------- Index of Articles
Bush Contemplates National ID Card For All Citizens
Blunkett wants ID cards for all
Veterans' alert on uranium shells
Power company increases security at nuclear plant
Goshutes Appear to Elect Anti-Nuke Officer
MILITARY
SAS troops clash with Taliban unit deep inside Afghanistan
MI6 SPIES FIND EVIL BIN LADEN
Taliban near isolation
People fearful, Taliban resolute
In the Taliban's Hands, An Old, Varied Arsenal
Whatever You Think About Afghanistan Is Probably Wrong
Taliban say they've lost contact with bin Laden
State Of America's Bio Defense - Not Good - We Are Vulnerable
Defense May Be Inadequate for Germ or Toxic Attacks
Recent UN Security Council and SG responses
Helms backs strikes against Iraq, others
Military slumlords
Rumsfeld: Contact lost with spy plane in Afghanistan
First U.S. Planes Land At Uzbek Air Base
Pro Forma Order Sends U.S. Military to War
First U.S. Planes Land At Uzbek Air Base
OTHER
Bill in Brazil Would Allow More of Jungle to Be Razed
Aid Agencies Responding to the Afghanistan Exodus
Across U.S., a Security Scramble
Worldwide Probe Yields Pieces to Jumbled Puzzle
A Top Boss in Europe, an Unseen Cell in Gaza and Decoys Everywhere
Borderless Network of Terror Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe
U.S. to share evidence against bin Laden with allies
ACTIVISTS
Anti-war march OK, raises security doubts
WHY I OPPOSED THE RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE FORCE
The words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Pure, High Note of Anguish
JOINT STATEMENT FROM JAPAN
---------
Bush Contemplates National ID Card For All Citizens; UK Initiating
DRUDGE REPORT,
SUNDAY SEPT 23-24 2001
http://www.drudgereport.com/id.htm
A highly controversial option has emerged for use in fighting terrorism in the United States: A national ID card which would be issued to every citizen.
A proposal for the creation of a national ID card was presented to President Bush in recent days, top government sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT.
The ID card plan was included in a classified briefing outlining steps the nation can take to limit exposure to terror attacks.
Bush briefly discussed the ID card option with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to insiders.
"I can tell you this, the president is very reluctant [to issue a national ID card]," a top White House source said on Sunday. "But we must look at all options."
Just as House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt [D-MO] says Congress should quickly move to open debate on security measures such as a national ID card.
"We are in a new world," Gephardt said. "This event will change the balance between freedom and security."
SAFETY FROM A CHIP
ORACLE Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison this weekend called for the United States to create a national identification system -- and offering to donate the software to make it possible -- free-of-charge.
"We need a national ID card with our photograph and thumbprint digitized and embedded in the ID card," Ellison said in an interview Friday night on the evening news of KPIX-TV in San Francisco.
Blair has tentatively approved identity cards which will be introduced for the first time in Britain.
The universal identity card leads major papers in London on Monday:
'ID CARDS FOR ALL' fronts the TIMES.
'IDENTITY CARDS ON THE WAY IN FIGHT ON TERROR' headlines the MAIL.
'WE'RE ALL GOING TO HAVE ID CARDS' splashes the SUN.
Blair has opted for a voluntary scheme in issuing the card, rejecting a compulsory "on demand" card because of connotations with Nazi Germany, where lack of proper identity cards could result in instant arrest, according to reports.
However, it will be virtually impossible for anyone to live a normal life without the new ID card in England - possession of a valid card will be necessary for boarding an aircraft, buying gas, opening a bank account, starting a job or claiming government benefits.
UK. Home Secretary David Blunkett on Sunday questioned the idea of a "voluntary card".
"It would not be a great deal of help" in the fight against terrorism, Blunkett said on BBC1's On the Record.
Blunkett stressed the need to balance the fight against terrorism with the freedoms of a liberal society.
But he said that his "instincts" were that beating terror must take priority and that politicians' ability to act must not be hamstrung by an excessively legalistic approach to human rights.
New laws are expected to be rushed through the U.K.'s Parliament in coming weeks to allow for the legality of a mandatory ID card.
In a nationwide poll released Sunday, a stunning 85% of Brits would welcome a national ID card system in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States, with an overwhelming majority calling for the cards to be packed with information to clearly identify the holder: These include photograph (97%), date of birth (96%) eye color (92%), a finger print (85%), DNA details (75%), criminal records (74%) and religion (67%).
Stateside, U.S. Rep. George Gekas [R-PA], chairman of the House immigration subcommittee, told reporters last week that Congress could no longer reject out of hand a national ID card system for citizens.
In a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, seven of 10 Americans favored a requirement that citizens carry a national identity card at all times. The proposal had particularly strong support from women.
ORACLE's Ellison said in the electronic age, little privacy is left anyway.
"Well, this privacy you're concerned about is largely an illusion,'' he told PIX's anchorman Hank Plante. "All you have to give up is your illusions, not any of your privacy. Right now, you can go onto the Internet and get a credit report about your neighbor and find out where your neighbor works, how much they earn and if they had a late mortgage payment and tons of other information."
Developing...
---
Blunkett wants ID cards for all
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 24 2001
London Times,
BY MELISSA KITE, STEWART TENDLER AND DANIEL MCGRORY
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001331435,00.html
RIGID security measures, including compulsory identity cards for all Britons, are being drawn up by ministers as part of the global war against terrorism.
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, confirmed yesterday that tough legislation, which could breach human rights laws, would be brought before MPs soon. Britain, he said, must throw down the gauntlet to terrorists as never before.
The proposed legislation is thought to include increased powers of arrest for the police to interrogate suspects and moves to abolish some rights of judicial appeal for immigrants turned back at airports.
Police may be allowed to arrest people suspected of having knowledge about terrorism, simply to interrogate them. Legislation to allow transcripts of telephone conversations bugged by MI5 to be used as evidence in court is also reported to be under consideration.
Mr Blunkett confirmed that identity cards were being considered "very seriously indeed". Asked whether they would be voluntary or compulsory, he said: "I think a voluntary card in the present circumstances would not be a great deal of help."
Speaking on the BBC's On the Record programme, Mr Blunkett said that at least three anti-terror Bills would introduce a range of new police powers, including the increased powers of arrest. Compulsory ID cards would use the latest technology, by scanning the iris of the eye or using thumb or finger-printing.
The move could involve a redrawing of the balance between human rights and anti-terror legislation, the Home Secretary said. "My instincts are to ensure that we take whatever action is necessary to prevent those engaged in terrorism abusing our democracy in order to destroy it. Yes, there will be a balance to be struck, there will be tensions between the European Convention on Human Rights and the necessary protection we seek."
The Home Secretary warned Labour backbenchers worried about the possible violation of human rights that failure to act would allow terrorists to "make a monkey out of us". However, he added: "This should not be seen . . . as some sort of police state. We don't have a police state and never will."
Tony Blair has been in touch with Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, and Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, to seek their support for the measures. Today he will call in members of three Commons select committees - defence, home, and foreign affairs - as well as the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, to brief MPs. He will also address representatives of Labour's parliamentary committee.
The moves came as anti-terrorist detectives prepared to renew their questioning of an Algerian pilot who went to flying school in the United States over possible links to the World Trade Centre attack.
Lotfi Raissi, 27, was arrested on Friday with his 22-year-old French wife, Sonia, who works for Air France at Heathrow. A second man in his mid-40s was arrested in Birmingham and brought to high security cells at Paddington Green police station.
A district judge at Bow Street Magistrates' Court agreed under legislation in the Terrorism Act 2000 to allow police to continue holding the three until Wednesday.
They were arrested after information from the FBI in New York alleging that the Raissis might have provided a safe haven for terrorists. The information was based on checks of mobile telephone calls made by the terrorists.
Mr Raissi is a student at the Four Force Aviation company in Poyle, Surrey, close to his home in Colnbrook, Buckinghamshire. Yesterday Frode Iversen, from the company, said he joined at the beginning of the year.
He said he understood that Mr Raissi had qualified as a commercial pilot in the US and was taking part in a £2,000 18-month course to qualify to fly aircraft in Europe. Mr Raissi worked from home by computer and did not attend the school often.
Yesterday Mr Raissi's relatives said the police action was groundless. His elder brother Mohamed, 29, was also arrested in the raids and later released.
-------- depleted uranium
Veterans' alert on uranium shells
By Macer Hall
23/09/2001
The Telegraph
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/wsold123.xml
SHELLS with depleted uranium tips are being transported to the Middle East for use in the war against terrorism despite concerns of health threats to thousands of Nato service personnel, The Telegraph has learnt.
Veterans of the Gulf War and the Balkans who believe that the armour-piercing ammunition caused them to suffer leukaemia and other illnesses, last night gave a warning that a new generation of service personnel could be at risk. Nato has been investigating complaints by former service personnel from several European countries that radioactive dust spread by the weapons made them ill.
A spokesman for the United States Defence Department confirmed that depleted uranium shells were widely used in America's armed forces. The department refused to take any action after a Pentagon report found no link between depleted uranium and cancer.
The Ministry of Defence, which earlier this year agreed to test hundreds of veterans for traces of uranium poisoning, also confirmed that depleted uranium rounds could be used in a forthcoming conflict against terrorists. An MoD spokesman said: "We do still have depleted uranium-tipped shells and, if we have to, we will use them." He added that the only depleted uranium-tipped shells used in British Armed Forces were those fired by the the Army's Challenger 2 tank.
Tony Flint, a spokesman for the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said: "This is a major concern for us. Depleted uranium should not be used in any forthcoming conflict. These weapons do not just affect the enemy, they have consequences for the troops that go in on the ground after they are fired."
Mr Flint, a 54-year-old Gulf veteran, now suffers from fatigue and a muscle-wasting illness. He added: "Depleted uranium will cause a lot more deaths through poisoning. We could be creating another generation of service personnel with terrible illnesses."
Bernie McPhillips, of the Gulf Families Association, another campaign group, said: "If they go ahead with a ground invasion, it is more than likely that depleted uranium weapons will be used and there will be consequences for our troops. Until they develop a new weapon, depleted uranium will continue to be used."
A recent investigation for the MoD by the scientists at the Royal Society found no evidence of a link between depleted uranium and cancer, but conceded that further research was needed.
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- florida
Power company increases security at nuclear plant
Florida Power called for the highest level of security at its Crystal River complex. So how secure is it?
By ALEX LEARY
St. Petersburg Times,
September 23, 2001
http://www.sptimes.com/News/092301/Citrus/Power_company_increas.shtml
CRYSTAL RIVER -- A chilling thought occurred as Sunny Lippert watched suicide pilots plow jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
While the world froze in horror, all Lippert wanted to do was get in her Ford Taurus and drive east, far from Crystal River.
"This might not be the place to be," she recalled thinking.
If terrorists could not get to President Bush, who was reading to children in a Sarasota classroom, they might choose the next best target, Florida Power's nuclear plant.
Lippert, a 53-year-old nurse who has concerns about the effects of radiation, ultimately dismissed the thought of attack as "stupid." But it was not implausible by any means.
Moments after the second attack on the World Trade Center, Florida Power executives called for the highest level of security, cutting off most public access and augmenting its armed patrols.
The sense of alarm apparently rippled through a work force used to inflated public concern about safety. School officials said many of the students who left early Sept. 11 had connections to the energy complex.
Florida Power refused to provide detail about heightened alert or how the chain of events unfolded, saying that information would compromise security.
Spokesman Mac Harris said the plant's containment building, which houses the reactor and nuclear fuel, is "very, very solid," pointing to the 4-foot thick concrete walls.
"This plant is really among the most secure industrial facilities in the United States, or for that matter, the world," Harris said.
"I think a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant in Crystal River that would result in a large release of radioactive material is extremely low."
Others are not so sure. "Nothing is safe from terrorism. They are sneaky," said Jessica Elam, 51, who lives a few miles down U.S. 19 from the Florida Power energy complex.
"I think we've been taught a lesson. No one picked up on the World Trade Center attack either time," said Steven Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, which has called for National Guard protection of power plants.
Dolley noted that half the nation's 103 nuclear plants have failed mock ground attacks conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The names of the deficient plants are not made public for security reasons.
Harris said Crystal River has been subjected to at least two tests, called Operational Safeguards Response Evaluations, the most recent in summer 1998.
"We were satisfactory," Harris said, declining to be more specific.
'That thing is built like a fortress'
Earl Childs, a 65-year-old Crystal River resident, was finishing lunch at Crystal Paradise restaurant on Thursday when asked about the threat of a terrorist attack.
"It's certainly nothing to be concerned about," Childs said to the agreement of the men sitting with him. "That thing is built like a fortress."
Just about anyone in Crystal River will tell you that, and for good reason. The containment building is made of at least 4 feet of steel reinforced concrete and there are additional concrete and steel barriers protecting the reactor and fuel rods.
Add to that the security personnel who patrol the grounds 24 hours per day, the video cameras, alarms and detailed response strategies and the plants are "hardened" targets, officials say.
Of course, said Harris, "no nuclear plant can be guaranteed to be impervious to every form of attack that can be imagined."
It is unclear whether the plant could withstand a dive-bombing 757 or 767, aircraft that weigh more than 100 tons and are filled with hundreds of gallons of fuel.
In the past, nuclear operators here (though not Harris) have told the Citrus Times that the plant could survive a hit from a jet.
Last week, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission echoed that assurance to reporters.
In reality, no one knows for sure.
An NRC news release on Friday acknowledged that nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes. "Detailed engineering analyses of large airliner crash have not yet been performed."
Because of the lack of testing, it is hard to say what would happen if a jet crashed through a containment building. Some groups say an attack could disable the plant's cooling systems and cause a meltdown.
"In a worst case, far more than 5,000 people would be likely to die." said Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute as he referred to what was the early estimated death toll from the attack on the World Trade Center.
People might not die immediately, but the long-term effects of cancer would be dramatic, he said.
Edwin Lyman, scientific director for the NCI, said his calculations indicate that the engines of a 767 going at maximum speed could penetrate between 3 and 6 feet of reinforced concrete, depending on the concrete properties.
Burning fuel could cause a huge fire, like that which engulfed the World Trade Center, and melt structural steel and inner components, Lyman said.
"These plants are designed to withstand shock, but a terrorist who knew what he was doing could probably locate a vulnerability."
Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the fears are overplayed. He cited a 2000 United Nations report that looked at the effects of the Chernobyl accident.
Of the workers present April 26, 1986, 134 recived high doses of radiation and suffered from radiation sickness. Thirty died not long afterward.
The report said there were 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer but other than that, "no increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality have been observed that could be attributed to ionizing radiation."
-------- utah
Goshutes Appear to Elect Anti-Nuke Officer
Slate
Sunday, September 23, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/09232001/utah/134367.htm
Locked out of their tribal offices in Tooele County, members of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes held scheduled elections beneath the sun Saturday, reportedly choosing leaders opposed to a plan to store radioactive waste in Utah's west desert.
Just over half of the tribe's 73 adult members took part in the balloting, which saw Mirlinda Moon elected as chairwoman and Sammy Blackbear elected as vice chairman, according to Anne Sward Hansen, who observed the election.
Hansen represents the Environmental Justice Foundation, which favored Moon and Blackbear. Independent verification of election results was unavailable Saturday.
The newly elected leaders oppose a 1997 plan pushed by ousted Chairman Leon Bear that would allow the storage of up to 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel on Goshute land in Skull Valley about 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
The state of Utah strongly opposes the plan, which must be approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Bear -- re-elected in 2000 to a four-year term as chairman -- has refused to step down and maintains that his ouster was illegitimate.
He had reportedly locked the offices and barred the windows to the tribal office in Skull Valley, forcing voters to cast ballots outside.
-------- MILITARY
SAS troops clash with Taliban unit deep inside Afghanistan
The Times (UK)
September 23 2001
James Clark, Tony Allen-Mills and Stephen Grey, Washington
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/4326959
SAS troops in Afghanistan have been fired upon by Taliban soldiers in the first clash of the campaign against global terrorism.
Nobody was hurt, military sources said, adding that the gunfire had been "more symbolic than directed". They suggested that the small SAS team had "spooked" Taliban soldiers near Kabul, who had fired indiscriminately before fleeing.
However, the incident marks an escalation in what has so far been only an intelligence war. The Taliban are in a high state of alert for coalition forces waiting to enter their country.
It is rare for Ministry of Defence insiders to confirm that their forces have been involved in skirmishes, but a source close to the SAS said there had been a clash late on Friday.
SAS troopers, together with members of MI6 and the CIA, are working with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in the search for Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born millionaire believed to have masterminded the suicide hijacker attacks on America 12 days ago in which 6,818 are feared to have died.
They are seeking intelligence about Bin Laden's whereabouts, the location of mines, routes he might take out of the country and the help of guides for later operations.
Unlike their American counterparts, SAS troopers specialise in long-term operations behind enemy lines, making them ideal for intelligence-gathering missions in Afghanistan.
The soldiers involved in the clash with the Taliban were believed to be from a four-man unit that had crossed the border, possibly from Tajikistan.
The SAS men on the ground are communicating with commanders via RAF Nimrods from the secretive 51 Squadron, using state-of-the-art "squirt" radios to transmit large amounts of data in seconds, helping avoid either interception or pin-pointing by the enemy.
American forces are also on the move. Advance units of two United States army divisions are on the Afghan border preparing for strikes against the Taliban regime.
Units of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Air Assault Divisions arrived at bases in Pakistan, near the border towns of Quetta and Peshawar, as a huge build- up of ships, aircraft and troops ordered to the region by President George W Bush continued. A Pentagon official declared that the military was ready to respond "the second the president pushes the button".
US military aircraft carrying reconnaissance equipment landed yesterday at a base near Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. It also emerged that US attack helicopters are still stationed inside Uzbekistan after recent joint military exercises. Northern Alliance rebels were reported to be advancing towards Mazar-i-Sharif, a possible bridgehead into Afghanistan for American forces.
The coalition operation inside Afghanistan coincided with intelligence reports that any further terrorist action would be radically different from the suicide hijackings that led to three passenger planes being crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. "They've been there and done that," said one US government adviser. "The real fear now is chemical."
