------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Analysis: Terrorism With Weapons Of Mass Destruction
U.K. Tested Kids' Bones for Fallout
Will Europe Go Wobbly?
Kyl refuses to rule out U.S. nuclear retaliation
MILITARY
Opposition to Taliban urges quick U.S. strike
In Afghanistan, a Culture of War
Former Afghan king backs U.S.
Biological and Chemical Warfare Are Here Now
Some See U.S. as Vulnerable in Germ Attack
$1 billion is sought to fight bioterror
Biological, Chemical Threat Is Termed Tricky, Complex
Panel Urges Legalization of Marijuana in Jamaica
Floodgates may open for Afghanistan opium
United Nations Scrambles To Keep Up in Afghanistan
Large U.S. Force in Afghan Area Gives the Option to Strike
Remaking the Military
OTHER
Deaths Raise Alarm on Power Plants
Japanese - Americans Recall Internment
Hill Puts Brakes on Expanding Police Powers
Espionage Spy Tech
U.S. Pursued Secret Efforts to Catch or Kill bin Laden
Americans Overseas Targeted
The secret war
Bush Names Army General To NSC Post On Terrorism
Rush Is On to Boost Region's Response To Terror Attacks
ACTIVISTS
War protesters clash with cops
Thousands Fill Streets Of D.C. to Protest War
OCT 13 ACTIONS: NOW MORE THAN EVER
I am thankful- a prayer
-------- NUCLEAR
Analysis: Terrorism With Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Felipe Rodriquez
17 September 2001
From: ninedots@aol.com
SUMMARY
The terrorist network around Osama Bin Laden has been trying to acquire nuclear weapons and nuclear materials since about 1993. There are various reports that he has succeeded in obtaining nuclear weapons and material. Any form of retaliation against Bin Laden and his network should take this information into account. It is possible that the WTC bombing was a trap, with the intention to provoke the United States and NATO into retaliation. Retaliation could be a trigger that provokes terrorist attacks with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
TERRORISM & WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
In May 1998 US congressman Curt Weldon met with General Alexander Lebed, former Secretary of the National Security Council in Russia (1). In that meeting Lebed mentioned that the Soviet Union had manufactured 132 suitcase nuclear explosive devices, and could locate only 48 of them. These devices have an explosive charge of about 1 kiloton. They where allegedly created for the KGB, to be used around the world in the event of a conflict with Russia. A 1 kiloton nuclear device has a blast radius of about 500 meters, and is capable of destroying part of a city center, or any landmark building. Lebed said one person could detonate such a bomb by himself.
In an article in the Jerusalem Report(2) in 1999 Yossef Bodansky says that Bin Laden has acquired portable nuclear devices. Bodansky reports that Bin Laden's associates acquired the devices through Chechnya, paying the Chechens $30 million in cash and two tons of Afghan heroin. Bodanksy is Director of the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Senior Editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs publications and director of The International Strategic Studies Association (3).
Israeli military intelligence sources reported that Bin Laden paid over 2 million pounds sterling to a middle-man in Kazakhstan, who promised to deliver a "suitcase" nuclear bomb to Bin Laden within two years. (4)
The Arabic news magazine Al-Watan Al-Arabi reported that Usama Bin Laden was engaged in a comprehensive plan to acquire nuclear weapons.(5) In 1993, Bin Laden instructed some of his aides to obtain weapons-grade uranium that could be used to develop small nuclear weapons.(6)
Bin Laden wrote a document that was titled the endorsement of the nuclear bomb of Islam, in it he says that a nuclear bomb is needed to terrorize the enemies of God, and that it is the duty of the Muslims to prepare as much force possible to terrorize the enemies of God (7). This document was found in the residence of Khalid al Fawwaz. A US indictment against Fawwazz charges that he acted, together with others of the Al Qaeda group, in a conspiracy to murder United States nationals.
Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl is a Sudanese national and the star witness for the prosecution in the United states v. Bin Laden trial in the US. Al-Fadl alleged that Bin Laden and his associates sent him to Sudan to buy uranium from Sudanese black marketeers in 1994/95.(8) Bin Laden's aide Mamdouh Mahmud Salim reportedly attempted to obtain highly enriched uranium in the mid-1990s.(9)
Even if terrorists did not acquire nuclear explosive devices, they could build a so-called 'dirty bomb', a conventional weapon that would shower lethal radioactive material over a wide area. There is a long history of nuclear smuggling incidents, most of these involve Russian radioactive material. A former greenpeace President said in 1995 that the organization had been offered a 800 kg nuclear Scud warhead by a former Soviet officer in 1991 (10).
There are also reports available that suggest that Bin Laden has obtained, or is trying to obtain, chemical and biological weapons.
In an interview with Frontline Samuel R. Berger, former U.S. National Security Advisor, says that the US has information that Bin Laden sought to attain chemical weapons, and that he wanted to use those chemical weapons against the United States (11). On March 4 2000 APBnews.com ran an article that said that bin Laden's trainees learn to use chemical weapons, and that there where chemical engineers present.
Manufacturing chemical weapons is not rocket science. One can obtain the relevant information from open literature, acquire the necessary chemicals, and prepare the agent. Formulas for manufacturing nerve agents, mustard gas, LSD, and herbicides are readily available in various scientific texts. (12)
In July 1999 the Pentagon considered a suspension of public tours because of heightened concerns of a possible terrorist attack with biological weapons by the followers of Osama bin Laden (13). Biological weapons are any infectious agent such as a bacteria or virus when used intentionally to inflict harm upon others. Biological weapons are immensely destructive. For example, botulinum toxin has been described as 3 million times more potent than the chemical nerve agent sarin. (14)
CONCLUSION
Current US policy to counter international terrorism rests on the following principles; make no concessions with terrorists and make no deals, bring terrorists to justice for their crimes, isolate and apply pressure on states that sponsor terrorism and force them to change their behavior, and bolster the counter terrorist capabilities of those countries that work with the US and require assistance (15). This is official US defense doctrine, and it is exactly how the US has reacted to the WTC attack in New York. The question is if this doctrine is still valid today, when dealing with terrorist organizations that have access to weapons of mass destruction.
A terrorist attack such as the WTC bombing takes a long time to prepare. The flight training of the terrorists itself takes months. It is unlikely that the attack on the WTC is a standalone activity. A hint in this direction is the assassination of the leader of Afghanistan's opposition to the ruling Taleban, Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before the attack in New York. Massoud's Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban alliance in northern Afghanistan, was the only potential US ally in a confrontation with the Taleban.
The WTC attack could well be part of a larger strategy with the aim of provoking the US and NATO into a full scale offensive. Such an offensive could give cause for further retaliation in the form of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction. There are many indications that groups affiliated with Osama Bin Laden have obtained weapons of mass destruction.
Because article 5 of the NATO alliance was invoked, the WTC attack is considered to be an attack on all NATO members. Once a military campaign against Bin Laden and other terrorist organizations gets going, NATO members should be aware that they become targets for terrorist attacks, possibly with weapons of mass destruction. Europe is in many ways a more open society than the US, and its intelligence capabilities are much less developed than those in the US. Europe is therefore more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Retaliation of the WTC bombing could have catastrophic consequences for the US and all NATO members, because the US and NATO are vulnerable societies; they have a lot to lose, whereas the terrorist organizations have nothing to lose.
The rules of military engagement have changed. The US and NATO are not fighting a well known enemy, that can be defined in terms of infrastructure, its leaders and its military capabilities. The NATO military apparatus and doctrine is not adequate to fight an enemy that is global and dispersed, and that has access to a large pool of funds, human bombs, and weapons of mass destruction. Military retaliation will not achieve results, but will provoke a counter reaction.
Taking the well organized attack on the WTC and the African embassies as example, and considering the fact that these groups have obtained weapons of mass destruction, a horrible scenario comes to mind. Every attack that was credited to the Al Qaeda network was bigger than the last, and some of these attacks involved multiple targets that where hit simultaneously. A doomsday scenario would be an attack on multiple city center targets, with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Such an attack would be devastating enough to destroy the economic and cultural infrastructure of Europe and the US. It would destroy the foundations of the society that we live in and treasure. Retaliation is a mistake, because it could trigger this destruction.
SOURCES:
(1) Report of meeting between Lebed and Curt Weldon
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/russia/suitcase/comments.htm l
(2) Jerusalem Report: October 25th, 1999
http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/isreport/septoct99/binladen.html
(3) Background of the International Strategic Studies Association
http://www.strategicstudies.org/background.htm#Start
(4) Marie Colvin, "Holy War with US in his Sights," Times, August 16, 1998.
(5) Report Links Bin-Laden, Nuclear Weapons," Al-Watan Al-Arabi November 13, 1998
(6) WMD TERRORISM AND USAMA BIN LADEN
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/binladen.htm
(7)UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. USAMA BIN LADEN, et al court transcript of Day 38 of the trial, May 2, 2001.
http://cryptome.hackerdojo.com/usa-v-ubl-38.htm
(8)UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. USAMA BIN LADEN, et al court transcript of Day 3 of the trial, February 7, 2001
http://cryptome.hackerdojo.com/usa-v-ubl-03.htm
(9) Benjamin Weiser, "U.S. Says Bin Laden Aide Tried to Get Nuclear Weapons," New York Times, September 26, 1998.
(10) CHRONOLOGY OF NUCLEAR SMUGGLING INCIDENTS
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_hr/s960320c.htm
(11) Interview with Samuel R. Berger
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/interviews/berger.htm l
(12) CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL TERRORISM: THE THREAT ACCORDING TO THE OPEN LITERATURE
http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/miscdocs/chemter_e.html
(13) CNN: Pentagon may cancel public tours amid fears of germ warfare
http://www.cnn.com/US/9907/27/pentagon.terror/
(14) Texas Department of Health; Bioterrorism FAq
http://www.tdh.state.tx.us/bioterrorism/faqs.htm
(15) US Office of the secretary of defence publication Proliferation: threat and response, januari 2001, page 61
http://www.defencelink.mil
Felipe Rodriquez
-------- britain
U.K. Tested Kids' Bones for Fallout
New York Times
September 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Nuclear-Testing.html?searchpv=aponline
LONDON (AP) -- Thousands of bones were removed from dead British children without their parents' consent during Cold War-era nuclear tests, the nation's Atomic Energy Authority said Sunday.
The femurs of about 4,000 young children were removed from 1954 to 1970, agency spokeswoman Beth Taylor said. The bones were used in tests to measure the effects atmospheric explosions of hydrogen bombs were having on humans and the environment.
``It is true that parental or relatives' approval wasn't sought,'' she said. ``We assume that parents weren't asked because it wasn't the norm at the time.''
Similar revelations were made in Australia in June. The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency said bones from dead Australian children were once shipped to the United States and Britain for testing.
Taylor stressed that the British research -- conducted in London and the Scottish city of Glasgow -- contributed to a decision to halt atmospheric nuclear explosions in 1963.
``The program was done for the best of reasons,'' she said. ``It was the period when we were doing atmospheric tests of hydrogen bombs and there was quite a bit of concern about the dangers of nuclear fallout.''
But that fact did not comfort activists angered by similarly secretive post-mortem organ removals. A spokeswoman for Scottish Parents for a Public Inquiry into Organ Retention said Sunday that stronger laws were needed to ensure parents had complete control of the children's bodies after their deaths.
The issue made headlines in Britain this year when it was revealed that a Dutch pathologist working at a Liverpool children's hospital had stripped children of their organs during post-mortem examinations between 1988 and 1995 without parental consent.
The government said in a January report that the actions of Dr. Dick Van Velzen were ``unethical and illegal'' and that ``the pain caused to the parents by this dreadful sequence of events is unforgivable.''
A related report said more than 100,000 hearts, brains, lungs and other organs were held by hospitals and medical schools across the country, many without the knowledge of next-of-kin.
-------- europe
Will Europe Go Wobbly?
Conetinental leaders may try President Bush's patience.
BY DANIEL JOHNSON
Sunday, September 30, 2001
Wall Street Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001241
"This is no time to go wobbly, George." Margaret Thatcher's celebrated remark to the first President Bush in 1990, just after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, still echoes down the years. On the eve of Desert Storm, the president agonized about military casualties in a letter to his children: "When the question is asked, 'How many are you willing to sacrifice?'--it tears at my heart. The answer is, of course, none, none at all."
Today, as Americans contemplate the ruins of the World Trade Center and mourn their thousands of dead, the question elicits a very different answer from the present occupant of the White House. Unlike his father, George W. Bush does not need a British prime minister to stiffen his resolve. Tony Blair's support for America, both practical and moral, has been impressive, but the prime minister's role is primarily symbolic. The president could not have been clearer about the need to accept casualties in order to eradicate Middle Eastern terrorism once and for all. Mr. Bush is readying the world, not for a short campaign, but for a long war.
Here in Western Europe, however, this kind of fighting talk makes politicians nervous. No sooner has American policy escaped from the body-bag syndrome that crippled it for so long, than Europeans hanker for the bad old days when pusillanimous U.S. administrations suffered one humiliation after another. A weak America makes Europeans feel more self-important.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, when Washington invoked Article 5, the mutual-defense clause of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it was an unwelcome shock to many Europeans that the alliance on which they have depended for more than half a century also involves reciprocal obligations to America. It has long been axiomatic among the mainly leftist political class of Continental Europe that the role of the "European pillar" of NATO is to restrain the U.S. If the British government, too, were to adopt this stance, then the alliance might reveal itself to Washington as a double-edged weapon.
While opinion polls show that a large majority of Britons support military action against Afghanistan and possibly other states that harbor terrorists, substantial numbers throughout Continental Europe--possibly even a majority--oppose such action. What is it that makes Europeans reluctant to accept even so clear a casus belli as a direct assault on New York and Washington? They fear that American retribution will in turn provoke reprisals from militant Islamists. They are much influenced by the presence of many millions of Muslims who are now citizens or refugees in the European Union. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, they do not yet believe that this time America really means business. Quite simply, they do not expect the U.S. to win the war against Islamic terrorism.
European appeasement and Islamic aggression are two sides of the same coin. Both boil down to a lack of respect for American military prowess. Americans have long been despised in the Middle East for their reluctance to sacrifice their young men in war. But that contemptuous attitude may now change. In his notorious faxed message of defiance this week, Osama bin Laden paid Americans a backhanded compliment by comparing them to the crusaders and, by implication, the Israelis: "The new Jewish crusader campaign is led by the biggest crusader Bush under the banner of the cross." The fearsome memory of Richard the Lionheart still lives on in Arab mythology, just as the Israelis are accorded grudging respect as a most formidable foe. If those who defy the U.S.--whether Bin Laden, the Taliban or Saddam Hussein--are seen to be punished, the Islamic world will certainly treat Americans with new respect.
It is not so simple in Europe. There are, of course, many other reasons Europeans are so lukewarm about President Bush's "crusade." There is the deep-rooted culture of anti-Americanism, especially but not exclusively on the left, that led many Europeans to stereotype President Bush as a Texan cowboy. Such anti-Americanism is absent from the warm language of support used by Prime Minister Blair, President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, but it bubbles up from below all the time. Even Mr. Blair tolerated direct criticism of Mr. Bush from a member of his cabinet, International Development Secretary Clare Short.
There is also a desire among European leaders to exploit the new coalition to pursue their own purposes, even when these run counter to Washington's war aims. The Germans, for instance, are trumpeting their own "special relationship" with President Putin, even going so far as to hold out the prospect of NATO membership as a reward for Moscow "permitting" the U.S. to operate in central Asia. Never mind that the German-Russian rapprochement may constrain Washington's freedom of maneuver if, for example, America's unfinished business in Iraq is next on Mr. Bush's agenda.
In a crisis of this gravity, Americans, whether Jews or gentiles, offer instinctive support to Israel, as the only democracy in the Middle East. Europeans, by contrast, are instinctively distancing themselves from Zionist democracy in order to cozy up to Islamic autocracies and theocracies.
This week British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw almost caused a serious diplomatic rift with Israel by according formal recognition to "Palestine" as a state. This mistake was made in the course of a visit to Iran, where Mr. Straw published a deliberately provocative article in which he stated that "one of the factors which helps breed terrorism is the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine." In other words: in order to appease Iran, which has a long history of sponsoring terrorist groups responsible for suicide attacks not only on Israel but also on the U.S. and Britain, the foreign secretary was quite happy to alienate the West's most reliable ally in the Middle East. Only a hastily telephoned apology to Ariel Sharon from Tony Blair averted permanent damage.
European strategy in the months ahead is very likely to get in the way of America's. A war against terrorism cannot be prosecuted effectively if most of the terrorist states are welcomed into the coalition. The U.S. needs European political support, even if only the British are likely to provide serious military assistance. But Mr. Bush should have no hesitation in publicly rejecting European diplomatic machinations or overtures that do not serve American interests. "I am a patient man," he remarked on Tuesday. Before long, he may find that it is the Europeans who try his patience most.
Mr. Johnson is associate editor of the Daily Telegraph.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- us nuc politics
Kyl refuses to rule out U.S. nuclear retaliation
Associated Press
Sep. 30, 2001
http://www.azcentral.com/news/0930attacks-kyl30.html
TUCSON - The United States should retaliate with nuclear weapons if terrorists launch chemical or germ warfare against the nation, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Friday during a town hall meeting.
"I can't think of any other appropriate response in the case of a massive attack with biological weapons. We have to let terrorist states know that nothing is off the table."
Kyl wasn't specific about the potential targets for such a counterstrike and conceded that that response would kill innocent civilians.
Nonetheless, he suggested the United States should consider using nuclear missiles even if it wasn't clear who launched a chemical or biological attack.
"I would probably go a step further and say to all terrorist states that we're probably not going to know exactly where it came from," Kyl said. "So we're going to hold them all responsible."
The Sept. 11 attacks have heightened fears that terrorists might release anthrax, smallpox or other potentially fatal airborne agents in American cities.
Kyl said he believes terrorists will attempt another massive strike against the United States in some fashion during the next several months.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Opposition to Taliban urges quick U.S. strike
September 30, 2001
By Julius Strauss
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010930-24387755.htm
FAIZABAD, Afghanistan - Leaders of the Northern Alliance fighting for control of Afghanistan warned the United States Friday that it was missing its chance to deal a death blow to the Taliban.
Speaking in Faizabad - the badly damaged and dusty capital of the territory he controls - President Burnahuddin Rabbani said the West's hesitancy over setting up a formal alliance with the government was a mistake. The anti-Taliban forces, which control less than 10 percent of Afghanistan, believe that with American air power and NATO logistical support they can overrun the country in weeks.
Mr. Rabbani, a sagelike figure to the Afghans of the North, who was ousted from the capital, Kabul, by the Taliban five years ago, spoke at a small government guest house built in the middle of the fast-flowing mountain river of Kuchka. His government is still recognized by the United Nations.
"America has declared war on terrorism; we are in the front line of that war," he said. "We only hope negotiations will improve. But during recent days America seems to have been stepping back."
Military commanders in the Northern Alliance think that if America does not act now, it may ultimately fail to subdue the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden.
Said Amin Tariq, the military commander of the northeastern province of Badakhshan, said: "After the attack on America, President Bush promised he would arrest the terrorist leaders and punish them. If he delays, world support will divide and the moment will be lost."
For the residents of Faizabad, the stakes of the U.S. battle against terrorism could not be higher. After 24 years of continuous war they have been reduced to a precarious and threadbare existence.
Aid workers now say that the final reserves are being consumed, and that starvation will soon set in, compounding the drought that has already devastated whole regions.
Amir Safawi, a local agricultural engineer, said: "People have already sold most of their livestock. If they once had 50 sheep, they now have two or three, if they had five head of oxen, they now have a single animal."
Even after the grinding poverty of Tajikistan, the former Soviet Union's poorest republic, arriving in northern Afghanistan seems like moving back several centuries to a poorer, meaner world.
The ancient Russian military transport plane making the 50-minute hop over a Western arm of the Hindu Kush into the ravaged, rugged country touched down on a runway so crooked that the pilot had to use heavy yaw to prevent a slide onto the rocks.
Faizabad is like an exaggerated medieval setting from a film. Small children, barefoot in the mud, carry plates of dirty, unleavened bread that they offer for sale.
The president, who has a long white beard and the air of a once-wealthy man now living off reduced means, tours his small fiefdom in two green Land Cruisers.
Abdul Alim, a 43-year-old driver for a Western aid agency that has now evacuated its international staff, said: "The Taliban has taken away the way of our grandfathers and imposed rules we cannot live by.
"Now it is the turn of the whole world to help. They have finally seen the terrorism we have faced for years."
It is almost a wonder that life has survived at all. Only an unreliable air bridge and a precarious mountain road connect the town with its one friendly neighbor, Tajikistan.
The drive to the Panjshir Valley to the south takes two days. The 80 miles to the front line to the west takes a day by car.
Traders hauling contraband on donkeys across the Pakistani border can reckon on a week in each direction and a path 15,000 feet high. Yet, despite the hardships, a steely pride still gleams from the Afghans, who exude determination.
Commander Tariq, who spent two years in a Soviet-run detention center and whose shoulder and forehead are deeply scarred by shrapnel, said: "For those used to living in comfort, Afghanistan seems like hell. Yet Afghans are very resilient I am thinking if the Taliban is not stopped here, there is nothing to prevent them moving into Central Asia."
--------
In Afghanistan, a Culture of War
Fiefdoms of Disparate Warlords Fuel Shifting Alliances and Foes
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46843-2001Sep29.html
JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan, Sept. 29 -- They were two boys, Mohammad and Asadullah, growing up in the northern part of Kabul, playing soccer, and for a few precious years oblivious to the chaos around them. Then one day young Mohammad noticed the tanks.
He was about 6 years old then. The tanks were Russian. They rumbled down the street, and he ran home crying to his parents, who told him the Soviet Union was finally leaving Afghanistan.
"It was frightening," he recalled. "I was scared. I never forget."
Not much later, his older brother showed him a gun. Ubaidulla was a guerrilla fighting in the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal. He urged the little boy to pick up the gun, to feel it, to hold it in his hands. To shoot it. "I felt like a man," Mohammad remembered. "I wasn't afraid."
