were involved, including members of al Qaeda, the international terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden - the prime suspect in the attacks on Sept. 11. One hijacker, Mohammed Atta, suspected of being the pilot aboard the jet that slammed into the World Trade Center's north tower, recently met with Iraqi intelligence officials.
Meanwhile, an army of 4,000 FBI agents sought to strengthen the government's case against bin Laden, tracking thousands of leads and gathering evidence against a widening band of terrorists and their accomplices in the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The probe has focused on the 19 air pirates who commandeered four planes, including information on where they lived, worked, trained and with whom they associated, federal authorities said. Agents also want to know whether more than four aircraft were targeted in the scheme and, if so, what happened to those would-be terrorists.
The investigation also is centering on questions of who provided the financial and logistical support needed to pull off the attacks.
The FBI, authorities said, has significant evidence tying last week's attacks to bin Laden - based on intelligence data, information from witnesses, and evidence collected in raids on the homes, cars and businesses used by the hijackers. Most of the evidence gathered remains under seal. A federal grand jury in White Plains, N.Y., has been convened to review evidence and issue warrants.
FBI agents are still looking to question about 200 people believed to have information on the attacks. They are on a list of names sent to federal agencies, state and local authorities, the U.S. Border Patrol and the airlines. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has detained 75 others on immigration violations, all of whom are being questioned by the FBI.
While no foreign governments have been connected to the attacks, German intelligence officials yesterday said as many as 30 terrorist cells operate in that country, staffed by "sleeper agents" - many believed to have ties to bin Laden. They have identified about 3,250 of the country's 3.1 million Muslims as "potential extremists."
Last week, German police found what they called "airplane-related documents" in a suitcase belonging to one of the hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, who was aboard the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. They said Jarrah, Atta, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, another hijacker, were associated with an Islamic fundamentalist group in Hamburg that planned attacks on U.S. targets.
Mr. Ashcroft said it was "premature" to discuss what evidence had been gathered so far in the FBI probe, adding it was "far too early" to know whether the FBI's arrests of three Detroit men Tuesday night was "some sort of major breakthrough in the case."
Members of the FBI's terrorism task force, pursuing "a series of leads," arrested Karim Koubriti, 23, Ahmed Hannan, 33, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 21, on charges of fraud and possessing false documents after agents found airport-related diagrams and documents about a military base and an unnamed "American foreign minister" in a house they used.
A five-page FBI affidavit said agents recovered from the Detroit house "handwritten sketches of what appeared to be a diagram of an airport flight line, to include aircraft and runways." None was charged.
The agents had gone to the house looking for a man named on the list of 200 "suspects, potential associates of the suspects and potential witnesses," the affidavit said. Authorities believe some of the men worked for a company that provided food service to airlines at the Detroit airport. Detroit Metropolitan Airport identification badges for food service workers were taken from the house.
FBI agents continue to search for a fourth man in the Detroit area identified as Nabil Al-Marabh.
Among the 75 being detained by INS are four who also are being held on material witness warrants issued by the grand jury. They are:
• Ayub Ali Khan, 51, and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, 47, who were taken into custody in Texas after their flight from Newark, N.J., was grounded in St. Louis immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. They had $5,000 in cash and box cutters like those used by the hijackers when apprehended on an Amtrak train in Fort Worth.
• Habib Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Algerian who was detained last month after he sought flight training in Minnesota and Oklahoma. One of the schools became suspicious and called authorities when he offered to pay cash and inquired about learning to fly a Boeing plane. The man has been in custody since Aug. 17.
• Albader Alhazmi, 34, a Saudi national and Saudi-trained doctor who was doing a medical residency in radiology at University of Texas Health Science Center. He did not show up for work on Sept. 11.
--------
Terrorists network in cyberspace
September 20, 2001
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010920-32841968.htm
In the past nine days, the Internet has provided news, information and a sense of community to those who find solace in cyberspace.
E-mail, electronic greeting cards, bulletin boards and chat rooms were an immediate and effective panacea to the continuing instinct to check up on far-flung friends and family.
The global village has a photo album as well. Touching scenes from prayer vigils, rescue scenes and patriotic moments were the mainstay in several "bundles" of photographs that were widely circulated around the Internet.
There is a darker side as well.
The Internet also harbors a number of "jihad Web rings" that link Web sites sympathetic to a variety of terrorist causes. With unsettling irony, some feature pop-up ads for airlines, dating services, travel agents and shopping malls, among other merchandisers.
Internet providers are scurrying to shut down sites in violation of service policies that prohibit the promotion of violence. "Unwitting advertisers," according to Reuters news agency, are pulling their notices from the offending sites.
The Web presents other complexities.
In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, hundreds of new Internet domain names were registered containing "references to the terrorist attacks," notes Cybercast News Service.
But according to Neal Livingstone of Global Options, a D.C.-based counterterrorism and investigative group, 22 of these names may have been registered by those terrorists who planned and executed last Tuesday's siege on New York and Washington.
The disturbing names include "attackontwintowers.com," "worldtradetowerattack.com," "horrorinnewyork.com" and "pearlharborinmanhattan.com." Some were registered as far back as June 2000.
Three of the names contained dates: "august11horror.com," "august11terror.com" and "worldtradecenter929.com"
Mr. Livingstone, whose company provides Internet risk analysis for corporate clients, said an Internet domain-registration company had notified him about these suspicious name registrations because "the FBI had not been interested in the information."
Domain registration requires a credit card, billing address and other data that could benefit investigators following the paper trail of terrorists on these shores and beyond. The information, however, is not readily forthcoming. Companies that provide these domain names have strict privacy policies.
"We will not share such information with other third parties, except in response to formal requests (e.g. subpoenas or court orders) made in connection with litigation or arbitration proceedings," notes the privacy statement for Network Solutions, which is the world's largest registrar of domain names.
Mr. Livingstone would not reveal the source of his information and does not know the identity of those who registered the names. The names, he surmised, might be part of a greater propaganda campaign that never reached fruition.