It was revealed last night that crop-spraying planes had been grounded in America after police found evidence at a suspected terrorist hideout suggesting that plans were being made to disperse biological or chemical agents. In Britain, the security services believe the main threat could be the release of poisons into the air or the contamination of water.
Proposals for emergency anti-terrorist legislation were presented to Tony Blair yesterday amid pressure from opposition MPs and some ministers for an early recall of parliament.
Ministers and MI5 officials are concerned that any crackdown on terrorist suspects could fall foul of human rights legislation. They are pressing for a new "judge-proof" law to be rushed through parliament.
David Blunkett, the home secretary, who has secured agreement for a European Union-wide arrest warrant and a faster extradition process, wants stronger powers to freeze or confiscate terrorist assets.
American officials, who offered a $5m reward and protection for anyone providing information about the terrorist attacks, said yesterday that the threat of further assaults would not divert them from hitting Bin Laden's Afghan allies hard. "They are about to see what the wrath of God feels like," said one intelligence source.
Military tension was heightened by reports in Pakistan that an unidentified reconnaissance drone had been shot down over Afghanistan. If the aircraft was American, the incident would indicate that US forces have launched scouting missions.
The crisis was complicated by the arrival of Pope John Paul II in the Kazakh capital of Astana on a long-planned visit. Kazakhstan is close enough to Afghanistan for the Pope's security to be a concern should hostilities break out.
At the presidential retreat in Camp David, Bush held a "council of war" with senior advisers. He was expected to sign an executive order identifying terrorist groups and placing a freeze on their assets.
Today he will preside over a flag-raising ceremony when the Stars and Stripes will formally be hoisted back to full mast, signalling the end of official mourning for the victims of the attacks on September 11.
US officials said the military campaign would fall into two phases: an opening salvo of missiles and aerial bombing restricted to targets inside Afghanistan, followed by a potentially protracted ground campaign spearheaded by American and British special forces.
Early targets are expected to include the airport at Kabul, communications towers and power supplies. Terrorist targets in other countries might be considered once all US forces heading for the region are in place, the sources said.
In the latest deployments, the US amphibious ship Essex left the Sasebo naval base in Japan, followed by the nuclear-powered submarine, Bremerton. The two vessels departed a day after the USS Kitty Hawk's aircraft carrier battle group left its home port near Tokyo. More than 100 warplanes, among them B-1 and B-52 bombers, are also believed to be ready to begin flying missions.
Concern that Saudi Arabia was reluctant to let American commanders run an air assault from the Prince Sultan airbase near Riyadh receded when the US said its operation was "up and running".
At home, Americans struggled to resume normal lives.
A full programme of American football games was under way, with F-15 fighters ready to enforce no-fly zones over stadiums. Documents left behind by the hijackers had indicated some kind of follow-up action on September 22 - yesterday. The sense of unease was heightened by last week's economic free-fall on Wall Street, which suffered the worst one-week losses since the Depression of the 1930s.
Israeli tanks entered a Palestinian-controlled part of the Gaza Strip last night and exchanged fire with Palestinian gunmen, a Palestinian official said.
The exchange was apparently in response to mortar bombs fired at a nearby Israeli settlement, and is the most serious breach of the Middle East ceasefire insisted upon by Bush in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
-------- afghanistan
MI6 SPIES FIND EVIL BIN LADEN
By IAN KIRBY, Political Editor
News of the World (UK)
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/4326959
BRITISH intelligence agents have discovered the position of terror chief Osama bin Laden.
A specialist MI6 squad - some working undercover in Afghanistan - traced the Al-Queda leader to a desolate region close to the town of Jalalabad on the country's north-east border with Pakistan.
PM Tony Blair's official spokesman last night confirmed: "Bin Laden is in Afghanistan. We know he is there, put it that way."
When asked if Bin Laden's exact whereabouts had been identified, he insisted: "We know where he is."
A senior Ministry of Defence source confirmed that intelligence agents have been "actively pursuing" Osama bin Laden in the north of the country. He added: "They have been given good information and are following it up. I understand Britain is leading the search."
The vital new information was passed to Mr Blair by foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning and military adviser General Tony Piggott, as they flew to meet President George W Bush in Washington.
Sir David is chair of the Joint Intelligence Commitee, effectively head of MI5, MI6 and the other secret services. Mr Blair then passed on the information to Mr Bush as they dined in the White House on Thursday night.
The search for Bin Laden has been led by America's CIA using satellite technology.
Elite
But the remote passes of the Hindu Kush mountains, with their caves and underground passages, are almost impenetrable even to cameras in space.
The CIA have NO agents on the ground in Afghanistan. But MI6 HAS maintained a small but specialised team since 1999.
They are nicknamed The 'Golden Crescent Club' and work for the 'Global Issues Controllerate'. They are an elite unit of agents who usually investigate major drugs producers in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.
But immediately after the September 11 atrocity in New York they were contacted and given new orders. They are the closest thing the intelligence services have to James Bond. They are even licensed to kill - but only in self-defence.
Downing Street last night refused to deny that Bin Laden has been located.
But they said he is not yet under constant surveillance.
Armed with the news, Bush and Blair finalised the details of a search and destroy mission to take out Bin Laden and his terrorist organisation.
Meanwhile the US government has put an incredible £18 million reward on the head of Bin Laden and his gang - dead or alive.
Informants are even offered a place in the witness protection programme usually reserved for those who squeal on the Mafia and Cosa Nostra.
--------
Taliban near isolation
Washington Times
September 23, 2001
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010923-29417559.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan's Taliban leaders found themselves further isolated yesterday when the United Arab Emirates severed diplomatic ties.
A Saudi Arabian official told the Associated Press that the kingdom may follow suit, a move that would leave Pakistan as the only country with full relations.
The UAE, where some 100,000 Afghan nationals live and work, decided to sever relations after failing to persuade the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden, the global terrorist leader believed to have orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"It is impossible under such circumstances to maintain diplomatic relations with a government that refuses to heed the clear will of the international community," the local WAM news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said it has no plans to follow suit because Islamabad played a key role in communicating between Kabul and the rest of the world.
Aid groups warned of a looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and opposition forces claimed advances in the north.
Western reporters who were told to leave Kabul yesterday described it as a city of fear bracing itself to bear the brunt of an American attack.
As the thousands of Afghans tried to flee the country, the situation at Afghanistan's 1,560-mile border with Pakistan became more explosive.
Scuffles broke out between groups of angry refugees and Pakistani frontier guards who refused to let them cross, United Press International reported.
The only good news for the beleaguered Taliban came in reports they had shot down an unidentified pilotless spy plane.
But there was no easing of pressure from the United States, which insisted again that Kabul hand over bin Laden, the exiled Saudi terrorist leader.
Mystery surrounded the origin of the spy plane. The Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad, Mullah Abdul Saleem Zaeef, told Reuters news agency the spy plane had been downed while taking pictures over northern Afghanistan. A Pentagon spokesman in Washington declined to comment.
Anti-Taliban forces, although holding less than 10 percent of the country, reported gains yesterday.
"We are busy fighting," opposition Gen. Rashid Dostum told Reuters. "Our advances have been good. We have taken a lot of their trenches, prisoners and seized a lot of their arms."
Conditions in Kabul continued to deteriorate. Patients fled hospitals and doctors rationed dwindling stocks of medicine and supplies.
Dr. Saleh Rahman Rahmani of the Kabul children's hospital told journalists that doctors had been told to go to the nearest clinics and hospitals when the war started.
"The borders are closed, and no medicines are getting through," Dr. Rahmani said. "We have some to keep us going for a week or less, and it is not clear what will happen when the war starts."
In Central Asia, two key republics from the former Soviet Union that border Afghanistan voiced support for the U.S. offensive against terrorism, although details remained vague.
Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmonov said yesterday that his country was "ready to cooperate" with the United States, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency reported from the Tajik capital of Dushanbe.
He did not specify exactly how Tajikistan would help.
However, The Washington Times reported Friday that Tajikistan and neighboring Uzbekistan have secretly agreed to let the United States mount raids into Afghanistan by U.S. commandos.
In Uzbekistan, U.S. warplanes have already landed, Uzbek military sources told AFP yesterday.
They said the U.S. jets were stationed just outside the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and were equipped with surveillance devices, presumably aimed at Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia just to the south.
The sources refused to disclose the number of aircraft or when they had arrived.
It has further emerged that heavily armed U.S. attack helicopters are still stationed on a military base some 25 miles east of Tashkent, following joint NATO-Uzbek military exercises in the region this month.
Use by the United States of former Soviet bases has been busily debated in Moscow.
--------
People fearful, Taliban resolute
Washington Times
September 23, 2001
By John Simpson
LONDON SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010923-62755956.htm
NANGARHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan - This is a deserted, silent, frightened country. The fear of an all-out American attack has emptied the cities and grossly swelled the number of refugees lining up at the border of Pakistan.
Here in the countryside, thousands of townspeople are taking shelter with their kinfolk.
Just as I witnessed in Baghdad before the start of the Persian Gulf war a decade ago, people are paralyzed by the thought of the coming onslaught. There is the same combination of fear and utter bewilderment.
The indications are that the Taliban government, under its reclusive leader, the one-eyed Mullah Mohammed Omar, intends to stand fast for as long as possible.
But he and his colleagues know that their power rests on an uneasy coalition of military groupings and militias, which mostly came together in 1996 when the Taliban was closing in on Kabul.
The Taliban's success was always political rather than military. Its forces were distinctly inexperienced and often ramshackle, but it managed to persuade scores of warring groups that it had the power to win.
Now, neither the Taliban nor anyone else thinks it can conceivably survive long against an all-out American attack.
Reports from several parts of Afghanistan speak of Taliban commanders quietly slipping away and joining the exodus to the countryside with their men.
Nor can the Taliban rely on civilian support in Kabul or anywhere else, except its heartland of Kandahar. In recent years, it has become as unpopular as previous Afghan governments and for the same reasons: its growing corruption and complete mismanagement.
The days when people were grateful for the relative order that the Taliban introduced have long gone. Altogether then, the Taliban represents by far the weakest and most disorganized enemy the United States and its allies have faced during the past decade.
By comparison, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic were serious opponents who could defend themselves. The Taliban cannot.
Still, here in Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province, which borders Pakistan and takes in the city of Jalalabad, the Taliban is dangerous enough on the ground. This is also the area where many of Osama bin Laden's Arab and Pakistani volunteers, an estimated 1,000 of them, are trained and operate.
They may well be prepared to fight if the Americans and their allies put ground forces in here. The Arabs among them have nowhere else to go and are powerfully motivated to fight.
Their presence makes it particularly hard to infiltrate Nangarhar Province.
With the distinguished news photographer Peter Jouvenal, a veteran of 21 years' combat reporting in Afghanistan, I made the journey here with the aid of a group of cross-border smugglers.
Their advice was that we should disguise ourselves as women, because any Taliban group we came across would be unlikely to stop or search us.
• John Simpson is the British Broadcasting Corp.'s world affairs editor.
--------
In the Taliban's Hands, An Old, Varied Arsenal
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page A31
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10842-2001Sep22?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 22 -- Last month, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia paraded samples of its military hardware through the streets of Kabul, the country's war-battered capital. Turbaned soldiers toted U.S.-made Stinger missiles. A truck carried a Scud missile mounted on its bed. Soviet-made fighter jets roared overhead.
In the seven years since former guerrillas who fought the Soviets made common cause with younger, radicalized Islamic students to form the Taliban, the Muslim militia has seized most of Afghanistan. Along the way, it has amassed one of the most eclectic, ramshackle military arsenals of any country in the world, according to intelligence reports and international arms surveys.
There are few nations in modern times in which the military hardware has changed hands more often than in Afghanistan. Because the country has been involved in such a complex web of wars over the past two decades, the International Institute for Strategic Studies -- which each year compiles the most authoritative unclassified count of military hardware and manpower in each of the world's countries -- wrote in its current assessment, "It is impossible to show the division of ground force equipment among the different factions."
The Taliban's arsenal is an international smorgasbord, although most of its heaviest equipment is left from the 1979-89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: T-54 and T-62 tanks, a few armored personnel carriers, field artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems, about 15 MiG and Sukoi fighter planes and fewer than 30 helicopters.
Most of the equipment is at least third- or fourth-hand materiel -- first captured from the Soviets by U.S.-backed Islamic guerrilla factions, then passing among those groups as they turned on one another after the Soviet withdrawal, finally falling into the hands of the Taliban as it defeated various warlords.
The Taliban is not known to possess any chemical or biological weapons.
"There is no competition against the U.S. in a frontal attack," said Ahmed Rashid, who has traveled extensively in Taliban-held territory and recently wrote a book on the militia. "The Scuds are very old and can't be aimed properly -- but they are weapons of terror."
Most of the Taliban's equipment would be no match in combat against the U.S. military. But Pakistani military officials and analysts say the Taliban's antiaircraft weapons pose a potent threat to planes and helicopters, and its aging Scud missiles, with a 200-mile range, could be turned against Pakistan's border cities.
A Pakistani military officer said one of this country's primary security concerns is the fear of Scud launches by the Taliban in retaliation for Pakistan's support of U.S. efforts to capture Osama bin Laden, who lives in Afghanistan. "The Scuds may be inaccurate, but not so inaccurate that they couldn't hit the cities of Peshawar or Quetta," he said.
Today the Taliban claimed that it had shot down an unmanned surveillance plane over Tashkurghan Pass in northern Afghanistan, near the border with Uzbekistan. Pakistani military officials here could not confirm the claim, but they said Taliban troops are capable of hitting aircraft with their Soviet artillery and surface-to-air missiles.
The CIA supplied guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan with U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles during the final years of the Soviet occupation, and the missiles are credited with turning the war of resistance in favor of the rebels. U.S. attempts to buy back the Stingers in the early 1990s failed dismally, and the missiles have been displayed regularly in military parades around the country for a decade.
While the Taliban paraded at least three Stingers through Kabul during a recent Independence Day celebration, military analysts said it is doubtful the Stingers still function properly.
The Taliban is believed to have no more than 45,000 troops, and an estimated 8,000 to 15,000 of them are believed to be foreigners, including about 3,000 Saudis and other Arabs recruited by bin Laden.
In the past five years, bin Laden, the man Washington has blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has reportedly provided funding to arm those Arab troops for the Taliban. But most of the new weapons are believed to be small arms, machine guns and mortars used in the desert skirmishes by the mobile and well-disciplined Arab guerrillas, according to military analysts.
Newer equipment also has been provided for the Taliban by the Pakistani intelligence services over the past seven years.
Special correspondent Kamran Khan contributed to this report.
--------
Whatever You Think About Afghanistan Is Probably Wrong
By Marc Kaufman
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7907-2001Sep22?language=printer
Prepare to enter Afghanistan. Leave your assumptions at the border.
It was winter in Kabul, the winter of 1997, when the Taliban was first consolidating its power in the capital. The city was in ruins, food was scarce and thousands of war widows had converged on a makeshift distribution center, begging for help.
A van showed up with foreign-sponsored aid workers, women who were supposed to hand out plastic ID cards allowing the widows to receive cheap food. The widows, most covered in head-to-toe burqas, surrounded the van. From inside, where I was riding with the aid workers, we could see their pained faces and pleading eyes through the mesh of their coverings. The workers -- ghost-like in their burqas, too -- had difficulty opening the van doors. Then the vehicle began to rock from the crush of widows.
That was when two young Taliban guards pushed forward, their arms swinging. One had a sharpened green stick, one had a small metal chain, and they were striking anyone they could reach. Women howled as they were hit, some went down, and the crowd pulled back. When the women surged again, the guards -- barely old enough to grow beards -- started swinging once more. Several harrowing minutes later, the van sped away. As I looked back, I could see the women being herded into line.
Until Sept. 11, few Americans knew or cared about people and events such as these in distant Afghanistan. Now -- because the Taliban harbors Osama bin Laden and is unwilling to hand him over -- millionsare eager to drop bombs on the place.
The reaction is understandable. But the tempting call for revenge is based on a distorted view of a complicated and long-tragic history. Because our focus is almost exclusively on the incomprehensibly rigid and heartless Taliban, we conclude that cruelty and zealotry define Afghanistan.
But most Afghans are not like the guards I saw. Overwhelmingly, they are like the widows -- a once proud, rugged and extremely appealing people who have been reduced by endless war and misfortune to a desperate level of existence.
The Taliban is not the protector of most of these Afghans, not their government -- at least not as we understand the word. The Taliban rulers took control largely by force and maintain it with anextreme Islamic regimen that is not in the Afghan tradition, and by most accounts appeals only to a limited minority of Afghans. They promised an end to fighting and have delivered that in many areas. But the price was a heavy hand that ruthlessly rules over every aspect of Afghani daily life. As Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, commented to me last week: The only working part of the Taliban government outside of the military is the General Department for the Preservation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
The demonizing of Afghanistan also misses the sacrifices and success of the Afghan mujaheddin -- the guerrilla army that, with massive American aid, fought the former Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed Afghan army for a decade and, amazingly, prevailed. Those men -- the fathers, husbands and sons of the widows of Kabul -- were widely credited with helping to speed the Soviet Union's collapse, and were eagerly embraced by U.S. and European leaders not so long ago as world heroes. More than a million Afghans (out of a population today of an estimated -- no one knows for sure -- 20 million) are believed to have died in the war against the Soviets. President Bush understands this distinction between the Taliban and the Afghan people -- he took pains in his speech Thursday night to say most Afghans are victims of the Taliban, too.
But what the American public has perhaps least understood is how directly the United States helped spawn and build the object of our wrath. During the anti-Soviet war, the United States sent billions in military aid to the most fundamentalist and aggressive of the rebel Afghan commanders, and encouraged our Arab allies to do the same. But as soon as the Soviets left and the Afghan communist government fell, the American interest in Afghanistan quickly declined. Promised help for an Afghan Marshall Plan disappeared after the mujaheddin groups began to fight each other in the early 1990s, and by all accounts a toxic vacuum developed in Afghanistan and the refugee camps across the Pakistan border. The Taliban came to life, and later to power, in response to the chaos and violence that U.N. officials and two U.S. presidents (the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton) failed -- or declined -- to address.