Mohammad joined his brother in the guerrilla army. Today, he is 18, still young enough to have a clean chin while every man around him wears a beard, yet old enough to fight for his people and suffer combat wounds. He and his friend Asadullah serve together at a rebel post here, about 40 miles north of Kabul.
Mohammad Jared and Asadullah Mulomahamad were born four years after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They have known little but war. It raged around them as children, it rages around them now and seems likely to continue to rage around them for some time to come.
In a country where it is often hard to find food, clothes or fuel, the culture of war pervades every facet of life.
Men stroll through the bazaar carrying weapons. Buildings, bridges and byways have been shattered for so long that no one attempts to fix them. The cement factory bombed out nine years ago still has armed guards, even though it produces no cement. No one flinches at the sound of gunfire.
In today's Afghanistan, perpetual fighting and shifting alliances are part of everyday life.
Here in the Panjshir Valley, many Afghans are now attaching great hope to the prospect of yet another turn in the long conflict -- an anticipated military strike by the United States against the Taliban militia that controls most of Afghanistan and is believed to harbor the suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. But such an attack may do little to change daily life here, so deeply etched by war, just as it was on that day when Mohammad noticed the retreating Soviet tanks rumble down his street. Birth of Division
When U.S.-backed Afghan guerrillas forced the Soviets to leave in 1989, the fighters attempted to form a coalition government from among seven distinct groups. The guerrillas brought different ethnic and tribal differences, as well as outside supporters. The coalition splintered, leading to a civil war that left Kabul in ruins.
From this mayhem rose the Taliban, a group of Islamic students and veterans of the resistance war. The Taliban swept across Afghanistan from 1994 to 1996, driving the old warring factions into an uneasy coalition, called the Northern Alliance or the United Front.
Not only were there sharp ethnic divisions between the new rulers and the old -- the Taliban's members are primarily ethnic Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, and most of the Northern Alliance leaders are affiliated with northern ethnic groups, such as Tajiks and Uzbeks -- but different strains of Islam also split them.
Today, with the help of young fighters like Mohammad, the anti-Taliban coalition in the north resembles not so much an army as a collection of feudal barons who have banded together. There are no formal uniforms, no hierarchy or organization charts.
Each regiment is headquartered in its own mud or stone fortress, with a metal gate and a green, white and black rebel flag, usually guarded by a young soldier like Mohammad or Asadullah. Each is ruled by its own warlord, who commands the personal loyalty of the men under him. They have often switched sides, when it suited their interests.
Haji Almaz is one of the local potentates. He has his own regiment in Charikar, about 12 miles south of here. A lion of a man with heavy eyelids and a dry wit, Almaz controls part of the front lines north of Kabul, and would be among the first commanders in the capital -- if the rebels ever get the chance to take it back.
A visitor is invited inside to sit, shoes off, on a Persian rug while plates of green grapes and pots of tea are served. The warlord enters in a flowing Afghan robe and sandals, full of smiles and handshakes. He does not carry a gun himself. The men around him take care of security.
Whatever personal ambitions Almaz harbors have been sublimated to the greater cause of defeating the Taliban. Like many commanders in the Panjshir, Almaz is disciplined. He said he will move on Kabul only when ordered. For now, Kabul is too well defended. Almaz admitted that the rebel alliance could not maintain the sort of supply lines it would need to mount an effective assault.
This discipline has survived even the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik guerrilla leader who by sheer force of personality had managed to hold together this eclectic group of warriors, but was mortally wounded by a suicide bomber on Sept. 9. "Our forces, all the forces, are as unified as they were before," Almaz said. "We're working together, we won't disagree. Nobody can replace Ahmed Massoud but we are still unified." A Sense of Suffering
Mohammad Jared was away at the front one day three years ago when the Taliban launched a bombardment in his home neighborhood. Ubaidulla, his brother and idol who was then 23, was killed in the shelling.
It was a devastating blow for Mohammad, but not his last. A year later, during a pitched back-and-forth battle for control of the Panjshir Valley, an artillery shell landed in front of the young fighter and exploded, opening a five-inch gash in his leg and slicing into his belly. He lost consciousness, but his compatriots hefted him onto a donkey to carry him away from the battlefield. He spent two months in a hospital.
He was 15 at the time.
"I thought I would die," he recalled.
His friend, Asadullah, has never been wounded. But he too, nurses grudges. He vividly recalled being forced to flee by the approach of Taliban forces who burned down his house. "Other than the clothes we were wearing, we had to leave everything behind," he said. "We hate them. They're very bad people."
For all they have been through, both still seem impossibly young. Mohammad has penetrating eyes, a bright smile, fluoride-white teeth and a quiet, shy manner. Asadullah has a little more baby fat on the cheeks, and is a little more talkative.
Their sense of suffering at the hands of the Taliban resonates in every conversation here, with fighters and civilians alike. At the bazaar in Jabal Saraj, shopkeepers recalled the various Taliban occupations, and how they were forced to flee, while the Taliban forces punished men for not having long enough beards, or simply for living in the rebellious zone of Panjshir.
Mohammad Zarif, a 58-year-old shopkeeper, said they came to his house, forced him outside in the snow without his shoes. "They arrested me and beat me and crushed my nose," he recalled. His daughter brought a Koran to the Taliban to try to win his freedom, to no avail. Only later was he released.
Outside another warlords' compound, the 19-year-old guard, Rakhmatula Azimullah, recalled how the Taliban showed up at his family house in the middle of the night in 1996, demanded guns, beat his father and burned the house to the ground.
"If I saw the person who burned my house," he said, "I'd kill him."
Fazle Allah, who is not sure whether he is 55 or 56 years old, is also vengeful. His uncle was killed by the Taliban two years ago, his two sons were imprisoned and another uncle was hit in the head so hard that he has never recovered fully. The last time the Taliban controlled the area, he recalled, it sold young women and publicly killed six townspeople, two by stuffing money up their noses and slitting their throats.
Sitting in the cement factory that was closed after it was shelled in 1992, wearing a white cap that matched his beard, Allah seethed with anger. "If I could, if I had the chance, I wouldn't shoot them," he said. "I would use a razor blade on them."
He traced his finger across his neck to make the point clear.
Shooting would not be painful enough. Fighters' Enduring Dreams
At their guard post, Mohammad and Asadullah took a few minutes to contemplate what life might be like if peace ever were to come to Afghanistan. For them, it was a completely unfamiliar concept, nothing more than stories retold by older relatives, recalling a gentler age.
Asadullah would like an education. The school in his neighborhood was destroyed. He wants to become a doctor or an engineer. "It's clear that if there wasn't a war, I would live a normal life in a regular home," he said.
That sounded good to Mohammad. He wants to learn to read and write, maybe have a garden and work in the government.
"My whole life I've fought," he said. "I have a dream that there would be peace in our country."
For now, it is only a dream.
--------
Former Afghan king backs U.S.
USA TODAY
09/30/2001
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/09/30/king.htm
ROME (AP) - The former king of Afghanistan told a U.S. congressional delegation Sunday that he was by America's side in the fight against terrorism and would back a U.S.-led liberation force to oust the hard-line Taliban. The delegation, headed by Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, visited King Mohammad Zahir Shah at his villa in a luxurious gated community on the outskirts of Rome.
Weldon said Zahir, who ruled for 40 peaceful years, is a "critical" figure who "can rally those against the Taliban."
The Taliban have protected terror suspect Osama bin Laden and are under threat of U.S. retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
"We have a common struggle against terrorism," Zahir said.
Weldon told reporters that Zahir, 86, spoke of his desire for a return to democracy in Afghanistan. The former king, who introduced a constitutional monarchy, has lived in Rome since his 1973 ouster opened the way for decades of conflict in Afghanistan.
"All of America is looking to the king to play a key role here and help us coalesce those who oppose the Taliban and those who oppose Osama bin Laden's presence in their country," Weldon said.
Weldon said the king spoke of a two-year transition to democracy with an interim leader and does not envision a long-term presence for foreign troops.
"His wish is that the U.N. play a role. But he did not dismiss the notion that if the U.N. could not agree, that a U.S.-led force of allies would in fact liberate his country and allow this process to go forward," Weldon said.
Zahir also stressed the importance of humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, where winter is approaching.
The meeting came a day after the delegation held talks with members of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban forces, who gathered in Rome to plot strategy for unifying the fight against the hard-line Islamic militia. A few members of the anti-Taliban forces joined the Sunday session with the congressional delegation at Zahir's villa.
At least four guards in bulletproof vests with machine guns watched over the meeting.
The field commanders also met Saturday with delegation member Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who said afterward that Afghans could count on a "major aid package" to rebuild their war-shattered nation if they overthrew the Taliban and helped root out bin Laden.
"This is Afghanistan's best shot, the best shot they've had in the last 10 or 15 years," said Rohrabacher, a California Republican and a senior member of the House International Relations Committee.
The former king has hosted several commanders from various Afghan groups this week at his villa in Rome, a bid to rally them together. The king's office said they had agreed to create a new military council, made up of commanders, tribal elders and former army officers.
Zahir's overthrow led to the eventual arrival of a pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan and the 1979 Soviet invasion. Soviet troops withdrew in defeat in 1989, and the Taliban seized power in 1996 after devastating fighting between rival groups. The alliance still controls less than 10% of northern Afghanistan.
-------- biological weapons
Biological and Chemical Warfare Are Here Now
Healing Our World: Weekly Comment
By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.,
Environment News Service,
September 30, 2001
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2001/2001L-09-30g.html
How many deaths will it take 'till we know that too many people have died. The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind The answer is blowin' in the wind. -- Bob Dylan
There has been much written in the press the last couple of weeks about the threat from terrorists if they commandeered a crop duster to spread biological warfare agents. Yet few writers have mentioned that these planes are used for this purpose every day, but not by terrorists. Instead, they are used by licensed operators who are spraying deadly chemicals on our lands and on our children.
We don't have to wait for chemical warfare to be waged on U.S. soil by terrorists. Such warfare has been underway for over a century. Every day, billions of pounds of deadly chemicals, many of which were used as chemical warfare agents in World War I and II, are applied as pesticides and herbicides to soil, plants, and people around the country and the world.
Near Sheldon, Illinois, grower Joe Zumwalt applies a low-insecticide bait that is targeted against western corn rootworms feeding on and laying eggs in these soybeans. (Photo by Ken Hammond courtesy U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)
The U.S. releases over six billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment each year.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 200,000 people are killed by pesticide poisons, worldwide every year. That means 547 men, women and children die every day from pesticide poisoning. In addition, four million children die each year from the effects of contaminated water and other toxic hazards. That's nearly 11,000 per day.
UNICEF reports that many independent authorities assert that at least 500,000 Iraqi children under five have died since 1990, in part as a result of the U.S. sanctions and the effects of the Gulf War.
Surely these threats and atrocities are worth waging a war upon to save lives.
Crops aren't the only place pesticides are sprayed. Pesticides are being used in classrooms, offices, playgrounds, lawns, playing fields, locker rooms, bathrooms, storage rooms, basements, school gymnasiums and day care rooms. Kitchens and cafeterias are the areas most frequently treated with pesticides. Pesticides and herbicides are applied to eliminate many kinds of pests, including weeds, mice, cockroaches, ants, flies, lice, ticks, fleas and other insects. Some people spray outdoors to kill bees, wasps, ants, rodents and pigeons.
Pesticide and solvent vapors, unlike most chemical warfare agents that dissipate rapidly, can persist in indoor air for weeks or even years. Pesticide residues can contaminate indoor surfaces, and can remain in carpets and dust for months or years. They can also persist outdoors in soil for years and some weed-killers commonly used at schools can last from one to five years in the soil.
Research over the last 20 years shows that pesticides cause sterility, birth defects, and neurological disorders.
Pesticides stay on fruit and produce and most cannot be washed off with water. In studies done by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 108 different kinds of pesticides were found on 22 fruits and vegetables commonly eaten by children! Sixteen pesticides were found in eight samples of processed baby food.
Crop dusting aircraft are the worst offenders, possibly contributing to more pesticide poisoning episodes than any other delivery method. Less than 10 percent - some say as little as one percent - of the pesticide gets applied to the crop. The rest becomes airborne and can affect people, animals, and plants many miles away.
These chemicals are regularly detected in the air thousands of miles from where they were used. DDT, banned in the United States in the 1970s has been found in Antarctic ice, penguin tissues, and in most species of whales! Farm pesticide resides have been found in vacuum cleaner bags of people living in cities many hundreds of miles from farms.
The life systems of the Earth are intimately connected. You cannot affect one without eventually affecting them all.
Millions of tons of hazardous substances have been improperly disposed of and cause a continual threat to human, animal, and ecosystem health. (Photo courtesy U.S. EPA)
Crop dusters spray every day, and not just to end insect infestations. Potato growers apply pesticides from crop dusters to kill foliage on fields they are about to harvest to make it easier to get the potatoes. Apple growers spray a chemical on the apples to keep them on the trees longer so they get redder and don't fall off in the wind.
The Environmental Working Group estimates that every day, 1.1 million children eat food that, even after it is washed, contains an unsafe dose of 13 organophosphate pesticides. Of those children, 106,600 ate food that exceed the EPA's own safe daily dosage level for adults by 10 times or more.
The foods found to most likely contain unsafe pesticide levels are peaches, apples, nectarines, popcorn and pears. Among baby foods, pears, peaches and apple juice had the highest levels.
The problem is much worse than we can even imagine. We have no way of knowing the true extent of the illnesses and deaths that result from toxic pesticide exposure. A study in California reported that 16 out of 20 critically ill children that were transferred to a major medical center from smaller hospitals were wrongly diagnosed. They were actually suffering from acute pesticide poisoning.
The number of deaths each year from pesticide poisoning is staggering and grossly underestimated. Migrant farm workers suffer the most and their deaths and birth defects rarely show up on the lists of the dead, since they can't afford health care and fear reprisal by immigration authorities. They may never make it in to a hospital or to a doctor.
Business and industry have been waging chemical warfare on U.S. citizens for decades. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) estimates that more than 32 million workers are exposed to harmful substances from more than 3.5 million workplaces. Yet over the last 30 years, OSHA has issued only 170 citations to employers for not having proper procedures to protect against toxic substances leaving the workplace.
Solvents such as benzene, carbon disulfide, methylene chloride, and ketone are a few of the 49 million tons of solvents that are produced annually in the United States, and 9.8 million workers are exposed to them daily. They are in nail polish, paint, plastics, rubber cement, furniture and thousands of other products. They are absorbed through the skin or ingested.
Thousands of people are sickened and many die from these exposures annually.
We are under constant assault from industry sponsored chemical warfare every day:
Asbestos, especially from construction workplaces, causing lung tissue scarring and cancer of the lining of the lung. Hormones from pharmaceutical workers, embalmers and farm workers cause many health problems for them and their families. Lead from employees who work in the lead smelting industries, fix batteries or radiators or who work at a shooting range can harm the brain, nervous system and kidneys. Cadmium from electroplating plants, paint pigments and solder is linked to lung and prostate cancer and even low level exposure can be harmful. PCBs and other chlorinated hydrocarbons come home with firefighters, plastics workers or those who work with electrical transformers and can cause cancer. Pesticides from farm workers, gardeners or park maintenance workers can easily be transported into the home and can cause many fatal illnesses.
Many pesticides are part of a deadly family of pesticides that came from chemicals that were developed as nerve gases during World War II. Please take that in for a moment. Chemicals that were specifically designed to kill all life forms quickly during wartime were approved by our government for use on our lawns, in our homes, and around our children. Toxic terrorism is taking place right now.
This family of organophosphate pesticides - nerve gases - were first synthesized in Germany before and during World War II. Tabun, Sarin, and Soman were made by Gerhard Schrader in the 1930s and '40s.
Sarin, still available today, is lethal to an adult human if only 1,700 mg gets on his or her skin. It doesn't even have to be taken internally to kill.
Sarin gained worldwide attention when on March 20, 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo, a terrorist group in Japan, placed Sarin on five subway trains traveling toward Kasumigaseki station. This subway stop is a common one for those working in Tokyo government offices. Twelve commuters died and over 5,000 were injured.
More than 100,000 human-made chemicals have been introduced into the environment in the past 50 years. More than 1,000 new chemicals are developed each year. Wherever you live, there are probably more than 250 synthetic industrial chemicals in your body that were not present in the bodies of your grandparents when they were your age.
A permanent ban on crop dusters would not only lessen a terrorist threat, but would lessen the daily toxic terrorism that is perpetrated on American lives and ecosystems - and all the Earth - every day. Pursuing the American Dream has many consequences. It is a trail covered with the blood of innocent children, women and men, considered by industry to be acceptable consequences of progress.
The losses in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania are tragic, and my heart goes out to the victims and their families. But sadly, their numbers pale in comparison to the yearly death toll from existing toxic practices in the United States and around the world. Let's extend our outrage to the other many hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths around our nation and the world that occur because of our business-at-all-costs model for economic growth.
We don't have to wait to demand action on chemical terrorism - it's here today.
RESOURCES
1. Read the tragic stories of those who have been poisoned by pesticides at: http://www.getipm.com/our-loved-ones/memorium.htm
2. Find out about pesticide poisoning and learn of alternatives at: http://www.safe2use.com/
3. Track pesticide abuse from the Pesticide Action Network at: http://www.panna.org
4. See details of pesticide poisoning from the Soil Association
5. Visit the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides at: http://www.beyondpesticides.org/
6. The Rachel Carson Council's Guide to Pesticides can be found online at: http://members.aol.com/rccouncil/ourpage/samples.htm
7. Read the Environmental Working Group reports at: http://www.ewg.org/pesticides/
8. Read about the facts of the sanctions against Iraq from Voices in the Wilderness and from Citizens Concerned for the People of Iraq at: http://www.endiraqsanctions.org
9. Find out who your Congressional representatives are and e-mail them. Tell them that you want an end to ALL the senseless deaths that take place every year that are considered a consequence of progress and the pursuit of the American Dream. If you know your Zip code, you can find them at: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html
{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle. He can be found watching at all the outpouring of support for the tragic deaths on September 11 while millions of children and adults die each year, unnoticed. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com}
----
THE BIOLOGICAL THREAT
Some See U.S. as Vulnerable in Germ Attack
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
New York Times
September 30, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/health/policy/30BIO.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - The United States is inadequately prepared to confront bioterrorist attacks, according to a broad range of health experts and officials. The nation must develop new vaccines and treatments, they say, but it must also fortify its fragile public health infrastructure, the first line of defense in detecting and containing biological threats.
Bioterrorism - the intentional release of potentially lethal viruses or bacteria into the air, food or water supply - poses daunting technical challenges, and experts say it would be difficult to carry out a successful attack. Still, many believe it is inevitable that someone will eventually attempt it in the United States.
In the weeks since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, much of the discussion about bioterrorism has centered on a shortage of antibiotics and vaccines. But the bigger problem, officials agree, is a lack of basic public health infrastructure and preparedness that could thwart a terror attack or limit its effects.
Doctors are poorly trained to recognize symptoms of infection with possible biological weapons, like plague and anthrax, which can resemble the flu. Many of the nation's hospitals lack necessary equipment - in some cases even simple tools like fax machines - to receive or report information in an emergency. Though a number of federal agencies have established bioterrorism response teams and procedures, and there has been steady improvement in laboratory facilities around the country to test and identify biological agents, the result is a patchwork, set against a larger patchwork of cities, counties and states with their own reporting requirements and plans.
"For bioterrorism, the No. 1 inadequacy, if you had to rank them, is the inadequacy of our public health infrastructure," said Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee. "That is a product of about 15 years of neglect."
In a report issued last week, the General Accounting Office said the government's bioterrorism planning was so disjointed that the agencies involved could not even agree on which biological agents posed the biggest threat. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, consider smallpox a major risk. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not even put smallpox on its list.
At the same time, there are holes in the federal bureaucracy, where two important health positions remain unfilled: commissioner of food and drugs and director of the National Institutes of Health. The Food and Drug Administration will play a crucial role in the development of vaccines or treatments, but President Bush and Congress - in particular Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts - have been unable to agree on an acceptable nominee.
Federal officials got a taste of how complicated, and chilling, a bioterrorist attack could be during a war game played at Andrews Air Force base, outside Washington, in June. The exercise, code-named Dark Winter, began with a report of a single case of smallpox in Oklahoma City. By the time it was over, the imaginary epidemic had spread to 25 states and killed several million people. As it unfolded, growing grimmer and grimmer, the government quickly ran out of vaccine, forcing officials to make life-and-death decisions about who would be protected and whether the military would have to be brought in to quarantine patients.
"Dark Winter showed just how unprepared we are to deal with bioterrorism," said Jerome M. Hauer, the former head of emergency management in New York City and now a bioterrorism consultant to Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of Health and Human Services. "It pointed out that there were significant challenges to all levels of government."
To meet those challenges, Senators Kennedy and Frist are urging President Bush to spend at least $1 billion on a range of measures that, they say, will improve the ability of health officials to combat bioterrorism. In an interview, Mr. Thompson agreed that improvements were needed, although he said the government was prepared to handle an attack right now.
"I would like to expand our pharmaceutical supplies," Mr. Thompson said. "I would like to strengthen the public health system. I would like to get some more inspectors for the food supply. I would like to expand security in our laboratories. I would like to purchase more vaccine."
For years, federal officials considered the threat of bioterrorism to be negligible. But concern began to mount in 1995, after a Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, launched nerve gas attacks in the Tokyo subways. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, some members of the public have developed intense fears of germ warfare, and are trying to stock up on their own supplies.
"We have people buying gas masks and antibiotics when that is not going to provide real protection," said Stephen S. Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University.
Mr. Thompson said the administration was "very confident that we could act and react to any kind of bioterrorist breakout." But while Dr. Morse and other public health experts say the nation is better prepared than it was even three or four years ago, they do not share that confidence.
For instance, the United States has only 7 to 15 million doses of smallpox vaccine on hand - estimates vary - while experts estimate that at least 40 million would be needed to combat a serious epidemic. Under a government contract, a company in Cambridge, Mass., is testing a new vaccine, but it will not be available until 2004 at the earliest.