-------
Ashcroft Presents Anti-Terrorism Plan to Congress
Lawmakers Promise Swift Action, Disagree on Extent of Measures
By John Lancaster and Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59050-2001Sep19?language=printer
Appealing for urgent action in the face of an undiminished terrorist threat, the Bush administration yesterday presented Congress with its proposed anti-terrorism package as lawmakers vowed to continue their bipartisan push for a swift response to last week's air assaults on New York and Washington.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft met with key Democrats and Republicans at the Capitol yesterday afternoon to discuss the measures, which would greatly enhance the government's ability to conduct domestic surveillance and keep suspected terrorists from entering the country.
After the meeting, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said the proposals had been well received and promised to work through the weekend with the aim of producing a mutually acceptable bill by the time his panel holds hearings on the matter next Tuesday.
Leahy cautioned, however, that Congress would not rubber-stamp the anti-terrorism proposals, which have already sparked concern among civil liberties groups and others who fear the measures outlined in Ashcroft's 21-page document would undermine the Constitution, especially with regard to immigrants' rights.
"If the Constitution is shredded, the terrorists win," Leahy told reporters after the meeting. "We want to do this carefully."
Despite such concerns, Leahy indicated that Congress could send the anti-terrorism measure to President Bush within a few weeks -- an expedited schedule that reflects the continuing sense of national emergency that has gripped the Capitol since the morning of Sept. 11. Besides the anti-terrorism package, lawmakers are scrambling to put together a multibillion-dollar bailout for the nation's airlines -- most of which are hemorrhaging cash in the aftermath of the disaster -- as well as an economic stimulus plan.
In the meantime, lawmakers are trying to avoid divisive battles over issues such as missile defense, either by resolving them quietly or putting them off until next year. Yesterday, congressional leaders held at least three bipartisan meetings, including one at the White House, and the Senate passed proposals authorizing war bonds. Earlier in the day, Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) urged his colleagues to withhold any troublesome amendments -- and withheld one of his own -- while managing debate on an annual spending bill for the Treasury Department, Postal Service and other agencies.
Today, senators from both parties plan to travel to New York together by train to see the destruction firsthand.
While acknowledging the need for haste, Democratic senators meeting yesterday afternoon with Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) expressed concern that too much of it could be counterproductive. "If there was any common theme here, it was that people want a high degree of prudence and caution as we go forward," said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).
In the House, aides from both parties said they expected the White House to work out budget disagreements -- a locus of intense partisan sniping until last week -- with Congress in a matter of weeks. Aside from the terrorism legislation and spending bills, they predicted, very little else was likely to make it through Congress this year. Some lawmakers also hold out hope for finishing work on Bush's education plan.
For all the talk of comity and cooperation among parties, some fissures have started to appear, especially with regard to measures aimed at sparking economic growth. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) told reporters yesterday afternoon that "there is very strong interest" among his colleagues for a cut in the capital gains tax; a few feet away, Dorgan told another group of reporters that other forms of stimulus, such as an investment tax credit, "would make more sense."
After meeting yesterday with Leahy and other key lawmakers, Ashcroft said there is "substantial agreement" between the Justice Department's proposals and a similar plan drafted by Leahy and his staff. Ashcroft said he had directed his legislative staff to work "round the clock" to close any gaps between the two versions by next Tuesday.
"I believe we need every tool that is available to us -- tools that respect the Constitution of the United States and the rights of American citizens," Ashcroft said.
The proposed legislation would provide law enforcement with more tools in several areas, including expanded electronic surveillance and the ability to detain suspects and deport immigrants. It also broadens or changes criminal procedures in terrorism cases, involving -- among other things -- subpoenas, search warrants and seizure of assets.
Some of the electronic surveillance provisions have been requested for years by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI during the Clinton administration, but met with congressional resistance and opposition in the technology community.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates from across the political spectrum say the bill has been sloppily put together and threatens long-established rights for American citizens. "It's almost McCarthyesque," said Shari Steele, executive director and president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "It appears the government is really afraid and opening up the ability to intrude into the private lives of American citizens."
Privacy advocates who read the draft were particularly alarmed at how the bill might lower the threshold for wiretaps and search orders for all cases, not just those involving terrorism. "They want [to] relax wiretap law generally, and this is a good opportunity," said Michael Godwin, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.
Leahy's proposals, which were released in summary form yesterday, are consistent with the Justice Department plan in some areas but do not go as far in others. In brief debate last week over some similar provisions that were attached to an appropriations bill for the Commerce, State and Justice departments, Leahy expressed reservations at how quickly some of the changes were being enacted.
The proposals will also have to be vetted by congressional intelligence committees, where they may encounter less resistance. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who also participated in the meeting with Ashcroft, praised the administration's proposals and said they were consistent with his views that the nation's intelligence laws are obsolete.
"When these laws were written, the thing we thought we were protecting ourselves against was espionage," he told reporters. "Terrorism was not an activity that was covered in most of our intelligence-gathering statutes. These changes that were recommended by the attorney general today will close that gap."
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
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Committee: Terrorism Threat Is Long-Term
Agencies Advised To Collaborate More
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A33
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59624-2001Sep19?language=printer
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday described international terrorism as a long-term threat and called on the U.S. intelligence community to avoid considering last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as "a short-lived phenomenon."
"In the commendable rush to engage against the imminent threat associated with international terrorism, the intelligence community has adopted a crisis mentality," the panel said in its report on the fiscal 2002 intelligence authorization bill released yesterday.
Instead, the panel said, international terrorism "is not a crisis . . . [it] is a 'condition' with which we will have to deal on a long-term basis."
To meet that extended challenge, the committee said the community should prepare by determining in advance the roles of the Pentagon, CIA, FBI and other agencies, under the control of the director of central intelligence. Doing that, it said, would avoid making the norm "ad hoc approaches to coordination and interaction among the agencies created during crisis situations."
A portion of the report written before the events of Sept. 11 in part commended the nation's intelligence agencies for "aggressive, effective and creative intelligence efforts against the terrorism target," but said "there is room for improvement."
In the terrorism area, the committee recommended that law enforcement and intelligence agencies share more information with each other, saying it is "presently hindered by cultural, bureaucratic, resource, training and, in some cases, legal obstacles."
Another recommendation was for better exploitation of financial intelligence in the effort to uncover terrorists' activities and halt their ability to fund their operations. It called on CIA Director George J. Tenet and Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill to study whether Treasury's Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center should be the basis for broader cooperation.
Another proposal, included in a set of proposals to be offered in a bill this week by committee Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.), is establishment of a National Virtual Translation Center, which would "link secure locations maintained by the intelligence community throughout the country and apply digital technology to network, store, retrieve and catalogue the audio and textual information."