The public's limited understanding of Afghanistan also ignores the fact that an array of Afghans are still actively battling the Taliban. The Taliban's members come largely from one ethnic group -- the historically dominant Pashtuns -- but other ethnic groups together make up a near or slim majority of Afghans, and the core of the current opposition. Convinced the opposition would never prevail, however, and weary of its eternal infighting, the U.S. government stopped giving much (if any) military aid years ago.
Charles Wilson was one of a handful in Congress who pushed hard to fund the mujaheddin's fight against the Soviets, and the retired House Democrat from Texas still believes it was the right thing to do. But he acknowledges that U.S. policy after the Soviet withdrawal helped set the stage for today's catastrophe. "If there's one thing I regret in this, and I personally deeply regret it, is that after the war we abandoned them," he said last week. "The glamour was gone from Afghanistan, and we're paying for that inattention now."
Desperate people will reach for whatever help they can get, and help came in the form of wealthy, disaffected fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf -- including bin Laden -- who saw an opportunity to spread their branch of Islam. I saw that process at work several years after the Taliban had taken over eastern Afghanistan, when I traveled as a journalist to the provincial city of Khost. Half of the bazaar remained in ruins from missile attacks during the war years; the university (built with German aid) and the American-funded airport were badly damaged and unused. But amid the destruction, a huge and elaborate mosque was rising. Taliban officials told me with pride that money for the mosque had come from Persian Gulf sponsors.
The Arab benefactors often brought with them the Wahabi creed of Islam, an austere Saudi interpretation of the religion, and that mixed with doctrines taught by Pakistani fundamentalists to Afghan refugees in camps and Islamic schools during the war years. The result was a religious leadership never seen before in Afghanistan. The country has always been a tribal and socially conservative society, especially in the towns and villages of the parched Pashtun south, but centuries ago it embraced a decentralized, non-hierarchial Sunni Hanafi branch of Islam that featured wide tolerance. The jihad against the Afghan communists and Soviets radicalized many people, but the Muslims from the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere who fought alongside the mujaheddin during that long war were never widely popular. Those Arab newcomers became central to Afghan life only after the Taliban began its national conquest in 1994. Many Afghans I spoke with believed their jihad had been hijacked by these foreigners.
In Khost, for instance, I met a veteran mujaheddin commander whose daughter was attending a girls' school. By then the Taliban had banned education for girls, but many larger towns and cities kept their schools open anyway. The commander said that many parents in Khost would never accept such a ban, and the Taliban would not dare impose it on people who fought so hard to defeat the communists. I've often wondered what the man's convictions might have cost him later.
America's abandonment of Afghanistan after the communists left, and its untallied cost, was also on display in the Helmand Valley in southern Afghanistan, where American taxpayer money had built an extensive system of dams and irrigation canals in the 1960s and '70s. This was when the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for influence, and the aim was to make Afghanistan more prosperous by growing cotton for Asian markets. Thousands of Afghans were trained tomake it happen.
But by 1997, the Helmand Valley had instead become the world's greatest producer of opium poppies for heroin. The poppies were grown openly on land made fertile through American largess, and I was told the crop was taxed by Taliban officials. Farmers said they grew poppies because it was the only crop they could make a living on. Some trained Afghan irrigation specialists remained in the area -- idle, heartbroken and dreaming of an American return. (In May, the United States released $43 million in drought aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban began a campaign against poppy growers.)
An American presence brings more than technical advancements. It helps combat Afghan myths about our culture and our people. On my travels around Afghanistan and the neighboring Pashtun areas of Pakistan -- where women in burqas are a common sight -- I remember puzzled questions from drivers and guides about American relations between the sexes. These were generally educated people, but they wanted to know why American men let their wives be filmed naked for other men to see. I tried to explain that pornography was an industry, not a family business, and that most American women have never been filmed, clothed or unclothed. But they dismissed my explanations, pointing out that American pornography was circulated widely in Pakistan and even in some parts of Afghanistan. To imagine their bewilderment and disgust at what they saw in those porno magazines and films, think about the effect of dropping Penthouse into Puritan New England.
The men saw it all as a highly dishonorable reflection on our society -- they weren't keen on divorce, either -- and confirmation of their view that women should remain at home whenever possible and should travel outside only when fully covered. Their understanding of our nation was grotesquely limited, but they thought they knew a lot.
Let's not make the same mistake as we pursue bin Laden and the terrorists. Let's leave our easy assumptions at the border.
Marc Kaufman, a reporter on The Post national staff, visited Afghanistan and Afghan refugees more than a dozen times between 1988 and 1997 as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
--------
Taliban say they've lost contact with bin Laden
USA TODAY
09/23/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/23/taliban-binladen.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban have been unable to locate alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden for the past two days, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan said Sunday. U.S. officials cast doubt on the claim, saying the Taliban may be trying to elude President Bush's demands that they hand over bin Laden or face retribution along with the Saudi exile for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Bin Laden is the top suspect in those attacks. "We're not going to be deterred by comments that he may be missing. We don't simply believe it," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told Fox News Sunday.
Taliban ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef said the Taliban chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had sent emissaries to inform bin Laden of a decision Thursday by the country's Muslim clergy that he should leave the country voluntarily at a time of his choosing.
Zaeef said Taliban authorities had been searching for bin Laden for the past two days "but he has not been traced."
The Taliban leadership have said in the past that they are able to convey information to bin Laden through radio communication with Taliban security personnel who travel with him.
Bush has said the Taliban - the hard-line Islamic militia that rules most of Afghanistan - must hand over bin Laden and members of his alleged terror network, allow U.S. access to bin Laden's camps and free two detained American aid workers. If they don't, Bush said, the Taliban will face military action along with bin Laden.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the Taliban claim that bin Laden was missing "is simply not credible."
"The Taliban may be trying to find a way to get themselves out of this terrible box they're in," Secretary of State Colin Powell told NBC's Meet the Press.
When asked if the Bush administration thought the Taliban were telling the truth about bin Laden's disappearance, Rice said, "Well, we're going to find out." But she insisted the U.S. response would not be deterred.
She said the Taliban movement can meet Bush's demands "or it can face the wrath of an international coalition that understands that the Taliban has been harboring terrorists for quite a long time. And that's a choice that they're going to have to make."
The Afghan Islamic Press, a private news agency based in Islamabad, also reported the Taliban claim. The agency quoted Omar's spokesman Abdul Hayee as saying "guest Osama" had "gone missing" and that "efforts were being made to locate him."
Quoting Hayee, the agency said that once bin Laden was found, he would be told of the clerical decision.
"Then it would be his decision whether he wants to stay in Afghanistan or not," the agency said.
Bin Laden has been living since 1996 in Afghanistan as a "guest" of the Taliban. Bin Laden is believed to have set up camps and hide-outs in various locations in the mountainous nation.
-------- biological weapons
State Of America's Bio Defense - Not Good - We Are Vulnerable
By Kristen Philipkoski
Wired.com
9-23-1
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,46924,00.html
Terrorists likely have considered biological weapons and may be working on ways to deploy them, biological warfare experts say.
Certainly after the Sept. 11 attacks, anything seems possible. The experts also say, however, it will take a level of scientific know-how to execute a biological attack that terrorists most likely don't have.
"The expertise of the terrorists is more along the lines of a traditional attack using high explosives, but that doesn't mean they're not trying," said Jim Lewis, the director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Even if Lewis is correct, that doesn't mean a biological attack can't happen. The chances a terrorist organization does have bio-weapons increases dramatically if it is sponsored by, say, Iraq or Pakistan, or another of the many countries that have the scientific infrastructure in place to produce bio-weapons.
By 1991, Iraqis had created weapons of anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
They didn't use them in the Gulf War, although they did release chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988. The former Soviet Union also had bio-warfare capabilities before its collapse.
Although the United Nations destroyed what appeared to be the final remains of the Iraqi offensive program in 1996, the United Nations Special Commission is not confident that Iraq has abandoned biological weapons research.
According to Jay Davis, a national security fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and former director of the defense threat reduction agency at the Department of Defense, it's also possible that terrorists have been working on developing a biological weapon for many years, if one were to judge by the intricate and persistent planning that went into the attack last week.
If anything is clear, it's that the United States is incapable of dealing with a biological attack -- a situation that has been hammered home perhaps too loudly to terrorists, said Mark Wheelis, a professor of microbiology and a bioweapons historian at the University of California at Davis.
"If terrorists are interested in biological weapons, it's probably our fault since we had the Secretary of Defense going on TV saying this is America's greatest vulnerability," Wheelis said.
If terrorists did succeed, and anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague, tularemia or any of many other potentially deadly microbes were released upon American civilians, it's likely they would go undetected until people started getting sick. That might be too late.
A World Health Organization study estimated that if a tularemia biological weapon were used against a modern city of 5 million people, it would cause 250,000 illnesses and 19,000 deaths.
The attack would trigger cases of pneumonia, pleuritis and lymph node disease within three to five days after exposure. Unless treated with effective antibiotics, the disease could lead to serious illness including respiratory failure, shock or death.
Researchers are looking for ways to detect bio-attacks before they cause sickness, but no 100 percent reliable technologies exist to date.
"There are sensors that are in the research and development mode that can be brought to bear to detect some biological pathogens, but we've got a long way to go," said Frank Cilluffo, senior policy analyst and deputy director of the Global Organized Crime Project at CSIS.
The military has a set of technologies that sample the air for particles and then perform what's called a PCR analysis to identify them. Using PCR -- polymerase chain reaction -- scientists can rapidly replicate DNA from a very small sample.
One limitation of the technology is that it takes at least an hour to get enough DNA for a detection device to take a reading. The technology is also prone to false positives and negatives, so officials have to guess whether a threat is serious enough to evacuate a public building.
"Say you get a false positive and you evacuate the Capitol building -- you can't do that too many times," Davis said.
The military is stepping up efforts to manufacture more and better bio-sensors.
A company called InnovaTek in Richland, Washington, is funded by the Army and the Navy to develop and manufacture a technology that collects particles small enough to be inhaled by human beings.
Since last week's terrorist attacks, the military has scaled up the project by "100 times," said InnovaTek president and CEO Patricia Irving, although she couldn't give specific numbers.
"The staff is working day and night on this issue," Irving said. "We have people adding a second shift to deliver this product. We're dedicated to doing whatever we can to provide the technology that will help protect people from terrorism."
A perfect system would detect biological weapons to warn people rather than to alert medical facilities.
"You'd love for it to be as fast as a smoke detector," Davis said.
With hopes of achieving a perfect system, researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies have embarked on efforts to use a technology called mass spectrometry. "Mass spec," as it's referred to, can separate proteins from cells, and the results would be essentially instantaneous.
The Department of Defense signed a contract earlier this year with Bruker Daltonics in Billerica, Massachusetts, to purchase mass spectrometers for chemical and biological defense over the next two years for more than $10 million.
The Defense Department <news/technology/0,1282,16550,00.htmlfirst used Bruker's spectrometers as part of the Army's Biological Integrated Detection System.
Even this technology is not free of false positives and would require backup confirmation from PCR or other devices.
The trick will be situating bio-sensors where an attack takes place. Putting them too many places would result in too many false positives and needless evacuations. But it's difficult to predict where an attack will occur.
In the event that a bio-attack escapes detection, there are unfortunately no antidotes for diseases caused by, for example, anthrax. The only possible treatment is an intense dose of antibiotics, which according to the Office of the Secretary of Defense can reduce the risk of death from 99 percent to 80 percent.
An anthrax vaccine is available. It can cause allergic reactions in some people but is often administered to people who work with animals and military personnel.
The government needs to give pharmaceutical companies incentives to develop antidotes, since, thankfully, there isn't a commercial market for them, said Cilluffo of the CSIS.
"We need to find ways to best tap into the biomedical community, because they're at the leading edge of technology much more so than Uncle Sam," Cilluffo said.
Ultimately, protecting the country from a biological attack will require a collaboration between the leaders in national intelligence, pharmaceuticals, both animal and plant agriculture (since attackers could also target the food supply) and national defense.
"This does not lend itself to setting up 'the bio-defense agency,'" Davis said. "It's the number two or three job for everyone. No one owns the whole problem."
President Nixon signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972 stating that the United States would never develop, produce, stockpile, acquire or retain bio-warfare agents or the means to deliver them.
----
THE BIOLOGICAL THREAT
Defense May Be Inadequate for Germ or Toxic Attacks
New York Times
September 23, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and MELODY PETERSEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/national/23GERM.html
Minutes after two jets slammed into the World Trade Center, an elite team of 22 soldiers was ordered from its base in Scotia, N.Y., to the scene of the disaster, the world's worst terror attack.
By 8:30 that night, the unit had deployed special gear in New York City and was quietly sampling the air, making sure the terrorists had released no deadly germs or toxic chemicals, which in theory could cause widespread illness and death.
No such dangers were found. But despite the fast start, experts say civil defenses across the nation are a rudimentary patchwork that could prove inadequate for what might lie ahead, especially lethal germs, which are considered some of the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Many experts approve of President Bush's decision to appoint a cabinet secretary for Homeland Security, calling it an important step toward protecting civilians against terrorist arms.
The emergency teams "did very well in dealing with this attack," Tara O'Toole, a physician at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview. "But we've never really had a test of the hospital system where people in large numbers required sophisticated medical care."
Moreover, there are no measures to routinely check for biological attack. Instead, the authorities rely on reports from doctors that people are seeking medical attention for unusual symptoms. That is why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta issued a national alert on Sept. 11 calling on public health officials to "initiate heightened surveillance for any unusual disease occurrence or increased numbers of illnesses that might be associated with today's events."
The alert is still in effect. "We haven't heard a thing," one federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said of any reports of unusual disease patterns.
But medical experts often fault this approach as inadequate, especially because symptoms of serious illness often appear days and weeks after an infection has begun to spread and when life-saving treatments are no longer effective.
The nation is "woefully unprepared to deal with bioterrorism," Jerome M. Hauer, former head of emergency management for New York City, told Congress two months ago.
How serious is the threat? Today it is considered low. Experts say that biological weapons, with few exceptions, are hard to make and use. In the early 1990's, Aum Shinriko, a Japanese cult, launched germ attacks in and around Tokyo that were meant to kill millions. The strikes produced no known injuries or deaths.
But the chances that some rogue state or terrorist group will successfully deploy germ weapons are seen as rising, as knowledge of how to make deadly weapons spreads, along with the necessary technology.
"There's a greater risk of dying on the highway than from exposure to anthrax," said Jonathan B. Tucker, a germ-weapons expert in the Washington, D.C., office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
But Dr. Tucker cautioned that the attacks on New York and near Washington were unusual in showing a high degree of care and preparation, suggesting that terrorists "may be able to overcome the technical hurdles" to mass destruction, especially if aided by rogue states or scientists.
George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, warned Congress last year that terrorists were exploring how "rapidly evolving and spreading technologies might enhance the lethality of their operations." A number of groups, he said, are seeking germ, chemical, radiological or nuclear arms.
Mr. Tenet added that operatives of Osama bin Laden, the renegade Saudi millionaire suspected in the Sept. 11 attacks, "have trained to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals or biological toxins."
Military experts say germ weapons can be cheaper, stealthier and potentially more devastating than nuclear arms, though hard for terrorists to acquire and use without hurting themselves.
Shock waves from the recent suicide attacks, experts agree, could help forge a consensus to erect better defenses against unconventional weapons, reversing decades of neglect of civil defense. Many government reports and private experts have criticized recent efforts as wasteful, poorly coordinated among some 40 federal agencies and ill suited for dealing with a wide spectrum of possible threats.
The Clinton administration, rocked by terrorist attacks on Americans at home and abroad, embarked on a wide but sporadic campaign to build civil defenses. Among other things, the campaign established a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines and on Sept. 11, Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, authorized the first shipments from it, sending truckloads of emergency drugs, bandages, dressings and other medical supplies to New York City.
Even so, Dr. O'Toole of the Johns Hopkins center said, the nation has vaccines or drugs to combat only about a dozen of the 50 pathogens thought to be the likeliest threats.
As part of the stockpile push, the disease control centers last year awarded a $343 million contract for making 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine, the first of which is due in 2004. The disease is a contagious killer of high fevers and open sores.
Though smallpox was eliminated from human populations in the late 1970's, stocks of the virus still exist and making vaccine has become a priority as worries over bioterrorism have grown.
The United States has on hand roughly 7.5 million vaccine doses, said Dr. Tucker in "Scourge," a new book on smallpox. That amount, he added, is "inadequate to cope with even a medium-sized outbreak that might result from a bioterrorist attack."
This year, federal and private officials met to act out how the government would cope with a smallpox outbreak. The exercise, code named Dark Winter, ended in chaos when the spreading disease overwhelmed all attempts at containment.
"Most state and local governments have not begun to address the issues that Dark Winter presented," Mr. Hauer told a House Government Reform subcommittee in July. "An incident using biological agents will likely go unnoticed for days, and the typical response of the first responders will have little impact. It is not a `lights and sirens' type of incident."
In the last few years, New York City has quietly undertaken many efforts to counter attacks with deadly chemicals or germs.
One program, the kind that the disease control centers called for nationally on Sept. 11, monitors patterns of emergency hospitalizations. Another trains city police officers and firefighters to handle such emergencies, including the decontamination of materials and people.
Stephen S. Morse, a biologist at Columbia University who directs its Center for Public Health Preparedness, which is part of a new national network of such groups run by the disease control centers, recently helped the city set up a program for training school nurses as well.
"Their main role would be sheltering people and ministering in the shelters," Mr. Morse said. "You hope for the best, and prepare for the worst."
The Defense Department, meanwhile, is continuing a wide effort, begun in the Clinton administration, to have university scientists and biotech companies come up with innovative ways to combat a variety of disease agents.
-------- u.n.
Recent UN Security Council and SG responses
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001
From: Felicity Hill <flick@igc.org>
Dear All,
Nuclear terrorism was mentioned in a Security Council Presidential press statement of Friday 21st September, which also indicated that the role of the UN and the Security Council is being discussed.
NGOs are prohibited from entering the UN at this time, so must to transmit their opinion and expertise by other means. Please see the newly updated list of governmental decision makers on the Reaching Critical Will website for the contact details of your representatives.
http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/govcontacts/govindex.html
The SC Presidential statement of Friday 21st is the first we have heard directly from the Security Council on the matter of terrorism and the acts of September 11, since Resolution 1368 of September 12. In the statement Jean-Davit Levitte of France promises that the Security Council is contemplating its role and then goes on to explain that the Council had been briefed on the 12 legal instruments on terrorism, one on fighting nuclear terrorism, the other on a global convention to fight terrorism.
