------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
NUKE TERRORISM: 44 CHERNOBYLS AT ONCE
Terror attack at Indian Point would put 20M people at risk

MILITARY
Taliban claims oil fuels U.S. bombing
Taliban arms allies on the border
Life Inside Afghanistan: Chaos, Fear and Refugees
Holy-war posters surface in Bosnia
Anti-Terror Campaign Turns to Doctors
Problems in Bioterror Response
'Germs': The Troubling Story of Biological Weapons
Official Iraqi Paper Praises Bin Laden
Kabul and Kandahar Hit as Fourth U.S. Carrier Is Sent to Theater
U.S. bombs hit Afghan homes
U.S. to Target Elite Taliban Assault Force
U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan

OTHER
An invitation to learn about alternative energy
'Cure' for blindness discovered in spinach

POLICE
In Federal Law Enforcement, 'All the Walls Are Down'
Bounty proposed on terror suspects

ACTIVISTS
Peace Protesters Stage Rallies Across Europe and Australia
Academics and activists call for peace
About 20,000 protest in Germany
peace demonstrations in Germany
Join us for a peace vigil against the war Wed. mornings in SF
GUATEMALAN TERRORISTS
No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak
Surprise at large turnout for national anti-war rally
Global Oppressors Can't Deliver Justice
Hundreds protest bombing by U.S.
Striking the match, starting the fire
Thousands in Berlin peace march against Afghan bombing
'Stop bombing Afghanistan!' London protesters say




-------- NUCLEAR

NUKE TERRORISM: 44 CHERNOBYLS AT ONCE

From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001
online.ie 11 Oct 2001
http://www.tmia.com/sabter.html & http://www.nci.org

New Scientist magazine has claimed that a terrorist attack on the Sellafield nuclear complex in northern England could potentially be 44 times worse than the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

The magazine said that if a hijacked jumbo jet crashed into the part of Sellafield where radioactive waste is stored, as much as half the waste would be ejected into the atmosphere.

Sellafield has 21 concrete and steel storage tanks containing more than 1,500 cubic metres of high-level caesium-137 waste. That is around 90 times the level of waste released when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded 15 years ago.

New Scientist claims a jumbo jet crash would break open the Sellafield storage tanks and release a plume of radioactivity into the air.

The burning fuel would also continue to pump radioactive material into the atmosphere, while a collapse in the cooling system would cause surviving storage tanks to heat up and spew out more radioactivity within hours.

The magazine said an incident like this "would contaminate large parts of Britain and, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Ireland, continental Europe and beyond. Some places would become inhabitable."

Following the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986, an exclusion zone of 4,800 square kilometres was established around the plant. Radiation spread so far that sheep in some parts of Wales still have to be tested before they are allowed into the food chain.

So far, the disaster has caused 11,000 confirmed cases of thyroid cancer in Ukraine and Belarus.

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

-------- new york

Terror attack at Indian Point would put 20M people at risk

Sunday October 14, 2001 10:54:52 AM
By ROGER WITHERSPOON
THE JOURNAL NEWS (Original publication: Oct. 14, 2001)

A catastrophic terrorist attack on the nuclear power plants at Indian Point could leave more than 20 million people in a 50-mile radius trying to flee lethal radioactive clouds without clear guidance from federal and state emergency officials.

A meltdown of the nuclear fuel and a fire at the two plants, 24 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River's eastern bank, would affect all of New York City as well as Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange, Sullivan, Ulster, Dutchess, Nassau and Suffolk counties. In New Jersey, Bergen, Passaic, Sussex, Hudson and Essex counties would be threatened. So would Fairfield County and parts of New Haven County in Connecticut, and eastern Pennsylvania around the Delaware Water Gap.

Though Nassau and Suffolk counties are outside the 50-mile zone, their 2.7 million residents would be cut off on the eastern end of the 120-mile Long Island unless they fled through New York City to New Jersey, or through Westchester to New England.

All would have to travel a limited number of bridges and roadways to leave in a matter of hours.

"An evacuation could not work around New York for that kind of radioactive release," said Paul Leventhal, head of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, D.C. "The kind of panic that would result from people deciding whether to flee or seek shelter should be avoided. It would make the response to the World Trade Center look like a picnic."

"There is no way we can evacuate this region if there is a nuclear emergency here," Westchester County Legislator Thomas Abinanti, D-Greenburgh, said last week, following a security briefing with other state and county officials at Indian Point by Entergy Corp., the plants' owner. "We try to evacuate White Plains every day, and the infrastructure is so limited that we are choked with traffic during a normal rush hour.

Gov. George Pataki yesterday ordered National Guard troops to begin protecting Indian Point and the state's other nuclear power plants.

For decades, federal officials, nuclear power operators and emergency planners believed that the prospect of destroyed containment buildings, a runaway nuclear meltdown and fire was too remote for which to realistically plan.

They planned, instead, for the possible need to evacuate people within one mile around the plants' site in Buchanan, and up to 10 miles within the direction that wind would carry radioactive particles. This "Ingestion Emergency Pathway Zone" or IPZ, is all planners believed they needed to prepare.

The plan depends on an orderly withdrawal, with school and public buses making repeated trips to Westchester to remove children and others from the affected area over several hours.

Only since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that the huge, reinforced concrete containment domes around American nuclear reactors are not designed to withstand the impact of a hit by modern, wide-bodied jets. The attacks also showed the plants' vulnerability, as both jets that slammed into the Twin Towers flew south along the Hudson River, directly above or not far from IP2.

Current emergency evacuation plans are not designed to handle the result of such a terrorist action, and only envision the release of a radioactive cloud over a short time period.

The plans do not envision a destroyed containment building, a nuclear reactor meltdown or a prolonged fire that would spew radioactive particles into the atmosphere for weeks, like the one that engulfed the Ukrainian nuclear plant at Chernobyl in April 1986. That left a permanent lethal zone of contamination around the city for 50 miles. Winds and waterways also deposited long-lasting radioactive material hundreds of miles away.

American emergency plans for nuclear accidents do not contemplate the need to move the public from such a wide region, as would be necessary in New York. The plans assume residents will wait patiently in their homes for instructions and follow directions to move out of the path of wind-borne radiation.

"Our evacuation plans are for a 10-mile zone," said Don Mauer of the New York State Emergency Management Office. "There are no detailed evacuation plans for the miles 10 through 50. The public is notified within the areas that require evacuation. We have the police to establish traffic control points for an orderly flow of people out of the area."

If radiation should spread, he said, "Those folks would be notified by public announcement that they have to leave the area."

The state's plans envision orderly, controlled evacuations from individual segments within the 10-mile zone around the plants. Those regions would depend on the prevailing winds at the time of the accident.

Nowhere do the plans contemplate the widespread movement of millions of people fleeing the uncontrolled release of radiation over several days, traveling in several directions.

"There has long been discussion in the emergency management community as to whether or not you could evacuate New York," said William Waugh, professor of public administration and urban studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

"That's particularly true of places like Manhattan, where you have limited access to bridges and tunnels. How do you move so many people in New York who don't have automobiles and rely on mass transportation? It could injure more people than you save."

It would be difficult to maintain order, Waugh said, even though the existing plans depend on it.

"There has been talk about fear management," he said, "and how do you contain a population at risk when you want to keep them quarantined and want to avoid panic? In a panic response, a lot of people would be injured trying to get out of the area. I imagine it is not possible to evacuate that many people."

Critics of the NRC, which regulates the nuclear industry's actions during an accident, and other emergency management agencies have long disputed the planned cutoff at 10 miles.

"I don't think the basis for the 10-mile zone was quantitatively linked to anything," said Ed Lymann, a physicist and scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington. "It would have been smaller if the industry had had its way. They were afraid it would alarm the public."

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan pointed out that evacuations are the responsibility of federal and state emergency agencies. "We look at the on-site response," he said, "because people at the plant are making decisions that greatly impact decisions on evacuations, like determining the level of emergency."

Lymann said there was validity to the industry's argument that the most lethal radioactive particles would fall closest to the site of the accident. But that does not mean people farther away would be safe.

"You can get pretty high assurances that you won't have acute radiation exposures far away," he said. "But broader contamination, causing death from cancer, can happen hundreds of miles from the plant. If you look at Chernobyl, there are areas of contamination a hundred miles away that are almost as high as right near the plant because of the prevailing wind patterns."

The prevailing winds in this region are from the northwest, blowing across Indian Point down to New York City and Long Island. During the course of several days, however, the winds shift in all directions.

"If you have a fire like they had at Chernobyl," said Tom Bevan of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, "the contamination went hundreds of nautical miles away."

A 10-mile evacuation, Bevan said, would be potentially effective only if radioactive steam was released. Radioactive material caught in a petroleum or other fire goes high into the atmosphere and spreads, said Bevan, who headed the U.S.-Ukraine Land Management Resource Center in Kiev, Ukraine, to oversee the assessment and cleanup of Chernobyl.

The situation in Chernobyl was complicated by the fact that Ukraine was then part of the Soviet Union, and the Communist government wasn't willing to admit to the unfolding catastrophe.

"The Soviets weren't willing to tell anyone that the stuff was blowing north," Bevan said. "They evacuated people away from the reactor and right into the path of where the fallout was going."

It took more than 600,000 emergency workers to cover the fire with sand and cement; up to 80,000 of them died, according to Sergei Korsunsky, science attache at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.

"In the civilian population," Korsunsky said, "we estimate about 3.5 million people were exposed to harmful doses of radiation. What is most terrible is that at least 1.5 million children were exposed."

The biggest long-term problem that resulted from the contamination was thyroid gland cancer, triggered by radioactive iodine isotopes.

"With my own eyes," Korsunsky said, "I saw villages where there were several hundred children and all of them - each and every single child - had thyroid problems. They had some kind of cancer or were on the way to getting cancer."

David Lochbaum, a former consultant to Indian Point 3 and a nuclear safety expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said the NRC is still reluctant to consider a catastrophe in its planning.

Lochbaum attended a two-day meeting on nuclear plant security at NRC headquarters in Maryland last week. "The issue of a plane crashing into a dome wasn't discussed," he said. "They didn't do anything to address trucks, boats, airplanes or whatever. They are only dealing with ground threats, which was their concern all along."

Lochbaum said the refusal of emergency planners to consider the destruction of a nuclear plant's containment building "was a fault even before Sept. 11."

"The containment can fail from the inside," he said.

A full meltdown would cause steam explosions with enough force to break open the containment buildings, he said, and "our containment structures aren't designed to handle that scenario."

An external attack, Lochbaum cautioned, would also threaten the storage pools of spent fuel at Indian Point 2 and 3. The pools are not housed in the containment buildings.

Radiation from a meltdown of the reactor's nuclear fuel in a destroyed containment building would have the same effect on the population as radiation from ignited fuel in the storage pools.

"The difference is, a reactor accident causes more fatalities in the first year," Lochbaum said. "With the radiation from spent fuel, more fatalities occur after one year from cancer than acute radiation exposure."



-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Taliban claims oil fuels U.S. bombing

October 14, 2001
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011014-99934380.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The Taliban, whether from twisted perceptions or a cynical propaganda ploy, is claiming the United States is bombing Afghanistan not to capture Osama bin Laden but to seize the "oil and natural resources of Central Asia."

By claiming a secret, commercial motive as the real reason for America's new war, the Taliban apparently hopes to convince world opinion that greed forms the root of Washington's air campaign against military targets in Afghanistan.

Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the Taliban's black-turbaned, black-bearded ambassador in Islamabad, laid out the claim at a news conference late last week. Reading from a one-page, typed document written in English and titled "American Terrorist Attacks on Afghanistan Continues," Mr. Zaeef said: "The present game is more about oil and natural resources of Central Asia" than about Osama bin Laden, leader of the organization identified by the United States as responsible for the deaths of more than 5,000 people in New York and at the Pentagon.

"To achieve this, America wants to replace the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with a pro-American government in Kabul," the ambassador read while sitting on the embassy's covered porch to journalists who stood on the front lawn in drizzling rain.

"Aggression has been launched against our sovereignty and independence, and global dictatorship is being unleashed by America under the cover of defending democracy."

Mr. Zaeef did not elaborate on the latest Taliban salvo against Washington.

It was not clear whether the Taliban's description of a blood-for-oil war was simply false propaganda to deflect attention from its sheltering of bin Laden, or a rare glimpse into the actual perception of Afghanistan's xenophobic, reclusive leadership.

In 1996, U.S.-based Unocal Corp. and other petrochemical firms were competing for the rights to construct a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan.

Unocal and other corporations were stymied, however, by heavy fighting between the newly victorious Taliban regime in Kabul and the freshly ousted Northern Alliance, which lost power after a 1992-1996 reign marked by bloody infighting.

"We are hopeful that this is a temporary situation," Unocal Pakistan Ltd.'s president and general manager, Richard Keller, was quoted by Reuters as saying in mid-October 1996, referring to the battles between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.

Two weeks earlier, when the Taliban seized power in Kabul for the first time, Unocal International Energy Ventures Ltd.'s executive vice president, Chris Taggart, was more upbeat. "I understand Pakistan has already recognized the [Taliban] government," Mr. Taggart was quoted as saying on Oct. 1, 1996. "If the U.S. follows, it will lead the way to international lending agencies coming in.