But perhaps the most pressing need, many health experts say, is improving the nation's ability to recognize when a biological attack is under way.
"We are not going to have a bomb fly out of the sky and land on somebody so that we can say, `Look, there's a bomb, and we are all dying of anthrax,' " said Asha M. George, who studies biological warfare for the Nunn-Turner Initiative, a nonprofit foundation in Washington. "It is most likely going to be a covert release, and people will get sick and go to their hospitals, and the public health system will have to pick up on this."
In some ways, the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a test of that system.
Minutes after two jets slammed into the World Trade Center, the National Guard was mobilized. The Guard has created 29 teams around the nation to aid the response to chemical, biological and radiological attacks; on Sept. 11, a 22-member unit was ordered into Manhattan to test the air for deadly germs or chemical toxins. None were found.
Soon afterward, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the branch of the health and human services agency that coordinates bioterrorism preparedness, alerted state and local health departments to look for signs of unusual illnesses that might be the result of bioterrorism. That alert remains in effect; so far, nothing out of the ordinary has been reported.
At the same time, officers from the centers' Epidemic Intelligence Service were stationed at 15 sentinel, or warning, hospitals scattered in New York City's five boroughs, also looking for strange symptoms. And for the first time, drugs and other medical supplies were dispatched from the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, which is maintained by the disease control centers to respond to a germ outbreak.
But in many respects, Sept. 11 was not a true test. There were no biological or chemical agents to detect. Because there were far fewer injured people than officials had originally expected, the epidemic intelligence officers were working in relatively calm hospital surroundings, as opposed to crowded emergency rooms. The drugs and medical supplies went largely unused.
So while Mr. Thompson insists the government "can handle any contingency right now," there is no way to know if the response would have been adequate during an actual bioterrorism attack, according to one expert closely involved in the government's antiterror planning who spoke on condition of anonymity.
For one thing, the expert said, in the New York City attacks doctors, nurses and other health care workers stayed at their jobs. But in the event of a biological attack, many might go home to their own families.
Moreover, with managed care's pressure to eliminate hospital beds and increase efficiency, hospitals have lost their so-called surge capacity - the ability to accommodate a sudden increase of patients.
"When you don't see very uncommon things, you don't think about very uncommon things," said Nicole Lurie, a former federal health official who worked on bioterrorism issues in the Clinton administration. "I saw three people in the morning yesterday with acute respiratory illness. They all had the same symptoms. Should I think this is bioterrorism?"
A big part of the government's challenge is in simply coordinating its response; across Washington, a range of bureaucracies, including the departments of energy, defense and justice and the health and human services agency, are busy planning for bioterrorist attacks. That job will soon fall to Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania, whom President Bush named to head a new Office of Homeland Security.
Some experts outside government say Secretary Thompson has already taken a step in the right direction by creating a new position coordinating a departmentwide initiative against bioterrorism. In July, nearly two months before the World Trade Center attacks, Mr. Thompson named Scott Lillibridge, the disease control center's top expert in bioterrorism, to fill the job.
So, despite their worries, many experts agree that the groundwork has been laid for improving the nation's response to a bioterror attack.
"Are we prepared to prevent it? No," Dr. Lurie said. "Are we prepared to respond to it? It depends on what form it takes. I would say that we are a whole lot further along than we were three or four years ago."
Mr. Hauer agreed. "A lot of what we need to do is being done," he said. "The problem is, some of these steps take time."
--------
$1 billion is sought to fight bioterror
September 30, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010930-81879084.htm
A leading Republican senator says Congress needs to appropriate "at least $1 billion" to increase U.S. preparedness against potential biological attacks, an amount that would triple current spending for that purpose.
"Bioterrorism remains a significant threat to our nation," Sen. Bill Frist, a doctor and Tennessee Republican, said in a statement that followed the release of a General Accounting Office report on this issue.
The report found that more must be done to coordinate "fragmented" federal efforts for addressing bioterrorism and that state and local preparedness needs substantial bolstering.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, called poor training and planning "a major problem" - especially among hospitals that would be on the front lines in a bioterrorist attack.
However, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, in an interview to air tonight on CBS' "60 Minutes," insists the United States is prepared in the event of any kind of biological attack. That assertion was proven already, he says, by actions taken immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In the interview, Mr. Thompson points out that eight staging areas around the country are each stocked with 50 tons of medical supplies - including vaccines, antibiotics, gas masks and ventilators - that can be moved within hours to the site of a bioterrorist attack. What's more, Mr. Thompson says, 7,000 medical personnel are ready to respond to any such crisis, anywhere in the nation.
He notes that on Sept. 11, nine tractor-trailers loaded with medical supplies from one of those eight secret staging areas ferried the goods to New York "within seven hours."
Once it was determined that the attack in question was neither biological nor chemical, the tractor-trailers returned the goods to their secret staging area, Mr. Thompson said.
"We've got to make sure that people understand that they're safe and that we're prepared to take care of any contingency, any consequence that develops from any kind of bioterrorism attack," Mr. Thompson said in the "60 Minutes" interview.
But not everyone is so confident. A Newsweek poll released yesterday shows that many Americans are not yet convinced they would be protected against an attack from biochemical weapons. The poll of 1,000 adults found that nearly half - 46 percent - are not too confident that national and local governments in the United States are prepared to handle such an attack.
Mr. Frist, the ranking Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee on Public Health, requested the GAO study on bioterrorism last November. Its release comes as some are warning that biological agents such as viruses or bacteria could be the next terrorist weapon used by enemies of the United States.
Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut Republican, said he's convinced there will be such attacks. In an interview yesterday on CNN's "Saturday Edition," he said: "There will be attempts at biological, chemical, even, perhaps, nuclear or radioactive material attacks on the United States. That's the reality. It's not a question of if; it's a question of when, where and of what magnitude."
Last week, the government banned flights by crop-dusters for two days because of fears they might be used in a biological or chemical attack. That action followed reports that one of the suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks had been asking questions about crop-dusting aircraft, and after crop-dusting manuals were found in the possession of a potential suspect.
Mr. Frist noted that federal legislation authorizing the expansion of national, state and local efforts to detect and respond effectively to bioterrorism and other significant public health threats was signed into law last fall. "But we need to get the appropriations through," he said, adding:
"Our first step is to increase the visibility of our federal response by providing at least $1 billion in funding, including strengthening state and local surveillance and response capabilities. We must also ensure greater coordination across federal departments to establish a comprehensive, coordinated response."
The Bush administration is spending $347 million this year on bioterrorism initiatives.
This report is based in part on wire service reports.
--------
Biological, Chemical Threat Is Termed Tricky, Complex
Smallpox Virus Is Most Feared in Array of Deadly Weapons
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47175-2001Sep29.html
As weapons of terror, anthrax spores would be the easiest to handle. The smallpox virus would be the least accessible, but the most feared. Ounce for ounce, botulinum toxin is the deadliest. Chemical nerve agents, however, are the only ones that have ever actually killed people.
Experts on the subject cannot say with any confidence what the United States should expect if terrorists turn to chemical or biological weapons as their next instruments of attack. Among the germs, toxins and compounds commonly mentioned, there's no clear front-runner.
Each agent offers a complicated mix of accessibility, difficulty of production and delivery, and lethality. A terrorist's goal -- mass death or merely mass panic -- is also a crucial variable that is hard to predict.
"I think it's just guesswork. . . . It's not ignorable is the most that one can say," said Alan P. Zelicoff, a physician and biological weapons expert at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Chemical weapons -- in particular nerve agents -- could cause mass death if distributed by airplane in particular settings, such as over a sports stadium. However, it would be hard for a terrorist group to make or acquire the amount of chemicals necessary for an attack of that size.
Much smaller quantities of biological agents -- either microbe or toxin -- are needed to kill large numbers of people. But while it might be feasible for terrorists to get or produce those materials, delivering them is extremely difficult. It requires expertise, special equipment and practice -- all of which is hard to conceal. (The smallpox virus is an exception to this generality.)
For a chemical or biological attack with mass casualties, "you have to have a state or the equivalent," said C.J. Peters, a medical virologist at the University of Texas at Galveston and former head of the special pathogens branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"I don't think the garden-variety terrorist is going to do anything," Peters said. "But take some group that has a lot of money and put them in a country that's full of terrorists and it's another matter."
However, evidence that it is possible to amass the material and know-how without a government's assistance exists in the case of Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic cult that conducted several acts of terror in Japan in the 1990s.
Aum Shinrikyo, which had about 40,000 members worldwide, operated a three-story chemical factory in Japan. Over a two-year period, it produced 65 pounds of sarin, a liquid nerve agent compounded from several dangerous and highly corrosive starting materials. The poison was then tested on sheep on a ranch in western Australia. The cult also produced some amounts of botulinum toxin and the bacterium that causes anthrax.
Aum Shinrikyo's experience, however, demonstrates that access to the raw materials does not ensure successful attacks. From 1990 to 1993, cult members released the botulinum toxin five times and anthrax spores four times, causing no casualties. The organization's most notorious terrorist act -- the release of sarin in the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995 -- killed only 12 people, although it injured more than 1,000 and caused panic. "I'm skeptical of high-tech scenarios for chemical or biological attack," said Jonathan B. Tucker, an expert on chemical and biological terrorism in the Washington office of the California-based Monterey Institute. An act of industrial sabotage at a chemical plant or the contamination of food in a few places is more likely, he said.
The only modern example of biological terror in the United States occurred in 1984 when a religious group called the Rajneeshees put salmonella bacteria in salad bars and coffee creamers in 10 restaurants in Oregon. This caused 751 cases of illness but no deaths.
There's universal agreement that the smallpox virus is the single most dangerous raw material for a non-nuclear terror attack. "If you look at all the bioterrorist agents, you can break them down into smallpox and everything else," Peters said.
Smallpox spreads easily from person to person and can kill up to a third of those infected; and virtually everyone on Earth is vulnerable. It is the only eradicated human infection. The last case occurred in 1978, and routine immunization has not been done for more than two decades. People who got single vaccinations as children are unlikely to still have immunity. There is no good treatment for it, and not enough vaccine exists to immunize large populations.
Starting next week, the World Health Organization will review at least two models of a hypothetical smallpox release to determine how many doses of vaccine might be needed to contain an outbreak, said David L. Heymann, director of communicable diseases at WHO headquarters in Geneva. He said he has heard that several countries are interested in acquiring stocks or restarting vaccine production.
(The U.S. government has 15.4 million doses of smallpox vaccine and has ordered 40 million more for delivery by the end of 2004. The Department of Health and Human Services will try to speed up production and delivery, an official said last week.)
The smallpox virus is known to exist in only two places: freezers at the CDC in Atlanta and at a facility in Koltsovo, Russia. Whether any person, institution or country violated WHO's call in the early 1980s to destroy or transfer samples to those two repositories is unknown.
Many experts believe there is a chance a small number of countries -- including Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq and Syria -- retain samples of the smallpox virus. As recently as 1990, the Soviet Union produced it in large quantities as part of a bioweapons program in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention that the country had signed in 1972.
Among more accessible microbes, the anthrax bacterium "would be the most likely" to be used as a biological weapon, said Kenneth W. Bernard, a U.S. Public Health Service physician who was previously on the National Security Council staff and who is now an adviser to Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
"It's a relatively stable bacterium, you can find it in the wild and it has been weaponised by a large number of countries, so the technology for doing so is out there," he said.
Primarily a disease of livestock, anthrax can cause fatal illness in human beings, especially when the causative microbe, Bacillus anthracis, is inhaled. Its advantage as a weapon, besides that, is that unlike most bacteria, B. anthracis can turn into a "spore" form in which it is relatively resistant to stresses such as heat and dryness. This means it can be stockpiled and disseminated dry. Growing large quantities of the anthrax microbe is tricky. Nevertheless, both the United States and Russia made anthrax-based weapons during the Cold War.
Untreated, inhaled anthrax microbes are fatal about 80 percent of the time. The infection can be treated with antibiotics, although they are of little benefit once severe symptoms appear.
Other bacteria frequently mentioned as possible weapons are the ones responsible for plague(Yersinia pestis) and tularemia(Franciscella tularensis). Each infects wild animals, and could be obtained from them.
Pneumonic plague, in which the bacteria infects the lungs, is almost always fatal if untreated. Antibiotic therapy can cure it if started early, but once symptoms appear many people with pneumonic plague die even with antibiotics. There is no vaccine available in the United States.
Tularemia of the lungs is fatal about 50 percent of the time. Antibiotics can help.
Botulinum toxin, produced by the soil bacterium Clostridium botulinum , is often called the most toxic substance on Earth. "A single gram . . . evenly dispersed and inhaled would kill more than 1 million people," according to an article published in February in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Making large quantities of the toxin requires an industrial operation, such as the one Iraq had before the Persian Gulf War, which allowed it to make about 5,000 gallons of concentrated material. Antitoxins exist but are in short supply. Intensive care, including the use of mechanical ventilators, can save some severely poisoned victims.
To produce mass casualties, airborne delivery would be the preferred method for unleashing all types of chemical or biological weapons. The poisoning of water supplies is unlikely, experts say, because the amount of toxic agent required would be prohibitively large.
Airborne delivery, however, is fraught with problems. There's an optimal size for particles to be inhaled into the lungs. Many terrorism experts are reluctant to discuss this topic, although details are readily available from many sources. In general, producing aerosols of the right size, either of liquids or powders, is extremely difficult or impossible without special equipment and expertise. Crop dusting sprayers, for instance, are designed to produce droplets many times larger than ideal. Weather conditions can also make a huge difference.
Efficiency, though, may be low on a terrorist's list of concerns. That fact alone raises the chance that some group may eventually attempt an act of terror using biological or chemical means.
"The chance of a large [bioweapons] attack that affects tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands is very small," said Zelicoff of Sandia. "But is that what the terrorist cares about? Inducing enough disease to produce panic or disrupt life is probably enough. I would posit that one or two cases of pulmonary anthrax in downtown Washington or New York would achieve that goal."
Staff writer Ceci Connolly contributed to this report.
-------- drug war
Panel Urges Legalization of Marijuana in Jamaica
New York Times
September 30, 2001
By DAVID GONZALEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/international/30GANJ.html
KINGSTON, Jamaica - Along Luke Lane, a narrow, cluttered side street nestled in one of West Kingston's busy markets, the smell from glistening heaps of red snapper quickly gives way to another more pungent aroma. On barrels, footstools and tables lie piles of thick, bushy buds of marijuana, eagerly trumpeted by vendors who puff away all day.
"People have nothing, so they plant ganja," said one young man, who declined to give his name but whose family grows marijuana in the countryside and sells it here for as little as $2 for a stem with a few thick buds. "If the police come by and mash it up, they will plant again the next day. And if the police come and take the herb here, we'll be out selling again the next day."
For all that it is widely used in public here, marijuana is also illegal, with possession - once punished with a mandatory sentence of 18 months at hard labor - still subject to a stiff fine.
Now, apparently in an effort to reconcile the law with reality, a government commission has recommended that Jamaica decriminalize marijuana for personal use while continuing bans on cultivation and trafficking.
"The current law is unenforceable because ganja cannot be suppressed because it is too entrenched," said Barry Chevannes, the dean of social sciences at the University of the West Indies, who headed the commission.
American officials, local clergy and the police have objected, but Prime Minister P. J. Patterson has said he finds some of the commission's recommendations "persuasive." International groups for drug law reform said the proposal reflected a growing trend in Europe and Canada toward easing drug laws.
United States diplomats and law enforcement officials have warned that decriminalization might violate international antidrug treaties and could result in Jamaica's being denied American foreign aid if it was deemed uncooperative in the war on drugs.
Fear of losing certification, and American aid, has worried local officials and the law enforcement authorities who oppose decriminalization.
Mr. Chevannes noted that the panel supported increasing public education efforts to discourage smoking among youths, did not recommend public smoking, and supported stiffer criminal penalties for large-scale cultivation and trafficking.
He said penalizing the widely accepted use of marijuana - some 6,000 people a year are charged with marijuana offenses - helped to bring the law itself into disrepute in Jamaica. Increased crime and warring drug gangs have left the public dazed by violence and murder, and distrustful of a police force that Jamaicans say regularly resorts to deadly force.
But at least a fifth of the population of some 2.7 million smoke it for relaxation, religion or relief from illness, the report says. Rastafarians consider it a sacrament, and have long resisted any attempt to ban the herb. A potent medicinal infusion is made by stuffing buds into a bottle of white rum and burying it for nine days. Mothers brew ganja tea to give a teaspoonful to newborns to ward off illness and evil spirits.
"People believe it is a panacea that can cure many things," Mr. Chevannes said. "With beliefs like that, it becomes virtually impossible to suppress."
Other Jamaicans believe that there are more pressing problems - urban violence and trafficking in cocaine from Colombia, for instance.
"We have other issues that are much more critical to be spending time on than that," said Wendell Smith, the managing director of a computer company. "Anyway, it seems to be legal now. At the beach or concerts, the smell is most noticeable."
Previous attempts to decriminalize marijuana have stalled, partly out of fear of backlash.
The Rev. Devon Brown, a Pentecostal minister, is one opponent. His brother was a promising student in a good college, "but back in the 70's he became involved with the Rastas and began smoking ganja," he said. "Thirty years later, he still hasn't recovered from that."
"It is not a positive part of our culture," Mr. Brown said. "It brings our values down."
The commission's report has yet to be acted on by Parliament, and the prime minister, who faces elections by the end of next year, may decide to delay any move for fear of political backlash. Some leaders of his People's National Party said they would favor a national referendum, rather than a parliamentary vote, on the issue.
"A political party must take a stand," said Paul Burke, the party chairman for Kingston and a longtime advocate of marijuana legalization. The report, he said, "just sidesteps the issue."
--------
Floodgates may open for Afghanistan opium
Sapa AP
September 30 2001 at 04:09AM
http://www.busrep.co.za/general/busrep/br_newsview?click_id=345&art_id=ct20010929194022959B230534&set_id=60&msn=
Washington - Opium could again flow from Afghanistan if the US made war on terrorism in the region, the US and United Nations (UN) officials said this week.
The officials said they were concerned the ruling Taliban would lift its recent ban on poppy cultivation in its territory in an effort to raise money to finance fighting the US.
Harvesting poppies for opium could also increase if the Taliban lost authority over parts of Afghanistan because farmers would no longer fear reprisals for growing the highly profitable cash crop.
Afghanistan was the world's leading producer of opium before the Taliban banned it in July last year, citing Islamic religious principles. Farmers complied, resulting in a 97 percent drop in opium production.
Opium had been an important source of revenue for the Taliban as it fought the opposition coalition in the northern part of the country, netting the group tens of millions of dollars a year, said one US official.
No US or UN officials interviewed this week had evidence that the ban had been lifted.
Pino Arlacchi, the executive director of the UN office for drug control and crime prevention, said that after September 11 his office's line of communication with Afghanistan and information about the country had been "drastically reduced".
With the next six-month growing season beginning in October, farmers will have to choose between planting poppies or much less profitable wheat.
"Hundreds of thousands of farmers are asking themselves what to plant this year - wheat or opium," Arlacchi said. "If they plant now, they will get a harvest about April or May next year. Will the Taliban be there in April or May next year?"
Arlacchi said opium was a good crop for bad times because it required little water and could be sold easily.
Last year Afghanistan produced about 4 000 tons of opium, accounting for about 75 percent of the world market. Almost all of it was consumed as heroin in Europe or as other opiates in Asia. Most heroin sold in the US comes from Latin America.
After the ban, production this year fell to 81 tons, according to the US state department. Of those, 76 tons came from areas controlled by the northern alliance, the primary opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The alliance is believed to fund its effort in part through opium trafficking.
The drop in supply caused the wholesale price to soar from about $35 a kilogram to as high as $770, according to UN officials. The ban earned rare praise for the Taliban, which has been repeatedly denounced for links to terrorists, oppression of women and destruction of relics of other religions.
The US and international officials have remained sceptical of the Taliban's commitment to drug eradication. Some suspected it of trying to cut supply to raise prices and control the market. They also said the Taliban had not wiped out existing stockpiles, which the UN said could total 100 tons.
Wholesale prices fell this week, leading to speculation that Afghan traffickers might already be selling their stock, according to UN data.
Arlacchi said that did not mean the Taliban was involved in the sales. "Criminal groups, who are as powerful as the Taliban E have full control of those stockpiles," he said. - Sapa-AP
-------- u.n.
United Nations Scrambles To Keep Up in Afghanistan
Hundreds of Thousands of People Running Out of Food
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47162-2001Sep29.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 29 -- U.N. agencies resumed aid shipments into drought-ravaged Afghanistan today for the first time since Sept. 11 in a hasty effort to feed an estimated 320,000 people who are expected to run out of food by the end of this week.
The World Food Program began trucking 200 tons of wheat from Pakistan to the Afghan capital, Kabul, from where it is supposed to be shipped to parts of the country most affected by the food crisis.
The U.N. Children's Fund sent a second shipment, containing 200 tons of food and warm clothing for children living in opposition-controlled areas in the north of the country. The cargo will be transported first by trucks, then by four-wheel-drive vehicles and finally by a train of 4,000 donkeys over the Hindu Kush mountain range.
U.N. officials also are making preparations to deal with as many as 1.5 million refugees who may seek to enter neighboring countries in the event of a U.S. military strike on Afghanistan. But with the prospect of an attack appearing less imminent, and relatively few refugees massing at Afghanistan's borders, several aid workers said that providing humanitarian assistance inside Afghanistan became an urgent priority to prevent mass starvation.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani government today shut down seven offices belonging to the Harkat ul-Mujaheddin, or Movement of the Holy Warriors, one of the largest militant organizations fighting Indian soldiers in the disputed Kashmir region. The group, which has strong ties to Afghanistan, was one of 27 organizations and individuals suspected of funding terrorists whose U.S. assets were ordered frozen by President Bush last week. The move came a day after the United Nations passed a resolution ordering member states to crack down on terror groups.
Many Harkat members are believed to be fighting alongside Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia against the opposition guerrillas in Afghanistan's north.