What is the role of the Security Council?
In the preamble of Resolution 1368, the Security Council recognised "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter", and in its first paragraph deemed the acts of September 11 as a threat to international peace and security, and therefore under its domain.
Under Chapter VII of the Charter, once this has been determined, the SC can decide upon sanctions (Art. 41) or armed force (Art. 42). Art. 48 provides that the SC can decide whether such enforcement measures are to be carried out by some or all member states.
The Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy is working on more detailed legal analysis of the documents and situation, but in some useful initial explanatory comments, John Burroughs of LCNP summarised Resolution 1368 as follows:
"Generally, then, the resolution lays groundwork for steps that may be taken by the SC in the future. It is not itself an action resolution. The emphasis perhaps is on justice and suppression of terrorism. But self-defense is mentioned. And the basis is there also for the SC, should it so choose, later to approve the use of force by the United States and other states to respond to the "threat to international peace and security". On the latter point, there is concern about the use of the SC to legitimize acts of force, especially by US and NATO. On the other hand, going through the SC probably imposes some constraints on US/NATO, and is also what is called for by the Charter and insisted upon by major powers like Russia and China."
The President of the Security Council referred to the New York Times OP-ED piece by Secretary General Kofi Annan entitled, "Fighting Terrorism on a Global Front" with a pull quote "The UN has the tools to do the job".
The full article is reproduced below. About half way through the article, Kofi Annan emphasised the role of the UN:
"The United Nations is uniquely positioned to advance this effort. It provides the forum necessary for building a universal coalition and can ensure global legitimacy for the long-term response to terrorism. United Nations conventions already provide a legal framework for many of the steps that must be taken to eradicate terrorism - including the extradition and prosecution of offenders and the suppression of money laundering. These conventions must be implemented in full...... Terrorism threatens every society. As the world takes action against it, we have all been reminded of the need to address the conditions that permit the growth of such hatred and depravity. We must confront violent, bigotry and hatred even more resolutely. The United Nations' work must continue as we address the ills of conflict, ignorance, poverty and disease."
I hope these primary documents are useful. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you would like more information or updates.
best wishes
Felicity Hill
--
SC/7152 21 September 2001
PRESS STATEMENT ON TERRORISM BY PRESIDENT OF SECURITY COUNCIL
Following is the text of this morning's statement on terrorism by the President of the Security Council, Jean-David Levitte (France):
The article of the Secretary-General in today's paper reflects exactly the general mood and the general will not only of the Security Council but certainly of the whole membership.
We all consider that the United Nations can and indeed must be fully engaged with determination, and in a unanimous way, in this fight against the scourge of terrorism.
The debate in the General Assembly on 1 October will be a golden opportunity to show again the unanimity of the membership of the United Nations.
The Security Council, on the very day of the attacks against the World Trade Center and against the Pentagon, issued a statement to the press, and on 12 September unanimously adopted resolution 1368 -- which is quite an ambitious text.
Before going further we wanted to be briefed by the Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, on this issue of terrorism, and Hans Corell has reminded us of the state of affairs. There are already 12 conventions dealing with terrorism in its different aspects. The last one was adopted during the last session of the General Assembly to fight against the financing of terrorism, and is open for signature until 31 December. So I take this opportunity to encourage all members of the United Nations to sign this very important convention.
Beyond these 12 conventions, Hans Corell reminded us that there are two initiatives under consideration by the Sixth Committee and the General Assembly:
-- the first one is proposed by India. It is a global convention against terrorism;
-- the second one is proposed by Russia. It is a specific convention to fight nuclear terrorism.
There are also specialized agencies and regional organizations which play a very important role in the fight against terrorism.
In this context we had a lively discussion with the Legal Counsel about the role of the Security Council. In the past the Security Council has already taken action in general terms -- for example we adopted resolution 1269 -- or action focused against this or that State -- we adopted two resolutions on Afghanistan, the latest being resolution 1333.
Is there room for action beyond resolution 1368 that we adopted unanimously a few days ago? This will be discussed next week.
How and when will we decide on that? I will simply recall paragraph 5 of resolution 1368, which says that "the Council expresses its readiness to take all necessary steps to respond to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and to combat all forms of terrorism, in accordance with its responsibilities under the Charter of the United Nations."
That is exactly what we are determined to do and what we will discuss next week.
--
Fighting Terrorism on a Global Front
by Kofi A. Annan
New York Times OP-ED,
Friday September 21, 2001
The terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11 aimed at one nation but wounded an entire world. Rarely, if ever, has the world been as united as it was on that terrible day. It was a unity born of horror, of fear, of outrage and of profound sympathy with the American people. This unity also reflected the fact that the World Trade Center, in this uniquely international city, was home to men and women of every faith from some 60 nations. This was an attack on all of humanity, and all humanity has a stake in defeating the forces behind it.
As the United States decides what actions it will take in defense of its citizens, and as the world comes to terms with the full implications of this calamity, the unity of Sept 11 will be evoked, and it will be tested. I have expressed to President Bush and Mayor Rudolph Guiliani - and to New Yorkers at services in churches, synagogues and mosques - the complete solidarity of the United Nations with Americans in their grief. In less than 48 hours, the Security Council and the General Assembly joined me in condemning the attacks and voted to support actions taken against those responsible and states that aid them. Of this solidarity, let no one be in doubt.
Nor should anyone question the worldwide resolve to fight terrorism as long as it is needed. The most eloquent global answer so far to last week's attacks has been the commitment of states from every faith and region to act firmly against terrorism.
The international community is defined not only by what it is for, but by what and whom it is against. The United Nations must have the courage to recognize that just as there are common aims, there are common enemies. To defeat them, all nations must join forces in an effort encompassing every aspect of the open, free global system so wickedly exploited by the perpetrators of last week's atrocities.
The United Nations is uniquely positioned to advance this effort. It provides the forum necessary for building a universal coalition and can ensure global legitimacy for the long-term response to terrorism. United Nations conventions already provide a legal framework for many of the steps that must be taken to eradicate terrorism - including the extradition and prosecution of offenders and the suppression of money laundering. These conventions must be implemented in full.
Essential to the global response to terrorism is that it not fracture the unity of Sept. 11. While the world must recognize that there are enemies common to all societies, it must equally understand that they are not, are never, defined by religion of national descent. No people, no region, and no religion should be targeted because of the unspeakable acts of individuals. As Mayor Guiliani said, "That is exactly what we are fighting here." To allow divisions between and within societies to be exacerbated by these acts would be to do the terrorists' work for them.
Terrorism threatens every society. As the world takes action against it, we have all been reminded of the need to address the conditions that permit the growth of such hatred and depravity. We must confront violent, bigotry and hatred even more resolutely. The United Nations' work must continue as we address the ills of conflict, ignorance, poverty and disease.
Doing so will not remove every source of hatred or prevent every act of violence. There are those who will hate and who will kill even if every injustice is ended. But if the world can show that it will carry on, that it will persevere in creating a stronger, more just, more benevolent and more genuine international community across all lines of religion and race, then terrorism will have failed.
Felicity Hill Director, United Nations Office Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 777 UN Plaza, New York, NY 10017, USA Ph: 1 212 682 1265 Fax: 1 212 286 8211 email: flick@igc.org, wilpfun@igc.org web: www.wilpf.int.ch www.reachingcriticalwill.org
-------- u.s.
Helms backs strikes against Iraq, others
September 23, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010923-14966786.htm
The State Department and the Defense Department disagree on the scope of the pending war against terrorism, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmed yesterday.
Interviewed on CNN's "Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields," Sen. Jesse Helms, North Carolina Republican, was asked about reports that the State Department would like to limit the initial targets of the impending U.S. retaliatory attacks to the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan and terrorists in that country, while the Defense Department would also like to strike at governments that support terrorists in other Arab countries, including Iraq.
"With this one, I'm with the Defense Department," Mr. Helms said, adding:
"I say that with apologies, perhaps to the secretary of state, but the State Department is wrong, in my judgment."
North Carolina's senior senator, who is finishing up three decades in the Senate - half of them as the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee - was then asked if he thinks Iraq will be a target of the attack.
"That depends on two or three things they are trying to work out, and I don't think they'll work them out. I think they will be a target," Mr. Helms said.
U.S. officials have identified wealthy Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, whose terrorist network has been sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed more than 6,500 persons. On Friday, the Taliban refused an ultimatum by President Bush to hand over bin Laden immediately.
However, some reports have suggested that Iraq - which has never gotten over its defeat by the United States and its allies in the 1991 Persian Gulf war - may have sponsored the attacks on U.S. soil. Iraq's government denies the charge.
Mr. Helms yesterday acknowledged uncertainty as to whether he would support sending U.S. troops to Afghanistan. "I would have to know a few more things about it. Now we have dispatched 2,200 Marines this past Thursday from North Carolina Marine bases, but I'm not sure that I feel confident about the general process there. But these Marines will not be sent directly into [Afghanistan]," the veteran lawmaker told CNN.
Mr. Helms recognizes the risks of sending U.S. troops to Afghanistan, given that the former Soviet Union was defeated and forced to retreat from that country following a 10-year occupation.
Mr. Helms said there's been much discussion about the failed Soviet invasion, as well as the difficulties that would be faced trying to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan, in meetings he's had with high-level officials in a secure room on the fourth floor of the Capitol during the past week. "I don't believe I want to talk about it further at this time," he said on CNN.
If the war on terrorism goes beyond Afghanistan to include Iraq, Mr. Helms was asked if the U.S. government should set as a goal the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. "The first President Bush ought to have gotten rid of him. I say that with all due respect to the former president, but that was one of the major mistakes that was made at that time," Mr. Helms said.
As Mr. Bush spoke at length by phone yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin - who has pledged his country's support in the war on terrorism - Mr. Helms said he does not think either Russia or China will be reliable allies in this fight.
"I do not, and I think it's a waste of time," said Mr. Helms, who is well-known for his candor and bluntness.
"China has demonstrated time and time again that they're not interested in working with the United States on anything. They are determined to do the best they can for China, regardless of the United States, and I haven't seen much better from Russia," he added.
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Military slumlords
September 23, 2001
By Bill Baskervill
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010923-79691939.htm
Many U.S. military families living in housing provided by the armed services have a beef with their landlord.
Long-neglected upkeep is a nagging, daily aggravation - and policy-makers and even commanders say it also lowers morale and hurts re-enlistment.
• At Fort Story in Virginia, termite damage went unattended so long at the home of the top enlisted man, Sgt. Maj. Jim Moors, that the house was condemned. Sgt. Maj. Moors said he just hoped to provide his wife with "a nice set of quarters before we retire" after 30 years in the Army. All other housing on the post is substandard, the service acknowledges.
• Ungrounded wiring, found throughout New Mexico's Kirtland Air Force Base, was blamed when an airman's television "blew up," housing director Elaina Day said. Antiquated electrical systems at many bases increase the chance of fire and shock.
• At Fort Bragg, N.C., Lucy Thomas and her neighbor, Sharon Carr, both soldiers' wives, are fed up with leaking and overflowing plumbing. Mrs. Thomas' ceiling has collapsed three times because of leaking pipes. "I've had three floods," she said.
The toilet in Mrs. Carr's cramped town house overflowed so much that it ruined three carpets. Sewage and toilet tissue routinely percolate to the surface in the front yard, she said.
"I've lived in public housing, and this is worse," Mrs. Carr said. "It's like we are nobody."
Recently, she moved out, planning to take her two children to live with her family while her husband, a sergeant first class, serves a tour of duty in South Korea.
Across the nation's military installations, the complaints are the same. Ceilings sag and floors buckle. Lead-based paint crumbles where soldiers' children play, and wallboard paste laced with asbestos lies exposed. Patched roofs and neglected pipes leak. Septic systems overflow.
"Inadequate" is the term applied by the services themselves to two-thirds of the 300,000 family homes owned or leased by the U.S. military worldwide. That means they are too small or have major problems with plumbing, electrical systems, air conditioning, termites, rot or mold.
Many homes, officials say, simply need to be demolished.
Retired Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith, commander of the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune, N.C., through July 1999, called himself the region's "biggest slumlord" because of decaying, 50-year-old base housing - still greatly needing work.
"I could make people live in my slum," he said, "but didn't have the power to fix them up."
Military brass worry about the effect that today's poor housing - a legacy of 200 years of neglect - could have on war-fighting ability as a second generation of professional troops decide if they should remain in the service.
"It has a direct relationship to recruitment and retention," said Raymond F. Dubois, deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.
President Bush held a White House ceremony in May in which he thanked 100 re-enlisting service members. Re-enlistment rates dropped during the 1990s, and it was a major issue during the presidential campaign, with Mr. Bush arguing that sagging morale was partly to blame.
Mr. Bush and Congress have spelled out plans to improve troops' housing, good news for the services, which reported this month that recruitment remains a major challenge, even though they met goals for the past two years.
"It's morally wrong to ask people who are risking their lives for the country to live in housing that the rest of us would be embarrassed to call home," said Rep. Chet Edwards, Texas Democrat and a member of the House Appropriations military construction subcommittee.
Congress appropriated $890 million this year to replace and renovate 6,800 family homes worldwide. Mr. Bush, who wants the services to eliminate substandard housing by 2008, two years ahead of the services' schedule, proposed spending $1.1 billion next year to construct or improve 6,300 family homes and to support private development of an additional 28,000.
This year's allocation averages to $131,000 per home, which military officials say is comparable to the cost of a similar civilian home. A new town house at Fort Carson, Colo., for example, has wall-to-wall carpeting, ceiling fans, a bay window in a large kitchen, a garage, and an underground lawn-sprinkler system.
Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said there is broad consensus in Congress to get the problem fixed. "The budgets thus far are on target for correction by 2008," he said.
Rep. Ed Schrock, Virginia Republican, recently made a whirlwind tour of 23 military bases with three other members of the House Armed Services Committee. He agreed that Congress is committed to fixing the problem.
"Time after time, base after base, state after state, we found conditions so bad that you don't want your worst enemy living in them," he said.
The long-term solution is privatization, the Pentagon hopes. In an experiment at Fort Carson, the Army has turned over all family housing to a private developer.
Blending privatization and military construction is expected to cut by two-thirds the projected time and cost of rebuilding housing - up to 30 years and $30 billion, if done by the military alone.
For at least 20 years, funding hasn't kept pace with even basic maintenance needs, much less construction requirements, said retired Brig. Gen. Robert L. Herndon, former chief of Army housing.
Clearing the maintenance backlog alone will cost $16 billion to $30 billion - "a huge spread because no one really knows how big the figure is," he said.
Associated Press reporters heard stories of neglected upkeep or saw blighted housing on visits to 15 American military bases in the United States and overseas. More than 50 service members and their families gave specific examples of the housing inadequacies broadly reported by the services and the General Accounting Office. AP also talked to base commanders, military housing officials and civilian experts.
Poor military housing is almost as old as the nation itself.
Soldiers were quartered in stables and shanties at frontier posts in the West, Army Corps of Engineers historian William C. Baldwin wrote in a history of Army housing. In 1870, the surgeon general reported that the United States had the "worst-housed army in the world." In 1924, national magazines published articles titled "Our Homeless Army" and "Army Housing: A National Disgrace."
Amid the nationwide housing shortage after World War II, "rather than be separated from their families many of the service personnel have accepted disgraceful living conditions in shacks, trailer camps and overcrowded buildings," the secretary of defense reported at the time.
Thousands of new homes were built in the 1950s and early '60s, but the shortage of family housing persisted. Those same houses are the ones now falling apart as the pressure for more and better housing increases.
Today, 740,000, or 53 percent, of America's 1,394,000 active-duty military personnel are married - and three-fourths of those have children. An additional 88,000, or 6 percent, are single parents.
"When there is a procurement program pending for aircraft carriers, Air Force jets or Army tanks, there is a legion of lobbyists from all over the country fighting for those programs," said Mr. Edwards. "There are few lobbyists fighting for better houses" for military families.
A tour of Camp Lejeune underlines that reality.
Staff Sgt. David Murray, his wife and three children live in the base's Watkins Village, an eyesore built in the 1970s. Sgt. Murray is a 10-year Marine veteran who had planned to make the Corps a career. Does he still?
"No, not if I have anything to do with it," said his wife, Katie. "I'm tired of living in a house that no matter what I do, I hate it.
"My way of making the most of it is to clean like a madwoman all the time," she said. But cleaning the walls is frustrating. She dampened a cloth and demonstrated: The paint came off with a light swipe.
"When the kids take baths, water leaks downstairs and pours out of the heating vent," she said. Part of the nightly bath ritual is to put a towel on the floor below, where the water leaks from holes in the side of the bathtub.
"When the wife says, 'I'm out of here, I'm not living like this,' then we lose the Marine, too," said Col. Tom Phillips, assistant chief of staff for installations and environment at Camp Lejeune.
Despite poor quality, base housing is in demand, with waiting lists up to two years at some installations. That's because base housing and utilities are provided free of charge.
Service members who live off base - about 65 percent of the force - receive a housing allowance, varying by rank, but must supplement it from their pockets. They typically pay 20 percent of housing expenses, studies by the services show.
That could add up to about $2,000 out of pocket annually for a staff sergeant with eight years in the Army and a base pay of $24,552 a year, according to the GAO. Officials hope increased housing allowances approved by Congress will eliminate out-of-pocket expenses by 2005.
Like family housing, many barracks housing single troops are considered substandard. The Pentagon has set new standards calling for greater privacy and space for service members, including eliminating barracks with a central latrine. Mr. Bush's proposed budget contains $1.2 billion to build or update barracks.
Soon after taking office, Mr. Bush used Fort Stewart, Ga., as a backdrop for a speech telling soldiers and their families on a windswept parade field that "America is not serving you well."
Fort Stewart rates 75 percent of its family housing as poor, and 16 percent as worse than poor.
Geoffrey Armbruster, who drives a Bradley fighting vehicle, lives with his wife, Patricia, and their four children in a "really bad" two-bedroom town house in Fort Stewart's Hallwood Homes, built in 1957.