"If the Taliban leads to stability and international recognition, then it's positive," Mr. Taggart added, expressing an optimism that was ultimately shattered when President Clinton refused to establish diplomatic relations with the Taliban.

Unocal had hoped to team up with Delta Oil Co. of Saudi Arabia to construct a pipeline and was tentatively mapping Afghanistan with satellite imagery, while trying to raise cash through the World Bank, foreign investors and other sources, according to news reports at the time.

"Obviously there has to be a government acceptable to the Afghans and the outside world," Mr. Keller was quoted as saying. The pipeline would have tapped into a lucrative gas field under Turkmenistan, in the Dauletabad zone, which was said to contain billions of cubic feet of natural gas.

If a 1,000-mile-long pipeline had been built across Afghanistan, the natural gas could have been shipped for sale to power plants in Pakistan, India and elsewhere.

Running south from Turkmenistan, the pipeline could have entered Afghanistan's northwest corner near Heart - a scene of current U.S. and British bombardment - and dodged the country's rugged central mountains by curving across the southern desert past Kandahar, the Taliban's headquarters. The pipeline would have exited Afghanistan near Kandahar by veering into southern Pakistan, near Quetta.

--------

Taliban arms allies on the border

October 14, 2001
By Anwar Faruqi
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011014-13459900.htm

CHAMAN, Pakistan - Girding for a U.S. ground attack, Afghanistan's Taliban fighters are arming supporters along both sides of the border and ordering people to evacuate towns and villages in the area, residents and Pakistani officials said yesterday.

Villagers who live along Pakistan's long, porous border also said the Taliban has dug trenches and fortified positions along the Afghan side of the frontier. On Friday, Pakistan's Frontier Corps was digging its own trenches on the low, drab hills that overlook the road to the border.

The border has been tense since Pakistan, once the Taliban's staunchest ally, pledged to cooperate in U.S.-led efforts to flush out or kill Osama bin Laden, who lives in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.

He is the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States.

Qila Leva, whose dirt-poor population of 200 straddles both sides of the border, is one of the villages ordered evacuated by the Taliban.

"About six days ago, some Taliban came and told us to leave," said Hadi Shad Khan, 50, whose home is on the Pakistani side of the line. "They said they wanted to build fortifications here."

In the towns of Vesh and Spin Boldak, which are near the border on the Afghan side and have survived economically thanks to a flourishing smuggling trade, residents said they had been told the same thing by Taliban fighters.

"We have been told to leave for our own safety," said Abdul Bari, a shopkeeper in Spin Boldak who runs his business out of a ship's cargo container. He spoke along the no-man's land separating the two countries.

The Taliban appeared to be making preparations in case any U.S. assault came on the ground at this southern stretch of the border near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, where the terrain is less mountainous. U.S. military leaders have hinted at imminent ground action after days of bombardment of Afghanistan, but have not said what form it will take.

In Chaman, whose estimated 400,000 people live off the smuggling trade with Vesh and Spin Boldak, many businesses that trade in smuggled goods such as Japanese consumer items, soap and tires have been moving inventories from warehouses in Afghanistan back into Pakistan.

Businessmen in Chaman, who travel daily into Afghanistan without passports or other travel documents, said the Taliban were insisting that merchants remove flammable items such as fuel, rubber tires and textiles - presumably to keep them from feeding fires caused by U.S. munitions.

Rumors have been widespread that the Taliban are stockpiling weapons in Vesh and Spin Boldak because they believe the Americans would be reluctant to attack targets so close to the border with Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the anti-terrorism campaign. No one, however, has seen convincing evidence of weapons being stored there.

Col. Mohammed Sarwar, commander of Pakistan's Frontier Corps, confirmed yesterday that he had met with Taliban officials the day before to warn the Afghans against trying to clear Qila Leva and other territories that belong to Pakistan.

"They asked the villagers to leave a few days ago," Col. Sarwar said. "We told them to stop doing this."

In Spin Boldak, Alauddin Ayatullah, a young Taliban preacher at the local mosque, said loyalists were being given arms. "We have arms and we are circulating them. But we are not giving them to just anyone," Mr. Ayatullah said.

--------

Life Inside Afghanistan: Chaos, Fear and Refugees

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55949-2001Oct13.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 13 -- A week of methodical pounding by U.S. warplanes has demolished what little modern weaponry the Taliban had and ripped apart its military infrastructure. But the bombing has done little to prompt mass desertions or kill the Taliban fighters, many of whom are now reported to be dispersed in residential neighborhoods and across the forbidding terrain of Afghanistan waiting for American troops to arrive.

As the U.S. air campaign grinds on largely out of sight, this is the picture of conditions inside Afghanistan that emerges from extensive interviews with recently arrived refugees, aid workers with Afghan staff still in the country, opposition leaders in northern Afghanistan and senior Pakistani intelligence and military officers with contacts in Taliban ranks.

It is a spotty picture of chaos and conflict, pieced together from ordinary people's anecdotes and official sources with a stake in the battle. But from what they have heard and seen emerges a clear image of tragedy: 27 million inhabitants of Afghanistan undergoing yet another bloody episode in the struggles that have kept them more or less at war -- with others and with themselves -- for more than 20 years.

The main target of the current conflict, Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born Islamic militant accused of promoting the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, appears to have eluded capture or death. As far as is known, he is still hiding somewhere in Afghanistan. His survival and the continued rule of his partners in the radical Taliban organization seem to point to eventual ground attacks by U.S. special operations soldiers, meaning things are unlikely to get better for Afghans in the weeks ahead.

Several thousand of bin Laden's foreign followers in Afghanistan -- estimated to number between 5,000 and 15,000, most of them Arabs -- have been integrated into the Taliban army, facing an array of rebel groups in the north. But most of the others in bin Laden's ranks were ordered to try to sneak into Pakistan or one of the Central Asian countries to the north, Pakistani intelligence sources said. As a result, they concluded, the ability of bin Laden's al Qaeda organization to operate in Afghanistan has been severely crippled for the time being.

"Whatever al Qaeda is left in Afghanistan is restricted to those bunch of Arabs who may be hiding in some cave with Osama bin Laden," one Pakistani military official said.

The U.S. bombing, launched last Sunday night as the opening salvo in what President Bush has vowed will be a long-term battle against terrorism, has largely spared residential neighborhoods in Afghan cities, although Taliban officials say up to 200 people were killed in a single village near Jalalabad on Thursday. As a result, Taliban soldiers in Kabul, the capital, and the country's other main cities have quit their barracks and fanned out into populated areas to avoid being hit -- and to wait for the arrival of U.S. ground forces.

"The abandonment of military garrisons is the main reason there have not been significant Taliban casualties in the U.S. raids," said a Pakistani intelligence source. A senior Pakistani military officer, referring to Taliban leader Mohammad Omar, added: "Mullah Omar ordered his troops to move into congested localities of Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar and wait until the U.S. boots touch the ground in Afghanistan."

At the same time, according to opposition leaders, the United States has deliberately refrained, for now, from bombing Taliban forces stationed north of Kabul in an effort to forestall an offensive on the city by commanders in the rebel coalition, known as the Northern Alliance.

The bombs and missiles raining on Afghanistan have hit military and other official Taliban facilities adjacent to and inside cities and towns, even terrifying people hardened by years of previous warfare. Thousands of Afghan families -- no one knows how many -- have fled into the countryside and along roads leading toward the officially closed border with Pakistan. With the harsh Afghan winter closing in, this has set the stage for what aid workers fear could be a human disaster unless waiting truck convoys can swiftly bring in food from depots in Pakistan.

"There are a lot of IDPs [internally displaced people] who left after Sunday and never went back," said a relief official whose organization has moved its non-Afghan staff members to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. "They are now in food trouble, serious trouble."

The World Food Program fed 3.8 million people a day in Afghanistan even before the bombing campaign. These included 900,000 internal refugees in aid camps. Although U.S. aircraft have dropped thousands of packets of ready-to-eat meals since last Sunday, only truck convoys can move sufficient food into Afghanistan before winter, the aid official said, and only two convoys have gotten through. The WFP announced today that the second convoy since the bombing began was nearing Kabul.

"We have to assume there will be a death toll," he said. 'Like an Earthquake'

Television may be banned by the Taliban in Afghanistan, but cheap transistor radios are everywhere, and one of them belongs to an aid worker in Kandahar who asked to be identified only as Mujaddadi. Thirty minutes before the airstrikes began last Sunday, he was listening to a BBC report that said Washington was continuing to press the Taliban to turn over bin Laden.

After 20 days of rumors and the certainty that the United States would attack, Mujaddadi recalled that he and many others in Kandahar, the Taliban's base, suddenly thought there might be no attack at all.

"No, they're not coming," Mujaddadi concluded. "And all of a sudden it started."

The first explosion was at 9:30 p.m. local time. It was in the direction of the airport, about 12 miles from downtown Kandahar. It was a somewhat muffled sound, but the reaction was instant panic. Then came a second explosion, this one much closer.

"Just like an earthquake," Mujaddadi recalled, speaking later in Quetta, the large Pakistani city across the border from Kandahar. "Because all the homes in Kandahar are mud houses, not cement, that was the one where everything shook."

The target of that hit, Mujaddadi said, was the compound that comprised Omar's residence and a guesthouse. But the Taliban leader was unharmed, having gone into hiding before the opening attack.

"It was chaos," Mujaddadi recalled. "It was just like what happened in New York City after the Twin Towers collapsed. People were hysterical, scared. People were getting whatever vehicles they could and putting their women and children in them and telling the drivers to take them out of the area, wherever. . . . People had their shoes in their hands, and they were running."

He left his house toward the center of town. There was no electricity -- not because the grid was hit by a bomb, but because the Taliban had ordered all lights turned off. He saw Taliban militiamen patrolling the city in their pickups, warning people to stay inside, to be calm, not to panic, not to begin looting.

The first barrage lasted from 9:30 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. A second barrage began at 4 a.m. and lasted about a half-hour, again at the airport. The movement out of Kandahar lasted through the night, and by noon the next day, when he left, Kandahar seemed empty, although not deserted.

Mujaddadi, a bearded young man with a white shalwar kameez, the traditional dress of his Pashtun ethnic group, said when he passed the airport, the glass in the control tower had been broken out, and a radar unit on top of the control tower had been wrecked. He said there was heavy traffic heading toward the border, but also heavy return traffic, because the border remains sealed to people without proper papers.

He was told thousands had tried to cross since morning. Most were turned back, but some managed to cross by bribing their way, going in taxis whose drivers flashed fake Pakistani ID cards they keep in their glove compartment, or by paying $1 for a 10-minute motorcycle ride through passes that circumvent the official crossing.

Mujaddadi, an Afghan armed with his aid organization's identity card, made it through after five hours.

Another Afghan aid worker who sought refuge in Quetta on Friday, who also wanted to be identified only by his first name, Ahmed, said Thursday was the fiercest day of bombardment in Kandahar.

"It was when the weapons depot was hit. Three missiles landed but missed," he said. "Then a jet came and launched bombs, and those hit the depot. . . . The depot was full of weapons, built up for years, including Russian weapons, and all of it exploded."

He said the explosions in the depot lasted through the night and continued into the next morning. Nine people injured by the explosions were brought to the hospital where he works. He said four were seriously hurt with injuries to the head, face and stomach.

Each night after dark, he said, the Taliban have been driving around Kandahar, passing out weapons to whoever would take them. But by the time he left, Ahmed said, businesses in downtown Kandahar had reopened, people were still there and the electricity was on. Watching From Rooftops

In much-battered Kabul, most people stayed indoors on the first few nights of bombing. But according to residents reached by telephone, soon the pattern of the attacks became known, and many residents went to their roofs to watch the warplanes strike the airport and military installations.

Markets remained open, with adequate supplies of meat, vegetables and fruit for those who can afford them, the parents of a young Afghan here told him by telephone from their apartment in Kabul. Electricity is on only in the early evening, they told him, but that regimen is not much worse than it was before the bombing began. Although most schools have closed, government offices were open to collect taxes through most of the week, and the youth's father, who works for the government, showed up at his office on schedule.

Fears of Taliban authority have remained high, indicating the bombing has not disrupted the militia's ability to enforce its will, police the city or tap the phones. On faxed advice from his father, for instance, the young Afghan, who calls home to Kabul almost every day, always asks his family how "our brothers," the Taliban, are doing.

Strangely, as the bombs fell through the week, the national currency, the afghani, gained strength against the dollar in Kabul, moving from 80,000 per dollar before the bombing campaign to about 45,000. Knowledgeable sources in Islamabad attributed the shift to hope for a political solution that would end the country's interminable fighting.

Checkpoints were set up around Kabul on the first night of bombing to prevent residents from leaving. But that did not stop an immediate exodus -- not of refugees, but of Taliban troops. Piling into pickup trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, they drove out of the city toward the front lines to the north, not bothering to douse their headlights, according to Northern Alliance rebels who watched the movements.

By daybreak, a similar convoy of vehicles began snaking back into the city over gravel roads.

Despite the bombing, Taliban forces have set up defensive outposts at key locations around Kabul, combining tanks and artillery units with antiaircraft batteries, according to an infiltrator working in Kabul for rebel commander Amanullah Guzar who smuggled back a letter at midweek.