In Kabul, the trial of eight foreign aid workers accused of spreading Christianity in Afghanistan, which was scheduled to resume today, was postponed until Sunday to give their attorney more time to prepare their defense, officials said.
Afghan authorities also announced that they had arrested a British journalist who sneaked into Afghanistan wearing a burqa , or head-to-toe covering. Yvonne Ridley, 43, a reporter for the Sunday Express of London, was arrested Friday on espionage charges in eastern Afghanistan, the official Taliban news service said.
In Rome, a group of Afghan political and military leaders met with the country's former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, to talk about forming a government of national unity if the Taliban is overthrown. Advisers to the 86-year-old ex-monarch were scheduled to hold talks this weekend with a delegation from the Northern Alliance.
In Afghanistan, about 4 million people depend on food assistance, and an additional 4 million will require supplemental food this winter, according to U.N. officials. The United Nations, which is seeking $584 million to fund humanitarian assistance programs in Afghanistan for the next six months, warned that the landlocked nation had plunged into a crisis of "stunning proportions."
The stopped food shipments to Afghanistan after the attacks on Washington and New York because the Taliban failed to provide security guarantees for humanitarian workers. U.N. offices in the cities of Kandahar and Mazar-e Sharif have been looted in recent days, a U.N. spokeswoman said.
Although the World Food Program has more than 10 tons of food already in Afghanistan, delivering those supplies has been hindered since the attacks by a shortage of trucks -- they have been commandeered to transport people out of cities in anticipation of U.S. military strikes -- and because the Taliban has ejected foreign aid workers. Afghans working for the United Nations and other aid agencies have been allowed to stay on the job, but many have abandoned their duties and joined the exodus from cities, officials said.
"In some locations, very few to no local staff are reporting to work," said Stephanie Bunker, a spokeswoman for the U.N. relief operation in Afghanistan.
The Taliban also has seized U.N. communications equipment, preventing foreign U.N. specialists, who have been evacuated to Pakistan, from providing directions to and receiving updates from Afghan staff. "It's hard to find out just what's going on there," Bunker said.
The transportation, labor, communications and security problems forced the WFP to scale back its program and focus on feeding only 1 million people.
Without new food shipments, officials said that 320,000 people in the northern provinces of Faryab and Balkh, which have been hit hardest by four years of drought, will exhaust their food supplies by week's end. The WFP estimated that another 1.6 million Afghans in northern provinces will run out of food by December.
Officials said some Afghans have resorted to eating grass, locusts and cattle feed. "It's a very grim situation," Bunker said. "It's hard to think of how things could get worse."
WFP spokesman Khalid Mansour stressed thatfood shipments were being resumed on a "trial basis."
"We don't have any security assurances," he said. But he said the WFP decided to restart the assistance because "the situation inside Afghanistan is extremely critical and could end in a major humanitarian catastrophe."
Mansour said that 200 tons of wheat were expected to arrive in feeding centers in northern and western Afghanistan before the end of the week.
Other international aid agencies also have reported problems with retaining Afghan staff members and getting vehicles to distribute food. Officials with those agencies have voiced concern that it could take the United States weeks, if not months, to assemble a broad international coalition to sanction military action against terrorist targets inside Afghanistan. Such an extended confrontation, humanitarian workers say, could prevent aid from reaching millions of hungry Afghans.
"The longer this goes on, the worse the situation will get in Afghanistan," said one Western aid worker. "The Americans need to take into account how their strategy will impact an already terrible humanitarian situation."
Another aid worker who has spent several years in Afghanistan said: "It's not that we want the Americans to rush into things and carpet-bomb the country. That would be a disaster. But they also must realize that dragging this out will result in the deaths of more innocent people."
U.S. officials, who have defended their approach as militarily and politically prudent, have urged the Taliban not to interfere with the shipment of food and other supplies.
Kabul Radio reported that Taliban officials held a series of meetings today in at least eight provinces to prepare the public for a possible U.S. attack. "Participants expressed their readiness to defend Afghanistan," the Taliban-run radio said in a broadcast monitored here. "They also expressed their readiness for jihad [holy war] against America."
-------- u.s.
MILITARY
Large U.S. Force in Afghan Area Gives the Option to Strike at Will
New York Times
September 30, 2001
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/international/asia/30MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The United States has now amassed a military force of 28,000 troops, more than 300 warplanes and two dozen warships in the region surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan, enough firepower to allow President Bush to strike at any moment should he so decide.
The diverse forces, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, bring a potent range of military options with them to keep pressure on those two isolated nations. But senior Pentagon officials acknowledge that those options are in many ways both imperfect and risky.
Although President Bush and his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, say the campaign against terror will be a new kind of war, the force in the region still relies predominantly on air power, with all its limitations, the officials said. Conventional wars are ultimately won by taking and holding territory, as one military maxim has it, but that is not an option being considered now.
The Pentagon has also mobilized special operations troops - their numbers are secret - but they are now playing mainly a supporting role to possible air and missile strikes, the officials said.
For now, other ground forces are most likely to play mainly protective roles in places like Kuwait.
The United States has recently dispatched B-52 and B-1 bombers to the region and has Navy F-14's and F-18's aboard nearby aircraft carriers. Air Force F-15's routinely enforce no-flight zones over Iraq, where American and British warplanes have continued to skirmish with Iraqi air defense forces even since the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks.
So far, the Bush administration has resisted temptation to retaliate immediately for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as it rallies broader international support for battling terrorism and gleans intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and his allies.
The question of how to battle terrorists in their remote and rocky Afghan havens has perplexed military planners in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, some of whom share a darkly comic answer when asked about the war plan.
"It's called A.O.S.," they say, using a barracks retort for "all options stink." Another senior military official said there was "no good option that wouldn't make us look useless."
Even a series of precisely calibrated strikes would require a vast and expensive network of bases, command posts, flight decks, refueling outposts and defensive weapons, with all the accompanying logistics.
A senior Air Force officer said late this week that the Bush administration was still negotiating for all the support for overflights and for basing aircraft it would like in the region.
John Bolton, the under secretary of state, ended the week in talks with Central Asian countries that border Afghanistan.
A senior official said that negotiations this week in Pakistan had given the United States significant access to bases there, mainly for search and rescue operations and reconnaissance.
"Some people were actually pleasantly surprised how much they agreed to," a Pentagon official said.
Ever since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United States has maintained a significant military presence in the region, largely to keep President Saddam Hussein of Iraq in check.
At any given time, those forces number more than 20,000 troops, nearly 200 fighter and support aircraft and at least one aircraft carrier and its accompanying warships, which include submarines, cruisers and destroyers able to fire scores of long-range cruise missiles.
Since the terrorist attacks, President Bush has greatly bolstered that force.
Immediately after the attack, he ordered the aircraft carrier Enterprise and its battle group to remain in the region after the carrier Carl Vinson arrived in the Persian Gulf, instantly doubling the naval firepower normally stationed there.
Each carrier has roughly 75 aircraft - half of which are F-14's and F-18's attack jets - capable of conducting around-the-clock airstrikes for days at a time.
Two other carriers - the Theodore Roosevelt, headed to the Mediterranean Sea, and the Kitty Hawk, which recently steamed out of its home port in Japan - could also join the operation, but have not yet received orders to do so, officials said.
President Bush also ordered the Air Force to send nearly 50 combat aircraft to the region, including B-52 and B-1 bombers now on Diego Garcia, the British island in the Indian Ocean, according to officials familiar with the preparations.
Although Diego Garcia is thousands of miles from Afghanistan, the bombers have more than enough range to reach their targets.
The B-52's, Vietnam-era bombers in most cases older than the pilots flying them, are equipped with 20 cruise missiles able to travel as far as 1,500 miles to their targets. The B- 1's, which as recently as NATO's air war against Serbia in 1999 were relegated to what the Air Force no longer likes to call "carpet bombing," now carry up to 24 satellite-guided 2,000- pound bombs.
The Air Force has also dispatched an armada of aerial refuelers, reconnaissance aircraft and other support aircraft to bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia, bringing the total of American aircraft in the region to more than 300, the officials said.
All told, roughly 6,000 additional American troops have poured into the region since the attacks. Those new troops include additional security forces as well as Army Special Forces units.
The United States has relatively few ground forces in the region. When the terrorist attacks occurred, the Army had about 3,000 troops there, mostly in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The largest group is a heavy task force in Kuwait, with about 1,100 troops, that has been there for a decade in case Saddam Hussein decides once again to attack Kuwait.
The Army also maintains a stockpile of equipment in Kuwait, along with two Patriot air defense batteries. Another Patriot battery is in Saudi Arabia.
A brigade's worth of equipment has been positioned in Qatar and another brigade's worth is afloat in the region.
Britain also has a significant force in the region, including more than 20,000 troops, an aircraft carrier, several other warships and dozens of aircraft, all taking part in a previously scheduled training exercise with Omani forces.
The force, Britain's largest single military deployment since the Falklands war in 1982, could easily switch from its training to take part in an American-led operation, officials in Washington said.
--------
Remaking the Military
New York Times
September 30, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/opinion/30SUN1.html?pagewanted=print
Tomorrow, the Defense Department will formally unveil the long-range planning report Congress requires every four years. Advance accounts suggest that it will reflect some of the new attention directed to homeland defense, fighting terrorism and growing instability in Central Asia. Yet it is already evident that bolder changes will be needed. Military responses to terrorism will bear little resemblance to the cold-war-era conflicts American forces are still being trained and equipped to fight.
The Bush administration has already acted in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by improving airline safety, demanding more timely intelligence warnings of terrorist plots and dispatching military forces toward Afghanistan. But the Pentagon also needs to be planning for the longer term. For years, far-sighted military analysts have been prodding the Pentagon to reorganize and re-equip American forces to make them more mobile and flexible and to let battlefield commanders make fuller use of electronically gathered information. That advice is now particularly timely.
The main threat to American security no longer comes from a superpower rival with state-of-the- art fighter jets, submarine fleets and tanks. Increasingly, it comes from a range of smaller, militarily weaker countries and international terrorists. These new foes may try to offset America's advantages in high-tech weaponry with low-tech improvisations like those used on Sept. 11.
To fight these enemies, America will call more frequently on its special operations units, like the Green Berets, Army Rangers and Navy Seals, along with 82nd Airborne paratroopers, who are trained to seize airfields that can be used as staging areas for military operations. These units, some of which may have already run reconnaissance in Afghanistan, need enhanced training and equipment.
There is also a need for additional C-17 transport planes to deliver troops abroad quickly, as well as unmanned reconnaissance craft for 24-hour surveillance of remote regions like Afghanistan.
In the longer term, all three services need to adjust their equipment purchases to the needs of mobile, long-distance 21st-century warfare. Their budgets are badly distorted by commitments to expensive weapons designed for the cold war.
The Army: Kosovo should have taught the Army that its highest priority needs to be lightweight, fast-moving armor that can be airlifted into battle zones far from existing American military bases. That is just what may be needed if the administration decides to use ground forces against a government sheltering terrorists. The Army's planned lightweight combat vehicle will fill this need, but production is not due to begin until 2012. The Army needs to speed up this schedule and should cut back or eliminate the heavy and gadget- laden Crusader artillery system to help pay for it.
The Air Force: The Air Force needs to increase its ability to operate in the absence of local bases near conflict zones. Yet it is devoting most of its procurement budget to two relatively short-range tactical fighters to replace the F-15. At most one is needed. The F-22 should be phased out in favor of the more versatile Joint Strike Fighter and the savings should be used to buy more long-range bombers and unmanned craft that can be used for striking enemy targets as well as reconnaissance.
The Navy: One of the Navy's main missions in fighting terrorism will be delivering aircraft and cruise missiles to the vicinity of combat areas. It also needs to maintain its long-term capacity to engage other naval powers. Traditional aircraft carrier groups are still useful for both purposes, although for strikes deep into landlocked Afghanistan, carrier-based jets would need in-flight refueling. Instead of investing its purchasing dollars in the expensive new DD-21, a large and potentially vulnerable surface ship, the Navy should buy smaller, cheaper arsenal ships, which are essentially floating platforms for launching missiles. It should also accelerate conversion of its unneeded nuclear missile submarines into stealthy platforms for launching cruise missiles. Each such submarine can fire 154 cruises, more than two-thirds the firing capacity of a seven-ship carrier battle group.
Americans are ready to rebuild the nation's security. The Pentagon must see to it that military spending goes to the right places.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Deaths Raise Alarm on Power Plants
Public Health Concerns Fuel Debate on Controlling Coal-Fed Facilities' Emissions
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A33
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46618-2001Sep29.html
CHICAGO -- Last fall, two Chicago area high school students died of asthma attacks at school. Jonell Henderson, a 14-year-old cheerleader, was stricken during a freshman football game, while Rebecca Davis, 16, lost consciousness while quietly seated in a classroom.
Although deaths from asthma can occur, they are relatively rare. What alarmed some parents most was that the two girls died within a month of each other in communities near some of the largest coal-fired power plants in the state.
No one can say for sure whether the plants had anything to do with the two deaths, but the deaths have alarmed many people living in the two girls' communities and adjoining areas. David and Cynthia Swanson of nearby suburban Glen Ellyn fret that air pollution and microscopic particles of soot from several of those plants may be threatening their two young sons, who suffer from chronic asthma.
"Power plant pollution is a known trigger for respiratory problems, and not enough is being done to correct the situation," said David Swanson, an IBM sales executive.
As the Bush administration prepares proposals to scale back a Clinton-era initiative of aggressive legal action against dozens of aging coal-fired power plants, the issue is sparking an intense debate over the health risks posed by pollution from those older power plants, how much should be spent to improve or replace them, and whether the benefits derived are worth the cost. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.) announced plans this summer to draft legislation to drastically reduce power plant emissions, but congressional aides now say that action may have to be put off in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Power plants built before 1980, including those in Illinois, generate about half the nation's electricity but nearly all of the utility industry's unhealthy sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and soot. Environmentalists, public health advocates and citizens groups contend that the plants' emissions pose a clear danger and that many of them should be shut down or retrofitted to reduce emissions. Industry officials contend that the link between power plant emissions and public health problems and premature deaths is not all that clear, and that there are limits to how much they can spend on anti-pollution measures and remain competitive.
Industry officials, researchers, health groups and environmentalists generally agree that it is impossible to directly link an individual's death to pollution or particulate matter from a specific power plant. Yet there is mounting evidence that power plant emissions are having a devastating impact on public health, contributing to asthma, bronchitis and other illnesses.
"The emissions from power plants kill people, and it has been estimated that more people die from emissions from these plants than from automobile accidents or homicides in our state," said John Thompson, director of clean air programs for the Illinois Environmental Council, an advocacy group. "The [utility] companies can practice knee-jerk denial or they can support responsible regulation that reduces or eliminates these health problems."
The controversy over power plant emissions has raged for years. Landmark studies by Harvard researchers in 1993 and the American Cancer Society in 1995 documented a high incidence of premature deaths among people chronically exposed to fine emissions.
Nationwide, as many as 30,100 deaths a year are related to power plant emissions, according to a study by Abt Associates, a private research organization that does work for the Environmental Protection Agency. By comparison, 16,000 Americans are killed each year in drunk driving accidents, and more than 17,000 are victims of homicides.
A recent study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis concluded that fine particle emissions from nine major coal-fired power plants in Illinois were responsible for 400 deaths a year throughout the Midwest, mostly related to heart and lung diseases, that could be largely avoided if tighter emission standards were applied. Tighter controls on power plants could also result each year in 2,000 fewer emergency room visits, 10,000 fewer asthma attacks and 400,000 fewer incidents of upper respiratory symptoms, the study concluded.
In the Chicago area alone, an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 people suffer from asthma. The prevalence of asthma among Chicago-area residents exceeds the national average by 25 percent. Among children, the asthma rate here is more than double the 6 percent to 7 percent national average.
"The problem is real. It's not just the haranguing of a few disaffected citizens," said David Cugell, a professor of pulmonary diseases at the Northwestern University Medical School.
Midwest Generation, an Edison International company, operates two power plants near heavily populated areas of Chicago, three others in the southwestern communities of Joliet and Romeoville and two more near Waukegan and Peoria. Pollution from those plants affects portions of nine Midwestern states. Officials of Midwest Generation strongly dispute the findings and methodology of the studies. Industry experts say there is no way to pinpoint the source of the harmful emissions -- and that pollution from cars, diesel trucks and other industries may be more of a factor than the power plants.
Since acquiring the plants two years ago, Midwest Generation has spent $200 million to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by half and has taken other steps, including burning low-sulfur coal, to cut down on pollution. But even with those changes, which were accounted for in the Harvard study, Midwest Generation still would have to spend hundreds of millions more to install new pollution scrubbers or to switch to gas-fired units to eliminate the health threat -- something it is unwilling to do.
"We are committed to working with federal and state regulators on ways to continue improving air quality, so long as there is a reasonable connection between the cost of new technology and the benefits gained by that technology," the company said in a statement.
The Bush administration is expected to announce a decision to revamp an initiative begun in the mid-1990s that has resulted in lawsuits against the operators of 50 or more older power plants in the Midwest and South that were found to have unlawfully expanded their operations and increased pollution.
EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said the administration is drafting legislation to replace the current enforcement programs with a new approach that would require deep cuts in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury pollution but that would allow industry to determine how to meet the targets. "The legislative proposal we will put out will get substantially greater reduction in power plant emissions than all the other regulatory programs put together," said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation.
Such a move could have significant impact on Midwest Generation's future. The company recently disclosed that it was involved in discussions with the EPA over its operations that could result in penalties or lead to litigation against the company. Should the administration decide to scrap its enforcement policy against older plants -- known as "New Source Review" -- the company potentially would be spared millions of dollars in fines and cleanup orders.
Although medical experts can't explain what causes asthma, they do know that air pollution, among other things, can trigger an asthma attack that constricts victims' airways, leaving them gasping for breath. Asthma attacks claim about 120 Chicago-area residents annually. About 65 percent of the victims are African Americans.
A tragic case in point was Jonell Henderson, the Richton Park high school cheerleader who collapsed and died from a bronchial asthma attack after running laps at a football game last Oct. 19. Henderson had been diagnosed with asthma about five years before and had used an inhaler to control it. A popular student with a strong academic record, Henderson modeled herself after Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the Olympic track medal winner who overcame asthma.
"She was a very nice person and a respectful girl," said Beatrice Najar, 15, Jonell's closest friend. "She had a lot of confidence in herself."
In Berwyn, a small community on the southern outskirts of Chicago, Ricardo Bernales, a physician, wages a daily battle to control the upper respiratory illnesses of his patients, many of whom are from low-income Hispanic families. Many of his patients are caught in a "vicious cycle" of air pollution emissions from neighboring power plants, microscopic dust mites and roaches in their housing and inadequate air conditioning during the summers when ozone levels are high, Bernales said.
"We know that the closer you are to the power plants, the worse your symptoms are," Bernales said. "The poor are suffering the most. To me, it's a crime the [utility] industry is trying to lower standards that already are lower than other countries."
Special correspondent Kari Lydersen contributed to this report.
-------- human rights
Japanese - Americans Recall Internment
September 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Internees.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- For Kiku Funabiki, there are new reminders of a time when civil liberties were a casualty of war.
She sees a turbaned Sikh wearing a button that says, ``I am an American,'' and remembers the badges worn in wartime Chinatown declaring: ``I am a Chinese-American.''
She reads about nail files confiscated at airports, and remembers the night FBI agents seized a nail file from her father's shaving kit before taking him to an internment camp.
``The deja vu is just chilling,'' she said.
In the 1980s, Congress apologized for the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor; internees were given $20,000 as token reparation.
But as the government seeks increased powers in its fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks, some wonder if civil liberties will be compromised.
UCLA law professor Jerry Kang said people assume that anything resembling the internment camps of World War II is no longer possible.
``I am a little bit more skeptical,'' Kang said.
Kang said while similar mass internments are not likely, curtailed rights for immigrants are -- especially in the event of another attack.
Among other things, the Bush administration is asking for access to student files of suspected terrorists at American universities; as it turns out, schools contacted by the FBI have already turned over files, saying safety trumps privacy.
Another provision Bush is asking Congress to consider would deport anyone the government suspects of supporting terrorists. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said those powers don't cross Constitutional lines; some members of Congress aren't so sure.
But when Japanese-Americans were rounded up 60 years ago, there was little protest. Today, some Japanese-Americans say they'll stand up for Arab-Americans.
``This is a time to help one another,'' said former internee Jimi Yamaichi, 78, at a rally last week in San Francisco's Japantown.
At the opening of the National Japanese American Historical Society exhibit on the internment camps last week, Funabiki said she was pleased to see differences this time, like President Bush attending a mosque soon after the attack.
But she still remembers the pain of internment.
``If anybody should be there for the Arab-American community,'' says Funabiki. ``It's me.''
-------- police / prisoners
Hill Puts Brakes on Expanding Police Powers
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46633-2001Sep29.html
In the days after Sept. 11, the Bush administration scrambled to write a tough new anti-terrorism bill, with the public squarely on its side. Polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly favor stronger police powers, even at the expense of personal freedom. But Congress is gently applying the brakes.
Since its introduction a week after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the administration's anti-terrorism package has run into strong bipartisan resistance, reflecting broad concern about its implications for the Constitution as well as lawmakers' desire to protect their role as a check on executive branch power.
Many lawmakers fear that the bill grants too much clout to police agencies, particularly in the realm of electronic surveillance. They are wary of lowering barriers to the sharing of information among law enforcement and intelligence services. They object to a provision that would permit the indefinite jailing -- without trial -- of noncitizens suspected of ties to terrorist groups.
"My constituents certainly want to give government the tools that it needs, but they are not willing to give government all the power that it wants," said Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr., a former federal prosecutor and a conservative Republican, in a telephone interview from his Georgia district. "They've seen these same provisions on government wish lists several times in the past."
Lawmakers emphasize that they are eager to pass anti-terrorism legislation -- possibly within the next two weeks -- and that they have no quarrel with many aspects of the Bush proposal. They say they share the administration's view that law officers chasing terrorists should have the same powers that apply to cases involving drug trafficking and other crimes -- something that is not always true under current law. They agree that surveillance laws need to be updated to take account of technologies such as e-mail.