Graham's plan reflects concern that in the current situation, neither the FBI nor CIA has enough Arabic and Farsi translators for the enormous amounts of intelligence intercepts occurring around the world. The situation is so bad that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on Monday publicly requested citizens with Arabic language capability to offer their services in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. His Internet announcement on the FBI Web page offered an "hourly rate paid for Arabic, Farsi and Pashto-qualified contract linguist services [that] will range [between] $27 and $38 per hour."
Yesterday, the FBI Web site carried Mueller's report that in response to his request, "The Arabic American community and others immediately overwhelmed our telephone switchboard." He added, "I want to thank you for your tremendous response and support."
In another part of its report, the committee raised its concern about the way in which the administration has been reporting presidential findings about sensitive covert operations that go only to the House and Senate leadership and the chairmen and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees. These reports, which by law are required to be written, have been only provided as "oral briefings on these sensitive programs, many of which present complicated factual and policy issues."
The panel wants the practice "rectified" and written findings provided that include "specific reasons for the limitations on access" that prevent disclosure to other committee members.
Another committee complaint was that regular intelligence reporting to Capitol Hill has been limited with the ending of the national intelligence daily, a publication whose classified contents often quickly found their way into news reports. With that publication dropped, the committee said, "There has been little effort to develop mechanisms to ensure that members of Congress receive intelligence, in a form tailored for their unique needs, to enable them to perform their policymaking responsibilities efficiently and effectively."
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World: Terror In 'Unconventional' Forms -- Nuclear, Biological, And Chemical
By Breffni O'Rourke
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/09/20092001131738.asp
The devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington have changed forever the way we see terrorism. What was previously brushed aside as being in the realm of nightmare must now be viewed as a definite risk: nothing can be ruled out. RFE/RL correspondent Breffni O'Rourke talks to experts to assess the risks of extremists using nuclear, biological or chemical warfare in what might be called the new era of terrorism and counter-terrorism.
Prague, 20 September 2001 (RFE/RL) -- The scale and ingenuity of the terrorist attacks in the United States are leading to increased awareness of society's vulnerability. There is a sense of dread that acts once considered unthinkable now fall within the scope of reality.
The vivid scenes of aircraft crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York are branded into the world's consciousness. What would be the effects of a fully laden airliner crashing into the containment building around a nuclear reactor?
David Kyd, the chief spokesman of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, sketches the resulting scenario:
"The combined impact [of the plane] plus the detonation of the fuel would likely rupture the containment, and the [question would be] -- depending on whether it was a real direct hit or an indirect hit -- would the cooling system rupture, would the back-up cooling system function or not, would the operators of the plant survive and be able to react? If all of those things are not so, then what would happen is that you would have a fuel meltdown and a radioactive release."
Kyd says that the extent of the radiation released depends on various factors, like the type of the reactor and the rate at which it was running at the time of the hit:
"If you assume it was running at a hundred percent, producing electricity as it would be most of the time, then you would be talking, indeed, something on the scale of Chornobyl."
Chornobyl, history's worst nuclear accident, occurred in Ukraine in April 1986, when there was a fire and explosion in the fourth reactor. A radioactive cloud spread over Scandinavia and both Eastern and Western Europe, and caused a higher level of ambient radioactivity as far away as Australia. In the West, nuclear power plants are surrounded by containment structures typically designed to withstand earthquake shocks and light plane crashes and keep radiation from being released into the atmosphere. But across Central and Eastern Europe, as in Russia, the older type Soviet-era reactors like Chornobyl lack proper containment structures, making them still more vulnerable to attack.
Kyd acknowledges this vulnerability:
"Yes, yes, yes, they are, but so is everything else -- so are oil refineries, airports, all the infrastructure of a modern industrialized state. These things are not made to withstand attack from a wide-bodied jet full of fuel. It's as simple as that. So we are now in a new and much more precarious situation.
Coupled with the possibility of attacks on nuclear power plants is the threat that terrorist groups might gain -- or already have -- possession of a nuclear bomb. That's been a theme that has been around in the movies for decades. But according to Leonard Spector, a senior member of the Monterey Institute -- a Washington-based think-tank -- the reality is more complicated:
"The difficulty of acquiring materials for nuclear weapons and crafting a nuclear device itself is extremely high. Now, I will caveat that in a moment, but broadly speaking this is seen as too far beyond the skills of virtually any kind of an organization, except a nation, and even then it would have to be a pretty capable nation."
Spector says it would take any country between five and 10 years to produce ingredients for nuclear weapons, and would involve using extremely complicated facilities. Then, or course, such materials would have to come into the hands of terrorists. It's an unlikely scenario, Spector says, but one that is aided by the collapse of a former nuclear superpower:
"The one problem is that there is this danger of leakage of nuclear material for weapons from the former Soviet Union, especially Russia. The United States has been working very actively with Russia to secure nuclear materials. We have not seen cases of leakage, but that is the one unknown. And if a terrorist organization were to acquire nuclear materials, it might be able to either perpetrate a hoax, claiming to have a nuclear device, or conceivably actually design something which would explode."
So the risk of terrorism by nuclear bomb exists, although it does not appear to pose an immediate threat to society because of the great technical difficulties involved.
And what of the other weapons of mass destruction, namely biological and chemical weapons? Would they be easier for terrorists to employ than a nuclear device? A London-based expert with Jane's military publishing group, John Eldridge, says in contrast to nuclear materials, biological warfare materials are not difficult to obtain: "Well, there are loads of different materials they can use. The classic material that people quote at the moment is anthrax, and the reason that appears to be a weapon of choice is because it can be created in conditions which make it extremely robust and resistant to the things which normally kill viruses and bacteria."
Eldridge goes on to say that the impact of a successful terrorist attack using a biological agent like deadly anthrax -- an acute infectious disease -- would take time to become evident because of the incubation period involved. But a release of anthrax spores could have a national or even international impact because of the way the wind and human travelers would spread the infection.
An attempt to use biological warfare for terrorist purposes, Eldridge says, has already reputedly taken place:
"The Aum Shinrikyo terrorists in Japan had certainly made and refined anthrax, and had used it, but it was fairly poor quality and the reports indicated that it never actually worked."