"The air conditioner has failed eight times. The kitchen sink gets stopped up and you can't get anything down it. We keep plunging and plunging and plunging," Patricia Armbruster said.
The Hallwood apartments also have leaky roofs and windows and bursting pipes.
"We maintain them, but they're old. They're falling apart," said post housing director Charlie Bunting.
Lead paint was banned for residential use in 1978. But most military houses built before then have it, like many private homes. Even when paint has been covered with nontoxic paints, cracking and peeling are common and an invitation for children to put paint chips in their mouths.
Asbestos is in wallboard paste and in floor-tile glue in many homes, base housing officials said. When major work is done on walls, ceilings or floors, workers wear respirators and hang signs warning: "Danger. Asbestos. Cancer and Lung Disease Hazard."
Military housing officials said they knew of no specific reports of lead- or asbestos-related illness.
At some bases, pest infestation is rampant. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, for example, the mice and roaches infesting some homes backing up to woods were bad enough. "And in the past few months we've had a lot of calls for bats," said Terry Mathews, chief of family housing.
Troops taking families overseas also face housing woes.
Some soldiers seeing the three-story apartment buildings at the U.S. Army post in Heidelberg, Germany, protest, "I wouldn't have brought my family if I'd known," said Dee Spellman, housing manager. Many of the apartments have not been renovated since they were built in the mid-1950s.
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Rumsfeld: Contact lost with spy plane in Afghanistan
USA TODAY
09/23/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/23/rumsfeld-spy.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States has lost contact with an unmanned aircraft over Afghanistan but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday he had "no reason to believe" the plane was brought down by Taliban fighters. "The United States has, in fact, lost a ... lost contact, I should say, with an unmanned aerial vehicle," Rumsfeld told reporters after appearing on a Sunday talk show. "That happens from time to time in terms of the controls. We have no reason to believe it was shot down." He gave the first confirmation of the loss of such an aircraft, used for years over Iraq and the Balkans for intelligence-gathering.
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban claimed Saturday that its fighters shot down an unmanned reconnaissance plane in northern Afghanistan and were trying to determine what country launched it.
The Taliban's official Bakhtar news agency said the aircraft was shot down over the Tashgurgan Pass in Samangan province, which borders Uzbekistan. At the time, Pentagon and CIA officials declined to comment on the report.
The United States acknowledged losing contact with two unmanned "Predator" spy planes during the past month over Iraq, which claimed to have shot both down. Washington did not acknowledge any hits by hostile fire.
Pinpointing the cause of the disappearance of such aircraft is difficult because the United States often cannot reach the wreckage. The Predators are drones that are controlled from some distance away.
Also Sunday, Rumsfeld took issue with comments from the Taliban that they have been unable to locate alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden for the past two days.
"They know where he is," Rumsfeld said on CBS' Face the Nation.
"It is just not believable that the Taliban do not know where the network can be located and found and be turned over and expelled," Rumsfeld said. Similar comments came from Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser.
Rumsfeld also was asked if U.S. military forces were "ready to strike" against bin Laden and his terrorist network for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
"What we've been doing since the day of the attack is getting our forces positioned in various places around the world. This is not an Afghan problem, this is a worldwide problem of terrorist networks," he said.
"We've been getting our capabilities located, positioned, arranged around the world, so that at that point, where the president decides that he has a set of things that he would like done, we will be in a position to carry those things out," he added.
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Pro Forma Order Sends U.S. Military to War
New York Times
September 23, 2001
By JOHN R. CUSHMAN JR.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/national/23DEPL.html
A bland appendix to a Pentagon publication, the Joint Staff Officers Guide, sets forth the recommended phrasing for orders sending the men and women of the United States military off to war.
"This is a deployment order," it says. "The Secretary of Defense has authorized the deployment of forces to Blueland in anticipation (or support) of military operations."
Of course, the orders issued this week for a new war on global terrorism contain names of real places instead of the mythical Blueland. Nobody could doubt that military operations were anticipated in Afghanistan after President Bush delivered an ultimatum to its Taliban government on Thursday. But he also warned that any nation that harbored or supported global terrorism might face America's wrath.
As troops received their orders, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld offered nothing more informative in public than Blueland to describe their destinations.
"We are trying to get ourselves arranged in the world with our forces in places that we believe conceivably could be useful in the event the president decided to use them for one thing or another," he said. "And I am not going to describe what forces we're moving, I'm not going to discuss the dates and times of when they leave and when they're going to arrive.
"There's no question but that when I sign a deployment order, what happens is someone in some state is told, `Pack your bag,' and he goes home and tells his wife or she goes home and tells her husband: `Told to pack the bag. We're leaving in X number of hours.' "
-------- uzbekistan
First U.S. Planes Land At Uzbek Air Base
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page A43
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10804-2001Sep22?language=printer
MOSCOW, Sept. 22 -- The first U.S. military planes arrived tonight in Uzbekistan in apparent preparation for retaliatory strikes on neighboring Afghanistan, according to wire service reports -- the first wave of what could be an unprecedented U.S. military presence in former Soviet Central Asia.
At the same time, another former Soviet republic in the region signaled new willingness to cooperate with a U.S.-led military operation against Afghanistan. President Imamali Rakhmonov of Tajikistan said today that "we express our willingness to cooperate with the international community, including the U.S. government, in the fight against international terrorism." He did not say what kind of cooperation Tajikistan would give.
Defense Department officials disclosed this past week that the Pentagon had begun deploying forces not just to traditional U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf area and Indian Ocean but also to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The officials said the deployment to Uzbekistan would be public, while operations in Tajikistan would be kept hidden at a remote base.
Initially, both countries disputed the reports, suggesting the sensitivity of a possible U.S. military presence in a region still dominated politically by Russia and fearful that a new war in Afghanistan would only lead to further destabilization throughout Central Asia.
But tonight, according to the Russian Interfax news agency, two C-130 cargo planes arrived at a former Soviet air base near Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, unloading equipment and approximately 100 U.S. military personnel. Interfax said official sources would neither confirm nor deny the planes' arrival.
Agence France-Presse quoted "Uzbek military sources" as confirming the arrival of an unspecified number of U.S. warplanes at the airport outside of Tashkent, and said that U.S. attack helicopters were still there in the wake of joint Uzbek-NATO exercises in the region earlier this month.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Bill in Brazil Would Allow More of Jungle to Be Razed
New York Times
September 23, 2001
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/international/23BRAZ.html
BRASÍLIA - A joint commission of the Brazilian Congress has approved a measure that would more than double the amount of the Amazon jungle that ranchers, loggers and miners would be permitted to raze.
The measure, sponsored by a "rural caucus" of legislators, would weaken many restrictions on Amazon land use and eliminate other safeguards altogether.
Though the bill must be approved by both houses of Congress to become law, environmental groups are alarmed and have begun a national campaign to defeat it.
"This legislation is dangerous to the Amazon and to all of Brazil because it puts the government's entire program of sustainable development at risk," said Adriana Ramos of the Social and Environmental Institute, a research and advocacy group. "The initial vote reflects the intransigence of a rural lobby that thinks only of defending its own narrow interests at the expense of society."
The measure, a new forestry code, would modify the government's current policy of requiring owners of land in the Amazon to preserve 80 percent of their property as forest. Instead of the 20 percent left for development, the new code would enable landowners to use at least 50 percent of their holdings for "productive purposes" once a "zoning study" granted approval.
"We have no objection to preserving the Amazon, which is, after all, part of the patrimony of the Brazilian people," said Senator Rubens Moreira Mendes, a leading member of the rural caucus. But the current restrictions, he said, "go too far in discouraging rational development and investment."
The draft code would also remove a longstanding provision that obligates landowners to replant deforested areas along riverbanks, allow them to replace some virgin forest with nonnative, commercially attractive species like eucalyptus, and redefine what constitutes jungle.
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso opposes the changes and was able to thwart an effort to pass a similar bill in May. But his government's coalition in Congress has weakened since then and is likely to become more divided ahead of presidential elections a year from now.
"A lot of bad things can happen at the end of a government, and one of the things we are seeing in the eastern Amazon is a sense of a free-for- all, with nobody minding the store," Stephan Schwartzman of Environmental Defense said in a telephone interview from Washington. "It's kind of open season, and that kind of mentality could lead people in Brazil to do things they think could create some sort of electoral advantages."
The debate comes as the pace of deforestation in the Amazon, which is bigger than all of Western Europe, appears to be picking up. After reaching a record level in the mid- 1990's, the destruction of tree cover slowed somewhat in 1999 and 2000, according to government monitors, as the Brazilian economy stagnated.
But Brazil has largely recovered from that crisis, and the current Amazon dry season has been marked by drought. That makes felling or burning trees easier.
"We have been seeing massive numbers of trucks and buses hauling laborers deeper and deeper into the jungle to cut down trees so as to create new cattle ranches," said Amarildo Gomes Pereira, who monitors deforestation patterns for the Roman Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission from the jungle town of Tucuma.
The government is seeking to postpone a final vote on the proposal. But backers of the bill like Mr. Moreira Mendes are pushing for a quick decision.
"The integrity of the most magnificent forest on the planet is a right of the many future generations of Brazilians who, unlike large landholders, have not been heard in Congress," the Minister of the Environment, José Sarney Filho, said recently. "It is up to the state and public opinion to undertake an intransigent defense of this right."
-------- human rights
REFUGEES
Aid Agencies Responding to the Afghanistan Exodus
New York Times
September 23, 2001
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/international/asia/23REFU.html
GENEVA, Sept. 22 - Anticipating a huge exodus of Afghans if the United States strikes at their country, international aid agencies have already begun a major relief effort in the region.
"Whatever is done, the humanitarian consequences will mean hundreds of thousands of new refugees," said Ruud Lubbers, the chief of the United Nations refugee agency, referring to the possibility of American military action. "At the same time, the Afghan people are imprisoned in their own country with no possibility for assistance for many who are starving."
Thousands of Afghans have been stopped at the borders as they try to flee, particularly to Pakistan. Iran, too, has closed its border. The two countries already hold more than three million Afghan refugees displaced by nearly two decades of war.
"We ask that borders remain open to all persons having to flee, not least because of the deteriorating security situation," Mr. Lubbers said.
He said he was asking neighboring governments to provide temporary protection to Afghan refugees, and to help the millions of Afghans who remain in the country, one of the world's poorest.
The normal flow of international aid, which Afghanistan has come to depend on, has been disrupted since relief workers have been evacuated in anticipation of possible American military action.
Mr. Lubbers, fresh from a conference call with agency leaders, said that despite the border closings many Afghans have managed to escape over small roads into Pakistan, whose government has not ruled out helping the new refugees.
Mr. Lubbers, whose title is the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said his agency had learned from the enormous crisis it faced three years ago during the American military action in Kosovo, when a "massive movement of people and the massive presence of the military, in a way, crushed" his agency.
"We learned good interagency cooperation, and to partner with the military," he said.
The refugee agency is sending 30,000 additional tents to border regions, as well as plastic shelter materials. It has appealed for $6 million in international funds to send its staff and relief supplies to Afghan borders. The agency spends $47 million to aid the country each year.
The United Nations agencies plan to ask for more money next week.
With supplies already running low inside Afghanistan and cold weather looming, Carol Bellamy, the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund, warned of an uphill struggle to care for Afghan children in the coming months. "Three years of drought, 20 years of war, and the ongoing displacement of one million people is now being compounded by the onset of winter," she said in a statement.
Unicef is already sending enough medicine for 100,000 people for three months, in addition to other supplies for sanitation and shelter, to Turkmenistan, on Afghanistan's northwest border.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is gearing up, too, by increasing its surgical and medical supplies in neighboring countries. Its staff was evacuated, along with most foreigners, earlier this week. However, the Geneva-based group said it was trying to win an agreement to return its staff to help with border relief operations.
The World Food Program said that its bakeries in the Afghan capital of Kabul had enough ingredients to keep going for about three weeks, but that distribution of bread was being hindered by lack of transport and fuel.
-------- police / prisoners
Across U.S., a Security Scramble
Patchwork Measures May Be Insufficient, Experts Say
By Eric Pianin, Bradley Graham and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10845-2001Sep22?language=printer
Wracked by fears of a fresh round of terrorism attacks, the U.S. military, federal and state authorities and private companies have implemented security measures on a scale rarely seen since World War II.
From saturation U.S. Coast Guard patrols of New York Harbor to a ban on guided tours at the Hoover Dam to the deployment of heavily armed South Dakota state police in black tactical gear at airport gates, officials have taken defensive steps that are affecting many aspects of life for millions of Americans.
As part of this scramble, safeguards have been beefed up at government buildings, office towers, hospitals, power plants, oil refineries, sporting events, airports, reservoirs, and bus terminals. Military surveillance planes routinely buzz New York and Washington and last week resumed random patrols over other major cities.
Security is so tight at U.S.-Mexico border crossings that U.S. Customs Service officials report a sudden sharp decline in attempted drug smuggling. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency is counseling families fearful of another disaster to "channel their energy" by stockpiling food, water, flashlights and batteries just in case.
"We haven't seen this type of level of readiness of forces within the United States since the chilliest days of the Cold War," said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association.
The multitude of activity underscores how seriously authorities are taking the possibility of another terrorist attack. Although no solid evidence of an imminent threat has emerged, within the past week jittery FBI agents have checked out tips of possible assaults in Boston, Atlanta, Richmond and Hollywood. With President Bush vowing to lead a protracted war to root out terrorists worldwide, officials in states large and small are girding for the possibility of additional deadly strikes.
While extensive and sometimes dramatic, the new security measures were instituted hastily and often chaotically after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They rely on personnel with wildly divergent levels of expertise, ranging from highly skilled Air Force pilots and seasoned border patrols to local police officers with no anti-terrorism training and relatively inexperienced private security guards. And the measures still fall far short of what specialists say are necessary to fully protect Americans.
Moreover, many of the actions of the past 12 days have been taken with no central authority coordinating the patchwork of state, federal and private entities involved in ensuring that all vulnerabilities are protected. And it has occurred in the absence of a clearly defined governmental strategy for homeland security.
No joint assessment of the threat to U.S. citizens and property has emerged from the CIA and other intelligence agencies to guide organizations responsible for defending the homeland. Substantial gaps remain in monitoring who and what comes into the country and in identifying terrorists before they can strike, according to experts.
Bush moved Thursday to improve these links by establishing a Cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security that will be headed by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge (R). But many experts agree that eliminating U.S. vulnerabilities and grafting new restrictive layers on a country long accustomed to many freedoms will require more drastic and longer-lasting measures.
"One of the problems this country has had in coming up with a coherent counterterrorist policy is precisely that we do not get sustained attention in a balanced way to this problem," L. Paul Bremer III, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism, told a Senate panel last week. "We need a sustained and balanced attention to this problem that's going to outlive the immediate emotions of this week."
In the broadest sense, the tightening of security is having its greatest impact on the airline industry, major ports and commerce centers throughout the country and along the borders with Canada and Mexico. Tough new Federal Aviation Administration security measures, including the indefinite closing of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and strict, time-consuming passenger boarding regulations, have discouraged travel and led to thousands of layoffs by the airline industry.
Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta told Congress last week that he has taken steps to secure the safety of American ports and the 2 million miles of pipelines that carry petroleum products and natural gas.
"We're in a heightened state of security," said Coast Guard Cmdr. Jim McPherson. The Coast Guard is routinely boarding and inspecting vessels, something that until last week was done infrequently, usually when there was concern about a vessel's safety record. The Coast Guard is also closely scrutinizing the names and nationalities of crew and passengers in search of terrorists.
In New York, the Coast Guard is restricting ships into the harbor, and those allowed in must be escorted by two tugs to control their movements. On the Potomac, vessels traveling north of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge are being boarded by the Coast Guard, while at Houston/Galveston, barges with chemical or hazardous materials must have round-the-clock security. In Boston, Coast Guard officers wearing riot gear and brandishing assault weapons are patroling the harbor 24 hours a day.
The Customs Service has placed all 301 ports of entry to the United States on its highest "Code Red" state of alert and devoted its fleet of P-3 surveillance aircraft to augment the Defense Department in its efforts to identify potentially hostile aircraft. Car and truck inspections along the U.S.-Mexico border have become so thorough, according to officials, that the incidents of arrests for attempted drug smuggling have plummeted. "The smugglers are watching us and holding back," said Customs spokesman Dean Boyd.
State police and Coast Guard units have provided added security to the nation's 103 commercial nuclear reactors. Yet the terrorists' use of hijacked airliners as weapons has confronted the nuclear power industry with a threat its plants were not specifically designed to meet, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledges.
"These are among the most robust structures in the United States," said NRC spokesman William M. Beecher. But "when they were designed, no one was conceiving of such an attack" as occurred Sept. 11.
An emergency committee of chief executives of the nation's electricity companies has been formed by the Edison Electric Institute to review security requirements. And Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, which oversees the nation's electric power grid, proposed last week that the energy industry reconstitute the Year 2000 security network created to protect against terrorist attacks and disruptions.
In the Pacific Northwest, several states and Canada are coordinating plans to protect the Bonneville Dam in Oregon, a major power generator. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation has discontinued guided tours of the Hoover Dam and has requested that the Nevada National Guard man checkpoints along nearby roads. Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas, generates about 4.5 billion kilowatt hours annually and powers a wide swath of southern California, southern Nevada and Arizona.
While the federal government struggles to coordinate its response to terrorism, governors and state officials have moved on their own. In sparsely populated South Dakota, Gov. William J. Janklow (R) has stationed police -- in black tactical gear armed with M-16 automatic rifles -- at every active airport gate in his state. "If there's ever going to be a shootout, I believe we have got to have massive firepower," Janklow said in an interview.
Michigan Gov. John Engler (R) has dispatched the National Guard to Canadian border ports to assist federal immigration officers. About 43 million people passed through the Detroit border point with Canada last year, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Washington state's Committee on Terrorism holds frequent drills and has begun stockpiling antidotes in the event of a biological or chemical attack.
In California, major Hollywood studios canceled tours and set up metal detectors and barriers to protect against attacks after receiving an alert from the FBI.
In Atlantic City, organizers of yesterday's 81st annual Miss America Competition implemented tight security measures. The annual parade, usually held the night before the pageant, was canceled for the first time after city authorities said they could not guarantee security along the 2 1/2-mile boardwalk.