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, last week called the administration bill "a measured and cautious response" that fits "well within the bounds of the Constitution."
Nevertheless, the precise language of the bill has been the focus of intense behind-the-scenes wrangling between congressional staff and legal experts from the Justice Department and the White House. On Wednesday, according to a Senate source, "things were in danger of coming off track" after Justice Department officials and aides to Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) hit an impasse in their negotiations. Leahy and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft were able to break the logjam during a phone conversation Wednesday night.
Congress was more accommodating in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, when it granted administration requests for emergency funds and a resolution authorizing military action with hardly a whisper of dissent. But lawmakers say the anti-terrorism bill falls into a different category.
"This is about how do we equip our anti-espionage, counterterrorism agencies with the tools they want while we still preserve the most fundamental thing, which is the civil liberties of the American people," House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) told reporters last week. "There are a lot of members that are acutely aware of the fact that the agencies don't always exercise due diligence in the way they handle information that is at their disposal."
History is also weighing on Congress. As more than one lawmaker has remarked in recent days, Americans have sometimes lived to regret the sacrifice of civil liberties -- such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II -- in the name of national security.
"It's sort of a reminder that you can do the wrong things for seemingly all the right reasons," said Donald A. Ritchie, the associate Senate historian. "Lincoln said that in times of crisis, the Constitution doesn't have to be broken, but it can be stretched. In that sense, they're looking for some balance to make sure everything they do is appropriate."
In stressing the need for haste, Ashcroft has repeatedly warned of "the clear and present danger" of further terrorist attacks; he initially asked Congress to pass the legislation in three days. It quickly became evident, however, that lawmakers had no intention of keeping that schedule.
Last Monday, for example, Ashcroft appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), had scheduled a vote on the measure for the following morning. But Sensenbrenner agreed to postpone the vote until this week after colleagues on the panel rebelled, saying they needed more time to study the bill.
In the Senate, Leahy has expressed sympathy with Ashcroft's desire for quick action, but he also made clear his desire for significant modifications. "We've made some progress," Leahy said at a hearing Tuesday. "I think we can make more." Leahy's staff is working with the White House and the Justice Department on a compromise version of the bill; a separate effort is underway in the House.
Congress has welcomed many parts of the administration bill, including proposals to block financial transactions among terrorist groups, beef up border patrols and stiffen penalties for terrorists. Lawmakers also are sympathetic to a provision that would permit the use of "roving wiretaps" -- which cover all forms of electronic communication as distinct from single phone lines -- in terrorism investigations; such wiretaps are now limited to criminal probes.
But other elements of the bill have given lawmakers pause.
Some proposals, for example, would expand law enforcement access to Internet communications -- a step that Armey and others say could violate the privacy of innocent Web users if it is not carefully designed.
Another would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to share material, including grand jury testimony, with intelligence services -- potentially opening the door to abuses such as "the savage campaign of defamation waged by J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI against Dr. Martin Luther King," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), said at the hearing last Monday.
In a similar vein, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House panel, said "we are deeply troubled" by a provision that would allow prosecutors to introduce evidence in federal court that had been obtained overseas by illegal wiretaps.
"Permitting information for illegal wiretaps performed abroad against United States citizens to be used in the federal courts as the administration proposes is -- well, some have said it's unconstitutional on its face," Conyers said.
On both the sharing of investigative materials and the illegal wiretaps, Leahy has made counterproposals aimed at accommodating the administration's goals in a manner that limits the potential for abuse, according to a committee aide. "In most cases it just boils down to there being sufficient checks on these new authorities," the aide said.
Perhaps the most contentious proposal would permit the jailing of any noncitizen who the attorney general "has reason to believe may further or facilitate acts of terrorism." At Tuesday's hearing, Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who chairs the panel's immigration subcommittee, criticized the detention standard as unacceptably vague.
Ashcroft defended the provision, saying it would apply only to noncitizens already subject to deportation proceedings. Persons undergoing such proceedings are permitted an opportunity to contest their detention before a judge. But a Senate aide disputed that interpretation. "There is nothing explicitly stating that [a detainee] would have immigration violation charges brought against him," the aide said.
As a result, the aide said, someone suspected of involvement in terrorism -- but not convicted of a crime -- could be held indefinitely at the discretion of the attorney general or other Justice Department officials.
Ashcroft promised the Senate panel that he would revisit the matter. By the following day, Justice Department officials had rewritten the detention standard, changing "reason to believe" to "reasonable grounds to believe." The subtle modification was supposed to satisfy lawmakers' desire for a higher threshold of evidence.
But Democratic staff on the Judiciary Committee were still not satisfied with the changes. They planned to continue negotiations over the weekend.
-------- spying
Espionage Spy Tech
'The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology' by Jeffrey T. Richelson
Reviewed by Martin A. Lee
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page BW04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37954-2001Sep27.html
THE WIZARDS OF LANGLEY Inside the CIA's Directorate Of Science and Technology By Jeffrey T. Richelson Westview. 416 pp. $30
During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, a CIA antenna mounted on a destroyer near Florida transmitted deceptive signals to make it appear as though a U.S. fighter plane were about to enter Cuban airspace. A Cuban pilot thought he had the American aircraft "in sight." But as he prepared to shoot down the intruder, a CIA technician flicked a switch and the "ghost aircraft" suddenly vanished from the Cuban's radar screen. The ability to project phantom airplanes onto enemy radar is among the numerous accomplishments Jeffrey T. Richelson discusses in The Wizards of Langley. Spanning a half-century of covert machinations, this is the first book to chronicle the CIA's extensive efforts to exploit science and technology for espionage purposes.
Since the late 1940s, CIA scientists have created state-of-the-art tools to support a wide range of cloak-and-dagger activities, including lock-picking and bugging devices, disguises that could alter an agent's voice and physical appearance, and exotic murder weapons such as exploding sea shells and .22 caliber cigarette pistols. Spy paraphernalia of this sort conjures up lurid images from James Bond movies. But real-life routines were considerably less romantic for members of the CIA's Directorate of Science & Technology (DS&T), which focused primarily on collecting and analyzing information.
The DS&T "made an enormous contribution to U.S. intelligence capabilities and national security," according to Richelson. It engaged in underwater as well as aerial surveillance and was instrumental in building and operating the U-2 and A-12 spy planes. Top-secret CIA projects with colorful code names such as WHALE TALE, BLACK SHIELD and NICE GIRL provided crucial data on Soviet nuclear armaments, missile launch facilities, chemical and biological warfare research and more general scientific developments behind the Iron Curtain.
Still, there were some major blunders. CIA analysts failed to predict the first atomic bomb test by the People's Republic of China in 1964. But this setback seemed to galvanize the experts in the DS&T, who designed the first spy satellites that enabled the U.S. government to snoop on its adversaries from the heavens. High-resolution imagery generated by the CIA's successful space reconnaissance program resulted in an intelligence bonanza for Washington.
Despite constant bureaucratic wrangling and bitter turf wars with the military services, the DS&T remained "at the cutting edge, substantially in advance of what was being done in either the private sector or other parts of the government," says Richelson. He credits the DS&T with several innovations that have aided modern medicine, including lithium batteries for heart pacemakers and technology that assists in breast cancer detection.
While these practical benefits are notable, the CIA's scientific endeavors also had a nasty underside. The author recounts various misdeeds of the Technical Services Staff, a "very spooky" outfit that tested drugs on unwitting American citizens in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of the seamier aspects of this story have been documented in other studies of the agency (including my own book Acid Dreams).
Army biochemist Frank Olson, an early casualty of these reckless experiments, plunged to his death from a New York City hotel window two weeks after he drank a cocktail spiked with LSD at a CIA gathering. After a 22-year cover-up, CIA officials declared that Olson had committed suicide. But recent forensic evidence suggests that he may have been pushed out the window after a struggle with unknown assailants, a possibility that Richelson does not mention.
A databank maintained in the agency's Office of Research and Development monitored and catalogued worldwide progress in pharmacology research. This office also pursued a futile quest to harness psychic powers for the "remote viewing" of Soviet military installations and other targets. In addition, the CIA tried to turn animals into intelligence assets. One ill-fated scheme, known as "Acoustic Kitty," entailed wiring a cat with transmitting equipment so that it could function as a mobile listening post.
In the post-Cold War era, the CIA has been grappling with the information explosion triggered by the Internet and a plethora of digital telecommunications. CIA scientists have pioneered data mining and retrieval systems, language translation machines and microwave technology that greatly increases the speed at which computers operate. The agency is currently providing venture capital to commercial firms such as SafeWeb, which has developed software that allows people to use the World Wide Web without leaving traces of the sites they have visited.
Richelson's book offers a rare glimpse into a vital aspect of U.S. intelligence. At times, however, his writing suffers from the sheer volume of detail he presents, and the amoral tone of the narrative can be disconcerting. He notes, for example, that CIA technicians facilitated plans to mine Nicaraguan harbors during the Reagan administration, without indicating that this covert operation violated international law.
From a purely technical standpoint, the achievements of Langley's wizards are impressive. But spy satellites will never completely supplant the need for reliable intelligence from human sources -- as the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington earlier this month tragically have reminded us. And scientific prowess, no matter how formidable, cannot guarantee wise policy choices. •
Martin A. Lee is the author of "Acid Dreams" and "The Beast Reawakens."
--------
INTELLIGENCE
U.S. Pursued Secret Efforts to Catch or Kill bin Laden
New York Times
September 30, 2001
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/30/international/30INTE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - The Central Intelligence Agency secretly began to send teams of American officers to northern Afghanistan about three years ago in an attempt to persuade the leader of the anti- Taliban Afghan opposition to capture and perhaps kill Osama bin Laden, according to American intelligence officials.
The covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti- Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Massoud was himself fatally wounded only two days before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the C.I.A. believes that he was assassinated by members of Mr. bin Laden's organization.
The C.I.A.'s clandestine efforts to deal with Mr. Massoud were among the most sensitive and highly classified elements of a broader long-term campaign, continuing unsuccessfully through the end of the Clinton administration and into the Bush administration, to destroy Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. The American campaign against Mr. bin Laden intensified after the August 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa, which transformed the Saudi-born exile into America's most wanted terrorist.
Today, the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Al Qaeda, the terrorist network he leads from his sanctuary in Afghanistan, has escalated to wartime levels. The Bush administration is considering a full range of overt and covert military and intelligence proposals that Washington policy makers would have considered too risky or unworkable before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But according to current and former intelligence officials and other policy makers, the United States has been trying to kill bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda for years, as the terrorist organization has become more ruthless and ambitious in its efforts to attack American interests around the world.
Clinton administration lawyers determined that the United States could legitimately seek to kill Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants despite the presidential ban on assassinations, according to current and former American officials. The lawyers concluded that efforts to hunt and kill Mr. bin Laden were defensible either as acts of war or as national self defense, legitimate under both American and international law. As a result, President Clinton did not waive the executive order banning assassinations.
There have been an array of unsuccessful attempts to target Mr. bin Laden and disrupt or destroy Al Qaeda, American officials say. The Clinton administration even considered mounting a secret effort to steal millions of dollars from the bin Laden terrorist network by siphoning it out of the international financial system, but discarded the scheme because of objections from the United States Treasury about the implications for world finance.
The United States launched cruise missiles against a meeting Mr. bin Laden was believed to be attending, encouraged Mr. Massoud and other Afghan leaders to try to capture him, and received a secret report from one Afghan group last year about its failed attempt to assassinate Mr. bin Laden.
The United States also led an international effort to shut down Afghanistan's airline, which American intelligence officials believed was being used by Al Qaeda to ship money and personnel around the world, while also pressuring other nations to arrest and disrupt Al Qaeda cells.
"This was a top priority for us over the past several years, and not a day went by when we didn't press as hard as we could," said Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser in the Clinton administration. "But this is a tough, tough problem. I think we were pushing it as hard as we could. And I think the Bush administration is handling it in a smart way."
But until the devastating attacks on New York and Washington, the American-led efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden lacked the sense of urgency that prevails today. American intelligence and law enforcement officials grew complacent about the threat of a domestic attack by Al Qaeda, failed by their own admission to share information adequately or coordinate their efforts, and were caught by surprise on Sept. 11.
Washington did not build a strong international coalition to focus on defeating Al Qaeda, which was seen by other nations largely as an American problem. Banks in Europe and the Middle East repeatedly balked at American pressure to cut off Al Qaeda financing, while wealthy individuals in Persian Gulf states - sometimes in the guise of donating to Islamic charities - continued to provide financial support to Al Qaeda.
At the same time, Al Qaeda was rapidly evolving into a larger and more complex terrorist threat, making it difficult for the United States to keep up with its scope and abilities. Mr. bin Laden's great achievement within the terrorist world has been to forge alliances with other Islamic extremist groups under the umbrella of Al Qaeda, providing them financing, training and a sanctuary in Afghanistan, while encouraging coordinated action.
The United States had only a hazy understanding of Mr. bin Laden's growing significance before 1996, when an Al Qaeda insider, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, defected to the United States and began to describe the extent of Mr. bin Laden's plans and objectives. Based largely on Mr. al- Fadl's information, a federal grand jury indicted Mr. bin Laden on terrorist conspiracy charges in June 1998, just two months before the twin bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The embassy bombings forced Washington to recognize that Mr. bin Laden had become a major national security threat. Sometime after the bombings, the C.I.A. began its efforts to work with Mr. Massoud against Mr. bin Laden, American officials said.
The officials declined to provide many details of the effort. But officials say that C.I.A. officers secretly traveled to Mr. Massoud's mountain stronghold in northern Afghanistan and opened talks in an effort to fashion an anti-bin Laden alliance.
Current and former officials said that Mr. Massoud was promised large sums of money if he and his rebel fighters could find a way to get to Mr. bin Laden. Short of capturing the terrorist leader, Mr. Massoud was asked by the C.I.A. to provide intelligence from inside Afghanistan about Mr. bin Laden and his organization, officials said.
It remains unclear even today whether Mr. Massoud - more interested in toppling the Taliban - ever made a serious effort to go after Mr. bin Laden. He would have faced enormous obstacles in doing so, considering that Mr. bin Laden was based in territory controlled by the Taliban and its military forces.
The effort to work with Mr. Massoud followed the most direct and open American effort to kill Mr. bin Laden. It came on Aug. 20, 1998, two weeks after the embassy attacks in East Africa. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on a complex near Khost, Afghanistan, where the C.I.A. had learned that Mr. bin Laden was scheduled to be meeting with 200 to 300 other members of Al Qaeda.
The sea-launched cruise missiles slammed into the camp only about an hour or so after Mr. bin Laden left the conference, American officials believe. According to former senior Clinton administration officials, some 20 to 30 Al Qaeda members were killed, temporarily disrupting the organization.
But the attack failed in its unstated but clear objective, which was to kill Mr. bin Laden.
One consequence was that Mr. bin Laden drastically improved his own security measures. Realizing that the United States had collected solid intelligence about his physical movements, he cut back on his use of electronic communications. American officials say he now tends to talk to subordinates only in person, and they then pass on his messages to others in the organization.
"He has become more sophisticated by becoming less sophisticated," said one former senior American official.
In addition, he moves frequently, traveling between Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, and the rugged Afghan countryside farther north, American officials say. "He became much more secure in his communications, and the only way to track him was to have people on the ground," said one former senior American official.
The Clinton administration has been criticized for not following up on its first missile attack with an all- out effort to get Mr. bin Laden. But former officials said that they lacked the "actionable intelligence," or precise information about Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts, to launch another attack.
"The main focus was location, location, location," said one former administration official. "We had intensive intelligence gathering efforts to track him."
In addition, the logistics of launching an attack by special forces in one of the most remote regions of the world also presented formidable obstacles. "We had a number of contingency plans, but logistically it was a nightmare," said a former senior Clinton administration official.
Still, another Afghan group, not connected with Mr. Massoud, did report to the C.I.A. last year that it had attempted to assassinate Mr. bin Laden, American officials said. The group, which the officials declined to identify, reported that it had attempted to kill Mr. bin Laden by assaulting a convoy in which he was thought to be traveling. They reported that it turned out that Mr. bin Laden was not in the convoy.
The reported assassination attempt was not approved or planned with C.I.A. assistance, American officials said. But the officials did say that the group had carried out the attack knowing that Washington had a great interest in either capturing Mr. bin Laden or having him killed.
Washington has also attempted to target Mr. bin Laden's finances. One idea briefly considered by the Clinton administration called for a clandestine effort to drain money out of bank accounts that could be tied to Al Qaeda. But former Clinton administration officials said that Treasury Department officials opposed the idea, fearing that it might damage the integrity of the financial system.
"Treasury was not enamored of the idea," noted one former Clinton administration official. Another former administration official said that the idea was flawed because stealing money from a bank account would in most instances leave the bank liable to make up the loss to the individual, thus hurting the bank rather than depriving Al Qaeda of money.
But the United States did mount an international effort to curb Mr. bin Laden's access to the financial system. In 1998, President Clinton invoked emergency economic powers against Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, giving the United States the power to freeze assets of any individuals or institutions working with or assisting the terrorist group. In 1999, the Taliban was added to the list, and American officials were surprised to find that the Taliban had actually left large sums of money in banks in the United States, mostly in older Afghan government accounts. Eventually, American and international pressure led to United Nations sanctions, and effectively shut down international flights by Ariana Airlines, the Afghan government's air carrier, which American intelligence had concluded was being used by Al Qaeda as its conduit to the Persian Gulf and the rest of the world.
In 1999, officials from the White House and the Treasury Department traveled to the Persian Gulf to try to pressure governments to shut down Al Qaeda's banking relationships. But they achieved only mixed results.
"Where we didn't have success was when other countries delayed or denied that there was a problem," said one former official. "Sometimes it was because of a lack of political will, sometimes because those countries didn't have the legal or regulatory frameworks they needed to really know what was going on in their financial institutions."
Former Clinton administration officials say they sympathize with their successors in the Bush administration who now confront Mr. bin Laden, and defend their own efforts as the best possible in a world that lacked the current sense of urgency about Al Qaeda.
"It was something that we focused on on a daily basis, and pursued with vigor, and I think we accomplished quite a lot," said former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. "I think we took it as far as was possible to go at the time, and I think what we did has provided the basis for things the Bush administration is trying to do now."
-------- terrorism
Americans Overseas Targeted
Sunday, September 30, 2001,
Salt Lake Tribune
COMBINED NEWS SERVICES
http://www.sltrib.com/09302001/nation_w/136413.htm
WASHINGTON -- The State Department has issued a worldwide travel alert for Americans after discovering that extremists in nine countries might be preparing to kidnap or kill American and British civilians in response to expected U.S. retaliatory strikes against terrorists.
The boldest plot, U.S. intelligence officials said, was uncovered by Indonesian authorities, who reported that a radical Muslim group planned to invade two upscale neighborhoods in the capital of Jakarta and seize large numbers of Americans and Britons as hostages if the United States or Britain were to attack Afghanistan.
The officials told Knight Ridder News Service that the "worldwide caution" issued Friday by the State Department was based on reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and foreign intelligence services.
According to the reports, suspected allies of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden have been casing hotels favored by Westerners. In some cases, officials said, extremists asked desk clerks and other hotel employees if any Americans were registered there.
Plans for possible attacks against Americans and other Westerners also were reported in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, the Bangladesh capital of Dacca, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pak- istan, Georgia -- the former Soviet republic -- and Bahrain, which is the U.S. military headquarters in the Persian Gulf, the officials said.
With more than 300 aircraft, 30 warships and nearly 30,000 troops now focused on Afghanistan, the United States is ready to begin military action against bin Laden and his Afghan hosts as soon as President Bush decides to act, according to senior U.S. officials.
The United States has identified bin Laden as the mastermind of the calamitous Sept. 11 attacks on four jetliners, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He has been protected by Afghanistan's puritanical Taliban leaders since 1996.
In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush said the Taliban, not the Afghan people, would be held responsible for harboring terrorists.
"The United States respects the people of Afghanistan and we are their largest provider of humanitarian support," he said. "But we condemn the Taliban, and welcome the support of other nations in isolating that regime."
Knight Ridder also learned Saturday that the United States is backing a fledgling political coalition to attract disaffected Afghans -- especially the country's few remaining profes- sional military officers.
"Our enemies here are Osama bin Laden and any Afghans who are protecting him," said one U.S. official. "We're not looking to attack Afghanistan. Afghanistan would be better off without bin Laden and his fellow travelers."
The effort centers on an attempt by former Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah, 86, to convene an assembly of anti-Taliban political, religious and military leaders from all of Afghanistan's ethnic communities, U.S. officials said.
The assembly would choose a government-in-exile and a military body to coordinate anti-Taliban resistance inside Afghanistan.
"The idea is an overall uprising," said an official of the United Front, the coalition of mostly ethnic minorities that has been fighting the Taliban since the militia of radical religious students emerged in 1994.
In other developments Saturday:
U.S. officials say the United States is receiving conflicting intelligence reports about bin Laden's whereabouts that are complicating efforts to track him down. According to some reports, bin Laden may have slipped out of Afghanistan and made his way to Somalia, Chechnya or Pakistan's northwest frontier, officials said. Although the CIA is taking the reports seriously, officials say, they still believe bin Laden is in Afghanistan.
Taliban officials said eight foreign aid workers -- including two Americans -- will stand trial in Afghanistan today for preaching Christianity. The trial, which had been scheduled to start Saturday, was delayed so the aid workers -- among them Heather Mercer, 24, of Vienna, Va., and Dayna Curry, 29, of Nashville, Tenn., -- could meet with their attorney for the first time. They face possible jail or even death.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said authorities have arrested or detained more than 480 people.
The New York Police Department's tally of those missing at the World Trade Center dropped to 5,641, with the number of confirmed dead at 309.
A day after the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a U.S.-sponsored resolution demanding that all countries crack down on terrorism, Pakistan shut down a militant organization, the Harakat ul-Mujahideen, or Movement of the Holy Warriors, which has been fighting Indian soldiers in the disputed Kashmir region.