By contrast, the same Japanese group, the Aum Shinrikyo, has certainly used gas successfully. In a terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 using the invisible nerve gas sarin, the group killed 12 people and injured hundreds of others.
Eldridge says that the impact of gas warfare is more localized than that of biological materials, since the logistics of moving around very large containers of gas make it less suitable for terrorist attacks on a mass scale.
So it's clear that any consideration of international terrorism must factor in modern weapons of mass destruction -- whether nuclear, biological or chemical. But does this mean we must expect terrorist attacks on these fronts now? Not necessarily, some experts say. Amy Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center for security issues in Washington puts it this way:
"When one examines the history of terrorist activities, what is clear is that they use the weapons they know the most. That is bombs of various types: pipe bombs, truck bombs, boat bombs, and now we've seen airliners turned into bombs."
In London, expert Eldridge agrees with that idea. He notes that the basic weapons apparently used in the U.S. terrorist incidents were not the latest high-tech gadgets but simple knives. Smithson emphasizes this theme:
"When the statistics are examined for what terrorists have been doing with chemical and biological substances, most of their activities by far have involved hoaxes, plots and pranks, and this is true around the world. On the rare occasions when they have used these substances, their intention has not been to cause mass casualties, but rather they have used these substances in an attempt to assassinate individuals or opponents."
Further, Smithson cites the technical difficulties involved, even when resources are plentiful:
"In Aum Shinrikyo's case -- this was a terror group which specifically recruited scientists and technically skilled people, for the purpose of trying to improve its chemical and biological weapons programs. They were very, very wealthy [and] they had a lot of technical resources to put into their chemical and biological weapons programs. But their bio-weapons program was a flop, from start to finish."
So it seems the world does not face imminent terrorist threats stemming from nuclear, biological or chemical warfare. That, of course, can change in time. And the threats to nuclear power stations should be considered as real potential dangers.
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Leftist coalition opposes war, rips 'imperialist' U.S.
September 20, 2001
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010920-23355540.htm
NEW YORK - While the U.S. government is planning to make war on terrorism, some longtime dissidents are planning a war against the government.
An anti-war coalition of longtime critics of U.S. policies made a promise this week: "We are going to stop the monster from roaring - we have the numbers."
The International Action Center (IAC) says that "monster" is the "imperialist" United States, which teeters on the edge of a military response to last week's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"We have 70 organizing centers, and more and more groups signing on to help us oppose this war," an organizer at an IAC meeting told a packed crowd at its 14th Street headquarters Tuesday night.
The upstairs loft is sandwiched between two union halls, those of the Local 169 and the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades. Coalition members, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with communist guerrilla Che Guevera and touting the AFL-CIO, seated the 90 attendees Tuesday.
They were protest veterans, with a long pedigree of causes and events: military exercises in Vieques, the presidential inauguration, the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, the IMF in Washington, Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
"It is essentially the working class that is under attack right now by the United States government and all over the world," said Samia Halaby, who is with the Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition.
"Muslims are now under attack all over the world," she added.
The more than 20 groups represented Tuesday - including the National Green Party, the Sikh Student Organization from George Washington University and the National Lawyers Guild - have made plans for a march on Times Square when the first U.S. missile is fired. If it occurs on a weekday, the groups will convene at 5 p.m., rush hour. If the U.S. response comes on a weekend, the meeting time is noon.
Plans are also in place for a Sept. 29 march on the White House, a quick change from the previously scheduled protests of the now-canceled meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Larry Holmes, the IAC's co-director and a two-time presidential candidate of the Workers World Party, a Marxist splinter group, gave a pep talk to the activists Tuesday, encouraging them and assuring that the government "cannot shut the movement down.
"We are shrewd, we have lawyers, and we have been in touch with our brothers and sisters and colleagues all over the world," he said. "To the government, those who are out there on the streets protesting, we are the terrorists."
Like officials in Baghdad, which has refused to express condolences to the United States for the terrorist attacks, the leaders of the anti-war groups blame "aggressive" U.S. policies.
"Under no conditions was this terrorist attack worthwhile," said Mary Loo, who declined to give her last name because it is Palestinian. But she said the attack gave several of their causes a higher profile.
"It is like one of those plastic snow decorations, that you shake up and the snow flies," she said, standing in Union Square handing out fliers for upcoming meetings and marches. "It has given all of what we have said for a long time some credibility."
"I am angry," she added. "I am angry at our government for getting us into this."
Post-terrorism Union Square has become an open market for all sentiments. The U.S. flags are countered by posters that disparage American policies.
"Perhaps now you can remember the poor, working, disabled, disadvantaged, underprivileged who have been ignored," implores one such sign, written on white cardboard with red and blue marker.
The peace marchers hold court loudly and proudly daily, while those who favor a military response of some sort are more inclined to walk silently among the photos of the deceased.
But some are clearly enraged that anyone would be advocating peace when their neighbors have been killed by acts of war.
"That is ridiculous," said 23-year-old Wendy Auerbach, who spent an evening this week taping up posters of Osama bin Laden with the phrase "Wanted: dead, not alive."
"I am in favor of peace, but we won't have any if we don't do something about this."
Meanwhile, the anti-war groups have ruined the neighborhood for some who called the ground of Union Square home before the attacks.
"I've been living here for a month or so," said a 35-year-old man, sitting next to his bedraggled blue bedroll. "These kids come in for this cause, or whatever it is. These are just kids who actually have a home to go to. They want to live on the street because all their friends are."
He's going back to a shelter on the lower east side, he said.
"It's more peaceful there."
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Peace Groups Are Urging Restraint Students,
Activists Set to Hold Rallies Across the Country
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59308-2001Sep19?language=printer
Ending their silence after a week of mourning the victims of terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, a broad range of religious leaders, social activists, entertainers, student organizations and business figures are beginning to publicly urge President Bush to show restraint in his response and to carefully calibrate the use of U.S. military power.
As part of the budding peace offensive, over 1,200 members of the National Council of Churches and a diverse coalition -- organized by Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Rosa Parks -- issued strong statementsyesterday noting that, while the attacks' perpetrators should be brought to justice, wholesale military action would incite more terrorism, not end it. Demonstrations and teach-ins are planned on scores of campuses today, and some of the groups that had geared up to protest the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington are joining forces, instead, in plans for a peace gathering here on Sept. 30.