According to the letter, the Taliban stationed a Russian-made ground-to-air missile system at the bottom of the main landing strip at the airport; a tank, two artillery pieces and three antiaircraft batteries in the area around the old 8th Division headquarters and a BM-21 multiple rocket launcher, two tanks and a command post opposite the old Intercontinental Hotel, where troops are housed.

The main military command post is in the center of the city where Mohammed Hassan, said to be the third-ranking person in the Taliban hierarchy, supervises the defense of the capital, the letter said. Fleeing to Villages

Near Jalalabad, in northeast Afghanistan across the border from the Pakistani city of Peshawar, the intense bombing on Thursday killed 160 to 200 people in the village of Kadam, according to Taliban officials. In the city itself, another 29 were reported killed in bomb and missile attacks.

Malik Jalal Shezad, a local political leader, said the bombing appeared to have been "very accurate" earlier in the week, striking the nearby airport, a small hydroelectric dam and military facilities outside the city.

"They are bombing only the empty places, but the women and children are very afraid," he said after reaching Peshawar on Thursday. "The city is 100 percent empty now. Everyone has migrated to the villages and scattered.

Shezad said he saw Taliban troops firing against the U.S. planes, but they were too high to reach. The Taliban military, he said, moved a convoy of about 140 pickup trucks into the area during the week to reinforce the city.

The local leader said he witnessed a widely reported incident in which a French journalist, Michel Peyrard, who was caught sneaking into Afghanistan disguised as a woman, was driven through the streets of Jalalabad by Taliban authorities, still covered in the veil and long robe.

"Some of the people wanted to stone him, and some Arabs wanted to shoot him, but the Taliban rescued him and took him away in the vehicle," Shezad said.

Taliban officials have charged Peyrard with spying and have said they will put him on trial. Nervous About Defections

In the mountains of central Afghanistan, news that the U.S. bombing had begun arrived like a flash. Nuridin Akhmady, a former Taliban commander, had been waiting for the moment. Like many Afghan mujaheddin, or holy warriors, he initially welcomed Taliban rule when the militia swept into Kabul in 1996, ending several years of fratricidal conflict among rival guerrilla groups.

"I thought the Taliban were good people, good Muslims," he said. But then they took over his mountain town. "When they arrived, within several days they began to arrest people."

Then about three months ago, they killed his brother.

After the U.S. bombing began, Akhmady organized 35 fellow commanders in his isolated region to defect along with 1,000 of their men. More important than the troops, however, was the road they brought with them, the only open north-south route for the Taliban to supply the north.

Akhmady's has been the only defection of any scale, although a key U.S. goal is to peel away Taliban commanders.

In the weeks leading up to the beginning of military action Oct. 7, a number of Taliban officials visited opposition and exile groups in Pakistan, making overtures for a peaceful solution to the crisis that would revolve around a return of the former Afghan king, a senior diplomatic source said. But the feelers have ceased now that bombing is underway, he added.

According to a Northern Alliance infiltrator in the Jalalabad area, Taliban leaders appear nervous about defections. "They're very scared, not of the United States, but of the United Front," he said, using another term for the Northern Alliance, "because they know many local commanders have contacts with the United Front."

He said Taliban leaders went around to local commanders seeking loyalty.

"Will you fight against the United Front or not?" he said they asked. "We must wage jihad against the United States," he quoted them as saying. "We must defend our homeland. It's our duty to defend the country. We must not be afraid of anybody. God will help us."

Correspondents David Finkel in Quetta, Peter Baker in northern Afghanistan, Susan B. Glasser in Tashkent and Pamela Constable in Peshawar, and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi, contributed to this report.

-------- balkans

Holy-war posters surface in Bosnia

October 14, 2001
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011014-9486484.htm

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Posters exhorting Bosnia's Muslims to rise in holy war against America were printed and ready for pasting about the time the first U.S. cruise missile slammed into Afghanistan.

"We want a third and a fourth world war for Islam - long live bin Laden," reads one of several posters recently confiscated by police. "Afghanistan, Bosnia - why wouldn't you fight for oppressed men, women and children?" asks another.

Mostly secular or religious moderates, the overwhelming majority of Bosnia's more than 1 million Muslims, pose no terrorist threat. Most remain grateful to the United States for its support in their 1990s war against Serbs and Croats and condemn the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"It's always the innocent who die," said Lejla Hamic, 20, a deeply observant Muslim covered head to toe in traditional garb. "I feel sorry for the people of America."

Still, as the United States widens its war against Osama bin Laden, officials are paying attention to signs that a radical fringe is trying to stir up Bosnia, one the largest Muslim areas in Europe.

Chief U.N. war-crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said last week she had turned over information to the United States on "people who were staying in Bosnia in connection with terrorist groups."

And Mohammed Besic, interior minister of the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia, acknowledged that "terrorism is a danger" as he announced the arrest of Bensayah Belkacem, who was carrying Yemeni and Algerian passports and is accused of discussing - on the phone with a bin Laden aide - how to procure foreign passports.

Twenty other suspects are being screened on U.S. request, he said. Bosnia is home for up to 200 Islamic fighters, or mujahideen, who came to the country mostly from the Middle East to fight on the Muslim side in the 1990s war against Serbs and Croats, then stayed and married local women.

Some of those who fought in Bosnia have been linked to terrorist acts, including three Saudi nationals who confessed to the 1995 bombing of a U.S. base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, according to a report compiled for the U.S. Congress. It says the three also fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Bosnia's mujahideen lead secretive, separate lives. Before dropping out of sight, their Palestinian leader, Imad Hussein Abu Hamza, last month distanced himself from the "killing of children, women, innocent people and civilians."

But alluding to the still-to-come U.S. strikes on Afghanistan, he said "the entire Islamic world" has an obligation to defend Muslims there, should they need help.

Since Sept. 11, potential radicals, including the Islamic fighters, have been under increased surveillance by police working with the FBI and NATO intelligence, international officials say. The new government in the Muslim-Croat federation appears to have been goaded into action by the attacks and Western pressure to get tough or lose crucial financial and political support.

-------- biological weapons

Anti-Terror Campaign Turns to Doctors
Physicians Scramble to Learn About Bio-Weapons; Some Urge Mandated Training

By Avram Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55906-2001Oct13.html

Public health officials say vast numbers of the nation's private doctors are uninformed about how to recognize, treat and report casualties of a biological attack.

Although tens of thousands of physicians have given themselves crash courses on anthrax and other bioterrorism threats in the past month, most doctors aren't familiar with the 12 bacteria, viruses and toxins most likely to be used as biological weapons, health officials say.

"Every community has physicians who are well versed and prepared to respond, but they are probably the exception," said Craig DeAtley, an associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University. Before the attacks, physician interest in seminars was minimal, he said.

Some health officials have suggested that community physicians be urged, if not required, to undergo bioterrorism training to increase the likelihood that the public health system will perform effectively after an attack. Nothing less will suffice, they say, if the government is to respond promptly with drugs and vaccinations that could avert thousands of deaths in population centers.

In the past month, doctors have been offered a barrage of scientific information from medical societies, state health departments and scholarly journals. Health officials hope doctors will take advantage of that free knowledge so they will be able to recognize and treat biological casualties, resist prescribing antibiotics unnecessarily and -- above all -- report suspicious cases immediately.

"The physicians in the U.S. have not been trained to think of themselves as part of the public health network," said Arlington County Health Director Susan Allan. "It wasn't part of their training or practice to be sentinels. I would mobilize every stick of furniture I have to respond to a biological attack, but we can only do something if the calls come to us."

Allan, like other public health leaders, worries that a few infected victims could lead to mass casualties if doctors and druggists are not vigilant.

"Everybody is looking to see anything unusual, but they don't have the knowledge of what to look for," said Mohammed Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association and former health director for the District. "Your eyes won't see what the mind doesn't know. Most of us have not seen these exotic, tropical-type diseases in this country."

But DeAtley and other educators are optimistic that public pressure on doctors and their thirst for knowledge will encourage training.

Some doctors support mandatory bioterrorism education. Ramesh Desai, an Arlington gastroenterologist and internist, thinks most doctors already are ready but supports one mandatory three-hour course to reach the "last 10 or 20 percent who are not prepared."

Others reject the idea.

"Mandating education is a fool's errand," said Cheryl Winchell, a Gaithersburg family practitioner and former member of Maryland Board of Physician Quality Assurance. "We dealt with this issue repeatedly at the board, and I was successful for nine years in keeping that from happening. The last thing we need is a law."

Winchell thinks the nation's physicians will "self-correct" their weaknesses -- especially if patients ask doctors whether they have upgraded their knowledge. "If patients start asking that question, doctors will be more likely to stay one step ahead of them," she said.

To help them do that, the D.C. Medical Society will hold a seminar on bioterrorism next month. Still, the group's president, cardiologist Stuart Seides, thinks the heightened concern about the subject should not skew the nation's health care agenda.

"People are still dying in large numbers of AIDS, heart disease, cancer, accidents and other things that were happening before September 11," he said. "I don't think bioterrorism trumps everything else and pushes it into the corner. It scares us, and we think about it all the time right now. But as we move away from this, we will need to put it into perspective."

Medical leaders say doctors are educating themselves. They are being invited to chat rooms, teleconferences, hospital meetings, medical society gatherings and lectures by epidemiologists. Government officials are issuing advisories.

An online medical reference site, emedicine.com, is making more than 2,000 pages of peer-reviewed articles on trauma, terrorism, biochemical and radiological warfare available free to physicians. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published on its Web site the consensus results of scientific conferences on bioterrorism, said AMA board Chairman Timothy T. Flaherty.

A Falls Church technology firm, C2 Technologies Inc., recently finished an interactive training program designed to teach Navy and Marine doctors how to rapidly assess, diagnose and treat victims of exposure to biological, chemical and radiological weapons. C2 created the computer program under a Navy contract using extensive databases provided by biowarfare experts in the military, said company President Curtis Cox. The computer-based program can present 110 attack scenarios and score doctors on their performance. Navy officials did not say Friday whether they would make the material available to private doctors.

George Washington University is developing a program for all health care professionals that includes interactive, Web-based training and live components.

Julie Casani, Maryland's bioterrorism coordinator, has seen demand surge for her class. Before the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Casani had booked eight courses for doctors through January.

"I now have 24 courses scheduled" in the same period, with up to 100 doctors in each class, she said. "And that doesn't include the little one-hour talks we're being asked to give."

Casani said community physicians are hungry for information. "There's a sense of unease among physicians," she said. "People have never seen a case. They are as overwhelmed at the prospect of an overwhelming epidemic and outbreak as everyone else."

Maryland Health Secretary Georges C. Benjamin said doctors must be trained not to assume that every patient complaint is ordinary.

"Doctors should track it closely, get a second opinion sooner or order an additional test that they wouldn't order before," he said.

Akhter said he is especially concerned that private physicians abide by laws that require them to report communicable diseases to states even if they find them inconvenient and cumbersome. Those laws must be enforced and expanded to include suspicious illnesses, he said.

"It's one thing not to report syphilis but another to protect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people," Akhter said. "Life before September 11 was different. Today, our lives are changed forever. I would bet you that if somebody didn't report a case of anthrax or smallpox, that doctor would not only be fired but crucified by his colleagues."

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Problems in Bioterror Response
First Cases Show Need to Inform Public and Guard Against Panic

By Rick Weiss and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01

Bioterror Response

Bob Stevens, a photo editor who worked at the supermarket tabloid the Sun, traveled all day Monday, Oct. 1, wishing he could just go to bed.

He and his wife, Maureen, were returning to their Lantana, Fla., home after a visit to North Carolina, and he had been feeling feverish since the day before. He knew he was very sick, his wife said. But he had no idea how sick he was.

He didn't know that his blood and spinal fluid were teeming with a rare and extremely toxic kind of microbe, against which his body was virtually defenseless.

He didn't know he would soon become the first person to die of a biological attack on American soil.

Stevens's death would launch the first real test of the nation's ability to respond to a new kind of war, one that challenges public health systems, the ingenuity of doctors and police, and the public.

The tale of biology, politics and terror that has unfolded in the two weeks since Stevens fell ill sheds light on the challenges that the nation will face in the age of bioterror. It shows the difficulties of trying to balance the public's hunger for information against law enforcement's need to keep the evidence trail unspoiled. The need to communicate risk to citizens without at the same time causing panic. The value of top-down federal oversight and, at the same time, of grass-roots alertness and astute observation by every doctor, nurse and potential patient.

"Considering this was the first off, everyone did a damn good job. It's been a good dress rehearsal, and it'll be better next time," said Martin Hugh-Jones, a professor of epidemiology at Louisiana State University.

But clearly there were problems in how this wave of attacks was detected and met. Cooperation among local, state and federal agencies was sometimes dangerously absent. Tensions rose at times when it was unclear which agency was in charge. Information was often spotty, and statements of reassurance were sometimes less than convincing.

Moreover, the events of the past two weeks have in some ways been almost too simple to count as a real test. The nation was on the lookout for trouble in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Anthrax, the disease being perpetrated as a weapon, is treatable with antibiotics if caught quickly. And the method of delivery -- through the postal system -- limits the number of potential victims. By contrast, an aerial attack would overwhelm current hospital resources, experts have concluded, and would trigger waves of panic that would dwarf the ripples of fear now ruffling the nation.

It is hoped that lessons are being learned, said Mohammad N. Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association. In particular, he added, the nation must beef up the detection network that worked relatively well in Florida and in New York but is still largely absent in other regions.