----
The secret war
September 30, 2001,
The Observer (UK)
by: Martin Bright, Antony Barnett, Burhan Wazir, Tony Thompson and Peter Beaumont inLondon; Stuart Jeffries in Paris; Ed Vulliamy in Washington; Kate Connolly in Berlin; Giles Tremlett in Madrid; Rory Carroll in Rome Sunday
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,560658,00.html
A matrix of terrorist cells - allied to bin Laden but often more extreme than him - planned mayhem across the continent from bases in Britain, Spain, Germany and France. Only now are the links between these shadowy groups coming to light as intelligence services realise that, unknown to them, the battle had started long before 11 September
When Djamel Beghal was approached by intelligence officers in the departure lounge of Dubai airport two months ago, he looked like any other smart business traveller from the Middle East. Beghal was a devout 36-year-old Algerian who dressed in Western clothes and travelled clean-shaven in order to attract as little attention as possible during his travels between the Muslim world and the West.
As a member of Takfir-wal-Hijra, an extreme and puritanical Islamist organisation financed by Osama bin Laden, he knew he had to keep a low profile, but Beghal was being cautious for a second reason. Returning to Europe from Kabul after a year of training with Abu Zoubeida, named on the FBI's list of most wanted bin Laden lieutenants, he was preparing to participate in a series of pan-European 'spectaculars' on American targets. Beghal - a constant presence at Finsbury Park mosque in London where he recruited for his cause in the late 1990s - was on his way to open the European front of bin Laden's war on the West.
It is a disclosure that has sent a shudder of fear and horror through Europe's intelligence and police: the knowledge that the murderous attacks on New York and Washington which took the lives of almost 7,000, were to be repeated throughout Europe as well.
French investigators now believe Beghal was returning to France to give the go-ahead for a suicide attack on the US embassy in the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, using a lorry or even a helicopter. By last week Beghal - who spent two years in London recruiting for his violent and bizarre organisation of fanatics - was emerging as one of the key British links at the centre of a worldwide conspiracy; the point of contact between bin Laden's group and a wider network of allied Islamist terror groups.
Last Friday another possibly crucial link, Lotfi Raissi - an Algerian pilot resident in Britain - was standing before a British court, fighting his extradition to the US. He had been named by the FBI as the man who trained key figures in the suicide attacks in America on 11 September. Britain, along with Germany and France, had emerged as a key jumping off place for the world's biggest terrorist conspiracy.
Raissi's home in Colnbrook, Berkshire, sits under the Heathrow flight path. It is an unassuming modern suburban house, divided into flats. His neighbours knew him as a quiet, dumpy, slightly strange character who spoke little and gave nothing away when he did. Many assumed he didn't speak English because he often failed to acknowledge them when they greeted him. 'I would see him and his wife out in the back garden but they just kept themselves to themselves,' says neighbour Gary Hanley. 'When you looked at them to say hello, they would just look the other way. They made it clear they didn't really want to get involved with anyone socially.'
The first neighbours knew of Raissi's background was when armed police raided his house last weekend. He now stands accused by US investigators of training four of the suicide hijackers, giving increasing credibility to claims that Britain has become a haven for Islamic terrorists. It is a claim borne out by the evidence presented to Bow Street magistrates on Friday, outlining in detail for the first time the allegations against Raissi at a hearing to determine whether he should be extradited to the US.
Prosecutor Arvinda Sambir gave a list of devastating charges which put him at the heart of the terror plot. She claimed he was the lead instructor for four of the hijackers, including the man who seized the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington to Los Angeles and skillfully steered it into the Pentagon.
On 23 June Raissi visited Las Vegas with his wife and then flew to Arizona with the Pentagon pilot. The FBI claim he was there to ensure the hijackers were capable of taking control of the aircraft and smashing it into the Pentagon. 'He attended a number of flying schools attended by four of the hijackers,' said Sambir. Raissi has denied all the accusations, and his family say they are confident he will be found innocent.
US officials have identified a 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour as the hijacker who crashed the plane into the Pentagon. He attended CRM Airline Training Centre in Scottsdale, Arizona and was videotaped travelling with Raissi.
Raissi, who previously worked for Algeria's national airline, had registered for an advanced flying course at the Four Forces Aviation flying school in nearby Poyle. The company promises to give pilots all the training they need to fly jets in just three months, and has a number of state-of-the-art simulators. He was determined to get a licence to fly commercial planes in Europe and was described as a good student by his instructor. The company went into voluntary liquidation earlier this month for reasons unconnected to the attack on the World Trade Centre.
Prosecutors say that the warrant from the US was for obtaining a pilot's licence dishonestly - because he did not declare a previous conviction for theft or that he had had surgery on his knee. Both would have barred him from applying for a licence. Further charges are expected. One source said: 'It is no secret that conspiracy to murder is being looked at.'
Sambir said that when Raissi was arrested by British police, logbooks were found in his house with crucial dates missing. Further details about Raissi were also emerging in the US yesterday, including the disclosure that he received a US commercial pilot licence in January 1999, with a rating to fly a Boeing 737. Two days later he was certified a ground instructor, and in March 1999 received a license to be a flight instructor.
Raissi, who lived at this time in a Phoenix apartment complex, listed himself as both a student and employee at Westwind Aviation Academy, a flight school at the Phoenix Deer Valley Airport. He has said he trained at Westwind in 1997 and 1998, according to documents the FBI showed to another local flight school director. In an odd twist, a database search of public records shows Raissi had used the social security number of a Jersey City woman who died in 1991. The woman, Dorothy Hansen, was a retired factory worker.
There was further evidence to show his relationship with the hijackers went further than mere association. Relatives of Raissi have said he flew jets in the US for several years and was undergoing further training at Heathrow. Police spent two days searching his ground floor flat and took items away for further examination, including flying manuals. But Raissi's uncle, Kamal, has insisted he had no links with terror groups. 'Of course Lotfi has flying manuals at home - he is learning to be a pilot.'
The truth about Raissi's possible involvement in the American carnage may not be established for many years as long-winded extradition proceedings in Britain must precede any American trial. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe has played host to a sprawling network of terror groups whose activists were crucial to the 11 September terror, and who are currently planning to repeat their murderous actions. And key to many of the plans was Djamel Beghal - until he was seized at Dubai airport.
For Beghal, Dubai airport, the busiest in the Middle East, was perfect for his purposes. It allowed him to travel unremarked between Afghanistan and Europe, where he had established cells in several countries including Britain. This was a key transit point from the Far East and South Asia, and Beghal knew it was better to arrive from an Arab country than draw unwanted attention by coming straight from Kabul or Islamabad. As he waited for his flight to be called, he knew his terrorist cells were primed for action as soon as he touched down on European soil.
But Beghal had not counted on the vigilance of staff at passport control, who spotted he was travelling on false French documents. At first, the local intelligence officers who seized him had no idea of the coup they had pulled off. Calls to CIA officers and officers of the French foreign intelligence service - the DGSE, based in Dubai - set alarm bells ringing.
Excited French intelligence officials told them they had been tracking Beghal for almost a decade. He was, they explained, a known activist with Takfir-wal Hijra, which they defined as 'a radical hardline Islamist movement founded in Egypt as a splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood'.
The story of Beghal and his friends, as it has emerged in the last few days, is the inside story of the secret war of Osama bin Laden and his allies in Europe against America and the West. It is the story of a coalition of nebulous anti-American Islamic fundamentalists. It is also the story of the fanatic who lived to tell his shocked interrogators of the full scope of their plans.
It is all the more compelling for the fact that while others implicated in the attacks and planned attacks - Lotfi Raissi included - have furiously denied their involvement in bin Laden's terrorist campaign, Beghal has described it in its most frightening details.
Beghal's story also tells of a failure of imagination and cooperation among US and European anti-terrorist specialists on a massive scale. If police and intelligence services had all the pieces of the jigsaw - as it has now emerged - they were unable, or unwilling, to make sense of them.
That 'vast picture' was described in graphic detail on Friday by FBI chief Robert Mueller: a terrorist network spanning the globe, a 'picture' that he added 'is nowhere near painted'. Alongside Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft significantly widened the frame of that picture beyond bin Laden and his network, saying the investigation 'has not ruled out the involvement of other individuals and other organisations in this attack'. He said the FBI and intelligence services were 'not just looking at the al-Qaeda network' but 'a series of networks all over the world'. Among them - it is now becoming clear - is the network commanded by Beghal.
Beghal's Takfir group has emerged as central to the wider terrorist plan to hit Americans throughout the world. Crucial to that plan were groups and individuals across Britain.
When Beghal left his flat at 112 Boulevard John Kennedy in Corbeil just outside Paris in October 1997, he was heading for London, where he was to emerge as a key figure in recruiting young Muslims for the Jihad - Holy War. He would travel around Britain's mosques and sometimes venture as far as Germany before returning to his London base.
Crucial to the case against Beghal and his associates is the extremity of his beliefs. Translated, Takfir-wal-Hijra means 'Anathema and Exile', adhering to an extreme fundamentalist view of Islam. Unusually for a religion that has historically tolerated Christianity and Judaism, this form of Islam regards even other Muslims who don't share its extreme ideals as 'infidels' who should be punished brutally, sharing an outlook with the Taliban's hardline clerics.
In London, Beghal naturally gravitated to the mosque at Finsbury Park, fast emerging as a magnet for Islamic extremists in Britain - despite the well-established moderate credentials of the mosque's leadership. And even among the extremists, Beghal stood out as one of the most dangerous.
Members of the Algerian community in north London have told The Observer that Beghal was a feared figure around the mosque. 'It is always the ones without beards who are the most dangerous,' said one moderate Algerian who met him. 'Members of this group would kill their own fathers if they caught them smoking or drinking.'
Indeed, one video doing the rounds at London mosques is a Takfir-wal-Hijra 'snuff movie', showing the execution of a member of the organisation judged to have committed a sin.
The group, once thought beyond the pale - even by bin Laden's al-Queda organisation - believes that everyone who does not adhere to their views, including less devout Muslims, should be counted as infidels and were legitimate targets in any Holy War.
One man who knew Beghal during his time in London said: 'This is the most terrifying group of extremists you are ever likely to meet. If you don't agree with them you are an enemy to Islam, and they believe it is legitimate to kill you.'
Beghal's voice, while extreme, was not a lone one among young Muslim extremists on the fringes of Britain's mosques during this key period. Many - including the police and intelligence services - were happy to write off their activities as that of a noisy but harmless group of hotheads playing at being Holy Warriors.
What they did not realise is that Beghal and others like him had long gone beyond talking and joined in an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists' terrorist-in-chief, Osama bin Laden, and his al-Qaeda group.
Evidence of those close links emerged in a Paris court case last week in evidence gathered by the DST, the French counter-terrorist service. One member of the network, Nacer Eddine Mettai, said: 'Bin Laden approved the ties between Takfir and the Algerian GIA (the Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Algerians). He agreed to finance Takfir as long as it helped him put his own programme into practice.'
Mettai's evidence has proved crucial to the understanding of bin Laden's methodology, revealing how terrorists from different countries and organisations - but all extreme Islamist and hostile to the West - have gathered under a flag of convenience. These are links, both financial and material, that the West's intelligence agencies have simply missed, allowing men like Beghal to operate almost with impunity.
By August of last year, Beghal had dropped off the radar of MI5 and other agencies which had been watching him in Britain, curious to learn more about his activities but lacking sufficient evidence to intervene and arrest him. What they now know is that he left for Pakistan to study with religious scholars before moving on to the training camps in Afghanistan to prepare for his eventual mission.
Though Beghal had disappeared, French intelligence officers keeping watch on his apartment outside Paris, still rented in his name, became curious about a regular visitor to Corbeil. Kamel Daoudi, a 23-year-old French-born computer specialist, shared Beghal's extremist sympathies. When the young man left his own home earlier this month and moved in permanently to Beghal's apartment, French investigators believed they had identified the new leader of a French extremist cell, dubbing him 'Commander of Corbeil'.
What is now clear is that Daoudi was a key player in Beghal's terrorist group. As well as being a computer expert, French intelligence believed he was also Takfir's master bomb-maker, and that he had been given the job of building the explosive device they believe would have demolished the US embassy in Paris and killed hundreds in another spectacular terrorist attack.
Alarmed that a huge atrocity was being planned, the French authorities finally decided to move against Takfir-wal-Hijra on Monday 10 September. They applied to anti-terrorist judges to begin proceedings, little knowing they had barely scratched the surface of a huge conspiracy that, within a day, would see four hijacked US jets attack America.
Within hours of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon alarm bells were ringing, not just at the headquarters of the French intelligence service but among police and intelligence services across Europe, all of which had been tracking similar groups and individuals, and catching hints of similar plots so appalling that they almost beggared belief.
Slowly, an appalling realisation began to dawn: the men they had been following, watching and waiting to make their move, were miles ahead of them. War had been declared by the terrorist months - perhaps years - before. And they hadn't noticed.
Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, police in Belgium and Holland told the French they could not wait for their byzantine legal system to crank into action before acting against Takfir. They raided addresses linked to Beghal, unravelling a vast network of cells planning a series of attacks on prominent targets later in the year. All of these arrests were made possible because of information supplied by Beghal to French anti-terrorist officials who flew to Dubai last weekend.
Thanks to his evidence, the full scale and scope of what was intended finally began to become clear to police and intelligence agencies across Europe and the US. It consisted of a loose network of groups in Germany, France, Spain and UK, all with the same aim in mind: attacks on US interests across the globe.
Among the planned attacks, police now know, was one on the US consulate in Marseille, and a plot to kill President Bush and other G8 leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialised nations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said last week his government provided information to the United States about possible attacks on the Genoa summit by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden. 'There was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives,' said Mubarak. 'As a result, precautions were taken. But no one imagined that Boeings full of passengers were going to crash into buildings.'
Last Friday French police finally smashed down the door of Beghal's flat in Paris. But Daoudi, the 'Commander of Corbeil', was not at home. Having been alerted to Beghal's arrest by an article in the French press he had escaped the raid on the flat. When police burst in at 1.30am they found mobile phones and bomb-manufacturing equipment but no Daoudi. The presumed number two of Takfir Wal-Hijra's French operation had fled, along with the simcards and chips for the cell phones used by the organisation.
Daoudi's father, Tahar Daoudi, said last week that his son had lived a peaceful life in Paris's chic fifth arrondissement until, in straitened circumstances, the family of Algerian origin was forced to move out to the suburbs of Paris.
'He was a brilliant boy,' said Tahar Daoudi of his son. 'We arrived in France when he was five years old and in the following year he was brilliant in school. Later he started specialising in computer studies, but finally he decided he didn't want to work any more.
'When we moved he changed all his friends. He was very generous and they got a lot of money out of him - all the money that was supposed to pay for his studies.
'We were furious with him and threw him out of the house. I was furious with him for hanging around with kids who filled his head full of nonsense. I saw him for his civil marriage in 1999, but that was pretty much it.'
Yet this once generous computer whizz-kid was now on the run from international security services, with police closing in on his seven associates. Where would he go? Who could he turn to to offer him a safe haven? It appears there was only one choice - Britain, where a sophisticated Islamist support network operated in every major city.
A mile from the centre of Leicester on the Prospect Hill estate, Muslims in the predominantly Asian community were going about their everyday lives. Some were going to the local mosque in Asfordby Street, others were doing some early morning shopping at the nearby Hill View Stores or getting their children ready for school.
Four days after the Paris raids there was no reason for this quiet Leicester community to expect the events across the Channel were about to have any impact on them.
Just before 8am on Tuesday the sirens of dozens of police cars shattered the morning peace. Armed anti-terrorist officers surrounded the house where Daoudi was sheltering and, as the doors were smashed in with a battering ram, the area was sealed off. Three men were arrested, two from Prospect Hill and one from an upstairs flat in Rolleston Street around the corner.
Scotland Yard would not give any information other than that the arrests have been made in connection with the 'arrest of seven Arab suspects in Paris'.
One of the those arrested was described as an intense, serious man, tall and well-built and very protective of his wife, who always wore a veil.
The next day French television named the individual who had escaped the police raids in France and been caught in Britain. It was Daoudi. In four days, a man alleged to have been an explosives and computer expert for one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world had slipped quietly into the UK.
Despite these arrests in Leicester, British police were keen to dampen down fears that the country was a key base for Islamic terrorists. By yesterday Daoudi's run was over. France's most wanted terrorist was back in France, quickly extradited by the UK, and in the custody of the anti-terrorist police the DST.
The secret war. Part 2
Police believe up to 30 more 'spectaculars' are planned
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,560733,00.html
While Beghal was devising his murderous plots, other cells in Hamburg and across Germany were busy too, almost certainly unaware that their efforts were being duplicated across a continent - but pursuing the same aim. Among them was an intelligent, disaffected and darkly handsome young man whose name and face have become synonymous with the slaughter in America on 11 September.
His name was Mohamed Atta and he would soon be notorious for flying a hijacked jet into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Three of the dead hijackers, police would quickly establish, had come from Hamburg.
A team of agents dispatched by the FBI to Germany has been focusing on the northern city of Hamburg, where three of the men who died in the planes and four others who were on the FBI's initial list of suspects studied at universities. Investigations have spread to other universities throughout the country thought to have links with the terrorist cell. In several German states, investigations were last week under way to uncover hundreds of suspected 'sleepers'.
What has emerged in the past week is that - like Beghal and his friends in both Paris and London - Atta was not unknown to the authorities.
Indeed he was under surveillance between January and May last year after he was reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives and for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation.
The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the mens' arrest. The German interior ministry has defended the police, saying there was never enough information to lead to arrests, although suspicions were growing about what the men were up to. Indeed, so alarmed were the authorities that last year federal police ordered state prosecutors to investigate the structure of the bin Laden cells in Germany.
And like the group around Beghal, Atta's organisation was also using Britain both as a way station on its route to commit terror in the US, and as an alleged home base for some of those suspected of supporting them. The FBI has revealed that 11 of the hijackers who died in the US had been in transit through Britain. More seriously, US officials believe, the group associated with Atta also used Britain. Among this group was the so-called 'twentieth hijacker', 33-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman whose brother has accused Islamic fundamentalists in Britain of brainwashing him.
Moussaoui crossed the Channel in 1992, living in Brixton and hoping to get a job in international commerce and earn a good wage. Nine years later he was cheering in his American prison cell as he watched television pictures of passenger jets crashing into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
In August Moussaoui had been arrested in Minnesota after instructors at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy told police of the peculiar behaviour of the pupil who did not want to learn how to take-off or land - only how to maneuver the plane in the air.
Moussaoui's time in Britain appears to have been crucial to his transformation from hothead to active terrorist, nurtured in Britain's Islamist fringe. His brother, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, said: 'He began to change when he went to Britain. It was there that he got drawn into an extremist group. All alone in London he found friendships within the Islamic fundamentalist groups littered around London's mosques. I noticed a change in his attitude when he came back to France. He became racist, a black racist,' said his brother.
'I saw how they operate when my brother came back to France with a friend he had met in Britain. He was indoctrinating the friend, just as he had been indoctrinated himself, and his aim was to control all aspects of his life. He had become a little guru.'
Abd-Samad last saw his brother in the mid-1990s, when he tried one last time to turn him against on fundamentalism. But to no avail. His younger brother walked out and went to train in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The next time Abd-Samad saw his brother was on a list of suspected hijackers responsible for the US atrocities.
And Moussaoui was not alone. Also in Britain was another key figure US and European investigators now believe was key to the US end of the plot. What has also become clear in the past few days is that the story of the German, French and British cells is a story repeated across Europe. In bedsits and shared apartments across a continent, quiet young men were studying, working and praying - and meeting to prepare the secret war against the West, ordered by bin Laden and his closest lieutenants or by the leaders of the groups in alliance with him.
The picture is of a vast and nebulous terrorist organisation of affiliated networks, each with largely autonomous cells, but all working to the same end: targeting US interests around the world, each planning 'a spectacular'.
It was a conspiracy protected by its investment in the principal of 'redundancy'. The police could intercept one, two, even a dozen cells, but other cells would still remain actively pursuing their targets. It was a redundancy built into the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon themselves. Multiple teams hijacking multiple aircraft would ensure at least one reached its target.
The planned attacks on the G8 summit and US targets across Europe, investigators in Italy now suspect, were the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, yesterday it was revealed that Italy's secret service believed that up to 30 more 'spectaculars' may be in the pipeline, including a number envisaging some sort of airborne assault, some of them aimed at London and other European capitals, including the Vatican
According to Rodolfo Ronconi, head of Italian Interpol, there was a possibility that those involved in the attacks on America used Italy as cover to enter Europe. 'We are talking about sleeper cells,' Ronconi said last week.
The picture that Ronconi and other European officials have painted of the network of cells across Europe has been consistent with the methodology of bin Laden, the patient planner ready to invest years in setting up attacks, and allowing his men wide operational autonomy.
Indeed, a spate of terror scares which rattled Italy earlier this year is being revisited by intelligence agents to see if they can detect the hand of Osama bin Laden.
In January the US Embassy in Rome had its first security closure in a decade because of an alleged plot by three Algerians to launch a suicide attack. In April Italian police smashed what they said was another Islamic fundamentalist plot to bomb the European parliament in Strasbourg, France. An alternative target was said to be the cathedral in Strasbourg. Five suspected members of a terrorist group - all Tunisian and believed linked to Osama bin Laden - were arrested near Milan while German police seized another suspect in Munich.
'For the first time, we believe we can determine a direct link between Islamic terrorist cells and training camps in Afghanistan,' said Stefano Dambruoso, an investigating magistrate. The Milan cell allegedly recruited volunteers in Europe to be trained as mercenaries, trafficked arms and provided false identity papers.
In Spain, too anti-terrorist police were last week busy moving against other 'sleeper cells', descending on five towns and villages and arresting six Algerian migrant workers. The six men, allegedly members of the bin Laden-backed Group for Call and Combat, are likely to be charged with membership of an illegal armed group.
'This was a sleeper unit,' explained Spain's national police chief Juan Cotino last week. He described the group as also a support unit for other cells linked to bin Laden across Europe, providing forged documents, passports and credit cards.