Some protesters bring a special moral force to their argument. Judy Keane, whose husband, Richard, was killed in the World Trade Center during last week's attacks, spoke out against military retaliation during a prayer vigil that she helped organize near her home in Wethersfield, Conn., Sunday evening. The event drew more than 5,000 people.
"The World Trade Center [attack] was in retaliation for something else, and that was the retaliation for something else," she said in a telephone interview yesterday. "Are we going to continue this in perpetuity? We have to say at some point, okay, let's find another way of doing this."
Business executive and CNN founder Ted Turner argued against a military solution yesterday at the United Nations as he delivered a $31 million check to cover part of the United States' U.N. dues. "We should not, I don't think, go around and indiscriminately start bombing countries that we suspect the terrorists are in because there are terrorists everywhere, here in the United States," he said. "What were [Oklahoma City bombers] Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh but terrorists?"
The statement by the National Council of Churches declared: "We must not, out of anger and vengeance, indiscriminately retaliate in ways that bring on even more loss of innocent life." The coalition of more than 100 people organized by entertainers Belafonte and Glover and civil rights legend Rosa Parks said in a separate letter: "Our best chance of preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law."
Organizers say there is a fast-growing network of peace activists who will likely outnumber the demonstrators who rallied during the Persian Gulf War a decade ago. Student groups are planning peace demonstrations on 105 college campuses in 30 states today. More than 1,000 students and community members from nine Boston-area schools are expected to participate in noontime rallies that will converge in a march from Boston to Harvard Yard, while close to 3,000 are expected to march and mourn on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.
"There's pretty much a consensus among students in this group [that] we want to prevent the continuation of the cycle of violence by averting war," said Brad Hornbake, 22, a senior at Emerson College in Boston.
Meanwhile, the Washington Peace Center, a pacifist and human rights group, is planning a major "peace event" in Washington on Sept. 30 as an alternative to the canceled meetings of the World Bank and IMF. Organizers stressed that the event will not involve any of the "confrontational tactics" that were used during previous meetings of the international agencies.
"We don't want the violence here to be perpetrated somewhere else," said Maria Ramos, a coordinator of the event. "The U.S. has the moral high ground now . . . . This is a time for building alliances based on law and strengthening international tribunals [for] cross-border terrorism."
Special correspondent Colum Lynch contributed to this report.
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Voices of Experience Call for Caution and Tolerance
Past Terror Gives Retirees Perspective
By Eugene L. Meyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2001; Page GZ23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57309-2001Sep19?language=printer
They offered no easy answers, no simple prescriptions for a secure future. Instead, they pleaded for a longer view of recent events, from their perspective spanning nine decades.
With their considerable life experience, eight residents of Collington, an upper-income retirement community in Prince George's County, had come together to discuss the cataclysmic events of the past week.
Mostly, they said they were not surprised. For some, rage was tempered by practicality and a reluctance to meet violence with violence.
They worried, not so much about themselves as their progeny. They eschewed any short-term military response. They cautioned against blaming innocent Arabs and Muslims. They urged Americans to learn more about foreign places where people hate the United States.
"It is hopeless to attack militarily without considering why they got so angry," said Leila F. Wilson, 89, whose late husband Evan was U.S. consul general in Jerusalem in the 1960s and who lived also in Iran, Lebanon, Egypt and India.
"This is war, but against whom?" asked Margaret E. Martin, 89, a retired government statistician and economist. Nobody could say.
They have lived through world wars, the London blitz and the carpet-bombing of Nuremberg, through Pearl Harbor and the Cuban missile crisis and, through postings overseas with the World Bank and State Department, they have endured other acts of terrorism and civil war on foreign shores.
Ranging in age from 71 to 89, the group included a former ambassador and career foreign service officer, academicians and social workers, a career State Department official, an economist, a retired Air Force pilot, a specialist in public administration and international organization.
Now, in their retirement, they have witnessed foreign terrorists bringing destruction to the World Trade Center in New York, to the Pentagon in Washington, to a rural field in western Pennsylvania, with four hijacked airplanes used as guided missiles.
To 87-year-old Patricia Glover Brubaker, who devoted 30 years at the State Department to sifting intelligence about other countries, last week's tragedy was, she said, the third defining event of her life, after Pearl Harbor and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
"Each time," she said, "life changed -- suddenly, shockingly." But it was not her own life that most concerned her.
"I've had my life. It's been great. But I'm terribly nervous about my daughter, who works on the 30th floor of a high-rise in the center of Philadelphia, which could easily be another target."
Catherine S. Chilman, 86, with a doctorate in psychology and a long academic résumé, said she was a little embarrassed when her three daughters phoned her -- one in Australia, another in Canada, the third in Boston.
"They had the idea I'd be a nervous wreck, 'poor old mother,' but . . . it was embarrassing to me to, well, say I'm used to this. . . . I feel at my age, it doesn't make much difference personally . . . and my thought is I've survived all these different horrible traumas."
But Eva Yale, 71, the youngest in the group, was not as stoic. Born in Germany in 1930, she witnessed the bombing of Nuremberg by Allied planes and after the war had come to this country to feel safe.
"I remember standing in front of what at that time was a high-rise building -- probably it was five or six stories -- and seeing it burning, burning, burning," Yale said. "There were no firemen, nobody coming to try to help. Everything just burned. The whole city burned. There wasn't any digging out of people. They were just dead, and when I hear them talking about body parts, I remember a brain hanging on a brick wall . . .
"You get used to it somehow. I mean it's just so horrible, but what impressed me was the outpouring of support here. I don't remember it happening in Nuremberg. It just burned, and then while you were still standing there watching it burn, there was another air raid and some more buildings burning. It was endless. You feel absolutely helpless. There's no place to turn. You just wait for what comes from the sky.
"That's what I'm afraid of, I guess," Yale said. The images of the World Trade Center towers collapsing, she said, "brought back to me what for many years I had tried to forget."
British-born Evamaria Hawkins, 73, was working in London's East End near the end of the war when German V-bombs, the first guided missiles, struck from the air. "People did not stand by and do nothing, but they did help each other," she said. "But there was a kind of fatalism. You knew if you didn't hear it anymore, it was on its way down. There wasn't much you could do. You carried on as normal."