"If it was some other part of the country . . . we wouldn't even know by today, because there's no system in place to monitor these kinds of things," Akhter said. A Doctor's Hunch

Stevens, 63, was admitted to JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, an hour north of Miami, feverish and confused at 2 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 2. His blood pressure was low. By the time Larry Bush, an infectious disease specialist, examined him a few hours later, Stevens had lost consciousness and was breathing with the help of a ventilator.

Emergency room doctors initially suspected spinal meningitis, and they put Stevens on antibiotics. When Bush examined his spinal fluid later that morning, he did see loads of bacteria -- but not the kind that usually causes meningitis.

Later that day, when none of four different preliminary tests could rule out anthrax -- an unlikely but plausible explanation for Stevens's rapid decline -- Bush notified the Palm Beach County Health Department about the strange case. Then, using a special biohazard container, he sent blood samples to a state laboratory in Jacksonville for more definitive tests.

By the second full day of Stevens's hospitalization, microbiologists in Jacksonville had conducted two tests on the germs taken from Stevens, who was now unconscious and heading toward multiple organ failure. One test pointed toward anthrax, while one was equivocal, but the signals were increasingly clear. "We had every test going towards it and nothing going away from it," Bush said. The state lab rushed a sample to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health authorities started to scramble. "By that time, everyone was really on notice that this was a potential case," said Palm Beach County Health Department spokesman Tim O'Connor. "People flew in, big time."

A team of state health officials arrived in Palm Beach County that night. CDC staff arrived the next day. Palm Beach County Health Department Director Jean Malecki dispatched county investigators to learn all they could about Stevens's travels, habits and contacts. Malecki herself interviewed Maureen Stevens at the hospital and at the Lantana home the Stevenses had shared for more than two decades.

Concerned that the case might have resulted from an intentional act of contamination -- or, in the light of recent government warnings, an act of terrorism -- the Health Department contacted Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Tim Moore. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) had just signed an executive order designating Moore as the state's "incident commander" in the event of a terrorist attack. And just one week before Stevens was hospitalized, Moore had met with the chief of Florida's Department of Health to confirm contingency plans in the event of a biological attack.

Also fortuitously, several laboratory chiefs from around the state had recently returned from Atlanta after attending a CDC training course in identifying bioterror agents. When the samples arrived from Bush, they had everything they needed and knew what to do.

So far, several observers said, the response to something so unexpected was going unexpectedly well. But the public -- that big, unpredictable and emotional variable -- had not become a player yet. And that was just about to change -- at first in little leaks, and then in a flood.

For example, Rep. Peter Deutsch (D-Fla.) learned about the home state case accidentally that Wednesday, Oct. 3, when a group of county commissioners visited him in Washington to discuss the president's economic stimulus package. "I asked them about coordination in the event of bioterrorism," Deutsch said. "And one man pulled me aside and said, 'This is going on right now.' " Diagnosis Confirmed

The next morning, Thursday, Oct. 4, laboratories in Jacksonville and Atlanta confirmed the diagnosis of anthrax. Stevens had become the first American in a quarter century to come down with inhaled anthrax.

Word of Stevens's diagnosis spread quickly through the Sun newsroom. The rest of the world was not far behind as plans were hastily made for a Florida news conference that would mark the beginning of a rocky, week-long effort to inform the public about the mysterious occurrence without causing panic.

It was the second day on the job for the new secretary of the state Department of Health, John O. Agwunobi. It was also his birthday. Agwunobi called the media together to announce the case, taking care to emphasize that there was no evidence that it had been caused by an act of terrorism.

That announcement was quickly followed by an unscheduled appearance by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson at the day's regular White House briefing for reporters. Thompson's message was clear, if a bit hard to believe for an already rattled U.S. public: Don't worry.

"It appears it's an isolated case," he said. "Sporadic cases of anthrax do occur in the United States. The most recent one was within the past year in the state of Texas."

As it turns out, however, the case in Texas was cutaneous anthrax, a much less dangerous -- and less rare -- form of the disease. And even that case of cutaneous anthrax had been the first in this country since 1992. Inhalation anthrax like Stevens's had not been seen in this country since 1976. And the last real outbreak of the disease occurred in 1979 in the former Soviet Union, when an accident at a biological weapons production plant left at least 68 people dead.

Thompson also hinted that Stevens may have contracted anthrax by drinking water out of a stream while in North Carolina. Experts later scoffed at that idea, noting that anthrax manifests as a very different disease when the infection is food- or water-borne.

An administration official said Thompson's statements were responsible, and that the secretary was careful to couch his reassurance. "He said, 'It appears at this time, this is what we know,' " the official said. "The important thing was to go out there and let the public know the facts. He was saying, 'We are on top of this.' " Employees Summoned

The next day, Friday, Oct. 5, that delicate process of trying to both inform and reassure got replayed for employees of American Media Inc. (owner of the Sun and several other publications) as they were summoned to the third floor to receive a presentation from two doctors.

"They just told us as much as they knew about how the disease worked and that everything was being done that was humanly possible to find out where it came from," said Carla Chadick, a staff writer for the Sun.

Some reporters said they were given conflicting information -- a claim that would be heard much more vociferously a few days later, as their building was shuttered and sealed off with yellow police tape and they stood in line to have their nasal passages tested for the anthrax bug. But no one was panicking yet.

"At that point, we still felt okay," said National Enquirer reporter Don Gentile. "It was like, 'Oh God, what is anthrax?' "

Stevens's desk, where a keyboard was later found to be contaminated, is on the same floor where the meeting was held. But, at that point, concerns were not raised about being in the office. Now, some employees want to know if that was the smartest place to have the meeting.

Meanwhile, preparing to launch an ambitious investigation, leaders of local, state and federal agencies assembled at 8 a.m. that Friday to plot strategy. "There were teams everywhere. There were doctors everywhere," said O'Connor of the Palm Beach County Health Department. At 4 p.m., Stevens died. By then, unbeknownst to almost everyone, case number two was already developing.

Ernesto Blanco, a 73-year-old co-worker of Stevens, had checked into a Miami hospital with symptoms of pneumonia. The attending physician concluded it "doesn't look like anthrax," according to Health Department briefs. But, as a precaution, he moved Blanco to the intensive care unit and ordered tests.

Ralph Miguel, 50, of Miami, Blanco's stepson, said last week that his father became ill on Monday, Oct. 1, the same day that Stevens was heading back from North Carolina.

"He was perfectly all right when he went to work that morning," Miguel said. "At about 2 o'clock that afternoon, some of his co-workers brought him home. He was feeling that bad. That was unusual because he is very healthy, and he would never leave work early."

Two days later, on Sunday, Oct. 7, Blanco tested positive for Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. So did Stevens's keyboard at AMI. Although Blanco did not have the classic symptoms of anthrax, the fact that his body harbored the rare spores took on extraordinary significance from an epidemiological standpoint.

"That made it pretty convincing that the exposure was in the workplace," said James Hughes, director of CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. That evening, officials from CDC, along with those of from state and local health departments, decided to close the building. Everyone agreed.

"There was discussion, but there was no debate," Hughes said.

From that moment, though, a debate did grow as to whether the probe was still a standard health investigation or had turned into a criminal investigation. More pointedly, some observers began to ask: "Who's in charge?"

According to Florida Department of Health documents, the investigation was under the control of the FBI as of that day. Yet the department did not publicly declare the infections as potential criminal acts. And Attorney General John D. Ashcroft stopped short of calling it a criminal case until two days later.

Given the confusion at the time about who was in charge, it is still not clear who gave the order to seal AMI's offices late Sunday. Nor is it clear who, if anyone, should have invoked that option sooner, as some employees now believe.

State Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell Jr. (D), who sits on the newly formed Florida Senate Select Committee on Public Security and Crisis Management, has received a number of phone calls from outraged AMI employees. "The problem was that no one was in charge. I represent 500,000 people, and even I don't know who to call for answers," Campbell said.

"After they diagnosed anthrax, the response time was terrible," Campbell continued. "They waited Thursday, Friday, Saturday and most of Sunday to tell people they might have been exposed. Every day is significant with something like this. And if you don't catch it early, it can be fatal."

Florida Department of Health spokesman Frank Penella defended the pace of events, saying that epidemiological investigations operate under a theory of "triangulation."

"The first guy that was tested -- that was only one point in the triangle, if you will. We had to have a second point to find the commonality. Initially we looked at everything. He [Stevens] was from Lantana; he went on a trip to Duke University. Then Mr. Blanco was tested positive, and boom, we had the commonality -- the office. We moved immediately to shut it down."

Some state lawmakers criticized the amount of time it took for the government to set up an information hot line. State Sen. Ron Klein (D) has a district office three blocks from the AMI building. By Sunday, the rumors were flying, he said, but people had no place to call for good information.

"There was a lot of misinformation -- that it had been found at other locations and so on," Klein said. "When something like this happens, people need to know where to go."

On a Sunday night conference call with the Florida Division of Emergency Management (DEM) and county personnel, the state Department of Health requested that the agency open a hot line, according to Florida DEM spokesman Jim Loftus. Employees there worked through the night to have the hot line up and running by 5 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 8.

"It's always difficult to disseminate accurate information when you have four or five different agencies involved with different responsibilities," Loftus said. "To the extent that we can improve on that, we will."

Another area of confusion that arose at this point was how much to reveal to the public. Public health officials were restricted by the FBI from speaking about the case, according to state Department of Health acting Deputy Director Annie Neasman and others. And some health officials started chafing at the restrictions.

In the wee hours of Monday, calls started going out to AMI employees, instructing them not to go to work that morning but to show up at the Health Department to get tested. Police tape surrounded the building. FBI agents swarmed around the grounds.

AMI workers were interviewed, had samples taken from their noses and were given a 15-day supply of antibiotics. Several later complained that they were not given good information about the variety of antibiotics that could be effective. The strain of anthrax that had been found was responsive to many drugs, not just the commonly prescribed ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, an omission that became important as pharmacies in Palm Beach County began to report shortages of Cipro.

"The scariest thing has been all the misinformation," said a woman who writes for one of the AMI publications and who spoke on condition of anonymity. "One person would say this, another would say that. It was very disorganized."

Administration officials stuck to a single message: There was no evidence that the infections were linked to the Sept. 11 attacks -- which was technically true -- and everything was under control.

In fact, however, confusion was beginning to reign for the tens of millions of television viewers and newspaper readers around the country who were suddenly gripped with fear as it began to seem more likely that a biological attack had indeed been perpetrated. Unlike in previous epidemics, such as the Pennsylvania outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in the 1970s and the Hantavirus outbreak in New Mexico in 1993, news conferences were rare in Florida and Washington, their timing was sporadic, and in some cases they were delayed for hours or even ultimately canceled. That meant news organizations had no choice but to swamp local, state and federal officials with individual calls. Voice-mail boxes at those agencies filled to overflowing. Electronic pages went unanswered. Frustrations

Matters grew even more chaotic on Wednesday, Oct. 10. Blanco had gotten better and was being moved out of the intensive care unit. But a 35-year-old woman who worked at AMI -- one of the more than 1,000 people tested in the aftermath of the building's closing -- tested positive for anthrax exposure.

Stephanie Dailey told reporters she had been informed that day between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. that at least one spore was found in her nasal cavity. That was the same time that health officials were wavering for hours about whether to hold the news conference that they had previously promised.

By this point, said Moore, the state's law enforcement commissioner, state and federal law enforcement officials were getting frustrated. It was clear to them that a criminal act had been committed, yet no one in Washington had acknowledged that anything more than a public health investigation was underway.

"We needed to be unleashed to do our jobs," Moore said. "We wanted a little more urgency, a little more action, and more local U.S. attorney decision-making authority to make some things happen."

Moore took his concerns to Jeb Bush.

Bush picked up the phone while Moore was still in the governor's office. He spoke to Ashcroft, Condoleezza Rice and the director of the FBI, asking that they send a high-ranking law enforcement official to coordinate the activities of the agencies investigating the case.

"I called to urge and suggest that a high-level FBI official come to Palm Beach to coordinate these activities and have a significant leader that our Health Department, the CDC, local law enforcement and others could look to as the person in charge," Bush said later in a news conference. Soon after, the president dispatched Ruben Garcia Jr., a high-ranking FBI official in Washington, to take charge of the investigation.

Moore was delighted. The logjam was broken. After days of characterizing the incident as a health probe into an isolated incident, federal authorities reversed course that night, publicly acknowledging that they believed the act was deliberate. At 8 p.m., representatives of all the critical agencies addressed the media as one in a Boca Raton hotel, announcing that the AMI incident was now a criminal investigation, and that the FBI was in charge.

"It is now a criminal investigation," U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis said.

Several Florida state lawmakers are now questioning why the FBI wasn't quicker to take charge. "It took the FBI a few days to really kick in to the investigation," said state Rep. Dan Gelber (D). "People are going to want to look at that." Gelber, a former U.S. Senate staff director who worked on terrorism legislation, also said that it remains unclear to him "who was in charge at various points, who was making decisions." In the future, he said, "we need to have a much more disciplined and organized response."

Already, officials said yesterday, that kind of coordination is improving as subsequent cases have begun to appear across the country.

"It's a constructive relationship," said Bradley Perkins, the CDC epidemiologist leading the Florida investigation. "We're breaking new ground."