Even with all those measures, the scale of the challenge in just getting a better handle on U.S. border traffic remains daunting. Figures compiled by a federal commission led by former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) show that each day 340,000 vehicles cross U.S. borders, 58,000 cargo shipments enter the country and 1.3 million people come in. Yet less than 2 percent of those cargo shipments and vehicles were being inspected by the Customs Service.
"A lot of other things need to be done to defend the United States against terrorist attack," said Fred C. Ikle, a former undersecretary of defense for policy who has written about homeland security.
The range of threats now being anticipated extends well beyond the attacks of Sept. 11. They include the potential disruption of computer networks, the use of chemical weapons and the spread of infectious diseases.
The lack of U.S. preparedness only compounded the severity of the reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, said Stephen Flynn, a Coast Guard commander who has been leading a study on homeland security for the Council on Foreign Relations. "When the system lacks integrity, the only option is to shut it down," he said.
Staff writers Caroline Mayer and Peter Behr and special correspondent Pamela Ferdinand contributed to this report.
--------
Worldwide Probe Yields Pieces to Jumbled Puzzle
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10839-2001Sep22?language=printer
From searches in San Antonio to arrests in France, the largest investigative hunt in U.S. history expanded ever outward last week, producing a vast haul of information about the terrorist assault on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center -- and glimpses of a suspected network of conspirators.
Federal agents by the thousands spent the week searching apartments, tracking bank documents and deciphering e-mail records to extract information about the terrorists who caught the country by surprise. Details emerged of their travels and financial dealings, along with revelations about possible hijacking plans that went unfulfilled.
Abroad, authorities in France, England and Germany sought or detained potential witnesses as investigators tracked the movements of the plotters back and forth across the Atlantic. At home, investigators focused on myriad sites, from an apartment building in Jersey City to a hospital in San Antonio to a Gold's Gym in Greenbelt.
Twelve days into the probe, about a dozen material witnesses were in custody, a grand jury was meeting in White Plains, N.Y., and no charges had been filed directly connected to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Nuggets of information emerged that fueled fresh queries.
Were terrorists planning to use trucks in their designs, given that several men detained last week had sought truck licenses or truck-driving lessons -- and one had obtained a permit to haul hazardous waste?
Were other hijackings in the works? Federal investigators found box-cutters on at least two more airplanes searched after the attacks. Two men on another flight -- scheduled to fly from Newark to San Antonio via St. Louis -- the day of the assaults were later arrested carrying box-cutters.
Were the hijackers or any of their associates employed in the airline industry or able to access secure airport areas? A bag left behind at Boston's Logan International Airport by Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers, included airline uniforms. Two men arrested in Detroit last week had previously worked for an airline food service.
If public attention during the first days of the investigation focused largely on the 19 men identified as hijackers, last week an array of new names was added to the list of potential accomplices.
One of the most interesting was Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston taxi driver with links to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi crusader identified by President Bush as the mastermind of the hijackings. Over the past 18 months, U.S. Customs Service agents established that Almarabh had financial dealings with two of the hijackers, law enforcement authorities said.
Leads begat leads. Hunting for Almarabh, investigators failed to find him in a certain Detroit apartment. But when they raided the apartment, they discovered three men who possessed false identification documents, a notation about an American military base in Turkey and crude drawings of airplane flight paths.
The FBI also arrested a San Antonio radiologist, describing him as a material witness with valuable information. Authorities who confiscated computers he used at a University of Texas hospital would not comment on news accounts that said Al-Badr Mohammed H. Al-Hazmi was connected through financial dealings to the hijacking plot.
Investigators have compiled much, yet the complexity of the puzzle can be symbolized by a lone detail: FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III conceded Thursday that the true identities of some of the 19 hijackers remain unknown.
To create confusion and avoid detection, the hijackers may have doctored names and concocted aliases. Sometimes that was as simple as changing a letter or two in English spellings of Middle Eastern names.
At least two assumed the identities of Saudi Arabian citizens whose passports went missing years ago in Denver and Cairo, the Saudi embassy reported. Others shared e-mail accounts and credit cards, moving frequently between residences, states and countries.
Investigators recovered the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder from United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania on Sept. 11. Passengers who made farewell calls from the airliner had said they intended to charge the hijackers in an attempt to retake the plane. Cockpit microphones captured shouts in English and Arabic, but investigators remain unsure what happened.
"There are screams in the background. But I don't think it is conclusive on what happened to cause the jet to crash," a government official said yesterday. The recording and the data recorder are still being analyzed.
The FBI and a bevy of intelligence services are trying to connect the dots between the hijackers and others who may have supported them. One intriguing dot is Zacarias Moussaoui, a native of France arrested Aug. 17, four weeks before the attacks, in Minnesota. His capture has gained fresh significance in hindsight.
Managers of a flight school in Eagan, Minn., alerted the FBI on Aug. 13 to a man who had never flown solo in a single-engine plane yet wanted training on a Boeing 747 simulator. Moussaoui told officials at the Pan Am International Flight School that he didn't care about takeoffs or landings. He just wanted to learn to steer.
Federal authorities detained Moussaoui for suspected visa violations and prepared to deport him. An agent said that intelligence groups studied him, but had no context in which his odd request made sense. Law enforcement officials acknowledged yesterday that they had been warned at least 10 days before the attacks by French intelligence that Moussaoui was a suspected terrorist.
Aicha Moussaoui told a French magazine that her son converted to a strict form of Islam while living in Britain in the 1990s. She called it a "real brainwashing."
One aspect of Moussaoui's movements offers tantalizing suggestions about how the hijackers communicated, choosing e-mail over telephones much of the time. Moussaoui traded cyber messages with a separate flight school for five months without giving his name, signing his missives "zuluman tangotango."
Since the attack, government agencies have subpoenaed e-mail records and contacted experts in computer programming and encryption for help in navigating the ways the conspirators used the Internet to communicate. For several years, intelligence organizations have had evidence that bin Laden and his al Qaeda network embedded information in e-mails and Web sites.
Librarians reported that hijackers used public computers in the weeks before the crime. In Delray Beach, Fla., librarian Kathleen Henman said three hijackers monitored her as they surfed, making sure that she could not see their work. The FBI seized computers from Delray Beach and Broward County and requested computer lab sign-in sheets from Sherwood Regional Library in Fairfax County.
A twist that strengthened the appearance that the hijackers had help was a series of false bomb threats made against airliners and air traffic control facilities as the hijacked planes headed toward their targets.
Closer to Washington, suburban Maryland was the base of operations for the American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers in the weeks before Sept. 11. The FBI traced the five men to a pair of budget motels on Route 1 in Laurel. Hani Hanjour, the suspected pilot of Flight 77 when it turned toward the Pentagon, paid an instructor at Freeway Airport in Bowie to guide him on three flights in August.
And all five hijackers, within two weeks of their assault, spent time lifting weights at Gold's Gym in Greenbelt. Three of the men bought temporary memberships, while the other two joined them on occasion,.
They resisted a gym employee's pitch to enroll for a longer stretch.
-------- terrorism
TERRORISTS
A Top Boss in Europe, an Unseen Cell in Gaza and Decoys Everywhere
New York Times
September 23, 2001
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ with RAYMOND BONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/international/23NETW.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 22 - Officials in Europe, the United States and Pakistan say they have identified new elements of the bin Laden terrorist network, including a top lieutenant in Europe and a previously undisclosed cell in the Gaza Strip.
At least 11,000 terrorists have been trained in the past five years at camps operated by Osama bin laden across the border in Afghanistan, these officials say.
But Mr. bin Laden and his Afghan camps are only part of the problem, they acknowledge. Western governments have concluded that many of the terrorist operations linked to Mr. bin Laden are being run by a very senior lieutenant in Europe, where it is far easier to operate because of access to telephones, travel and banks, one European ambassador said.
There is also substantial evidence that once terrorists are dispatched around the globe as "sleepers," they are given considerable latitude in selecting their targets and executing their plans in order to minimize communication and detection.
Even before the Sept. 11 attacks on America, security agencies in Europe rounded up several groups of followers of Mr. bin Laden. Suspects were arrested this summer in Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Britain.
The scope of the network was illustrated by an operation that started with the arrest of four militants in Frankfurt last Dec. 26. The suspects were two Iraqis, a French Muslim and an Algerian.
An intelligence official familiar with the arrests said authorities suspected the group intended to bomb the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.
The leader of the terrorist cell, an Algerian identified as Muhammad Bensakhria, escaped. He was arrested later in southeastern Spain and prosecutors say he and his colleagues had been trained by Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan.
Other members of the cell were arrested over the summer in Italy and Germany and an Italian antiterrorist official said evidence was seized indicating that the group planned to supply weapons to militants in Britain, Germany and Belgium.
Earlier this year, Israeli authorities "stumbled on" an Al Qaeda cell in Gaza, a senior American official there said. The official, who offered few details of the operation, said the Israelis were not even looking for the bin Laden organization and did not know they had a cell in their midst.
President Bush said this week that the network operates in 60 countries. But the harder truth, the intelligence officials said, is that no one knows how far Mr. bin Laden's reach really extends.
It is certain, however, that the organization's influence goes beyond secretive terrorist cells. It has exported instability on a global basis by training and financing Islamic-oriented insurgency movements from the Philippines and Malaysia to Nigeria and Chechnya.
A good example of its influence is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which is trying to create an Islamic state in the Ferghana Valley that includes parts of three Central Asian countries: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
American intelligence officials said the group's members were trained at a former Soviet military base now operated by the bin Laden organization near the city of Mazar- i-Sherif in northern Afghanistan.
Estimates of the Uzbek group's strength range from 2,000 to 3,000 fighters, most of them well-equipped with the latest weapons and surveillance equipment. From bases in northern Afghanistan and Tajikistan, they have carried out numerous hit-and-run attacks through the region over the last three years.
"Without a doubt, the strength of the I.M.U. is external support," Michael R. Hickok, an expert on Central Asia at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, said in an interview. "Among its supporters are the Taliban and Osama bin Laden."
Training terrorists and those who assist them is carried out by the military wing of the bin Laden organization. Another wing deals with public relations, trying to spread the anti-American message as far as possible through interviews and videotapes.
Muhammad Ismail Khan, a Pakistani journalist based in Peshawar, described a morning in August of 1998 when he was awakened by a telephone call informing him that Mr. bin Laden wanted to be interviewed. He and several other journalists went to the airport, where a bin Laden associate gave them tickets to Banno, south of Peshawar. There they were met by a van and escorted across the Afghan border at an unmarked crossing point and on to Mr. bin Laden's camp.
Such camps in Afghanistan have provided the training grounds for at least 3,000 hard-core terrorists recruited from Arab countries as well as Pakistan and Muslim regions like western China, Chechnya and Central Asia, officials said.
A NATO ambassador said the most frightening aspect of the bin Laden organization is that so many of his adherents joined Al Qaeda as young boys and have been indoctrinated thoroughly in terrorist techniques and a deep hatred of the United States.
Another 8,000 men have received instructions on logistics, like moving money, planning sophisticated attacks, blending into Western cities and communicating secretly, officials said.
Intelligence authorities have tracked a network of business dealings that includes agriculture companies, banking, and export-import firms around the world. Along with providing money for the training, the authorities said, the empire can be used for moving people and money around the world.
There has been little success in shutting down his finances, the step regarded by many intelligence officials as one of the keys to stopping his operations.
"The massive amount of money is the fuel of this," said a NATO ambassador in an interview in Brussels. "The international system is so globalized, so instant, with so many opportunities for anonymity that these guys can take advantage of it."
Another expert, Peter Bergen, a journalist who is completing a book on Mr. bin Laden, said that while the name has become synonymous with terrorism in the minds of most Americans, the Saudi exile is only the best-known leader of the organization and the public starting point for a particular brand of transnational terrorism.
"We use the name bin Laden with multiple connotations," he said. "There are groups that have sworn allegiance, others who might work with him, and others who think he is a good guy."
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Borderless Network of Terror Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe
By Doug Struck, Howard Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 23, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10543-2001Sep22?language=printer
MANILA -- Abdul Hakim Murad washed his hands, and broke a basic rule of bombmaking.
When the water mixed with chemical residue in the kitchen sink of unit 603 in the Dona Josefa Apartments here in 1995, it set off an eruption that would reveal the inner workings of a clandestine terrorist cell allied with Osama bin Laden.
It also revealed a plan that gave a chilling preview of the attack in New York and Washington on Sept. 11.
Arrested and tortured by Philippine intelligence agents, Murad told the story of "Bojinka" -- "loud bang" -- the code name bin Laden operatives had given to an audacious plan to bomb 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. -- all after attempting to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
The plot in the Philippines, which was recounted to U.S. investigators at the time, appears to be a model of the methods, aims and structure of the network that bin Laden's followers have assembled in dozens of countries around the world. Members of this diffuse confederation of radical Islamists, drawing inspiration, funding and training from bin Laden's al Qaeda group, have provided the foot soldiers -- and some commanders for his core organization -- for attacks on U.S. citizens.
These cells, the groups that host them and any country that allows them to operate within its borders are now the declared enemies in the U.S. war on terrorism. An examination of operations linked to bin Laden's network in five countries -- the Philippines, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Egypt -- shows how difficult the fight will be.
Despite common organizational patterns and ideology, the terrorists fighting for bin Laden's cause come from diverse locations and backgrounds. Some have long ties to bin Laden and al Qaeda. Others have acted nearly autonomously, undetected by authorities until the last moment before an attack, or after one had occurred.
The Philippines plot of 1995 had many hallmarks of an operation mounted by terrorists tied to al Qaeda, which means "the base." According to Philippine intelligence reports obtained by The Washington Post, the attempt to bomb the airliners was meticulously planned and well financed, and involved preparations in countries across the globe, including the United States.
Intelligence records indicate the precise flights that were to be targeted: United 808, Delta 59, Northwest 6, and others. The records included calculations to determine when to set the bomb's timer on each flight. They also included the names of dozens of associates, and photos of some; a record of five-star hotels; and dealings with a trading corporation in London, a meat market owner in Malaysia and an Islamic center in Tucson, Ariz.
The intelligence records list flying schools in San Antonio, Schenectady, N.Y., and New Bern, N.C., where Murad trained as a commercial pilot. They describe how money moved through an Abu Dhabi banking firm. Bar hostesses were bribed with gifts and holiday trips to open bank accounts in which to stash associates' funds.
The plotters also included in their plans the motives for the mission, in a manifesto recovered by investigators: "The U.S. government gives military aircraft to the Jewish state so the Jews can continue fighting and killing. All of this is a result of the U.S. government's financial and military support of the Jewish state. All people who support the U.S. government are our target."
Bin Laden's links to the Philippines were established early in the 1990s. In 1991, Abdurajak Janjalani, who had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan, returned to the Philippines and founded Abu Sayyaf -- "father of the sword" -- which announced itself by killing two American evangelists in 1991 in a grenade blast. Officials believe Janjalani got money from an Islamic foundation run by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, who lived in the Philippines with a Filipino wife.
When Pope John Paul II announced he would visit the Philippines in 1995, authorities worried about possible attacks by Abu Sayyaf. But the real threat turned out to be even graver.
On Jan. 6, one week before the pope's visit, Police Station 9 in Manila noticed a fire alarm was activated in an apartment building not far from the pontiff's expected route. At first the cause appeared to be a simple cooking fire. But Capt. Aida Fariscal, the night commander, went there to see for herself. "I had a sixth sense," she said.
As she was looking around, Murad, a 26-year-old Pakistani who called himself Saeed Ahmed, returned. He panicked, and tried to run. His shoe caught on the roots of a potted plant, and Fariscal commandeered a taxi and two bystanders to haul him back to the station. "He offered me a lot of money to get him out of this mess," said Fariscal. When she and others returned to the apartment, they found a bomb factory, stocked with beakers, gallons of sulfuric acid and nitric acid, glycerin, large cooking kettles, filters, funnels and fuses.
Slowly, pieces of disparate puzzles came together. Investigators found Casio watches in the apartment that matched a timing device used to detonate a small chemical bomb a month earlier on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo, killing a Japanese businessman. They found a stack of passports -- Norwegian, Afghan, Saudi, Pakistani -- for the three men in the apartment.
Murad would not talk. Handed over to intelligence agents, he taunted them. That didn't last.
"For weeks, agents hit him with a chair and a long piece of wood, forced water into his mouth, and crushed lighted cigarettes into his private parts," wrote journalists Marites Vitug and Glenda Gloria in "Under the Crescent Moon," an acclaimed book on Abu Sayyaf. "His ribs were almost totally broken and his captors were surprised he survived."
An investigator intimately knowledgeable of the investigation confirmed the torture, but gloated that it was Murad's fears of Jews that finally broke him. "We impersonated the Mossad," he said, referring to the Israeli intelligence service. "He thought we were going to take him to Israel."
Murad told all. One of his two roommates in Apt. 603 was a young Kuwaiti chemical engineer named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had helped plan the 1993 explosions at the World Trade Center, he said. They were in Manila to make a bomb to kill the pope. One of them would hide it under a priest's robes, and try to get close enough to kiss the pontiff as the bomb went off.
The next part of the plan was to bomb American airliners. The device on the Philippine airliner was a dry run, he said. Murad had earned a commercial pilot's license, and told investigators he had planned to fly a plane into the CIA headquarters.
Murad was turned over to the Americans. Yousef, who had calmly walked away from the Manila apartment when the firemen arrived, was found a month later in Pakistan. A third man at the Manila apartment, Wali Khan Amin Shah, was nabbed in Malaysia. All three were convicted by a New York court in 1997 of involvement in the bomb plot.
But the scheme apparently lived on, officials here say. "They didn't give up the objective," said former Gen. Renado S. De Villa, who was head of the security effort for the pope's visit. "Murad clearly indicated it was a large-scale operation. They were targeting the U.S. And they had a worldwide network. It was very clear they continued to work on that plan until someone gave the signal to go."
Watching the attacks in New York and Washington unfold on television earlier this month, an investigator here gasped, "It's Bojinka." He said later: "We told the Americans everything about Bojinka. Why didn't they pay attention?"
Robert Heafner, the FBI chief in Manila at the time, who is now retired here, said the information was heeded. "I believe everything was done that could have been done," he said.