Her husband, Edward K. Hawkins, 73, retired from the World Bank. His last post was in war-torn Sri Lanka, which, he said, also had suicide bombers. "It produces almost a desperation of what to do, and extreme caution because almost anything could happen. If you're dealing with suicide bombers, no one has yet devised a defense against them."
But Hawkins said more funding for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service might help. "We have under-funded . . . in the belief big government is bad," he said. "This is an opportunity to work on security aspects which are clearly a priority."
Mary S. Olmsted, 81, a career foreign service officer and onetime U.S. ambassador to Papua New Guinea, added the State Department to the list of under-funded agencies. The department, she said, is in the business of "affecting the minds and hearts of people around the world. It is the first line of defense, and there is not enough money to do it."
But policy considerations aside, they all said life must go on. Patricia Brubaker recalled a recent trip to the Kennedy Center.
"The tunnel was crowded with cars," she said. "We came to an absolute stop. We were all very aware this was potentially very dangerous. It would be very symbolic if the Kennedy Center were blown up, but then we enjoyed the opera. I am going to take calculated risks to do what I want."
For Eva Yale, it is not so simple.
"One reason I came to this country was to find peace," she said. "I felt if I would immigrate to the United States, I would never have to be afraid of anything, and I'm afraid again, because I don't think that's the last time."
Her husband, John Yale, 72, who flew cargo planes for the Air Force in Vietnam, expressed outrage over the attacks. "I don't profess to have the answers," he said. "The next generation may have to step in and solve this, just as all of us had to . . . and we can't give them a lot of advice. . . . This is a whole new ballgame."
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MAJOR VICTORY PERMITS ISSUED for Sep. 29
please post widely to all those coming to DC for Sep. 29 --
UPDATE FROM A.N.S.W.E.R.
Re: September 29 mobilization in DC
From: "Action Center" <actioncenter@action-mail.org> Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 19:07:44 -0400
The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition is pleased to announce that permits have been issued for Lafayette Park in front of the White House, the White House sidewalk and for a mass march. It is a great victory for the movement. We're very pleased that A.N.S.W.E.R. and our legal representatives at the Partnership for Civil Justice have succeeded in securing the Constitutional rights people have always enjoyed to demonstrate in these areas of Washington DC. Previously, the permits had not been issued and the organizers and the PCJ attorneys had filed a major lawsuit asserting the First Amendment rights of demonstrators in the areas around the White House.
The granting of the permits means that every person should be secure in the knowledge that we will have a lawful, orderly, disciplined activity against war and racism and in support of civil liberties.
BUS PARKING
Every organizing center and all activists need to know some logistical information: We have secured a bus drop off and unloading zone at H St. between 15th and 16th NW on the north side of Lafayette Park. This means that people can get off of the bus and go directly into the rally site. In the next few days we will notify people of parking arrangements for buses, vans and cars in the demonstration area. The demonstration should be concluded between 5 and 6 pm.
RESPONSE REQUESTED
To all organizers: Please let us know how many people from your area are coming to the September 29 protest. If you are organizing and are not yet listed as an organizing center, please email back. We will place your contact info on our web site so people in your area can get in touch with you (we are getting thousands of hits daily and many calls from all over the country).
Send replies to iacenter@action-mail.org
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Congresswoman Lee Calls For Peace
Davey D's Hip-Hop Corner
by - Davey D
9/20/01
http://www.daveyd.com/FullArticles/articleP80.asp
http://www.daveyd.com/barbaralee.jpg
Yesterday Monday Sept 17th we had an opportunity to catch up with Congresswoman Barbara Lee and talk to her about her decision to cast the only vote opposing President Bush's War resolution. Not even her fellow colleagues from the Congressional Black Caucus voted with her on this one. That includes such notable people like Maxine Waters, Charles Rengel, Jesse Jackson Jr., Cynthia McKinney to name a few. What is this all about?
Is Congresswoman Lee out of step with reality and the rest of the country? Or is she ahead of her time? Some people are saying she is unpatriotic for not supporting Bush on this one. They are angry with her to the point that she now needs police protection.
Others are saying she did the right thing by not only following her conscience, but also bringing to the floor and public discussions, an alternative viewpoint that has been all but locked out of this past week's conversations. Many are claiming something is wrong with you if you are not advocating war. Here's what Congresswoman had to say...Let us know what you think. mailto:misterdaveyd@aol.com
DAVEY D: They took this vote in Congress about what should be the response to the tragedy this week...and elected to take military action. In a vote 420 to 1 you were the lone dissenting voice that said no, we should not go to war.
BARBARA LEE: First, our nation is in grieving, we're all mourning, we're angry; there are a range of emotions taking place. Myself personally, I am also grieving and I believe fully and firmly that the Congress of the United States is the only legislative body that can say, "Let's pause for a moment...and let's look at using some restraint before we rush to action." Because military action can lead to an escalation and spiral out of control. So, why I voted no, was one, the president already has the authority to execute a military action. He doesn't need Congress; under the War Powers Act he has that authority. But Congress is the people's house, and the Congress is responsible for providing checks and balances, and you cannot just allow the administration to run ahead with a strategy without reporting back and without having some oversight.
Now we must bring the perpetrators to justice. International terrorism is upon us -- this is a new world and we cannot make any mistakes in dealing with it. We do not want to see our reaction lead to another reaction which could allow this to spiral out of control. So while we grieve and while we provide assistance -- and I did vote to provide assistance for the families and communities that have been devastated and also providing funding for anti-terrorist activities for securing our own country -- we've got to conduct a full investigation and be really deliberate about how we move forward militarily. We cannot make any mistake about this, this is an unconventional war and we have to fight it in an unconventional way.
DAVEY D: We're talking about the nature of terrorism and whether it could be a tit-for-tat type of scenario if we go out and retaliate and hit the wrong targets or capture the wrong people, the next thing you know we could be involved in a situation where a can of worms has been opened that we just can't close it up.
BARBARA LEE: We don't know the real nature of terrorism in the true sense of the word. We have not invested in combating terrorism the way we should have, which involves many issues. It involves our foreign policy, it involves multinational cooperation, it involves diplomatic efforts. It involves pulling all of these very multifaceted areas together to come up with a real way to deal with terrorism. I don't believe we have faced the fact that terrorism is the new war that this country is going to have to fight. We're looking at putting up billions of dollars for national missile defense. Well, anti-ballistic missiles -- that would not have saved the lives or prevented the horrible morning that we saw last Tuesday, it just wouldn't have done it. So, we're looking at putting military money into the wrong areas. We need to look at what this means in terms of securing our country, securing our world, and how to use our tax dollars toward that purpose. I am convinced that military action alone will not prevent further terrorist attacks.