But in the long term, many experts agree that the nation must improve communication and coordination and, perhaps above all, rebuild its public health system to provide an early-warning system for newly emerging diseases -- whether delivered by nature or by terrorists.

"These expenditures improve quality of care for all diseases," said Philip Brachman of Emory University. "You don't have to wait for terrorism to get the benefits. You'll have better equipment, better-trained people, better labs. And that's good for everybody.

This report was compiled with material from staff writers Peter Slevin, Justin Blum and Sue Anne Pressley and special correspondent Catherine Skipp in Florida; staff writers David Brown, Ceci Connolly, Amy Goldstein, Dan Eggen and Lisa Demoraes in Washington; and staff writers Michael Powell, Dale Russakoff and Ben White and special correspondent Christine Haughney in New York.

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'Germs': The Troubling Story of Biological Weapons

New York Times
October 14, 2001
By GIDEON ROSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/books/review/14ROSELT.html?searchpv=nytToday

Two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a friend called me up in panic. His cousin had supposedly heard from a high-ranking F.B.I. source that another, even more catastrophic attack on New York was imminent. ''Nuclear?'' I asked. ''Or biological,'' he said knowingly. The only way I could get him off the phone was to promise to check the rumor out, which I sheepishly proceeded to do. Two responses from people with high classifications were basically the same: ''I haven't heard anything, and I wouldn't do anything silly -- but after Tuesday, who knows?''

''Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War,'' by three veteran reporters for The New York Times -- Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad -- offers reasons the tip could not be laughed off. It tells the story of biological weapons and the fight against them, using biography and historical narrative to make the issues clear and accessible. The tone is somewhat alarmist, but because of the care with which the authors have assembled their case, not to mention our new sense of what is possible, even skeptical readers may have trouble sleeping easily after they finish it.

Biological weapons are easier to make than nuclear weapons and deadlier than chemical ones. The worst-case scenarios involve the dissemination of genetically engineered ''superbugs'' that are lethal, contagious and untreatable. As the authors point out, an attack could happen almost invisibly: ''There would be no 'scene' at which experts could converge. In germ terrorism, the 'first responders' would be doctors and nurses, and the first signs of attack would be the arrival of sick people at an emergency room.'' Anyone who had come into contact with the sick over the incubation period of the virus could unwittingly pass on the contagion. What could the danger be? The influenza epidemic of 1918-19 killed 20 million people, far more than died during World War I.

The book opens with a description of the ''first large-scale use of germs by terrorists on American soil,'' the spreading of salmonella in Oregon salad bars by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in 1984. The most chilling aspect of this incident, in which 751 people were poisoned, is how much it resembles the better-known nerve-gas attack in a Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult a decade later. Both were carried out by followers of bizarre gurus who presided over large, rich organizations; both were preceded by smaller operations designed to test methods and weaponry; and yet both took authorities by complete surprise.

Only years later, in fact, did the full details surrounding the Oregon incident become known. Investigators at first attributed the outbreak to improper food handling, the authors explain, because they were drawn to the most probable cause of the illness: '' 'If it looks like a horse, don't think about zebras,' they are taught. For American scientists in 1984, bioterrorism was, in effect, a zebra.''

Among those called in to investigate the Rajneesh episode was Bill Patrick, a pillar of America's own biological weapons program. The authors use Patrick's story, along with those of the biologists Joshua Lederberg and Matthew Meselson, to sketch the contours of that program from its origins during World War II, through the renunciation of offensive biological warfare by the Nixon administration, to the focus on defense during the last decades of the cold war. The tale is full of interesting tidbits -- who knew that the only United States biological attack was against Hjalmar Schacht, the head of the Reichsbank under Hitler? -- but describes what was at most a minor sideshow of the larger superpower confrontation.

In the 1990's, however, biological weapons moved closer to center stage. One reason was Saddam Hussein, who not only vigorously pursued all weapons of mass destruction but refused to give them up even after his defeat in the Persian Gulf war. Revelations about the extent of the Iraqi biological weapons program demonstrated just how easy it was to evade international restrictions and forced officials to consider how ill-prepared American forces were to cope with such weapons. The first days of the gulf war saw some anxious moments, as when ''a half dozen British soldiers stationed near the front lines reported flulike symptoms.'' But sometimes a horse is just a horse: instead of anthrax, it turned out to be the flu.

Another reason for concern was Moscow. Investigations in the early 1990's proved conclusively that a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, had been caused by a military accident; a top Russian weapons scientist, Kanatjan Alibekov, defected in 1992 with priceless information; and visits by Americans to former Soviet installations revealed an illegal offensive biological weapons program of staggering extent. A gram of anthrax spores can kill dozens of people; at its peak, the Soviet program could produce 4,500 metric tons a year -- along with smallpox, the Marburg virus and ''a genetically improved version of the Black Death.''

Most of this material is familiar, thanks to ''Biohazard'' (1999), by the Russian defector -- now known as Ken Alibek -- and the authors' earlier reportage for The Times, but it shocks nonetheless. The reader tours decaying laboratories where some of the most vicious killers in history were enhanced and weaponized. ''In one bungalow . . . hundreds of small cages were stacked together; in another room stood a human-sized cage -- for large 'nonhuman primates,' man-sized monkeys. . . . The animals were long gone, but a stench familiar to veterans of the world of germ warfare clung to the ruins -- a blend of bleach, dust, animal waste and death.''

If Iraq and Russia showed the danger of national weapons programs, other events in the 1990's, from the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to Aum Shinrikyo's attack in the Tokyo subway, brought home the threat from smaller groups. Within a few years, American officials from President Clinton on down were consumed with how to protect our armed forces and public from biological attack.

Yet despite much effort and billions of dollars thrown at the problem, neither the military nor the citizenry is remotely ready to handle a serious crisis. The military's anthrax vaccination program appears to have been something of a boondoggle, and simulations show that the use of biological weapons against American cities would cause utter chaos. Even New York, whose Office of Emergency Management has set the standard for how to prepare, would be overwhelmed should any of the truly horrific scenarios actually take place.

So how should one handle such a serious but unlikely contingency? Some simply dismiss it. The authors quote one military officer as saying about biological warfare: ''There's an in box, an out box and a too-hard-to-do box. . . . We saw it as a threat, but we didn't want to deal with it, to put together a war plan. It was too difficult.'' This is psychologically understandable; after all, the United States never really had an answer for what to do about nuclear weapons if deterrence failed, yet it managed to get through the cold war anyway. We may get lucky again, and a combination of prevention, deterrence and intelligence -- together with the inherent difficulty of successfully weaponizing diseases -- could allow us to live through several more decades unscathed. But it would be wise to think of this as an insurance question, and to take steps to lower the odds and reduce the consequences should the unthinkable ever occur.

The most obviously beneficial move would be to upgrade dramatically the nation's public health and epidemiological surveillance systems, which constitute one of the few tools available for dealing with a biological attack (a step that would have much wider benefits as well). Another sensible measure would be increasing our cooperative threat reduction programs with Russia to keep tabs on the materiel and personnel of the former Soviet arsenal. With little pork and few headlines involved, however, these remedies are likely to attract more rhetoric than action.

They shouldn't. We know now that there are people who want us dead, that there are ways to kill us in large numbers and that there is little we can do to stop them. The authors cite the C.I.A. as warning that Osama bin Laden has been ''training his operatives to use chemical and biological toxins,'' and at least one of the hijackers identified in the Sept. 11 attack was reportedly checking out crop-dusters in Florida earlier this year. A few weeks ago, experts knew that terrorists preferred the familiar to the exotic, and thought bombs posed the greatest threat. That was then; this is now.

Gideon Rose is managing editor of Foreign Affairs.

-------- iraq

Official Iraqi Paper Praises Bin Laden

October 14, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Attacks.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A newspaper owned by President Saddam Hussein's son sang the praises of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday, likely signaling a shift in the Iraqi government's attitude to the United States' No. 1 enemy.

While Iraq has been quick to condemn the United States for its airstrikes on Afghanistan, it had previously downplayed their target -- bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Protesters at a mass demonstration last week in Baghdad denounced America but did not carry bin Laden posters or chant his name.

Government officials denied media reports of an Iraqi link to bin Laden. They pointed out that Iraq does not recognize the Afghanistan government that harbors him.

However, on Sunday the newspaper Babil published a column that addressed itself to the foreign ministers who took part in the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Qatar on Wednesday. The conference gave quiet support to the U.S. airstrikes.

``(President) Bush despises you,'' the columnist told the ministers. ``He did not inform you of the strikes because you have no say. He informed (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and others while you were sitting ... Shame on you.''

The columnist was not named, but Babil is owned by Odai Hussein, the son of the president.

``Compare your faces to Osama's beautiful appearance on all televisions of the world, swearing that he will not let America live in peace until Arabs do,'' the columnist continued, referring to the videotaped speech of bin Laden that was broadcast shortly after the airstrikes began on Oct. 7.

``He said it while facing blasphemy's missiles falling ... and the whole world listened,'' the columnist wrote.

On another page, Babil published a poem written in homage to bin Laden.

``All America is trying to kill me and I wish to die while fighting,'' says one line. The poet portrays bin Laden as lonely figure enduring ``the oppression of the enemy.''

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

THE FIGHTING
Kabul and Kandahar Hit as Fourth U.S. Carrier Is Sent to Theater

New York Times
October 14, 2001
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/international/asia/14MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 - The United States and Britain resumed airstrikes against Taliban military targets near two major Afghan cities on Saturday as a fourth Navy aircraft carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, passed through the Suez Canal today and steamed toward the Arabian Sea.

After briefly easing its bombardment on Friday in deference to the Muslim holy day, American attack planes struck before dawn near the airports in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as in the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold. British submarines fired Tomahawk cruise missiles in the first British attacks since the opening salvos last Sunday.

When the Roosevelt and its air wing of more than 40 F-14 and F-18 fighter-bombers arrive in the next three days, Navy officials said, they will have the largest massing of naval air power since the Persian Gulf War, when six carriers attacked Iraq from the gulf and Red Sea.

A senior Navy official said the Roosevelt would relieve another carrier, the Enterprise, after a few days, underscoring the military's recognition that the war on terrorism is a marathon, not a sprint, and that the Pentagon is already working to rotate its forces.

For years, the Navy has held its six-month deployments as almost an inviolate rule, except in wartime, to retain crews and ease the burden on Navy families at home. The Enterprise had finished its tour in the gulf and was bound for its home port in Norfolk, Va., when the Pentagon ordered it to stay put after the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11.

"This is meant to be a global campaign over time, so we have to use our resources wisely," said one Navy admiral.

With Taliban air defenses largely destroyed, F-14 and F-18 fighter bombers based on two carriers, the Enterprise and the Carl Vinson, are now operating round-the-clock patrols over Afghanistan, a senior Navy official said, ready to pummel any "targets of opportunity" that show up on the battlefield.

These targets, detected by American intelligence working closely with the Taliban's Afghan foes the ground, could include military convoys, aircraft or other forces associated with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. A fourth carrier in the Arabian Sea, the Kitty Hawk, has left behind most of its air wing to make room for helicopters that could be used for commando raids into Afghanistan.

"We can and will be operating at any point around the clock," Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said today.

Even as the air campaign revved up again, Tajikistan sent reinforcements to its borders with Taliban- controlled areas of Afghanistan. Russian forces stationed in Tajikistan, the former Central Asian Soviet republic, reported fighting on the Afghan side of the frontier. This week, Tajikistan gave the United States permission to use its air space and its bases for military operations.

Afghanistan's opposition alliance today claimed fresh victories on the ground against Taliban forces. A commander of the Northern Alliance, the ragtag rebel group that controls 5 to 10 percent of the country, said the alliance had seized control of three villages in a northern province.

That claim could not be independently confirmed, but senior Defense Department officials on Friday attached credibility to reports that anti-Taliban forces had seized Chaghcharan, an important provincial capital in the north-central part of the country.

There were conflicting reports of whether the renewed fighting the ground was coordinated with the American air strikes. "Pakistan has asked the United States not to bomb the front line," said a Northern Alliance commander at Bagram, 20 miles north of Kabul. "It does not want the Northern Alliance to go to Kabul."

Other Northern Alliance officials, however, have said anti-Taliban forces would delay an offensive against Kabul until American air strikes softened up Taliban forces.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday that the armed opposition in Afghanistan should move against the Taliban in areas where the United States has bombed - in the north, near Mazar- i-Sharif, for example, but not against front line Taliban troops north of Kabul.

"We feel we have done a certain amount with respect to those Taliban and Al Qaeda military targets and it may very well be more appropriate for ground forces to be moving in areas where we previously have been bombing," Mr. Rumsfeld said in Washington.

--------

U.S. bombs hit Afghan homes

October 14, 2001
By Willis Witter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011014-78749744.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - American bombers misfired yesterday, hitting civilian homes in the Afghan cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad and sending a new wave of internal refugees fleeing to the countryside, relief agencies said.

The strikes ended a 24-hour pause Friday in the bombing campaign to respect Muslim day of prayer.

The Taliban claimed hundreds of civilians had been killed, and in Washington, the Pentagon admitted a 2,000-pound bomb had gone astray in a Kabul neighborhood. It acknowledged claims by the Taliban of four dead and eight injured.