Among those arrested in Cascante, a small town in northern Navarre, was 26-year-old Mohamed Belaziz, who was detained at the nondescript flat he shared with other Algerian migrant workers. Among his possessions - seized by police - was a diary, roughly scribbled in bad Arabic and even worse Spanish, which they claimed was proof of his contacts with a Europe-wide Islamic terror network.
A list of contacts included names in Britain, Ireland, Rome and Frankfurt. It also referred to a trip made, or due to be made, to London and Ireland. Police claimed Belaziz was a suicide bomber in the making.
The jottings in his diary certainly showed him to be depressed. 'All is emptiness. I hate life,' he wrote. 'They hate us. I am going to hold on, in Allah's name, but one day...' he adds, before trailing off in illegible Arabic.
Belaziz is believed to have been the right-hand man of Madjid Sahouane, owner of the Albadil, the only Islamic 'halal' butchery in nearby Pamplona. His workers yesterday insisted police had got the wrong man.
Sahouane, however, was often away, travelling in his white van, supposedly to buy produce in both Spain and France. Police suspect he was often on other business, following the instructions of the Salafist cell's leader, Mohamed Boualem Khnouni, alias Abdallah.
Boualem Khnouni's operations were based in the eastern town of l'Alcudia de Crespins. Like most of those arrested, he lived the life of an immigrant labourer, changing jobs and never appearing to be wealthy - although his flat was stuffed with computer and forgery equipment.
Spanish police said they had been watching him for nearly two years. He had moved into an apartment that had previously belonged to suspected members of Algeria's GIA group - which is, in turn, close to the Salafists. Banned in Britain, the Salafists were also on the list published last week of 27 groups and individuals whose funds the US wants to freeze.
With no proof that he had broken any laws, they had decided not to arrest the man they now say was in contact with some of Europe's most dangerous terrorists. When they finally acted, it was at the insistence of the Belgian investigating magistrate dealing with Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian suspected of plotting to blow up the Nato headquarters in Brussels. Trabelsi, the judge said, had travelled to Spain in July for meetings with the Salafists.
Not only had they been in contact with Nizar, but police said they had also provided support to another potentially lethal bin Laden cell, known by the codename 'Meliani'. This cell - broken up by police in Frankfurt, Milan and the Spanish city of Alicante over the past year - was made up of north Africans who had been through training camps in Afghanistan. They were armed with machine pistols, grenades and explosives. The Meliani cell's 12 members had been planning a bomb attack on Strasbourg Cathedral and another attack on the US embassy in Rome. Cell leader Mohamed Bensakhria was arrested in June in Alicante. He was described at the time as 'one of the most wanted men pursued by Western security services.'
In a crowded corner of the prayer room in Finsbury Park Mosque last night, Muslims huddled together to speak of Tafkir-wal-Hijra. The group, around 20-strong, are a regular presence at the mosque -Tafkir members regularly stand watchfully outside on Friday afternoons, distributing anti-Western literature. 'I remember them as hard line fundamentalists,' says Abu Saeed, 25, a Finsbury Park Mosque regular. Saeed, a self-described orthodox Muslim, says even he was surprised by the strength of Tafkir's anti-Western sentiments. 'But they don't look like fanatics as we know them,' he says. 'They're dressed like Westerners, have polite manner, but used to hand out literature saying that smoking and alcohol is punishable by death. Even by the standards of Finsbury Park Mosque, they were an extreme lot.'
Other visitors to the mosque recalled the group trying to recruit young men into their organisation. 'It's not like we think they are recruiting to fight a Jihad,' says one man. 'But they are asking young men to take a stand against what the Americans are doing to the Muslim Ummah.'
That 'stand' - for some at least within the group - envisaged mass murder.
-----
Bush Names Army General To NSC Post On Terrorism
Downing Wrote Key 1996 Study
By Mike Allen and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46920-2001Sep29.html
President Bush plans to name a retired Army general to a new counterterrorism post, and declared yesterday that his war preparations are gaining momentum but are unlikely to produce quick results.
Bush has asked retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, a career specialist in counterterrorism, to join the staff of the National Security Council as assistant to the president and national director for combating terrorism, officials said.
Downing wrote a scathing 1996 study of security lapses by U.S. commanders in the Middle East after a bomb in June 1996 killed 19 members of the Air Force in a barracks in Saudi Arabia called Khobar Towers. The report criticized the entire military chain of command from the Air Force wing commander up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and concluded that the U.S. government should stop regarding terrorism as an intermittent problem and instead begin treating it as "undeclared war against the United States."
As investigators into the attacks worked through the weekend, a government official said the FBI has divided its targets into three groups of perpetrators: those who arranged the financing, those who planned the logistics of weaponry and access to planes, and those who carried out the attacks.
Bush spent the weekend at Camp David and met by a secure video link with his National Security Council. He planned to take a break by watching last night's football game between the University of Texas and Texas Tech.
The president used his weekly radio address to give a progress report on what he called "a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity."
"We did not seek this conflict, but we will win it," he said.
Officials said Bush's message was designed both to begin the process of prolonging the patience of citizens at home, and to assure allies and potential allies that the United States plans a sustained effort and will not be deterred even if frustrating setbacks occur.
"This war will be fought wherever terrorists hide, or run, or plan," Bush said. "Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all. Our weapons are military and diplomatic, financial and legal. And in this struggle, our greatest advantages are the patience and resolve of the American people."
Bush said the U.S. government respects the people of Afghanistan. "But we condemn the Taliban, and welcome the support of other nations in isolating that regime," he said.
The National Security Council and the State Department have prepared a 10-paragraph "Afghanistan Declaratory Policy" that says the international community "must devote itself to stabilizing Afghanistan."
"The Taliban do not represent the Afghan people, who never elected or chose the Taliban faction," the memo says. "We do not want to choose who rules Afghanistan, but we will assist those who seek a peaceful, economically developing Afghanistan free of terrorism."
Listing the progress he has made, Bush said in his radio address that troops are being sent around the globe so they will be "ready to answer when their country calls."
"International cooperation is gaining momentum," Bush added, mentioning meetings this week with leaders of Canada and Japan and promises of support from Russia and Indonesia. He then pointed to what the administration is calling the first shot in the war: his order freezing U.S. assets of 27 individuals and groups accused of funding terrorists.
Democrats offered support, not a rebuttal, in their radio address. Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, who took office in July, said, "The Democratic Party stands 100 percent behind President Bush as he prepares the appropriate military response."
Downing, the new counterterrorism official, is a former commander of Special Forces troops in combat in Panama and the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and later was chief of the Special Operations Command. The NSC already has a counterterrorism adviser, but an administration official said Downing will be part of "an increased focus and more division of responsibility." The upcoming appointment was first reported by U.S. News and World Report.
In another effort to build the administration's expertise in preparation for war, officials say retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, former chief of the Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, is expected to join the State Department as an adviser for the current operation.
Also yesterday, former president Bill Clinton and former senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.), who ran against each other in 1996, held a news conference at Georgetown University to announce a drive to raise $100 million for the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund, which will offer scholarships to children and spouses of people killed or disabled in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"There's not any politics or partisanship in an effort like this," Dole said. "We're both Americans. We both love our country."
Clinton said: "I have stood in those lines at the crisis center and talked to the victims' families. And some of the people who will benefit from this are even not yet born, because the young women who lost their husbands are pregnant now." Information is available at www.familiesoffreedom.org.
Jesse L. Jackson yesterday abandoned his plan to go to Afghanistan as a mediator, but said he instead will send a letter asking for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists to be turned over to an international court. Jackson said he was deterred by the failure of a delegation from Pakistan to make progress with the Taliban.
Jackson denied he had initiated contact with the regime that controls most of Afghanistan. He said Afghan officials had called him and sent two letters. "I would not have known how to contact them," he said. "I couldn't call 1-800-TALIBAN."
--------
Rush Is On to Boost Region's Response To Terror Attacks
By Steve Twomey and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46817-2001Sep29.html
Sept. 11 taught this, among so much else: Common radio channels would help. As an intractable, mammoth blaze raged at the stricken Pentagon, fire companies on the scene from Maryland could not communicate easily with those from Northern Virginia and Washington, said Edward P. Plaugher, Arlington County's fire chief, who had overall command at the scene. Portable radios had to be doled out. Runners had to be used.
Within the close confines of its disaster operations center that day, Fairfax County realized anew that it needs more space and more telephone lines. Montgomery County discovered the advantages of commandeering as many publicly funded cable channels as possible for quick contact with residents. The District learned it must seek technology that would give government telephones priority service, so its officials will not be rendered incommunicado again when land-line and cell networks clog in a crisis.
And strategies are being crafted to ensure that if the federal government frees its 240,000 workers during a terror attack, local jurisdictions have been tipped first, so they can police intersections, synchronize lights and reverse traffic lanes -- and avoid the paralysis of Sept. 11.
Emotionally shaken like the rest of the country, but galvanized as well, those responsible for public safety in Washington and its suburbs have been dissecting the events of nearly three weeks ago and have begun to shift their disaster assumptions and preparations in ways small and profound.
It is an after-action analysis underway within governments across the country, but one with a unique urgency here, where the pervasive presence of the federal government and the nation's premier monuments and museums renders the area a target like no other and adds complexity to the task of protecting the populace.
"The other day, I woke up sputtering, 'Do you have batteries? Do you have flashlights?' " said Peter G. LaPorte, the District's Emergency Management Agency chief. "My brain almost explodes with ideas of things I need to get."
Or things he needs to do. LaPorte said that the city has realized that the top floor of an eight-story building is not an ideal place for its emergency command center, not when hijackers are plunging 757s and 767s into landmarks or when someone could drive a truck bomb into the building's public, underground garage. So the city is weighing whether to move the center to ground-level quarters.
Not only do the reviews underway locally focus on the obvious -- security at reservoirs, power plants and public places -- but on government's response to an attack once it begins, including how to cull fact from fiction in a chaotic environment, how to keep communication links viable, how to evacuate.
Much as Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard states post signs telling residents which roads to use to flee hurricanes, District officials hope to more quickly empty downtown in the future by publicizing three or four main evacuation routes.
"We'll be one of the only cities in America to be able to move people out rapidly," Transportation Director Dan Tangherlini said. "And I'm not talking about a year from now. I'm talking right away."
He has asked contractors to estimate the cost of installing 100 video cameras at key intersections to monitor an exodus. The city has only four cameras now. And LaPorte wants $5 million to create a fire department team to respond to a chemical or biological attack, forms of terrorism suddenly at the forefront of possibilities. The city is supposed to have such a team, but its equipment is nearly obsolete, and its members rarely train, being used instead for routine firefighting.
Hospital officials are wondering whether they have enough outdoor showers to decontaminate victims of a chemical attack, so they do not taint emergency rooms. And although local trauma units had few casualties to treat on Sept. 11, the incident underscored how an attack that injures massive numbers would overwhelm hospitals.
"We don't have . . . what we call 'surge capacity,' " said Robert A. Malson, president of the District of Columbia Hospital Association.
In Montgomery County on the morning of Sept. 11, hundreds of workers at the main county government building in Rockville looked out to see employees at the state-run courthouse next door streaming out, having been allowed to go home. Although Montgomery County hoped to remain open to ensure government services, the sight of others leaving caused so much anxiety among county workers that they also were released.
"We need much better coordination," County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) said.
Indeed, some school systems closed early on Sept. 11, but others did not. And all schools were closed the next day, but all governments were open. It was a hodgepodge of responses that some officials feel confused the public about what and where the threats were, and how serious the situation was.
"It certainly does not convey a message of reassurance and stability," said Gerald E. Connolly (D-Providence), a Fairfax County supervisor and former chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
There is a need for "an established set of criteria in the region" about what to close in any comparable moment of uncertainty and danger, Connolly said, even though local governments have traditionally been loath to surrender power to a group. To the extent possible, either everyone closes or everyone does not. "The region just has to bite the bullet," he said.
Over the years, emergency management teams in the District and suburbs have gained considerable experience coping with snowstorms, hurricanes and floods, but those are predictable emergencies that afford the luxury of deliberation and staging. Although disaster plans and drills have also considered the possibility of terrorism, no official had been through an emergency arising with such stunning speed and accompanied by galloping fear that unimaginable destruction could be inflicted in the next minute on any building, any intersection, any neighborhood.
Plaugher, the Arlington fire chief, likened the impact of Sept. 11 to someone who has long dreamed of buying a new $20,000 Corvette -- only to go to a showroom and find that Corvettes cost thousands more. "We are now at a reality check," he said.
At the Pentagon alone, Plaugher said, there were lessons for fire departments about adopting compatible communications and methods of accounting for firefighters; in controlling "freelancing," the practice of well-meaning, off-duty firefighters arriving to help but failing to report their presence; in compelling firefighters to rest during a marathon battle; even in using the same radio terms.
In many respects, local government did well during the uncertainty, with the possible exception of the District's, which has been chastised by Congress for poor preparation and communication. The Metro system functioned throughout, its officials rejecting the D.C. police department's suggestion that it shut down, which would have left tens of thousands of people with no way to get home. Governments activated command centers quickly, and many workers showed up unbidden to pitch in. At the Pentagon fire, Arlington County received ample help from the District and other suburban departments.
Amazingly, e-mail was one crucial way that District officials could keep in touch with each other.
But as local officials ponder what did not go well or what could be improved, perhaps nothing is drawing more attention than the decision by the federal Office of Personnel Management to release government workers, a decision made without consulting local officials and one with substantial effects on congestion. For example, George Gacser, Potomac Electric Power Co.'s manager of emergency management and communications, said the utility had no problems on Sept. 11, except for moving personnel around.
"It was a colossal federal failure," said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). "Why didn't the federal government communicate to the District, instead of turning out federal employees into the streets and creating near panic?"
A federal official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said OPM tried to reach District officials in the minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. But phone lines were jammed, and indeed Verizon spokesmen said the number of land-line and cell phone calls in the Washington area doubled on Sept. 11.
Outside, the official said, streets were already becoming gridlocked as public- and private-sector workers headed home of their own accord. "There was going to have to be a decision made," the official said. "We did not know if there were other planes." When OPM got through to a District government phone and asked about organizing a conference call of local officials, the person who answered replied that the situation was only "a federal issue," the official said, adding that he did not know the identity of the District employee.
At 9:58 a.m., 20 minutes after the Pentagon attack and without having been able to reach any high-ranking city official, OPM decided that the government would close and employees could leave if they wished.
Since then, federal and local officials have explored how to surmount such communication difficulties. Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, the city's deputy mayor for public safety, now has a designated contact at OPM, as well as at the White House. And city officials are looking into multiple options -- including more phones lines and special dial tones that give government calls priority -- to ensure that they can communicate not only with the federal government but each other.
"International terrorists have moved the game up a lot," said Suzanne J. Peck, the city's chief technology chief. "All sorts of things you didn't think of before are now popping into your head."
-------- activists
War protesters clash with cops
September 30, 2001
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20010930-83140720.htm
Eleven protesters were arrested yesterday and at least two were injured in scuffles with police as some 4,500 people marched down Pennsylvania Avenue - all calling on the United States not to make war on terrorist leaders whose Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center killed more than 6,000 people.
Many of the demonstrators were those who had planned to be in town yesterday to protest the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meetings. When the World Bank meetings were canceled because of the attacks, organizers switched gears and turned their protest into an anti-war march.
Before the terrorist attacks, police had trained and prepared for 100,000 anti-World Bank and IMF protesters. Instead, they were faced by a much smaller crowd, which gathered at Freedom Plaza, at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Still, there were groups among the demonstrators who strayed from the strict route spelled out in the permit issued to leaders of the march last week.
At 9 a.m., about 900 protesters, led by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, a Washington-based anarchist group, were met by police in full riot gear as they assembled outside Union Station. This group, which did not have protest permits, repeatedly tried to break police lines as it marched from Union Station to the World Bank headquarters at 18th and H streets NW.
A clash broke out when about 200 of the protesters - many equipped with gas masks and balaclava coverings - tried to surround and halt a squad car near the MCI Center.
Several police officers and demonstrators suffered minor injuries. One of those injured was Assistant Police Chief Terrence W. Gainer. "I took a clunk on the head and caught some pepper spray," said Chief Gainer, who had been walking in front of the squad car.
It took police less than an hour to encircle the group, once it reached the World Bank, but more clashes ensued - one lasting 15 minutes and ending in the arrest of several protesters at the corner of 15th and H streets NW - when police herded the crowd in the direction of Freedom Plaza, where several thousand other protesters were waiting to begin their duly licensed anti-war march from the plaza to the U.S. Capitol.
"Overall, this has been a very responsive group," Chief Gainer said yesterday afternoon. "We've had good dialogue with the demonstrators."
"My first assignment as a police officer was the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where there was a big clash," Mr. Gainer said. "Today has been much better. There have been a few rough moments, but whenever you have a clash of ideas, there's going to be a bit of give and take."
Despite the day's smooth runnings, Mr. Gainer said he would "rather have had to deal with 50,000 protesting against the World Bank than what happened to the Pentagon and World Trade Center."
Some from the anarchist group were surprised the police acted so firmly when the group broke through police lines. "There were so many signals we have given the police over the last few days that this would be peaceful, why are they surrounding us?" said Adam Eidinger, a 28-year-old carrying a sign that read 'Violence Does Not Solve Violence, Why Value One Over The Other.'
As Mr. Eidinger's group merged with those at Freedom Plaza, who were organized by a new coalition called International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, his sign was lost in a sea of other signs showing how many different groups had come to protest.
"War Kills Children," read one. "Do More Innocent People Have To Die?" read another.
The two groups began making their way toward the Capitol lawn shortly after 3 p.m. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey estimated 4,500 demonstrators marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Ingrid Zemer, 21, of Fort Collins, Colo., was among them. She had driven 1,680 miles from her hometown to the District with some friends.
"I can remember when I was in high school seeing footage of Vietnam protesters and thinking, 'I hope if the day ever comes, I'll have the strength to stand up for what I believe in,' and now is that day," she said. "... I feel like I have a moral responsibility to be here."
Police lining Pennsylvania Avenue were equipped with see-through shields, protective vests, helmets and batons to protect them against acts of violence not covered in training manuals - breaking up fights among warring factions of demonstrators.
Police had to be "prepared for anything," Chief Gainer said, including clashes between the protesters and those who believe in President Bush's declared war on terrorism.
The two groups - protesters and counterprotesters who supported military action - had jostled one another in the morning on the periphery of Freedom Plaza, before the march began. A few scuffles and shouting matches had broken out.
Not much happened, however, when the two met up along the line of march, by the U.S. Navy Memorial at Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
One counterprotester, standing with others on the sidewalk, held up a sign that read, "Welcome traitors, seek therapy." Another pointed to individuals in the march yelling, "Hey you, swim to Cuba."
Anti-war activists used a bull horn to shout at the counterprotesters. "George Bush, we want peace. U.S. out of the Middle East," they chanted.
--------
Thousands Fill Streets Of D.C. to Protest War
By Manny Fernandez and Petula Dvorak
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 30, 2001; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46766-2001Sep29.html
Anarchists in black bandannas, peace activists with banners and signs, and police in riot gear took over the streets of downtown Washington yesterday during the first major national anti-war protest since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Young protesters, who beat drums and the bottoms of plastic tubs, shouted chants at stone-faced police in a tense standoff on one Pennsylvania Avenue block, while area activists and those who had come in caravans from California, New York, Ohio and Oregon called on thousands at Freedom Plaza to raise their voices for peace.
Such scenes had been anticipated for months by police, organizers and District residents, but the terrorist attacks softened what had been expected to be a clash between unprecedented law enforcement might and as many as 100,000 anti-globalization protesters. Yesterday's rallies, instead, developed into a largely peaceful display against military retaliation, marred by a few scuffles and three arrests during one of the day's two downtown marches. Eight more were arrested at the now-closed D.C. General Hospital in a related protest.
Police officials estimated the crowd in the two marches at about 7,000, while some organizers put the figure closer to 25,000, the same number that protested the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in the District in April 2000. That time, there were hundreds of arrests, skirmishes between police and protesters, and some property damage.
War was on everyone's mind, it seemed yesterday.
"I don't think the solution to violence is more violence," said Rachel Ettling, a 19-year-old sophomore at New York's Columbia University who held a red banner at a park in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol dome that read: "Amerika! Get a clue!" Ettling said she and the throngs of protesters were putting the country's best ideals to use. "It's a very patriotic thing to be an activist," she said. "This is democracy in the streets."
The focus of the protests, initially planned against global financial policies of the World Bank and the IMF, had changed since Sept. 11. After the attacks, the world bodies canceled their meetings, and some protest groups altered their message. They pleaded that the country not engage in what they called a "rush to war" and to condemn violent acts of retaliation against those of Middle Eastern background. Another rally and march for peace, organized by local anti-war activists, are set for 11 a.m. today from Meridian Hill Park at 16th and Euclid streets NW.
Yesterday, at a three-hour rally at Freedom Plaza before a march to the Capitol to stress those concerns, Leslie Sauer, 55, a landscape architect from rural New Jersey, held a sign that read, "8 million Afghan refugees need food now, not war and terror." Many protesters criticized U.S. foreign policy, which they say has exacerbated tensions in the Middle East.
"We rain bombs on Iraq, then we're surprised we're hated," the Rev. Graylan Hagler, minister at the District's Plymouth Congregational Church, told thousands gathered there. More rallies were scheduled in other parts of the country.
In an earlier march, some protesters seemed intent on fighting aggression with aggression. Many wore black bandannas to hide their faces or gas masks to protect themselves if the air turned chemical, and some carried sticks and black-painted trash can lids as shields.
All the clashes between police and protesters -- including the arrests and scuffles in which police used pepper spray on several demonstrators -- broke out during the march, organized primarily by a D.C.-based anarchists and anti-capitalists group, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. It had not sought a permit for the march, but police accommodated the group and escorted marchers from near Union Station to the Pennsylvania Avenue and 19th Street NW headquarters of the World Bank and the IMF.