DAVEY D: One of things I'm concerned about is the number of people of color who will be on these front lines. A third of the army is made up of people of color, because of the economic conditions we're in. If we have to go out there and fight a war, how is this going to impact our communities disproportionately -- and are we going to have some dire effects that will be with us for generations?
<http://www.daveyd.com/barbaralee2.jpg> BARBARA LEE: Certainly, that's always the case -- our communities are always disproportionately represented in the military and we'll be called to serve and fight. Whenever that happens, whomever it is, we have to be very careful. We don't want our young men and women put in harm's way. I am a very patriotic person, and I support the United States and our government. And I believe that my support for our country and for our people dictates that I be prudent, that I not rush to judgment on any decisions, and that we step back for a minute and realize any impact that this could have on young men and women of color, and all young Americans as we move forward. Fighting a terrorist war...I'm not sure our young people are prepared for that, and we've got to stamp out terrorism in the world but it's very complicated.
DAVEY D: I've got the sense that people think that this will be over in a hurry, almost like you're playing a game, and I'm trying to tell people, that this is real stuff. You've got people that have committed themselves to dying, and that's kind of scary.
BARBARA LEE: We're all in trauma right now, in a state of disbelief and mourning. A member of my staff had a family member killed in one of the planes. This catastrophe has touched the lives of so many people. Going back to why I said "No, let's use restraint," -- it's for that reason. My professional training is as a social worker, and I understand the human psyche, and the community psyche, and our country's psyche. Right not, were dealing with recovery, and we're dealing with mourning, and there's no way until we settle in, should we deal with decisions that could escalate violence and spiral out of control. We just all must be reasoned and reasonable about this. When we bring these terrorists to justice, we have to be pointed and know what we're doing. The world is a dangerous place.
DAVEY D: With all the money that we pay in tax dollars directed toward intelligence gathering, the CIA, the FBI, the racial profiling at airports and the like, how could we have someone come in to this country, learn to fly from our own schools, and fly an airplane for 20, 30 minutes and not be detected? Was this a breakdown in the intelligence community?
BARBARA LEE: Obviously, that money has not been spent properly and I think that one of the reasons I did vote for the $40 billion is that there's money in there to really look at how we increase the public safety of our people in this country, within the confines of civil liberties. We have to find that balance. Protecting the public, protecting the country, and not allowing our civil liberties to be eroded. That's where we need to put the funding and resources, and that's why I did support that money. But something went terribly wrong, and we'll see how these investigations go. But we have to insist on a full and thorough investigation.
DAVEY D: Do you think with all the concern right now, we will be finding our civil liberties actually taken off the paper altogether in the name of national security? Will people be pulled over, profiled, searched more? If I'm a part of an organization that says "Peace not war," will they label me a potential terrorist?
BARBARA LEE: Certainly we have to fight against that trend. There are those who would like to see that happen. They will overreact to a tragedy and use this opportunity to do just what you said. That's part of the danger in rushing to judgment. As a branch of the government that's responsible to the people, it's up to Congress to execute our Constitutional responsibilities to ensure that there's checks on policies that could be put in place under the name of national security. This is very serious.
DAVEY D: You've come from an era of the Black Panthers, from the Vietnam era, when there were a lot of groups that found themselves subjected to the Cointel policies of the FBI. They were harassed by the various government agencies, from the local police to the CIA, their patriotism was questioned. If we don't keep that in mind, do you think it might lead to us just falling in line and maybe not questioning government when we have a right to do so?
BARBARA LEE: We better understand the history, and I'm very on top of my own history with these agencies and I know what can happen. So we must be vigilant right now, because under the cloak of national security, many of our civil liberties could be just wiped off the floor. There are those of us who are going to fight to make sure that's not going to happen, but we're also going to fight to make sure justice is served by making sure that the people and organizations who did this are brought to justice. We also have to begin to look at our foreign policy, our diplomatic efforts, and some of the reasons why we don't engage in dialogue with certain countries and individuals and organizations. This is a very complex issue in the US, and we should be right now leading the world in showing our children how in the face of adversity we respond and minimize the loss of life. We don't want to see any more people lose their lives. We cannot tolerate another terrorist attack, and we certainly cannot tolerate any loss of life any more in our country, and anywhere in the world.
DAVEY D: Many are painting a picture that, "if you're not with the US, you're against us. " They would take a look at your dissenting vote and say, "Congresswoman Barbara Lee is not patriotic, she's not supporting the president, she's making it difficult for us to do what we need to do." How do you respond to that type of criticism?
BARBARA LEE: People have said that. And in my response, I tell them that I'm very patriotic. As a citizen, I have the right to represent a point of view. That's central to our democracy -- the right to dissent, the right to provide a different point of view that's out in the open, in the full view of the American people. I did not make this decision behind closed doors; I've explained my decision. I think the beauty of democracy, and one of it's fundamental principles, is the right to free speech and the right to disagree. I support the administration in their actions; that's not the point. Their role is this, they're moving forward. What we have to understand, is that the Congress is a body that represents the people in our country. It's up to us to step back and say, "Okay, now we have an additional responsibility." We must make sure that the president reports to us, so that we can report back to our constituents what's going on. You donut want to not know, do you?
Congress has a very critical role in this. So if I am going to be patriotic, and I am, and if I am going to be a good American, which I know I am, I am going to make sure that our democracy works and I'm going to hold it accountable, and make sure that it works not only for my constituents, but for the whole country. You don't want to rush to judgment while we're depressed and angry and frustrated. That's like herding cattle in one direction. You want people who are thinking clearly, who are working with the president, and giving them different ideas and insights. I'm an African-American woman, I'm on the International Relations committee. I have a point of view...as an American...that may be useful when we talk about international terrorism. There are many people who have different points of view...that's America. So to those people who say those things, they better check their own credentials. They may need to become more participatory in our democracy.