Separately, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP), an independent news agency based in Pakistan, reported that residential neighborhoods in Kandahar and Jalalabad were hit. It said the casualties could not be determined.

But even before thunderous explosions yesterday shattered the calm of the previous day, Afghans had begun to flee homes in cities for rural areas, many for the third time since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Now the focus is on targets closer to cities," said Mario Musa, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Islamabad.

Basing his assessment on daily conversations with Afghan Red Cross workers inside Afghanistan, he said people had been leaving cities in large numbers for the past 48 hours, presumably intending to return to the cities to work when they felt it was safe.

The same pattern, he said, occurred following the Sept. 11 attacks and the Oct. 7 beginning of the U.S.-led bombing campaign.

"People were constantly moving outside of cities to find sanctuaries for their families in the country," he said. "Then they would come back to work, shops would open. People have to work. They have families to feed."

The BBC broadcast television footage of destroyed mud homes in a neighborhood near the airport in Kabul, a rare look inside the country permitted by the Taliban, which has banned television for its own people in accordance with its strict interpretation of Islam.

The Taliban claims more than 300 civilians have died since the United States began bombing a week ago today, though Western officials have warned that the Afghan rulers are prone to exaggerate casualties.

Nevertheless, the confirmation yesterday of civilian casualties underscored the dilemma for Washington as it pursues Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The United States has limited its bombings to carefully chosen military targets and accompanied the strikes with air drops of food away from targeted areas to alleviate the unending misery of the Afghan people from years of drought and more than two decades of war.

For the first time yesterday, U.S. bombs destroyed a Taliban military headquarters, United Press International quoted AIP as saying. "Several bombs hit the Taliban's No. 1 Army Corps headquarters" near Jalalabad, the agency said.

But with a limited number of military targets as the campaign enters its second week, the risks of civilian casualties appeared to be rising and the Taliban appeared ready for a long propaganda campaign against Washington.

It prepared to let Western reporters into areas of Afghanistan it controls, over objections from its former ally Pakistan, a reversal of its decision to expel all foreign reporters a month ago.

Taliban authorities said they were searching for bodies in the remote mountain village of Khorum, east of Jalalabad near the Pakistan border. It claims more than 150 people died there.

"We once again want to say that [the U.S.] intention is a war against Muslims and Afghans," Taliban Information Minister Mullah Qudratullah Jamal told the Reuters news agency.

On Thursday, President Bush said the first phase of the air campaign had ended and offered the Taliban what he described as a second chance to turn over bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

But Mullah Jamal said bid Laden "is not the issue, and people have realized this by the crimes [the Americans] are committing. Our stance regarding the situation is as before. Our jihad (holy war) will continue until the last breath for the defense of our homeland and Islam."

According to reports from Kabul, Kandahar and the western city of Heart, more bombs fell late last night.

In Pakistan, demonstrations continued against the U.S.-led air strikes, albeit smaller and without the violence that accompanied some protests on Friday.

---------

U.S. to Target Elite Taliban Assault Force
In Next Phase Major Effort Aimed Partly At Reassuring Americans

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56067-2001Oct13.html

The Pentagon is planning an extensive range of actions during the next phase of the war in Afghanistan, including covert raids, continued bombing and large-scale helicopter attacks conducted partly to signal that the U.S. military is engaged on the ground in pursuing terrorists, defense officials and outside military experts said.

Over the next month, the U.S. military will hammer the Taliban militia's 55th Brigade, a seasoned assault force made up mainly of several thousand Arabs and other foreigners, sources said. Some experts see destroying that unit as crucial to undermining Taliban rule in Afghanistan and crushing the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden; to a great extent, the 55th Brigade represents bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.

With a dwindling number of bombing targets remaining after one week of airstrikes, the next month will bring a new emphasis on ground activity by U.S. Special Forces, including commando raids and reconnaissance missions, defense officials and analysts said.

U.S. troops who recently moved into the region around Afghanistan will focus on liaison with Afghan rebels already working to overthrow the Taliban, military experts said. In that role, they would coordinate U.S. airstrikes and rebel ground attacks aimed at weakening the Afghan rulers.

The military plan appears designed, at least in part, to reassure Americans that the government is going after terrorists. "You'll see the total effort," said a Defense Department official familiar with military planning. "It will be an air assault, and it will be real visible. I think the administration will want to show that things are being done."

Yesterday, U.S. warplanes continued to pound Afghanistan for a seventh straight day. In Friday's airstrikes, which were limited in deference to the Muslim sabbath, a 2,000-pound bomb dropped by a Navy F-18 missed its target, a helicopter at the Kabul airport, and killed as many as four civilians when it hit a house about a mile away, Pentagon officials said.

Military planners are operating under some time constraints as they plan the next phase of the war. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, a South Asia expert who previously served on the National Security Council staff, said the Pentagon has "a one-month window," from the middle of this month until mid-November, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins, to take apart terrorist networks and undercut the Taliban.

She noted that U.S. military planners have shown an unusual deference to religious sensitivities and are unlikely to carry out much overt activity during Ramadan. After that, the onset of winter is likely to force the United States to curtail much of its activity for several months.

The 55th Brigade is believed to number well over 1,000 fighters, and has grown more powerful and more politically significant inside Afghanistan over the last year as more foreigners have come into the country, said Ali Ahmad Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army who was a planner for the resistance after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Jalali recently wrote an analysis of the military situation in Afghanistan for the U.S. Army's professional journal, Parameters.

"The brigade was specifically formed under the Taliban to arrange, train and control the participation of Arab volunteers," he said. "The Taliban relies heavily on it." The unit spearheaded the Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif, the major city in the north, several years ago, and reportedly was active in attacks on the opposition Northern Alliance last week.

Even other experts who disagree with the view of the 55th Brigade as the keystone of Taliban power say they expect it will be a major target of U.S. attacks in the coming days, because it is an easily targeted conventional military unit that is associated both with bin Laden and the Taliban, and is believed to have sent some of its trainees outside Afghanistan as members of the al Qaeda network.

"I think those guys are going to get crushed," said Michael Vickers, a former Special Forces officer experienced in Afghanistan. "They are symbolic -- they are interlopers in Afghanistan."

Destroying the brigade might take months, the experts also warned. Tahir-Kheli, the former National Security Council staff member, warned that the unit appears to be spread out across the country, with a hard core of several hundred protecting bin Laden.

She predicted they are likely to fight to the death. "They have nothing to lose," she said. "They took over a country by force, and they've got nowhere else to go."

The key tactic of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is to keep up "continuous pressure," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. To achieve that, the U.S. military plans to operate round-the-clock and across Afghanistan, appearing anywhere at any time. The purpose, officials said, is to keep bin Laden and his network off balance, forcing them to make mistakes that will reveal their locations to the unmanned aerial vehicles the Air Force is operating constantly overhead.

"You'll see raids, constant reconnaissance, and hitting targets when you get intelligence," said retired Army Col. James Hallums, a veteran of unconventional warfare in Central America and Bolivia.

E. Wayne Merry, an expert on Central Asian defense issues at the American Foreign Policy Council, said, "We are going to be probing, hunting, searching, provoking and generally seeking to use our strengths" -- which he listed as mobility, long-range communications, all-weather capabilities and night fighting.

But experts on special operations said the United States, while willing to take more risks than it has in past attempts to kill bin Laden, will be extremely selective about actually putting U.S. troops into combat on the ground in Afghanistan.

"It's dangerous," said Vickers, the former Special Forces officer. When the U.S. military receives good intelligence on the location of bin Laden's associates or Taliban hard-liners, he said, it is likely instead simply to call in airstrikes.

The process of finding those targets already is well underway, analysts said, with the Pentagon now sifting through the results of the first week of bombing and combining it with reports from the Northern Alliance and from CIA contacts with Pushtun leaders in the south. Some of the first raids by U.S. Special Operations will be to capitalize and deepen on that intelligence, they said.

One question facing the U.S. military is that historically it does not have a good track record -- at least in public -- with such secret raids. In 1970, a group of U.S. troops on helicopters flew to the Sontay prisoner-of-war camp just west of Hanoi, only to find it empty. A decade later, Navy RH-53D helicopters trying to rescue American hostages in Iran crashed while refueling, killing eight. In 1993, 18 U.S. troops were killed during a Special Operations raid in Mogadishu, Somalia, that was carried out by some of the same units deployed to Uzbekistan.

On the other hand, experts say, the quality of Special Forces troops and training improved radically in response to some of those failures. Also, said retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Burnette, a former chief of operations for the Army, "There have been a lot of fairly successful ones [raids] that nobody will talk about."

When the United States does conduct raids inside Afghanistan, the troops first will rehearse them extensively, probably in another country, Special Forces veterans said. When they do go in, it will almost certainly be at night, to capitalize on U.S. technologies and skills.

High overhead the helicopters carrying troops will be layers of air support -- including AC-130 Spectre gunships or fighter jets for air cover, surveillance aircraft to monitor enemy activity, and refuelers to keep them all flying. If a tank approaches troops on the ground, they are likely not to try to destroy it themselves, but instead use laser designators to guide bombs that can be dropped from as high as 23,000 feet.

"A special operation will involve a few people on the ground but be supported by massive firepower overhead," said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a Green Beret during the Vietnam War who later served as a Special Operations planner.

The most spectacular kind of raid is a "snatch and grab," in which Special Operations seize people they want to interrogate for intelligence or capture for prosecution. But experts said that such efforts are among the most difficult missions that can be done, and probably would be rare in Afghanistan.

"Prisoner snatches are very hard, much harder than just blowing people up," said Killebrew, who conducted them during the Vietnam War. It is even harder, experts noted, when the prisoners are members of a group that has shown a willingness to die if Americans can be killed at the same time, raising worries about people carrying grenades in their clothes and detonating them when aboard a helicopter.

A former high-ranking CIA officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan said he doubted that orders would be given to Special Forces to capture bin Laden or any of the other 21 most wanted terrorists named earlier this week by President Bush. "I think we want to kill all 22 guys," he said. "We probably don't want to have any more guys in orange jumpsuits."

Staff writers Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham and researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.

--------- uzbekistan

U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan

By Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55834-2001Oct13.html

The United States and Uzbekistan have quietly conducted joint covert operations aimed at countering Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime and its terrorist allies since well over a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to officials from both nations.

The most significant advance came more than a year ago with stepped-up intelligence cooperation between the two countries in an effort to track and undermine suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. At the same time, U.S. Special Forces began to work more overtly with the Uzbek military on training missions.

"Our cooperation began long before the events of Sept. 11," said Rustam Jumaev, chief spokesman for Uzbek President Islam Karimov. In an interview, Jumaev said significant military and intelligence joint efforts extended back "two or three years" but would not discuss specifics of the cooperation.

In 1998, after terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton signed a secret intelligence "finding" authorizing the CIA to use covert means to disrupt and preempt bin Laden's operations.

"The intensified interaction with Uzbekistan," Jumaev said, reflected the conviction of the United States that previous terrorist attacks against American targets originated from bin Laden's Afghan refuge. The U.S.-Uzbek cooperation deepened after the embassy bombings and again after last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, he said.

The disclosure of such broad cooperation on sensitive matters, nurtured quietly over several years, offers new perspective on a U.S.-Uzbek alliance that seemed to come out of nowhere in the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington.

In a region still dominated politically and militarily by Russia, Uzbekistan was the first former Soviet republic to signal its willingness to aid a U.S. military operation against Afghanistan in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks.

That partnership went public on Oct. 5, when Karimov met with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, and announced that the United States could station ground troops, airplanes and helicopters at an Uzbek air base. While stipulating that, at least "for now," Uzbekistan could be used only to launch humanitarian and combat search-and-rescue missions, Karimov left open the possibility of allowing the United States to launch offensive strikes on Afghanistan from his territory.

On Friday, the two governments released a statement outlining the details of an agreement hammered out after Rumsfeld's visit. In the statement, such offensive operations were not explicitly ruled out, with the deal stipulating only that the Uzbek military base would be used "in the first instance" for humanitarian purposes.

More than 1,000 U.S. troops from the 10th Mountain Division have already arrived in Uzbekistan, according to Pentagon officials, and at least 1,000 more are expected. An undisclosed number of U.S. Special Forces troops also are operating in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan, a California-size nation of 25 million, offers strategic access to northern Afghanistan across an 85-mile border. The ultimate size of the U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan remains unclear, but every indication suggests it will grow, and remain in place for months or even years.

That's a sharp contrast to the environment before Sept. 11, when the major limiting factor on the U.S. presence was the desire of Karimov's authoritarian government to keep it quiet. "That put a limit on the size of things," recalled a former Pentagon official who was involved in cultivating the new relationship. "The bigger it got, the more visible it got."

Uzbekistan has long pursued the most independent policy of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia, courting friendly relations with the United States over Russian objections and withdrawing from a Russian-led regional security treaty. But even for Uzbekistan, playing host to U.S. troops represents a significant escalation of its cooperation with Washington.

"This is a dramatic change in the policy they have pursued since independence of allowing no foreign troops in their country," said a senior Bush administration official. "They were nervous from the beginning about the implications for them of allowing a large American presence."

Reflecting that continued nervousness, information about the new cooperation has been all but shut off by both governments. Lack of access to even basic facts about the U.S. deployment to Uzbekistan, Jumaev said, "is not just because of our Ministry of Defense. It is not because Uzbekistan is a closed country. This is what the Pentagon wants as well."