Abu Sayyaf still thrives in the Philippines, and could be a target in the U.S. war on terrorism. The group has grabbed headlines with its kidnapping schemes that have netted an estimated $25 million in ransoms. The group has bought high-powered speedboats and armaments, and has grown to about 1,200 soldiers by paying for recruits in the poor, remote islands where it operates. The group also holds two American missionaries, Martin and Gracia Burnham. A third American captive, Guillermo Sobero, could have been killed.
Observers here dismiss Abu Sayyaf as a gang of bandits with no current links to bin Laden. "They are now just a kidnap-for-ransom group, trying to use religion to justify their action," said Brig. Gen. Edilberto Adan, chief spokesman for the Philippine Armed Forces.
But the jitters of a wider war linger. Immigration authorities say four of the Sept. 11 hijackers may have passed through the Philippines several times since 1999. Sen. Rodolfo Biazon insists there is intelligence that 50 Abu Sayyaf were training in Afghanistan this year, though senior intelligence chiefs discount that report.
"We've been dealing with this problem for 10 years," said De Villa, still a top adviser to the president. "You're about to find that this is going to be a long haul."
Amman, Jordan
By the early 1990s, Raed Hijazi had found a mission.
Born and educated in California, Hijazi had been radicalized through college contacts he met at the Islamic Assistance Organization in Sacramento. He concluded that the country of his birth was the enemy of Islam. Violence was the means to confront it.
Hijazi traveled to Afghanistan, where he trained at bases run by al Qaeda. From there, he easily traversed continents with his U.S. passport. He worked as a cab driver in Boston, where he allegedly knew Nabil Al-Marabh, who was detained in Chicago last Wednesday in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. He came to Amman, where he assembled weapons, chemicals and other supplies from Syria, Europe and elsewhere.
Here, according to prosecutors, Hijazi helped organize what was intended as a spectacular disruption of Jan. 1, 2000, celebrations: deadly attacks on Western tourists and Israelis across Jordan.
Today, Hijazi is in a Jordanian prison. Of 27 accomplices arrested in the scheme, five received death sentences, 16 are imprisonned and six were acquitted. Hijazi is currently on trial, and during proceedings earlier this month quietly recited from the Koran while held inside a black cage. His lawyer maintains he was tortured in prison, and that he is innocent. Hijazi also faces a possible death sentence.
Hijazi's alleged role in the millennium plot demonstrates the entrepreneurial side of bin Laden's network, Jordanian officials say. In this case as in others, they say, a loose-knit local structure was drawn together for a precise mission at a precise time with cash, planning, and encouragement from al Qaeda.
Groups linked to al Qaeda were first detected in Jordan nearly a decade earlier, in a series of modest attacks. Small explosive charges were detonated in parking lots, injuring no one. Theaters showing Western films, deemed "pornographic," were attacked. So were liquor stores, as was the American School on the airport road.
Membership in these groups included some of the 500 Jordanians who had volunteered to fight in Afghanistan as part of a CIA-supported war against an invading army from the Soviet Union. Returning after years of "jihad," or holy war, these "Afghan Arabs" didn't fit with Jordan's increasingly Westernized ways. They particularly came to resent the country's peace treaty with Israel and its ties to the United States.
"They found difficulty being part of the society," said a Jordanian official. "They considered that this society and this government was not good Islam, was not ruled by religion. Bars serving alcohol. Swimming pools. Discos."
They formed groups under names such as Mohammed's Army, Challenge and Reform, or the Group of Mohammed Maqdissi, while maintaining contact with bin Laden and his deputies. Jordanian intelligence officials saw a common pattern: Organizations devised localized schemes, then reported to designated deputies either in Afghanistan or Western capitals such as London.
Sometimes the connection to bin Laden was peripheral. Jordanian authorities claim that money and guidance for the Challenge and Reform group came from a London-based man, Omar Abu Omar, who they say largely operates on his own, even though he has ties to bin Laden.
For the millennium plot, however, they went straight to the source.
Beginning in 1996, Hijazi and a man named Khadar Abu Hoshar, a veteran of the Afghan wars, contacted one of bin Laden's chief operatives, Gaza-born Abu Zubaida. Arrangements were made for Hijazi and others to travel to Afghanistan in mid-1999 for final preparations.
There, Jordanians allege, both Zubaida and Khalil Deek, also an American citizen, reviewed the plan and the targets: a Radisson hotel fully booked for millennium celebrations, Israeli border posts, Mount Nebo, where Moses is thought to have viewed the Holy Land, and other spots.
It was one of three known operations set for New Year's Eve, including a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport that failed when a customs official at the Canadian border discovered bomb materials in the trunk of a car driven by an accused Algerian terrorist, Ahmed Ressam.
Jordanian officials broke up the plot through a combination of infiltration, electronic surveillance and counterintelligence. Although they dismantled the cell, they are unsure if remnants remain. Last week, authorities detained Mohammed Maqdissi, convicted of organizing a terrorist group in 1996 but pardoned in 1999, apparently seeking information about the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the end, proving complicity in individual crimes has been easier than undoing the network, or even demonstrating its reach. The Jordanian military tribunal that handed down guilty verdicts on some charges in the millennium case acquitted all of the defendants of charges that they were associated with al Qaeda.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
In the two years since the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) introduced itself with bombings in this Central Asian capital, its heritage has been traced along the bloodlines of other groups born in Afghanistan.
One of its leaders, Juma Namangani, was a disillusioned Soviet paratrooper who embraced radical Islam on his return home to Uzbekistan, and eventually received training in Afghanistan from Tajik opposition and Pakistani and Saudi intelligence officials, according to a Russian military newspaper. The other leader, Tahir Yuldash, was a young activist in the same town in Uzbekistan who also wound up in Afghanistan, where he got to know bin Laden.
The IMU emerged from the guerrilla movement that challenged the government in Tajikistan during its 1992-97 civil war. Its goals are narrower and more nationalistic than those of bin Laden's borderless al Qaeda. It aims to topple President Islam Karimov and carve out an Islamic state in the Ferghana Valley, a fertile region that includes Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz territory.
Although the Bush administration has identified the IMU as part of bin Laden's network, its links to al Qaeda are fuzzy. It enjoys a haven in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and is said to receive funding from bin Laden. With camps in Tajikistan and an ability to launch raids into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, U.S. analysts worry that one day it could strike near the oil fields of the nearby Caspian region.
Meanwhile, Karimov's repression of political opponents and Muslim activists may only be fueling its growth. Men wearing beards and women wearing scarves are often harassed and thousands of political opponents have been jailed. Some accused of radical ties have been raped and even beaten to death in detention, their bodies sent home with crushed skulls and no fingernails, according to human rights groups. Karimov has also alienated his neighbors by planting land mines along the borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
The Uzbek guerrillas did not return to fight on their home turf this summer. Analysts say the Taliban leadership, faring poorly against anti-Taliban rebels, pressed its resident foreign allies into fighting in Afghanistan.
But now the IMU's 2,000 or so fighters may be on the move. According to the anti-Taliban group, Uzbek fighters were pulled back from the front lines about a week ago, and Russian border guards based in Tajikistan reported seeing concentrations of Uzbek militants on the other side of the border in recent days.
Aden, Yemen
In the days after a suicide bomb tore open the USS Cole as it paused for fuel in the humid Yemeni port of Aden -- killing 17 sailors and two zealots aboard an explosive-laden skiff -- anyone with the bushy whiskers favored by conservative Muslims was liable to be hauled in and asked hard questions.
In the context of the Koran, a full, untrimmed beard bespoke piety. But a different context had taken hold in Yemen during the latter half of the 1990s. Islam had become mixed with war. Militancy had bled into terrorism. And facial hair had grown suspicious enough that operatives of al Qaeda were instructed to shave before undertaking a mission.
The Cole attack on Oct. 12, 2000, had all the markings of al Qaeda: a walled-off safe house where the bomb was assembled, the sophistication of the "shaped charge" that took the technical aspect of the Cole assault up a notch from the group's alleged previous attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
And when authorities tracked down a newly issued boating license, they found a portrait of the suicide bomber, clean-shaven.
This stunningly picturesque, deeply Muslim nation of 18 million has nurtured a unique preoccupation with Islamic militants for nearly a generation. After the war in Afghanistan, Yemen absorbed not only its own veterans but also hundreds of foreign "Afghan Arabs" who streamed into a country that then required no entry visa.
In peace, however, the roving bands of righteous, heavily armed foreigners proved worrisome. Hundreds were asked -- then forced -- to leave.
"We can say that we deported almost all the non-Yemenis," said Abubakar Al Qirbi, Yemen's foreign minister. "There might be a few who remain. They are people who tried to integrate in traditional religious schools. Our security knows who they are. They are under surveillance."
As for the Yemeni veterans, the great majority settled back into normal life. Some, however, clung to the gun, setting up camps in the remote sections of a country that government officials are quick to acknowledge they control in name only.
Best known was the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan, also called the Islamic Army of Aden. The group praised bin Laden, whose father was born in Yemen, and used a camp reportedly established by him in the southern village of Mudiyah. But the army was more clearly tied to Sheik Abu Hamza, a handless, one-eyed Afghan war veteran living in London's Finsbury Park.
For all that, analysts here say the group was not taken seriously until December 1998, when it kidnapped 16 Western tourists, four of whom were killed after government forces attacked. The Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan has not been heard from since.
The plot against the Cole was more deft, and years in the making. A U.S. official said the idea of ambushing a U.S. warship in port appears to date back to May 1998, when the USS Mount Vernon paid an official visit to Aden, staying two or three days.
Over the next 2 1/2 years, a team was assembled and put into action. "These were 'sleeper agents,' " said one Yemeni official. "They try to live a simple life in the area where they are."
Yemeni and U.S. officials described the operation in three phases: In the first, a senior al Qaeda official assessed the feasibility of the mission and made initial preparations. In the second, a technical specialist arrived to provide "the infrastructure," in this case, a boat, trailer, car and bomb.
"And the third phase was the action," the Yemeni official said. "They work simple. They work very, very simple."
In Aden, the main hitch would be the bomb. The previous January, a boat laden with TNT proved so heavy it sank as it made for the USS The Sullivans, also on a routine fueling stop. When the Cole steamed in 10 months later, it was the first-ever arrival in Aden of an Arleigh-Burke-class destroyer, the platform from which cruise missiles were launched at bin Laden's Afghan camps in retaliation for the embassy bombings.
In the aftermath, the legions of bewhiskered potential suspects were winnowed to the six whom Yemeni authorities say they are prepared to take to trial. Jamal al Badawi, an Afghan war veteran whom Yemeni officials say is Egyptian, was described as the chief local organizer.
But the apparent mastermind was not to be found.
Mohammed Omar Al Harazi, a Saudi man of Yemeni descent who is also known as Abdul Rehman Hussain Mohammed Al Safani, departed Yemen a few days before the Cole attack, officials said. He also left Nairobi before the East Africa bombings he helped plan, according to a U.S. official.
As an al Qaeda official linked to both the East Africa and Cole bombings, Safani presumably was the person meeting with Al-Midhar, the suspected hijacker of the plane that struck the Pentagon, when a surveillance camera captured his image in Malaysia earlier this year. Al-Midhar was later added to an Immigration and Naturalization "stop list," but by then had already entered the United States.
Cairo, Egypt
When al Qaeda was founded in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Ayman Zawahiri was at the creation. The bespectacled Cairo physician would eventually help supply bin Laden's organization with its globalist ideology. Other Egyptians would supply the bodies, from field commanders such as former policeman Mohammed Atef to one of the suspected participants in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mohamed Atta.
In the beginning, Zawahiri and Atef formed a trio with the Saudi-born bin Laden, the labor neatly divided. Bin Laden brought financial resources, Atef provided a compelling ability to organize field operations, and to smuggle people and supplies around the region, and Zawahiri expanded the theological and philosophical base of their mission.
When the Afghan war ended, the men realized they had the makings of something sustainable. Following Zawahiri's ideas, they turned their eyes back toward Egypt, and across the globe to the United States.
The grandson of a sheik and a trained surgeon, Zawahiri was steeped from childhood in the modern Islamic politics that has coursed through Egypt since the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.
But in the 1970s he moved beyond the staid and nationalist political activism of the brotherhood to forge a broader theory of holy war. He saw it as a way to attack not only rulers perceived to be unjust, such as those in Egypt, but as justification to fight beyond national borders, anywhere that tyranny existed.
These principles of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the companion Islamic Group organization drew the disaffected such as Atef, brothers Mohammed and Khaled Islambouli, and others into a movement that penetrated not only the destitute slums of Cairo, but the ranks of the country's armed forces.
Though President Anwar Sadat had given Islamists political space, his decision to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 put him squarely among the enemies. Two years later, Zawahiri and Islamic Group leaders such as Rifai Ahmed Taha used connections in the armed forces to arrange Sadat's assassination during a military parade.
Ataf and others fled the country, moving easily through Sudan, Somalia and ultimately to Afghanistan. Some, like Khaled Islambouli, were tried and executed. Zawahiri and Taha served prison terms for gun and other violations. Many would meet under bin Laden's hospitality later in Afghanistan.
It is believed now that Atef was the al Qaeda member who identified the first American "target of opportunity": a peacekeeping mission to Somalia. To al Qaeda, the mission was another U.S. incursion into an Islamic country, like the U.S. troops who remained in Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf War. Al Qaeda members claimed to have helped organize the attack that killed 18 U.S. soldiers in Somalia in 1992.
While allegedly supporting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, Zawahiri and Taha also began focusing on their native Egypt, and President Hosni Mubarak's increasingly close ties to the United States.
Fundamentalism had spread quickly under Mubarak. Radical preachers set up storefront mosques in rural villages and urban slums. Islamist professionals took control of prominent labor syndicates such as law and engineering, Atta's trade. Islamic investment groups offered high returns and ample charity through shaky pyramid schemes.
When the military expertise of returning Afghan fighters was linked with the increasingly popular radical sermons of Abdel Rahman -- later convicted as an organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- and a flow of money and weapons from Zawahiri, Atef and others, the result was almost civil war.
Taha's Islamic Group had a popular base so wide that the entire Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba declared itself an independent Islamic state. Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad went for higher-profile targets outside the country, nearly assassinating Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995, and bombing Egypt's embassy in Pakistan.
Countered by an increasingly effective Egyptian police force -- more than 600 suspected terrorists and planners were executed or killed between 1992 and 1997 -- there has not been an acknowledged terrorist attack since the November 1997 murder of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor, a massacre that turned the population squarely against the militants.
Soon after the Luxor killings, leaders of the Islamic Group called a cease-fire, arguing that violence had failed to advance them toward the goal of making Egypt an Islamic state.
But in Afghanistan, Zawahiri wanted none of it. After more than a decade at bin Laden's side, he formally merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with his al Qaeda to form a combined World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. The name reflected the distance Zawahiri had traveled since the 1970s.
The group that once had formed around Sadat's murder was no longer satisfied with opposing the "iniquitous princes" in charge of the Arab world.
Now, they believed, they were after the power behind the throne.
Struck reported from Manila, Schneider from Amman and Cairo, Vick from Aden and Baker from Tashkent. Staff writer Bill Branigin contributed to this report.
-------
U.S. to share evidence against bin Laden with allies
USA TODAY
09/23/2001
The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/23/evidence-allies.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States will soon share evidence with allies that details how Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network are tied to the Sept. 11 attacks, top administration officials said Sunday. "In the near future we will be able to put out a document linking him to this attack," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Powell and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said the administration has made contact with Syria and Iran, two countries the United States has accused of sponsoring terrorism, about helping fight terrorism. But both officials said that terrorist-sponsoring countries must end all support or face more penalties.
"We are not going to declare that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists," Rice said on Fox News Sunday. "If you sponsor terrorism, you're hostile to the United States."
Powell said dismantling the al-Qaida network is the first goal. He also indicated that any military action in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding, will not be on the scale of the Gulf War.
"Let's not assume there will be a large-scale move," Powell said. "I don't think we should even consider a large-scale war at this point."
Powell also denied reports that Saudi Arabia had rejected U.S. requests to use a Saudi air force base to launch attacks against bin Laden's group.
"They have been very responsive to everything we have asked for," Powell said, adding that he would not discuss what the United States might ask for in the future.
"They've promised full cooperation in going after the financial support of these groups."
Powell said the president's decision late Saturday to lift penalties imposed against India and Pakistan after the two nations tested nuclear weapons in 1998 was "an important signal that we will stand by our friends who stand by us."
He said he was confident that Pakistan's help in the fight against terrorism would not spark internal conflict there.
Later Sunday, President Bush planned to raise the Stars and Stripes high at Camp David after nearly two weeks of flying flags at half-staff.
National Football League teams planned to return to the field the day after emotional displays of patriotism at college stadiums.
As the Pentagon rolled out B-52 bombers and moved more troops and equipment into place in the Persian Gulf, America's Middle East allies stepped up to support the operation. The United Arab Emirates cut ties with Afghanistan's Taliban leadership, and NATO ally Turkey said it would let American military planes use its airspace and airports.
Bush and Russian President Putin spoke for an hour by phone on Saturday; it was their third talk since the attacks. "We must unite forces of all civilized society," Putin said.
Bush signed a $15 billion aid package for the battered U.S. airline industry late Saturday, less than 24 hours after it cleared Congress.
On the investigative front, the Justice Department said investigators found box-cutter knives - like those used by the hijackers - after searches of some planes on the ground after the hijackings. A federal official said the security sweep discovered box cutters in two airplanes, but the official did not know where.
-------- activists
Anti-war march OK, raises security doubts
September 23, 2001
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20010923-68173904.htm
The District and the National Park Service have issued official permits to an anti-war group, allowing it to march and assemble up to 8,000 protesters on Saturday in Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House.
The permits were issued Friday to the International Action Center - just hours after President Bush declared war on terrorists in a nationwide broadcast - and caught some law enforcement officials off guard.
The president does not oppose the protests, said spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo. However, the Secret Service, which has something to say about the sudden arrival of thousands of angry people, is not happy about the issuance of the permits, a source in the Treasury Department said.
The action center, which bankrolled a group that was part of last year's raucous and at times violent IMF-World Bank meeting in the District, said it decided to turn a protest of international banking into an anti-war demonstration, after this year's IMF meeting here was cancelled for security reasons.