Trouble started at 11th and H streets near the Washington Convention Center about 10:45 a.m., when a shoving match erupted between police and demonstrators after two police vehicles leading the march slowed down but protesters would not. Activists swarmed the vehicles, and D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey and other high-ranking officials were among police there, batons in hand. Someone leaned from a police vehicle and pepper sprayed the surging demonstrators. Police used their batons to push the crowd from the cars. Several protesters were knocked to the pavement. One officer also fell; fellow officers quickly formed a ring around her, and she was led away in tears.
Lisa Fithian, a 40-year-old Los Angeles activist, was pepper sprayed, as was Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer. Ramsey lost his left shoe in a brief melee at 15th and H streets, where two arrests took place.
When demonstrators ended their march an hour later at Edward R. Murrow Park across from the World Bank and IMF, lines of police prevented them from leaving. The park soon became the scene of a sometimes-tense 90-minute standoff. Hundreds of police stood shoulder-to-shoulder surrounding the park.
Police officials said the tactic was used to cool off the crowd, but many who were detained said the action violated their rights. Protesters' nerves were on edge, and many sat down on the grass, while others started chants.
Attorneys for protest groups who were also detained began making plans to seek a hearing in federal court, while some protesters talked about why they were there.
"I wanted to send a signal to George Bush and Congress and the American people that everyone is not cowed into submission, not everyone is about unthinking vengeance," said Paul Sturtz, 37, of Columbia, Mo.
Others took things with a sense of humor. "We're actually thinking of ordering a pizza," said David Graeber, 40, a member of the New York Direct Action Network, who had cell phone in hand. At one point, a Baltimore man wearing a devil's mask and a clown nose, who said his name was Vermin Love Supreme, read sections of international law -- including Article 33 of the Geneva Convention -- through a bullhorn inches from a stern-faced line of police.
Police eventually negotiated with the group to march down H Street NW toward Freedom Plaza at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, where the second march was assembling at noon.
At that march, organized by a new anti-war, anti-racist coalition called International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism), speakers addressed the crowd for three hours before thousands of protesters streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
Participants exchanged angry words with about 100 counter-demonstrators organized by a national conservative group, Free Republic, who had gathered at the National Archives. In the morning, former U.S. senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York, had stopped by the counter-demonstration and urged participants to protest peacefully.
"Don't let there be a dust-up. Just let them know you're here," he said.
At the morning march, one counter-protester holding a sign reading, "Welcome Traitors," was spit on by demonstrators.
"I think it's a shame these people are out here," said the man, who gave his name only as Walter. "We need to stand together as a nation, but these people are mocking the 7,000 deaths. We should be mourning."
Not all bystanders were unsympathetic. Jeff Gorham, who was visiting from Richmond, said, "They're right to protest -- that's what makes this country great."
Police on horseback, bicycle, motorcycle and on foot and in vehicles were never far from the morning march, which proceeded to the beat of bongo drums as incense filled the air.
By 6 p.m., the two marches and the first day of protests were over, after a moment of silence and some impromptu dancing and drumming by one group at a fountain near the Capitol.
"It turned out well," Chief Ramsey said. "We could've done a lot more arrests there, but that's not our goal."
Earlier, as police escorted the morning marchers to Freedom Plaza, officers called to each other: "Keep your ranks; keep your ranks." Behind them, black-clad protesters with garbage lids said: "Hold it tight; link arms."
One protester, hearing the police, added, "Hey, they talk just like us."
Staff writers Michael Amon, David Montgomery and Lisa Rein contributed to this report.
----
OCT 13 ACTIONS: NOW MORE THAN EVER
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001 13:15:27 -0400
From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
OCTOBER 13, 2001
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST TO STOP THE MILITARIZATION OF SPACE
NO WAR IN CENTRAL ASIA! NO THEATRE MISSILE DEFENSE! NO NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE! NO STAR WARS RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT! KEEP SPACE FOR PEACE! FUND HUMAN NEEDS!
1) Action des Citoyens pour le Desarmement Nucleaire (France)
2) Action for Nuclear Disarmament (Cape Cod, MA)
3) Action NOW!
4) Activist San Diego (California)
5) Action for Peace (FoE Melbourne, Australia)
6) A Food Not Bombs Menu (Tucson, AZ)
7) Alaska Community Action on Toxics (Anchorage)
8) Alaskans Against NMD
9) AlliantAction (Minnesota)
10) All India Letter Writers Association
11) American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)
12) Amnesty Int'l (USF, Tampa)
13) Antiwar.com
14) APDH Human Rights Organization (Bariloche, Argentina)
15) Arizona Institute for Peace Education & Research (Tempe)
16) Article 9 Society (Kansai Area, Osaka, Japan)
17) Asheville Area War Tax Resistance
18) Association pour le Dialogue des Cultures (France)
19) Association of World Citizens
20) Atomic Mirror
21) Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition
22) Australian Peace Committee
23) Baltimore Emergency Response Network
24) Baltimore Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee
25) Bangladesh Campaign to Ban Landmines (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
26) Bolton CND (UK)
27) Border Women's/Mujeres Fronterizas (Texas/Mexico)
28) Boston Mobilization for Survival (MA)
29) Brandywine Peace Community (PA)
30) Brooklyn Peace Action (N.Y.)
31) CAAB (UK)
32) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK)
33) Cape Cod FOR (MA)
34) Catholic Action Network
35) Center for Social Action (Manhattanville College, N.Y.)
36) Central Coast Friends Meeting (San Luis Obispo, CA)
37) Central Coast Peace & Environmental Council (San Luis Obispo, CA)
38) Centre for Peace Studies (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
39) Chester River Monthly Meeting (Chestertown, MD)
40) Christian Democrats USA (Tampa, FL)
41) Christians Opposing the Militarization of Outer Space (Louisville KY)
42) Citizens Budget Campaign of Western PA.
43) Citizens Democracy Watch (Florence, OR)
44) Citizens for Legitimate Government
45) Citizens for Peace in Space (Colorado Springs, CO)
46) Citizen Soldier (New York, N.Y.)
47) City of Arcata Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Commission (CA)
48) Cleveland Peace Action (Ohio)
49) Coastal Convergence Society (Huntington Beach, CA)
50) Colorado Coalition for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Denver)
51) Columbus Campaign for Arms Control (Ohio)
52) Comite de surveillance de l'OTAN (Belgium)
53) Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)
54) Communist Party USA
55) Community Anti-Nuclear Network of Western Australia
56) Community First Coalition (San Francisco, CA)
57) CPPAX - Nuclear Weapons Abolition Task Force (MA)
58) CT Coalition to Stop Star Wars (Hartford)
59) Darmstadter Friedensforum (Germany)
60) Disclosure Project
61) Ecological Life Systems Institute (San Diego, CA)
62) Environment Centre of the Northern Territory (Darwin, Australia)
63) Environmental & Peace Education Center (Ft Myers, FL)
64) Fellowship of Reconciliation (Nyack, N.Y.)
65) Fellowship of Reconciliation (Olympia, WA Chapter)
66) Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice
67) Friends of the Earth Australia
68) Flyby News
69) Franciscan Sisters of Rochester, MN (Justice & Peace Network)
70) Fylingdales Action Network (England)
71) Globalise Resistance (UK)
72) Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
73) Global Resource Action Center for the Environment (New York)
74) Grandmothers for Peace Int'l
75) Grandmothers for Peace (San Luis Obispo County, CA)
76) Grassington and District Peace Group (UK)
77) Green Earth Organization (Ghana)
78) Green Party (Cuyahoga County, OH)
79) Green Party Florida
80) Greens (Lower Cape Cod, MA)
81) Greens (Mid Cape Cod, MA)
82) Greens (Upper Cape Cod, MA)
83) Greens/Green Party USA
84) Green Party of Brevard County (Florida)
85) Green Party of Hillsborough County (Florida)
86) Green Party of Manatee County (Florida)
87) Green Party of Michigan 88) Green Party of Ohio
89) Green Party of Pinellas County (Florida)
90) Green Party of San Luis Obispo County (CA)
91) Green Party of Sarasota County (Florida)
92) Green Party of Scott County (Arkansas)
93) Green Party of Skagit County (Washington)
94) Green Party of the United States
95) Green Party of Ventura County (California)
96) Green Party of Washington County (Arkansas)
97) Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (Poulsbo, WA)
98) Gensuikyo (Tokyo, Japan)
99) Headingley Green Party (UK)
100) Headingly & Kirsktall CND (UK)
101) Healing Ourselves & Mother Earth (Tecopa, CA)
102) High Desert Catholic Worker (Valyermo, CA)
103) Holland Peacemakers (Holland, MI)
104) Homes Not Bombs (Toronto, Canada)
105) Hopedance Magazine (San Luis Obispo, CA)
106) ICCR Militarism & Violence Resolution Issue Group (NYC)
107) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
108) Impact Press (Orlando, FL)
109) Indian Institute for Peace, Disarmament & Environmental Protection (Nagpur, India)
110) Initiative for Immediate Change in Energy Politics (Trier, Germany)
111) Int'l Association of Educators for World Peace
112) Int'l Center for Peace & Justice
113) Int'l Parliament for Safety & Peace (India)
114) Int'l Peace Bureau (Geneva, Switzerland)
115) Int'l Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Belgian Branch)
116) Int'l Youth & Student Movement for the U.N.
117) Iowa Peace Network (Des Moines)
118) Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
119) Ithaca Coalition for Global Justice (New York)
120) Japanese Descent Human Rights (N.Y.)
121) Joan Russow, Global Compliance Research Project (Victoria, Canada)
122) Jonah House (Baltimore, MD)
123) Just Peace Committee (UCC) New Orleans
124) Kodiak Rocket Launch Group (Alaska)
125) Korean Committee Against MD and for Peace
126) Latin American Circle for Int'l Studies (Mexico City)
127) Linking Peace and Life (Japan)
128) Little Flower Catholic Worker (Goochland, VA)
129) Loretto Disarmament/Economic Conversion Committee
130) Los Alamos Study Group (New Mexico)
131) Maine Green Independent Party
132) Maine Veterans for Peace
133) Maryknoll Affiliates Global Concerns Committee
134) Massachusetts Green Party
135) Massachusetts Peace Action
136) Mauritius Action for Disarmament & Peace
137) Medical Association for Prevention of War (Western Australia Branch)
138) Merrimack Valley People for Peace (North Andover, MA)
139) Metaphoria
140) Mid-Missouri Peaceworks (Columbia)
141) Mouvement de la paix (France)
142) Movement Against Nuclear Weapons (Chennai, India)
143) Mouvement Chretien pour la Paix (Belgium)
144) National Christian Council in Japan (Peace & Nuclear Issues Committee)
145) Natural Health Centre (India)
146) Nevada Desert Experience
147) New Mexico Peace Action
148) North Carolina Peace Action
149) North Coast Xpress (California)
150) North Dakota Peace Coalition
151) North Suburban Peace Iniative (Chicago, IL)
152) Norwich CND (England)
153) Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (Santa Barbara, CA)
154) Nuclear Free Takoma Park Committee (MD)
155) Nuclear Free New York
156) Nuclear Peace Action Group (Mendocino, CA)
157) Nuclear Watch of New Mexico (Santa Fe)
158) Nukewatch (Luck, WI)
159) OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, Ecology (Fayetteville, AR)
160) Oregon PeaceWorks
161) Pace e Bene Franciscan Center for Nonviolence
162) Patriots for Peace (Ft Walton Beach, FL)
163) Pax Christi Florida
164) Pax Christi (Marquette, MI)
165) Pax Christi (Metro New York)
166) Pax Christ (New Orleans, LA)
167) Pax Christi (St Louis University Chapter)
168) Pax Christi USA
169) Peace Action
170) Peace Action Maine
171) Peace Alliance Winnipeg (Canada)
172) Peace Coalition of Southern Illinois/Fellowship of Reconciliation
173) Peace Foundation Aotearoa/New Zealand
174) Peace & Justice Alliance (Seattle, WA)
175) Peace Movement Aotearoa/New Zealand
176) Peace Taxpayers
177) Peninsula Peace & Justice Center (Palo Alto, CA)
178) People for Nuclear Disarmament (Western Australia)
179) Pikes Peace Justice & Peace Commission (Colorado Springs)
180) P.L.A.G.E. (Salzburg, Austria)
181) Plutonium Action Hiroshima (Japan)
182) Plutonium Free Future (Berkeley, CA)
183) ProgressiveSecretary.org
184) Promoting Enduring Peace (CT) overlooked - Proposition One Committee
185) Queers For Racial & Economic Justice (N.Y.)
186) Raytheon Peacemakers, Central Massachusetts
187) Reality News Network (Palm Beach County, FL)
188) Resource Center for Peace & Justice (Brewster, MA)
189) Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center (Boulder, CO)
190) Svend J. Robinson (MP) New Democratic Party (Canada)
191) Sacramento-Yolo Peace Action (CA)
192) Sacred Earth & Space Plowshares
193) Safe Space (Charlottesville, VA)
194) San Francisco Bay Area Progressive Challenge (CA)
195) San Jose Peace Center (CA)
196) San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace (CA)
197) Save Our World (Vermont)
198) Scientists for Indigenous People
199) SHALOM, Int'l Network for Justice, Peace, Integrity of Creation, S.S.N.D. 200) Shundahai Network
201) Sisters of Loretto (Denver, CO)
202) Social Action Committee of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (CA)
203) Social Justice Committee - Monthly Friends Meeting (Boulder, CO)
204) Socialist Party USA
205) South Dakota Peace & Justice Center
206) SPARK (South Korea)
207) STAND (University of Akron, OH)
208) Steering Committee for the World Day of Actions (Japan)
209) St. Louis Economic Conversion Project (MO)
210) Sustainable Commuity Roundtable (Olympia, WA)
211) Swedish Green Youth
212) Swedish Peace Committee
213) Swedish Peace Council
214) The Article Nine Society Hiroshima (Japan)
215) The Nuclear Resister
216) Theosophical Order of Service Peace Department (Tucson, AZ)
217) The Peace & National Priorities Center (Oakland County MI)
218) Thomas Merton Center (Pittsburgh, PA)
219) Toronto Action for Social Change (Canada)
220) Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA)
221) UNYFY (Union of New York Free Youth)
222) U.S. Peace Council
223) Vandenberg Action Coalition (CA)
224) Veterans Against Nuclear Arms (Canada)
225) Veterans for Peace
226) Veterans for Peace (Gainesville, FL)
227) Veterans for Peace (Great Lakes Region, MN)
228) Veterans for Peace (Ipswich, MA)
229) Voice of Women (Quebec, Canada)
230) Waltham Greens (MA)
231) War Resisters League (New York, NY)
232) War Resisters League (Asheville, N.C. Local)
233) Western N.C. Physicians for Social Responsibility (Asheville)
234) West Marin Radio Project (California)
235) Women for Peace (Denmark)
236) Women for Peace (Berlin, Germany)
237) WILPF (German Section)
238) WILPF (Cape Cod, MA)
239) WILPF (Ann Arbor, MI)
240) WILPF (Asheville, NC)
241) WILPF (British Columbia Branch, Canada)
242) WILPF (Hartford, CT)
243) WILPF (Palo Alto, CA)
244) WILPF (San Francisco, CA)
245) WILPF (Santa Barbara, CA)
246) WILPF (Santa Cruz, CA)
247) WILPF (U.S. Section)
248) Women Speak Out for Peace & Justice/WILPF (Cleveland, OH)
249) World Peace Now (Sarasota, FL)
250) YARMOUK (Damascus, Syria)
251) Yorkshire CND (UK)
252) Young Koreans United of USA (Los Angeles, CA)
253) Youth Approach for Development & Cooperation (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
254) 8th Day Center for Justice (Chicago, IL)
OCTOBER 13 ACTION SITES
1) Adelaide, Australia
2) Albuquerque, N.M.
3) Amherst, MA
4) Ann Arbor, MI
5) Arcata, CA
6) Bangor Subase, WA
7) Beale AFB (CA)
8) Berlin, Germany
9) Boeing (Seattle, WA)
10) Boeing (Mukilteo, WA)
11) Bloomington, IN
12) Boston, MA (Oct 10 "Common Security-Don't Arm the Heavens" panel)
13) Boston, MA (Oct 4 vigil at Park Street Subway station)
14) Buckley AFB (CO)
15) Burlington, VT
16) Cape Cod Air Station, MA (Pave Paws Radar Facility)
17) Charlottesville, VA
18) Chennai, India
19) Chicago, IL
20) Cleveland State University (Keep Space for Peace Conference)
21) Columbia, MO (Post Office - 6th & Walnut))
22) Damascus, Syria
23) Des Moines, IA (Federal Building)
24) Dhaka, Bangladesh
25) Duluth, MN
26) Edwards AFB (California)
27) Ellsworth AFB (South Dakota)
28) Fairbanks, Alaska
29) Fayetteville, AR (Federal Building)
30) Florence, Oregon
31) Ft Meade, MD (National Security Agency HQ)
32) Fylingdales, England (BMD Radar Facility)
33) Hartford, CT
34) Hiroshima, Japan
35) Huntsville, Alabama
36) Isahaya City, Japan
37) Ithaca, N.Y.
38) Kennedy Space Center (Titusville, Florida)
39) Kodiak, Alaska
40) Lockheed Martin (Eagan, MN)
41) Lockheed Martin (Moorestown, NJ)
42) Lockheed Martin (Sunnyvale, CA)
43) Lockheed Martin (Valley Forge, PA)
44) Mankato, MN
45) Marquette, MI (Federal Building)
46) Menwith Hill, England (BMD Ground Relay Station)
47) Mexico City, Mexico
48) Munich, Germany
49) Nagpur, India
50) Nevada Test Site (Sunrise Service)
51) New Haven, CT
52) New York, N.Y. (Washington Square Park)
53) Olympia, WA (Madison School)
54) Osaka, Japan
55) Ottawa, Canada (Oct 5-6)
56) Palo Alto, CA
57) Perth, Australia
58) Peterson AFB (Colorado Springs, CO)
59) Philadelphia, PA (Liberty Bell Pavilion)
60) Phoenix, AZ
61) Pittsburgh, PA (Oct 11, Market Square)
62) Portland, Maine
63) Port Louis, Mauritius
64) Raytheon (Andover, MA - Oct 12)
65) Raytheon (Tucson, AZ)
66) Saintes, France
67) Salt Lake City, Utah
68) San Francisco, CA (Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard)
69) Santa Fe, N.M. (Cerrillos Rd & St. Francis Drive)
70) Seoul, Korea (Oct 11-13)
71) Stennis Missile Testing Center (Mississippi)
72) Stockholm, Sweden
73) St Louis, MO
74) Stuttgart, Germany
75) Takoma Park, MD (Oct 6)
76) Tokyo, Japan (Oct 12 forum)
77) Tokyo, Japan (Oct 14 protest)
78) TRW HQ (Cleveland, OH - Oct 12 & 14)
79) TRW (Fowlerville, MI)
80) USAF Feltwell (Norfolk, England)
81) USAF Lakenheath (Suffolk, England)
82) U.S. Consulate (Perth, Australia - Oct 12)
83) U.S. Consulate (Sydney, Australia)
84) U.S. Embassy (Accra, Ghana)
85) U.S. Embassy (Bucharest, Romania)
86) U.S. Embassy (Dublin, Ireland)
87) U.S. Embassy (London, England)
88) U.S. Embassy (Stockholm, Sweden)
89) U.S. Embassy (Tokyo, Japan)
90) U.S. Embassy (Vienna, Austria)
91) Victoria, Canada
92) Vandenberg AFB (California)
93) Weapon Industri-Terma (Lystrup, Denmark)
94) Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
95) Westport, CT
96) White Sands Missile Test Range, N.M.
97) Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada)
Please make plans to send us photos and reports on your actions immediately afterward so we can put them on our web site for all to see.
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com
-----
I am thankful- a prayer
Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2001
Reply-To: cwolman@mcn.org
1. I am thankful that the terrorists did not target nuclear power plants or use nuclear explosives. I pray that the USA will not cross that line and use nuclear weapons against Afghanistan.
2. I am thankful that the President took prompt and sweeping measures to prevent further terrorist attacks, and there have been no more to date; one was supposedly scheduled for Sept. 22. I am thankful that the USA did not succumb to panic. I pray that we will find ways to protect ourselves without unduly encroaching on our civil liberties.
3. I am thankful that we still have our civil liberties, that we are free today to gather and speak our minds. President Bush defined this conflict as "terror vs. freedom". I pray that he will continue to respect and defend the freedom of the citizens of the USA.
4. I am thankful that, 19 days after 9-11, no Afghanis have been killed by us, the American people are not screaming for blood, and we are dropping food and blankets to the refugees streaming out of the Afghani cities. I pray that Bush will continue to treat this as a manhunt for criminals rather than a war, despite his rhetoric.
5. I am thankful that the administration has been forced to reverse its isolationism and bullying tactics, and go to the international community for help. I am thankful that it has reversed its contempt for the UN, and gotten a strong antiterrorist measure through the Security Council that starts to shift the burden of fighting terrorism to the international community. I pray that this new attitude of cooperation will extend to working on global warming, abolishing nuclear weapons, abolishing poverty, and the host of other problems facing our planet today.
6. I am especially thankful that missile defense and star wars are no longer at the center of the administration's foreign policy, now that it has been replaced by the war on terrorism. I am thankful that Russia just reiterated its firmness on upholding the ABM treaty. I pray that escalating the nuclear arms race will disappear from the national agenda, and abolition of nuclear weapons will replace it.
7. I am thankful that Americans are being forced to look at US foreign policy and wonder why such hatred is directed at us. I pray that the President will publicly acknowledge that this country has inflicted terror and death on civilians in many other nations, will repent and sin no more.
8. I am thankful that the President is a Christian, and prays to the same God that I do, the God that tells us to beat swords into plowshares, and sends us the Prince of Peace. Bush has called this "a Christian war", a "fight of good against evil". I pray that God tells him the same thing He tells me,- not to kill innocent people, to respond to hatred with love, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.
9. Most of all, I am thankful for the wonderful peace movement, which is filling the streets and the Internet. I pray that God will be with us and use us to bring peace to this sad old world at last.
--------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!