DAVEY D: That's a key word -- participatory. I come across a lot of people who are waving the flag, but aren't registered to vote. All this information about foreign policy and our government's role has been out there, but a lot of people have ignored it until now. All of a sudden, they're out for blood, and don't even understand where Afghanistan is and what it would take to defeat it. This is a country that beat back Russia, a couple of times. It's not going to be an easy haul, and I'm afraid people aren't really thinking long term.
BARBARA LEE: Being patriotic at this moment in our history means participating in decisions about the future of our world. It means participating in decisions that will hopefully bring us to peace, and ensure that these terrorists are brought to justice and that no man, woman, or child, ever gets killed in such brutal assaults ever again That's what participatory democracy is about at this moment. People should feel understand and feel empowered that it's through their members of Congress that represent them, that they can make their voice be heard. Not just react, but engage.
DAVEY D: People would question, would you acting on behalf of Barbara Lee or were you acting on behalf of the Berkeley-Oakland district you represent when you decided to be that lone dissenting vote against Bush's resolution for war?
<http://www.daveyd.com/barbaralee3.jpg> BARBARA LEE: : First of all, this was not a poll-driven vote. This was the most painful vote I have taken in Congress, really in all 12 years that I've been in elected office. It was a grueling experience for me. I have been in many briefings, classified and unclassified. I have been in so many meetings. I was in the Capitol when the plane went into the Pentagon, and we had to evacuate. It's been a nightmare. I went through the intellectual process, through the fact-gathering, through the policy analysis, looking through the foreign policy and intelligence and military implications of our move. It weighed heavily on me. I was not going to the National Cathedral for the prayer service..because I wanted to continue in my discussions, and reflect on the resolution that was coming up. But at the last minute, I decided to go, that I had to pray over this. I realized I had to settle down and say some prayers, to try to get some strength to help me through the rest of the week.
It was a very powerful, very beautiful prayer service, very painful. I listened to the prayers, and prayed, and listened to the comments and the sermons. One of the clergy, very eloquently said, in his prayer, "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore, " And at that moment, I knew what the right vote was, and what I had to do. So it was a combination of factors that brought me to that place. There are very few times when there are votes of conscience that your moral compass must guide you, very few times that there's some bottom lines. And this was one of those times. I talked to my colleagues, and believe me, there are many members of Congress who feel as I feel, who are raising questions about not having the President report back on military action. People are concerned. I think my vote represented my week of deliberations, my discussions, my thoughts, my analysis, and my conscience, and I voted 'no.' I believe it was the right vote. I still say, and I said on the floor that night, "We must step back." We must allow time for the grieving, and the mourning. Congress has got to be the body that says, "Let's use some restraint, lets make sure that our actions lead to what we want to accomplish, and that's to make sure their are no more attacks on our people and on our country" We've got to make the most deliberate strategies that we can that are going to be effective.
DAVEY D: There's been a number of attacks throughout our country on our Arab brothers and sisters...even on those who look like they might be Arab. Sadly, some of this abuse has come at the hands of black and brown folks, who have gotten caught up in the wave of patriotism that has swept the country. What are your thoughts on this?
BARBARA LEE: This is very a serious problem. We passed a resolution on that same night that condemned attacks on Arab-Americans and Muslims and all those who could be under attack as a result of this. What we see now is an environment of fear. The worst is coming out in people. We've never had a war on our land before -- other countries have, the US hasn't. Were vulnerable. When people react in fear, what do they do? They turn on each other. The person who looks the wrong way receives the brunt of your anger and fear. So I'm urging and encouraging young people to please understand that when these planes crashed into the towers, they killed people of all colors, ages, races. creeds. It was an equal opportunity destroyer.
DAVEY D: It just seems a shame that people who have been persecuted, especially blacks and Latinos, who have been the brunt of abuse by the military, are turning around and attacking people in our own communities. Once upon time Latinos in LA were attacked by US Sailors in what is now known as the Zoot suit riots. African Americans were at the short end of the stick in numerous situations and scenarios
BARBARA LEE: We've got to pause and understand the moment that we're in. Moving forward, whether it's on a political level, or in our communities, against each other, there's some serious implications of this. If we donut understand that were grieving, we're baffled, we're afraid, this behavior is going to escalate. I'm trying to help young people understand who their enemy is and who it is not. In this moment of all moments, we should be embracing each other. My constituents are as conflicted and upset in California as people are all over the East Coast and the country.
DAVEY D: Do you think when you get back to Bay Area, you'll have some kind of a town hall so that those people that voted you into office can come on down and build with you?
BARBARA LEE: We' re definitely going to be holding events in our community to try and help sort though this grieving process. In terms of future direction, we want to bring some clarity and understanding as to how the Congress should function when we're in a vulnerable state, when we've been attacked and what our role is in terms of checks and balances. I want to do some education and forums and basic discussions with young people about their fears. I know children are scared about what they're seeing on TV But the way our country responds to it will ensure as they grow up that they are able to deal with their problems in a way that is appropriate. It's important that they see that rage and war gets out of control and leads to more violence. We have to be very measured in our response as we go after the perpetrators of this horror, and make sure that our children know that in the face of adversity, America can rise up and be the great democracy that it is, and deal with all these problems immediately.
DAVEY D: Have you heard from any high ranking officials about your vote. Also, Bush has two daughters who are college age...do you think that they would be on the front line? How do you think it will perceived if 19 and 20 year olds are being asked to serve this country and his daughters are still making headlines getting drunk at rat parties??
BARBARA LEE: That poses the kind of questions and dilemmas before us. There are many questions that have to be asked..the kind of terrain ahead of us in a country we don't know, how much collateral loss will we be inflicting in terms of innocent women and children? Loss of life is loss of life. The Congress needs to ask these questions, force the administration to answer these questions. That does not mean that we, and I, are not unified. I'm sure I will hear from the administration, I'm on the foreign affairs committee. I see Secretary Powell fairly frequently. I haven't talked to him. Hess been fairly measured in his response, I think Hess trying to bring some balance to the policy. But in terms of supporting the President, that Congress has to make sure that he is successful, that any reaction to this horrible attack does not come back in terms of any spiraling out of control. If you have nobody to check that, it could be very scary.
DAVEY D: Congresswoman Lee thank you so much for taking time out of your day to break it down for us. For those wishing to get in touch with Barbara Lee... her number is 510-763-0370
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