If the protesters show up in the numbers written on the city permit application - at least 5,000 people from the International Action Center (IAC), and up to 3,000 people from the Green Party - they will be met by "a big contingent of trained officers," said D.C. police spokesman Sgt. Joe Gentile.
"We do have concerns about [security], we can't comment on what our plans are," he added.
Sarah Sloan, a staff coordinator employed by the Action Center, said the IAC has enough money to stage a peace march and rally for at least 10,000 protesters.
She said the organization, which claims former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on its list of supporters, is "adequately" funded. It also retains several pro bono lawyers in the District who obtained the permits and who would help the Action Center fight in court to keep them if police agencies try to void them on grounds of national security.
Sgt. Dennis Moroni of the U.S. Park Police is advising everyone to hold their horses.
"We don't have a security assessment from the Secret Service, FBI and Metropolitan Police; so, as far as we are concerned, [the march and rally] is still on hold," Sgt. Moroni said.
The center said there is nothing wrong in shifting the focus of its demonstration.
"In light of the recent attacks, and the cancellation of the IMF meetings, we thought it important to refocus our protest and deal with the backlash against Arab-Americans, and this so-called war - nothing more than a bombing expedition that will kill tens of thousands of civilians," Miss Sloan said.
Miss Sloan said the Action Center's newly funded anti-war organization will continue to the District as planned, saying the organization's attorneys had assured its members that their protest and march is lawful.
"With our attorneys from the Partnership for Civil Justice, we received the permits and we will gather at the park from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, then march to the Capitol and hold another rally until 6 p.m.," Miss Sloan said.
Further details are to be given during a press conference tomorrow, the center said.
Attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, one of the center's representatives, said the permits are valid unless voided within 24 hours of their issuance.
She said the deadline has expired. "They need to read their own regulations," Mrs. Hilliard said.
She said the security assessment Sgt. Moroni wants done is not "in and of itself, a valid reason to revoke the permits."
"We had a meeting with the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday and they signed a permit for the march," she said.
The rally permit needed to assemble in Lafayette Park and on the steps of the Capitol "came from the National Park Service."
----
WHY I OPPOSED THE RESOLUTION TO AUTHORIZE FORCE
by Rep. Barbara Lee
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, September 23, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/09/23/ED228685.DTL
On Sept. 11, terrorists attacked the United States in an unprecedented and brutal manner, killing thousands of innocent people, including the passengers and crews of four aircraft.
Like everyone throughout our country, I am repulsed and angered by these attacks and believe all appropriate steps must be taken to bring the perpetrators to justice.
We must prevent any future such attacks. That is the highest obligation of our federal, state and local governments. On this, we are united as a nation. Any nation, group or individual that fails to comprehend this or believes that we will tolerate such illegal and uncivilized attacks is grossly mistaken.
Last week, filled with grief and sorrow for those killed and injured and with anger at those who had done this, I confronted the solemn responsibility of voting to authorize the nation to go to war. Some believe this resolution was only symbolic, designed to show national resolve. But I could not ignore that it provided explicit authority, under the War Powers Resolution and the Constitution, to go to war.
It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the Sept. 11 events -- anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk.
The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.
I have heard from thousands of my constituents in the wake of this vote. Many -- a majority -- have counseled restraint and caution, demanding that we ascertain the facts and ensure that violence does not beget violence. They understand the boundless consequences of proceeding hastily to war, and I thank them for their support.
Others believe that I should have voted for the resolution -- either for symbolic or geopolitical reasons, or because they truly believe a military option is unavoidable. However, I am not convinced that voting for the resolution preserves and protects U.S. interests. We must develop our intelligence and bring those who did this to justice. We must mobilize and maintain an international coalition against terrorism. Finally, we have a chance to demonstrate to the world that great powers can choose to fight on the fronts of their choosing, and that we can choose to avoid needless military action when other avenues to redress our rightful grievances and to protect our nation are available to us.
We must respond, but the character of that response will determine for us and for our children the world that they will inherit. I do not dispute the president's intent to rid the world of terrorism -- but we have many means to reach that goal, and measures that spawn further acts of terror or that do not address the sources of hatred do not increase our security.
Secretary of State Colin Powell himself eloquently pointed out the many ways to get at the root of this problem -- economic, diplomatic, legal and political, as well as military. A rush to launch precipitous military counterattacks runs too great a risk that more innocent men, women, children will be killed. I could not vote for a resolution that I believe could lead to such an outcome.
Rep. Barbara Lee represents the 9th Congressional District, which includes Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda.
----
The words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
delivered at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4th, 1967
MLK ON NEED TO RESIST WAR
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
"A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men [sic] do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on."
"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."
"We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries."
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." A nation that continues year and year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
"America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities over the pursuit of war."
"This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursed this self-defeating path of hate."
"We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who posses power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."
"Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves in the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
"May our country, on the brink of war, take to heart the final refrain of "America, the Beautiful": "America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law."
--------
A Pure, High Note of Anguish
Sunday, September 23, 2001
Los Angeles Times,
by Barbara Kingsolver
From: Marita McComiskey <mccomisk@uconnvm.uconn.edu>
TUCSON -- I want to do something to help right now. But I can't give blood (my hematocrit always runs too low), and I'm too far way to give anybody shelter or a drink of water. I can only give words. My verbal hemoglobin never seems to wane, so words are what I'll offer up in this time that asks of us the best citizenship we've ever mustered. I don't mean to say I have a cure. Answers to the main questions of the day--Where was that fourth plane headed? How did they get knives through security?--I don't know any of that. I have some answers, but only to the questions nobody is asking right now but my 5-year old. Why did all those people die when they didn't do anything wrong? Will it happen to me? Is this the worst thing that's ever happened? Who were those children cheering that they showed for just a minute, and why were they glad? Please, will this ever, ever happen to me?
There are so many answers, and none: It is desperately painful to see people die without having done anything to deserve it, and yet this is how lives end nearly always. We get old or we don't, we get cancer, we starve, we are battered, we get on a plane thinking we're going home but never make it. There are blessings and wonders and horrific bad luck and no guarantees. We like to pretend life is different from that, more like a game we can actually win with the right strategy, but it isn't. And, yes, it's the worst thing that's happened, but only this week. Two years ago, an earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 people in a day, babies and mothers and businessmen, and not one of them did a thing to cause it. The November before that, a hurricane hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines and even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Which end of the world shall we talk about? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work, where schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone thought possible. Seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.
There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down--hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside--and here in the place I want to love best, I had to watch people cheering about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and said the word "evil." When many lives are lost all at once, people gather together and say words like "heinous" and "honor" and "revenge," presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day from sickness or hunger. They raise up their compatriots' lives to a sacred place--we do this, all of us who are human--thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less willingly risked than lives on other soil. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony, because, really, every life that ends is utterly its own event--and also in some way it's the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had the chance to love the light that's gone, you miss it. You should. You bear this world and everything that's wrong with it by holding life still precious, each time, and starting over.
And those children dancing in the street? That is the hardest question. We would rather discuss trails of evidence and whom to stamp out, even the size and shape of the cage we might put ourselves in to stay safe, than to mention the fact that our nation is not universally beloved; we are also despised. And not just by "The Terrorist," that lone, deranged non-man in a bad photograph whose opinion we can clearly dismiss, but by ordinary people in many lands. Even by little boys--whole towns full of them it looked like--jumping for joy in school shoes and pilled woolen sweaters.
There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look finally at the things we don't want to see. In a week of terrifying events, here is one awful, true thing that hasn't much been mentioned: Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt in this new way. This is such a large lesson, so hatefully, wrongfully taught, but many people before us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths. It still may be within our capacity of mercy to say this much is true: We didn't really understand how it felt when citizens were buried alive in Turkey or Nicaragua or Hiroshima. Or that night in Baghdad. And we haven't cared enough for the particular brothers and mothers taken down a limb or a life at a time, for such a span of years that those little, briefly jubilant boys have grown up with twisted hearts. How could we keep raining down bombs and selling weapons, if we had? How can our president still use that word "attack" so casually, like a move in a checker game, now that we have awakened to see that word in our own newspapers, used like this: Attack on America.
Surely, the whole world grieves for us right now. And surely it also hopes we might have learned, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to any empty bed. The mortal citizens of a planet are praying right now that we will bear in mind, better than ever before, that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.
"Will this happen to me?" is the wrong question, I'm sad to say. It always was.
---------
JOINT STATEMENT FROM JAPAN
From: "Paul" <webmaster@globalcircle.net>
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 1:10 AM
On 9/23/01
Michael Eisenscher <meisenscher@igc.org> wrote:
The following was posted by Mr MUTO Ichyo, a longtime activist in Japan's peace movement and for many years the leader of the PARC (Pacific-Asia Resource Centre) collective in Tokyo that has put out the AMPO monthly. Please pass this important `911` statement by leading Japanese progressive groups and intellectuals on yr list. Thanks
Dear friends,
I take it that we all share a keen sense of crisis vis-a-vis the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and the Bush response to them. In Japan, partly for fear of being "left behind," and partly for the ulterior purpose of rushing all the political backlog (taking advantage of this crisis, the Koizumi government is making a new law and sending troops to the Indian ocean and even Pakistan. However, after a long period of political dormancy, there seems to be a beginning of peace movement, ordinary people now mouthing fears of being plunged into a war scheme whose outcome nobody.
An indication of this is the unexpected vigorous and quick response to a joint statement we prepared, to which we asked for support. In three days 1300 signed and the number is still increasing.
We attach that position statement, and I hope that you will spread it through whatever channels.
There are too many things I wish to discuss with you, but I stop here for today.
Wish you well.
Muto
--
MUTO Ichiyo <mutoi@mrj.biglobe.ne.jp>
We oppose the U.S. war of retaliation and Request the Japanese government to retract its support for this war
We were shocked at the sight of the massive destruction and deaths that resulted from the suicidal attacks at the economic and military centers of the United States carried out on September 11 using passenger airplanes as weapons. Thousands of innocent people were killed, and many more people suffered physical and psychological injuries. We who seek a world free from violence condemn this act, whatever its motivation, as a crime we cannot tolerate. We express our profound condolences for the victims to the bereaved families, their relatives, and friends, and wish for quick recovery of those who were injured.
We are alike shocked by what the U.S. government has decided to do in response to this incident. President Bush, declaring that the attacks were "acts of war", decided to launch "the first war in the 21st Century" mobilizing the whole international community to retaliate against the terrorists. Islamic extremists headed by Osama bin Laden are the immediate putative enemy. The United States is engaging in a full-scale war to annihilate "terrorist systems" said to be spread all over the world. The world's superpower has thus declared war against an entity which is not a state. Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz explained that the military campaign has as its objective termination of the terrorist networks and the states harboring terrorists. President said that the war will be large-scaled and prolonged. White House Press Secretary Fleischer briefed that in this war no option is excluded. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution giving President all powers of exercise of military forces and allocated $40 billion for this war. The NATO has decided to participate in this war invoking its collective security clause. Meeting an act of terrorism with a full-scale war is an unusual response. The September 11 mass killing of civilians obviously constitutes a major international crime, a crime against humanity. In addition to procedures under the U.S. domestic law, the perpetrators and accomplices of this crime should be brought to justice under the international laws and tried and punished by an international criminal court set up by the United Nations. Without such procedures proposed, the United States declared a state of war. Military attacks on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan are impending, and given the declared purpose of destroying the international terrorist systems, the theater of war is not limited to that country.
For the following reasons we strongly oppose this call for war and ask the Bush administration to immediately retract it.
Firstly, this war not only would fail to bring about solution to the problem but also is highly likely to bring the whole world into an infinite chain reaction of violence and hatred. It is impossible to eradicate amorphous networks of terrorists by regular military means. As long as the social soil generating terrorism persists, the eradication of one organization would not foreclose the emergence of another. More importantly, the September 11 incident strikingly demonstrated the high vulnerability of "advanced societies", that makes their perfect defense a matter of impossibility. Predictably, the U.S. retaliation is likely to invite an escalating terrorist counter-retaliation, which will be met by yet larger-scale counterattacks, thus leading the world into a situation without exits victimizing an ever larger number of innocent civilians. The only way to prevent such would be to introduce a complete global system of surveillance that will deprive individuals everywhere of their freedom and privacy and destroy democracy. Already, steps are being taken in this ominous direction.
Secondly, we hear in the loud official and private voices calling for vengeance a horrifying note of arrogance and hatred, indicating the revival of colonial-time notion of civilization versus barbarity. This war is described as a war to protect civilization (Secretary of State Powel) and the struggle of "the good against the evil" (President Bush). Reports are arriving about Arabs and South Asians in the United States being treated with hatred and violence. The mainstream opinion in Europe seems to uncritically accept this civilization-versus-the-other approach. The perception that this arrogance equating Euro-America to civilization has historically humiliated and excluded the Islamic world and eventually generated antagonists to the "West" is dangerously absent in the dominant retaliation discourse.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process, or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world ¡V seems almost entirely absent. (Seumas Miln, The Guardian Sept. 13)
The lack of this recognition fuels terrorism as a desperate form of action. The world remembers that the United States, by waging wars from Vietnam War to the Gulf, by supporting dictatorial regimes in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and, among others, by backing Israel's unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories, have directly and indirectly caused the deaths of far larger numbers of innocent non-combatants than the victims of the September 11 incident. Now the dominance of the world by the United States has come to an unprecedented level. The United States behaves as the global power center imposing neo-liberal globalization on the overwhelming majority of the world population, without addressing the resultant yawning gap between the rich and the poor and the disruption of the global environment. The Bush administration, adopting unilateralism as its policy, has been disrupting one positive international arrangement after another, ranging from global warming through ABM, nuclear testing, and international criminal court, to racial discrimination, all in the name of the U.S. national interests. This has provoked yet more intense public criticism and anger throughout the world. Such a global environment that the United States itself has created is the historical backdrop against which the September 11 incident occurred. In this sense, we consider that the September 11 incident victims were also sacrificed by the U.S. global domination.
Prime Minister Koizumi surprised us by promptly expressing his unconditional support for the United States'¨war of retaliation. The Japanese government is now searching for ways to enable the Japanese Self-Defense Forces to participate in the war, either by making new laws or misusing existing laws. They are also taking advantage of this incident to introduce crisis management packages and to militarize society. The government and ruling parties have decided to revise the Self-Defense Law in order to protect U.S. military bases in Japan and facilitate SDF¡¦s deployment for internal peace. These rightwing forces are now using the U.S. war for a trial run of a war-capable state introduced under the 1997 Japan-U.S. joint defense guidelines. We are convinced that Japan ought to do exactly the opposite. If Japan is a country that ¡§renounces war forever as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes, (Article 9 of the Constitution), what Japan ought to do with confidence and dignity try to persuade the United States into opting for other solutions based on ¡¨the trust in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world. (Preamble) The situation strongly suggests that only this approach will open up perspective for the prevention of another tragedy of the same kind. We demand that the Japanese government, following the Japanese constitutional pacifism, retract its support for the Bush government's war of retaliation and request the U.S. government to drop its war plans. We demand that the Japanese government drop its attempt to use this opportunity to become a full-fledged ¡§war-capable state." In concrete, we demand that the Japanese government abandon its state-of-emergency legislation, SDF law revision for the protection of U.S. bases, new legislation and/or enlarged interpretation of the guidelines related laws for SDF¡¦s war participation. We demand that the Japanese government drastically review its policy of promoting neo-liberal globalization processes that intensify social tensions and conflicts everywhere to an unbearable level. On this basis, the Japanese government should propose to the WTO and other related agencies a fundamental change of direction in global politico-economic management toward mitigating social tensions and ending elimination of the people at the bottom and further destruction of environment.
If people¡¦s security matters, marking a step forward in this direction is the only way to enhance the security of the people in the United States as well as the rest of the world. This is time we should cut the vicious cycle of violence and hatred. Whether the September 11 tragedy can be the starting point in this direction or be the trigger to set the vicious cycle of violence into motion depends on our ability and will to create viable people's linkages to prevent the war and its expansion. We are encouraged by voices coming from grieved New York people, "Peace, Not revenge!" In these voices we sense that many in New York who experienced the clashing calamity, now feeling war, bombing, and massive violence close to them, find that vengeance using overwhelming military power and the show of American force do not make amends for their grief. Voices against this war of vengeance are rising from peace movements and informed public of the United States. They are rising everywhere in the world. We join our voices with them. Let us act together to stop the war and create a world that does not foster terrorism!
Original signatories include:
Akiyama, Naoe (Japan Negros Campaign Committee)
Ishizaki, Atuko (Grass Seeds Association)
Ukai, Satoshi (Hitotsubashi University)
Oshima, Koichi (Christian Political League)
Otsu, Kenichi (National Christian Council of Japan)
Kokawa, Yoshinobu (Christian Peace Network)
Kimura, Kenzo (Catholic Council for Peace and Justice)
Ogura, Toshimaru (Project against Network Monitoring)
Kurihara, Yukio (literary critic)
Sugimoto, Rie (Institute of Local Science)
Ogasawara, Kimiko (NCC-J, Peace and Nuclear Issues Committee)
Ohashi, Yukako (Soshiren: From my Body)
Koshida, Kiyokazu (Pacific-Asia Resource Center)
Tawara, Yoshibumi (National Network on Children and Textbooks)
Tono, Haruhi (Asia-Pacific Workers¡¦ Solidarity Links)
Tomiyama, Yoko (Japan Consumers¡¦ Union)
Nakayama, Chinatsu (writer)
Hanasaki, Kohei (Sapporo Freedom School)
Fukutomi, Setsuo (Concerned Citizens of Japan)
Matsui, Yayori (VAWW-NET-Japan)
Muto, Ichiyo (People¡¦s Plan Study Group)
Yoshikawa, Yuichi (Concerned Citizens of Japan)
Watanabe, Ben (Center for Transnational Labor Studies)
Mizuhara, Hiroko (Japan Consumers¡¦ Union)
Yamaguchi, Yasuko (Women¡¦s Democratic Club)
Yamaguchi, Yukio (Citizens¡¦ Nuclear Information Center)
Mizushima, Asaho (Waseda University)
Ota, Masakuni (writer)
Amano, Yasukazu (National Fax Network Against War)
Tateyama, Hiroki (Yamaguchi University)
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