Indeed, when news of the U.S. deployment first broke last month, one Air Force officer happily noted that "we can put aircraft there where CNN can't film them taking off." Air Force officials were irate during the Kosovo war in 1999 when television networks broadcast live images of aircraft taking off from the U.S. base in Aviano, Italy.

Pentagon officials have indicated that a veil has been kept over the new and growing U.S. military presence in part because a Special Operations unit has been moved along with the 10th Mountain Division.

In several cases, Karimov's government has denied the little information Pentagon officials have released. Despite the president's public granting of permission for the U.S. deployment here, some officials have denied that such a deployment existed.

On Monday, for example, the deputy head of the Uzbek National Security Council denied that the 10th Mountain Division, or any American troops, were in Uzbekistan even as U.S. military officials said they had started arriving days earlier. On Friday, Jumaev said the number of American military personnel in Uzbekistan "does not exceed a three-digit number," although Pentagon officials have said more than 1,000 troops have already arrived.

While Uzbeks have been wary of describing their alliance with the United States too openly, U.S. officials have argued among themselves over just how far to go in courting a dictatorship accused of holding more than 7,000 political prisoners in the name of fighting terrorism.

The split has been most evident between the State and Defense departments, according to a former CIA officer who operated in the region. Pentagon officials have wanted to operate in Uzbekistan and believe that the closed nature of Uzbek society helps preserve operational security and protect troops.

The State Department, by contrast, worries about embracing too tightly a regime that has been criticized for human rights abuses. According to human rights groups, many devout Muslims have been arrested and tortured, without any evidence that they have ties to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a home-grown terrorist group linked to bin Laden. The group launched armed incursions into Uzbekistan in 1999 and 2000 and is blamed by Karimov for setting off explosions in the capital that killed 18 people.

When then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Tashkent last year, she publicly warned Karimov to "distinguish very carefully between peaceful devout believers and those who advocate terrorism."

At the time, the extent of Uzbek cooperation with the United States had not been disclosed, but there were hints that ties were growing closer. Uzbekistan sought to distance itself from Russia, and was an eager participant in the NATO-organized Partnership for Peace military exercises. Another hint was the announcement of U.S. assistance to tighten Uzbekistan's borders and fight the influx of drugs from Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan may well have offered a more appealing and stable location for secret American intelligence-gathering about Afghanistan. Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan to the east and south, was in turmoil and Gen. Pervez Musharraf took power in a coup there two years ago.

Western observers in Tashkent said they were aware of what one termed "a long-standing, very close relationship with Uzbek security institutions on Afghanistan issues." While declining to discuss specific operations, the observer said, "It's spectacular how close Uzbek-U.S. foreign policy interests have come together. We've worked for a long time with Uzbekistan on Afghanistan issues, so it makes sense that we have very strong cooperation on the intelligence side as well."

Both U.S. and Uzbek officials said their partnership grew slowly. In the years immediately following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and Uzbekistan's independence, relations with the United States were "quite weak", one close observer said. But by the late 1990s, the two countries found common cause in their alarm over Afghanistan. The ruling Taliban regime there captured the territory adjoining Uzbekistan in 1998, while the Tashkent bombings in early 1999 made Karimov even more insistent on the need to stamp out the IMU fighters being harbored in Afghanistan. Glasser reported from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

An invitation to learn about alternative energy at www.fuelcellpartnership.org

A public forum will be held Tuesday at 0930 PDT on this web site.
From: Bruderly@aol.com
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 14:32:08 EDT

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www.fuelcellpartnership.org

A public forum will be held Tuesday at 0930 PDT on this web site.

David E. Bruderly, PE Bruderly Engineering Associates, Inc. 920 SW 57th Drive Gainesville, Florida 32607-3838 352-377-0932

The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones; the oil age will not end because the world runs out of oil. Shiek Yamani

-------- health

'Cure' for blindness discovered in spinach

http://www.schwartzreport.net/ http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/10/14/nspin14.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/10/14/ixhomef.html

Age-related macular degeneration of the eye and retina pigmentosis afflict millions. Now, a team of surgeons working at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California with Dr Eli Greenbaum, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has established that light-receiving cells in the eyes of the blind can be triggered to work again. The protein, known as Photosystem One, derived from spinach, was able to generate electrical energy, and this energy could trigger light-receiving cells to function, enabling the retina to "see" images again.

-------- police / prisoners

In Federal Law Enforcement, 'All the Walls Are Down'
Personnel From Assorted Agencies Work Together at FBI Headquarters

By Jim McGee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56015-2001Oct13.html

Two meetings punctuate the day of FBI Deputy Director Thomas Pickard and show how federal law enforcement has been transformed since Sept. 11.

A tall, lanky man with an easy smile and the smooth gloss of a CEO, Pickard begins each day with a 7 a.m. briefing at the FBI's Strategic Information Operations Center, the command post for the massive federal investigation into the terror attacks. As the session starts, Pickard is joined by a senior official of the CIA who serves as his deputy. If CIA help is required, the intelligence officer makes a note to check the agency's files.

Exactly nine hours later, at 4 p.m., Pickard convenes another briefing inside a large executive briefing room that looks like an amphitheater, with big video screens on the walls and plush dark green leather seats.

Technicians patch agents in charge of the 56 FBI field offices into one giant conference call, and the seats fill up with officials from more than a dozen federal police, intelligence and military agencies. Pickard opens the discussion but defers to Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff, chief of the criminal division at the Justice Department. The conversation bounces around the nation, with updates of an investigation that has tentacles in every region.

The two meetings illustrate what nine years of terrorist attacks have wrought in the United States. The 7 a.m. briefing shows that although the FBI and the CIA remain separate agencies that operate under different laws and use different methods, they now act as one, senior officials for both agencies say.

The 4 p.m. briefing demonstrates how the Justice Department has forged the major federal law enforcement agencies and 94 local U.S. attorney's offices into a combined force centrally controlled from Washington.

The FBI's operations center on the fifth floor of its headquarters in downtown Washington is the nexus of those efforts, a vast mosaic of federal expertise and legal authorities. The FBI operations center is a 21st-century communications and data-processing platform that serves as a microcosm of the unified police and intelligence system.

At computer terminals throughout the 40,000-square-foot facility, personnel from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency work alongside agents of the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The FBI operations center is the mirror image of the counterterrorism center at CIA headquarters in Langley. There, too, the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, Customs and others work side-by-side. Just as Pickard's deputy is a CIA man, the chief of the CIA center has an FBI executive as his No. 2.

"All the walls are down," said FBI Assistant Director Thomas B. Locke. A 'Seamless' Integration

The foundation of this unified force was laid when a 2,000-pound bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993. Overwhelmed, the FBI sought help. Within 24 hours, agents from the Secret Service, the CIA and other agencies joined the existing FBI-New York Police Joint Terrorism Task Force.

That task force got results: A New York police detective searching the crime scene found a truck axle that led to the first arrest. A Secret Service agent obtained a full confession from Ramzi Yousef, the plot's mastermind.

Lessons learned from subsequent bombings forced more innovation.

The goal, said former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, was a "seamless" integration of FBI and CIA capabilities that was also legal. In 1975, a Senate investigation of illegal domestic spying had led to changes designed to segregate the two agencies' operations.

"What the American people want is the best possible protection that they can have," Gorelick said. "They also don't want anyone collecting information on them inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment."

From 1995 to 2000, a series of anti-terrorism measures and spending bills headed the government back toward a unified system, an effort that was slowed by laws and institutional structures that were originally designed to limit federal power.

One by one, obstacles were overcome by presidents operating in periods of crisis. Now, the Bush administration is embarked on the most extensive rollback of constraints on federal police and intelligence power.

The vehicle for this is anti-terrorism legislation advocated by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, versions of which were approved last week in the House and Senate.

The most controversial proposals are those that will make it lawful for the CIA and the U.S. military to tap into the awesome investigative might of the federal grand jury, the most powerful weapon in law enforcement's arsenal. If signed into law, the measure would allow prosecutors to readily share grand jury information with the CIA. That is crucial, a senior FBI official said, because it would allow the CIA access to some of the best information on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has used a series of grand jury investigations after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to assemble one of the largest and most carefully vetted bodies of evidence against bin Laden.

In tearing down the wall between federal grand juries and intelligence agencies, the Ashcroft proposal would also be removing the supervisory control of a federal judge, who under the current structure is the only person who can allow grand jury information to be shared.

Duke University law professor Sara Sun Beale, a former Justice Department official who is an authority on federal criminal law and the grand jury, said a key question is whether routine sharing of grand jury evidence with the CIA will gradually convert the grand jury into an engine of political intelligence-gathering.

"The grand jury was created to investigate criminal wrongdoing," Beale said. "It was given extensive authority to clear the innocent and discover evidence against the guilty." Historically, she said, judicial supervision and secrecy rules were integral parts of an official proceeding that can compel secret testimony and incarcerate uncooperative witnesses. "Now that we know the information that comes out at the end of the pipeline could be shared with intelligence agencies, how will the grand jury be used?" she asked.

In a frantic and ultimately losing battle, the nation's leading civil liberties groups argued that Ashcroft's approach would erode Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Oklahoma City Model

The World Trade Center bombing started the move to consolidate federal law enforcement, but it took another blast to build the new system. After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Justice Department developed "the Oklahoma City model."

Within hours of the explosion, Attorney General Janet Reno dispatched senior Justice Department officials to Oklahoma City to oversee the investigation and ordered other attorneys to coordinate the investigation from the FBI command center.

Thrown together on the fly, the Oklahoma City model relied on the FBI's antiquated, 4,000-square-foot command center. In the aftermath, Reno and then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh got $20 million from Congress for a 10-fold expansion of the FBI operations center.

Richly stocked with computers and high-speed data transmission lines, the new center allows fingertip control of investigations in a way unheard of a decade ago.

On Sept. 11, when the second fuel-laden jet plowed into the World Trade Center, a crowd was watching on a giant video screen at the center's telecommunication center. At the time, two teams of agents were already at work in the center tracking bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalists. Within 15 minutes of the first jet's attack, new teams of agents were pouring into the center's 20 rooms. Ultimately, more than 500 lawyers, agents, intelligence officers and support personnel worked 12-hour shifts in the center.

Near the middle of the facility is a state-of-the-art communications center, comparable to those found at the State Department and the CIA. It is surrounded by an expanse of office suites, conference rooms and large work areas with clusters of computer-equipped desks.

The operations center gives off an ambiance that falls somewhere between a big-city newsroom and a large insurance office. The entrance has large glass doors that announce "The George H.W. Bush Strategic Information Operations Center." The lights are bright, and the spaces are airy but windowless. The floors are made of a special anti-static material. The floor plan allows hundreds of people to work closely together in a logical flow.

The center's defining features are its walls, wiring and dimensions. With those building blocks, designers used architecture and technology to erase the barriers that had traditionally inhibited information-sharing among police and intelligence agencies.

The facility allows different teams of agents with different security clearances to work under one roof. The center's 65 miles of telephone and fiber-optic cable offer three types of local area networks: the regular FBI network that can connect to the networks of outside agencies; a classified network that operates at the level of Top Secret; and an even more highly classified Special Compartmented Information network.

"We can plug and play as we see fit," said Ronald Wilcox, deputy director of the operations center.

A visiting team of money-laundering experts from U.S. Customs can start working immediately on computers linked to Treasury's own network of databases. Teams from the intelligence community can tap into a secure interface with the CIA or the NSA.

The layout of the operations center is intended to help manage the flow of information from FBI field offices, other agencies and foreign sources. Agents use a computer software program called Rapid Start that enables field agents as well as supervisors in the operations center to review and synchronize work on tens of thousands of leads and suspects. Every FBI report of an interview is uploaded into the system for all to review.

A secure FBI intranet posts a constantly updated chronology of the case: what's happening, where it's happening and what has been discovered. As they sort through an endless cascade of information, analysts, agents and supervisors in the center can check the chronology on large video displays. Out in the field, each of the 56 FBI special agents in charge can view the chronology on their computer. "It keeps everyone on the same page," Locke said.

More than anything, the operations center is about control: of information, of operations, of a typhoon of a federal investigation.

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, Ashcroft knew where to find that control. He left the Justice headquarters building, crossed Constitution Avenue and commandeered an office suite in the FBI's operations center. Thereafter, he used the center to centralize the investigation in Washington.

Ashcroft was joined by 35 prosecutors from the Justice Department terrorism section as well as local prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Assistant U.S. Attorney David N. Kelley, chief of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's terrorism unit, was summoned to Washington to work full time in the operations center.

"We are not operating as a series of little offices," said Chertoff, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division. "We are a single, unified team. This is a case unlike any that has been faced in the history of the United States. It is a national case, and we are approaching it as a national group of prosecutors."

A generation ago, it would have been unthinkable for the Justice Department to exercise such control. When Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy decided to mount a national assault on the Mafia, he met stiff resistance from the FBI and local U.S. attorneys. Out of frustration, he borrowed Treasury Department investigators and created regional strike forces staffed by criminal division lawyers from Washington.

As recently as 10 years ago, logistics and technology still posed significant obstacles. So did the continuing autonomy of local U.S. attorneys, who are independent presidential appointees.

All of this is changing, Chertoff and others say.

They contend that the Sept. 11 investigation, with its far-flung venues in Europe and the Middle East, can be controlled only in Washington. Statistics demonstrate the dimensions of the case, the biggest in U.S. history: Since the attacks, the FBI and other agencies have detained 698 people and served more than 4,000 subpoenas.

Chertoff and his colleagues in Washington approve every detention and subpoena.

"We are one organization," he said.

-------- terrorism

Bounty proposed on terror suspects

October 14, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011014-17866900.htm

Rep. Ron Paul, Texas Republican, has introduced measures that would allow the Bush administration to hire personnel in the private sector to hunt down and capture Osama bin Laden and other terrorists sought in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. soil.

One bill Mr. Paul is sponsoring, the "September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act," would direct Congress to authorize President Bush to specifically target bin Laden and his associates using nongovernment armed forces.

A letter of marque is written authority from a government to a private individual or group to seize the subjects of a foreign state and/or their property as retaliation for injuries they inflicted.

The Marque and Reprisal Act, which Mr. Paul introduced in the House Thursday, would amount to international bounty hunting. But the congressman and his staff eschew that term.

"We think it's on a little higher level than that," Mr. Paul said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Those participating in the search for the terrorists "would be professionals," Jeff Deist, Mr. Paul's spokesman, said Friday.

"Western intelligence in the Middle East is exceedingly limited, so we should avail ourselves of the assistance of those with better information to track, capture or kill bin Laden," said Mr. Paul.

Noting that Congress is giving Mr. Bush up to $40 billion to fight terrorism, the Texas lawmaker says he believes it would be wise to spend some of that money on the "marque and reprisal" approach, which would "create an incentive for people in Afghanistan or elsewhere to turn" over bin Laden and his followers to the United States.

Mr. Paul says the Constitution gives Congress the power to issue "letters of marque and reprisal when a precise declaration of war is impossible due to the vagueness of the enemy."

He said such letters were issued by U.S. presidents in the first half of the 19th century "when they were dealing with acts of piracy" on the high seas.

The second measure Mr. Paul introduced Thursday, the "Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act," would make that change in definition.

The Liberty Committee, a research center allied with Mr. Paul, examines the two new bills in a question-and-answer format on its Web site.

One question on the site asks whether it "isn't against customary international law to engage 'privateers' to use armed force on behalf of a nation."

The answer is no, the committee says.

"While it is true that the Declaration of Paris of 1854 abolished privateering, the United States did not subscribe to that declaration," on the grounds that relying solely on large armies and navies for her defense "would threaten her national prosperity and endanger the civil liberties of her people."

Another question asks why nongovernmental persons or entities are needed in the war on terrorism when the United States has such a strong military.

For the response, the Liberty Committee points out that the CIA has had a special Osama bin Laden unit since 1996. Despite repeated efforts targeting him, he remains at large.

"Conventional military power and tactics can't do the job of locating and capturing an enemy that hides among civilian populations, or in temporary and remote locations like the mountains of Afghanistan," the committee says.

Mr. Paul said he discussed his proposal Friday on the Fox News Channel, and it drew a very favorable response from viewers.

"We got a lot of calls from people saying, 'that makes a lot of sense,'" he said.

As for whether the House will back his plan, Mr. Paul said he will be sending out "Dear Colleague" letters about the bills tomorrow. "I think it would be a lot tougher to get this passed if this were an either-or situation" - that is, if the bill sought to use private bounty hunters to replace the air strikes and other strategies that are currently being used against Afghanistan.

This would merely give Mr. Bush an additional tool, said Mr. Paul. He said he already knows he has the support of one influential House member, Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee.

"Dan Burton saw me on Fox and he told me later, 'Put me down. That sounds great,'" Mr. Paul said.


-------- activists

Peace Protesters Stage Rallies Across Europe and Australia
Numbers Smaller Than Expected; Polls Support Bombing

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 14, 2001; Page A26

BERLIN, Oct. 13 -- Thousands of peace demonstrators took to the streets in Germany, Britain and Australia today, but in smaller numbers than organizers had hoped for. Opinion polls indicated that the public, particularly in Germany, continued to back military strikes against Afghanistan in surprising numbers.

In central Berlin, about 15,000 protesters -- far fewer than the 50,000 some organizers wanted -- crowded into a square between two churches to hear a series of speakers condemn the bombing. In the background Jimi Hendrix music washed the crowd in the certainties of another era.

"Mr. President, the Taliban are no longer there," said Miriam Notten of the Berlin-based Afghan Culture Center, referring to the bombing of major cities in Afghanistan. "The people left are the poor."

Except for some far-left-wing demonstrators, however, there was ambivalence among some of the participants as they attempted to balance the need to bring the al Qaeda terrorist network to justice against the means with which to achieve it.

"That's exactly the question I was afraid you would ask," said Erika Stuelchken, draped in an antiwar banner, when asked the appropriate response to the killing of more than 5,000 civilians. "I know bombs are not the answer. An eye for an eye and the world is blind. If that makes me weak, I'm happy to be weak."

A coalition of student groups, left-wing groups, churches and unions organized this afternoon's rally, which was briefly disrupted when a group of neo-Nazis appeared in the dome of one of the churches above, leading the crowd to chant "Nazis out." A number of leftists scuffled with police who decided to leave the neo-Nazis in the dome rather than bring them out through a hostile crowd.

The neo-Nazis also oppose the bombing in Afghanistan, but their basic problem with the United States is Germany's defeat in World War II.

In Stuttgart, near the U.S. military's European Command headquarters, about 5,000 peace protesters held another rally, calling for Germans to unite against the bombing.

"This war threatens to spread a fire of hatred," said Sybille Stamm, a union leader in Stuttgart. Much smaller rallies were held in a number of other German cities, including Munich and Bonn.

But support for military action has increased in Germany since Sept. 11 despite a tradition of pacifism since World War II. According to an opinion poll conducted for the German television network ZDF, 65 percent of Germans support the country's participation in military strikes, nearly double the level of support immediately after the attacks and nearly three times the level of support for participation in the Kosovo campaign in 1999.

All major political parties except the successors to the former Communist Party in East Germany have supported military action.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, vociferous in his support of the United States, criticized the peace rally and said the demonstrators had misplaced their anger.

"Turn your focus on those who started this conflict," he said in an interview with the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that was scheduled to appear on Sunday.

In central London, about 3,000 people staged a march today to protest the bombing of Afghanistan.

"We're here because there are thousands of people across Britain who know that the bombing of Afghanistan is not going to put an end to terrorism," Carol Naughton, chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which organized the protest, said in an interview with the Reuters news agency. "It's not going to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. People who commit terrorist acts must be brought to justice through international law."

In Sydney, about 2,000 people, including Muslims and Christians, marched from Sydney Town Hall to an office tower housing the U.S. Consulate in the city center. Smaller rallies were held in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.

Marchers deplored the attacks on New York and Washington but said the U.S.-led airstrikes that began last Sunday were not the right solution.

The Australian government, backed by public opinion, has continued to support Washington's response to the attacks and has pledged to contribute elite troops, warships and planes to the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism.

Christian Stroebele, a member of the German Parliament whose own Greens party has backed the military campaign, said public opinion here and elsewhere will swing back as civilian casualties rise.

"I'm vehemently in favor of the people responsible being brought to justice. However, targeting innocent people is not the answer," said Stroebele, who noted that he attended a Berlin memorial service for the victims of the terrorist attacks as well as today's rally.

Below him, throngs of young people held banners with signs reading, "Two World Wars is enough" and "Your War is no Self-Defense, but Crime."

Among the demonstrators was a New Yorker, Jewl Mosteller, who carried a sign announcing her home town and her opposition to the war.

"We have to ask why people hate us," she said. "This is a good opportunity to take account of ourselves and our foreign policy."

Shortly before she spoke, the crowd heard an adaptation of "Hey Joe," the song made famous by Hendrix. "Hey, President Bush, what you doin' with that gun in your hand?" sang a performer to the crowd's approval. And in a moment of equal opportunity, also well received, he sang, "Hey, bin Laden . . . "

--------

Academics and activists call for peace

http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/peace.html

This is an initiative from a group of activists and academics calling for justice and peace after the atrocities of September 11th and in the face of war. Please take the time to read it through, and sign it if you agree with it. If you can, it would really help to send the URL, or forward copies of the text, to academic colleagues and fellow-organisers (without signatures - it isn't a chain letter!).

Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 07:03:04 -0400 From: Marita McComiskey mccomisk@uconnvm.uconn.edu

Although I have not seen any news coverage of the event, there was a peace rally at the state capitol in Hartford CT, Saturday, Oct. 13. Great speakers, puppets, singers, marchers, etc. Hundreds chanted their way from the capitol to the federal building.

It is important for us all to know how widespread the anti-war movement is, here and around the world. Power to the people and keep hope alive as we continue to work for peace.

--------

About 20,000 protest in Germany

10/14/2001 - Updated 05:27 PM ET
By Donna Leinwand,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/13/germany.htm

BERLIN - A Coca-Cola billboard towers over the plaza outside the Berlin City Hall where thousands of protesters gathered Saturday before heading to a giant anti-war rally several blocks away. To the protesters - many from the German Socialist, Communist and Green parties - the sign and the war in Afghanistan symbolize America's overwhelming power, its ability to use military might to impose its economic and social will on poorer and weaker nations.

"The American tradition is just to go in and bomb everything," said Konrad Engelschall, 27, a writer and philosopher from Berlin. "The future of the world is not the American way of life."

The subsequent anti-war rally, which appeared to exceed 20,000 people, filled Gendarmenmarkt, a large square in front of Berlin's main concert hall, and spilled out onto surrounding streets for several blocks in every direction. At least 30 pacifist and anti-globalization groups participated in the demonstration against the U.S. military strikes on Afghanistan.

"It's the biggest demonstration we've had. We will get a new peace movement in Germany," said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a member of Germany's parliament representing the Green Party. "We stand with America, but we don't stand with this war."

Many of the people at the rally said they are convinced the United States was not seeking justice for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Instead, they said the strikes on Afghanistan that resumed Saturday after a lull in deference to the Muslim holy day on Friday, are an excuse to seize economic and political control of a country that could be a critical bridge between Middle Eastern oil and western industry.

"We criticize this war from Bush because this war is against liberation movements," said Angelika Trendelenburg, 44, a nurse and member of the Marxist Leninist Party. "We think that the terrorists should get justice, but not with these attacks against Afghanistan. It's an imperialistic war."

Lydia Reumund, 23, a student from Leipzig, carried a banner that said in German: "Is that your globalization? Wealth for us, bombs for others?"

"War is the same as terrorism," Reumund said. "Politicians who make war, like Bush and the Europeans, don't seem to realize the danger of this, that the violence spirals. It is clear that terrorism must be undermined. But this can only be done by understanding the underlying reasons for terrorism. It is the great inequality, socially and economically, between the poor and the rich."

Reumund and others blame U.S. foreign policy for sowing the seeds that led to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The U.S. government, she said, built the Taliban, the hardline Islamic militia that now controls most of Afghanistan, to fight against the Soviet Union. Some of the former mujahaddin guerrillas who defeated the Soviets in the 1979-89 war later allied themselves with the Taliban as it rose to power in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Among them: Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The reason why these terrorist groups are coming up is American policy," said Ceren Turkmen, 20, a student who traveled to the rally from Munster. She pointed to the embargo against Iraq, which she said hurts "only the people, not the powerful." Baghdad claims U.N. sanctions imposed in 1991 after the Gulf War have caused thousands in Iraq to die due to a lack of food and medicine.

"America wants the money and the oil," said Turkmen, who finds it difficult to believe that the U.S. government did not know about the terrorist attacks beforehand. She theorized a conspiracy between the U.S. government and the terrorists. "America needed a new enemy."

Franziska Schubarth, 25, a student who grew up in East Germany, carried a sign that said, "50 years of 'humanitarian interventions' by the United States: Vietnam, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, Hiroshima." She said she was disappointed in German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder for standing with the USA. "We're the bloodhounds of America. We're too dependent on America. We should think for ourselves," she said.

She added that she doesn't trust the information coming from the U.S. media. "What we see now on CNN is propaganda," she said. "We just see (Secretary of State Colin) Powell or (Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld telling us what to think."

Ultimately, the war will not end the violence, said Ronny Weise, 24, a student and web designer from Berlin. "The reaction doesn't make sense. It's not a modern reaction. It's a Middle Ages response," Weise said. "The vicious circle of violence has to be broken."

----

50.000 at peace demonstrations in Germany

From: Regina Hagen <regina.hagen@jugendstil.da.shuttle.de>
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 15:54:15 +0200

Yesterday, two large and several small peace demonstrations took place in Germany. In Berlin, the capital, between 30.000 and 50.000 people are reported. Here, a planned "Space for Peace" protest day had to step back to allow the nation-wide event to take place. In Stuttgart, between 20.000 and 30.000 showed up for the demonstration and rally.

Before the main events, a few hundred people gather outside of Stuttgart at the European Command (EuCom) of the US military which is responsible for the US military's command structure in all of Europe and the Middle East. Here, the military space plans were made an issue. Other events were organized in various towns, among them Munich, were a major "Space for Peace" rally, demonstration, and teach-in was held.

Even if the lower numbers were true, much more people participated in the demonstrations than expected or even hoped for by the organizers. It is NOT true that all Germans extend the solidarity with the US to military retaliation. And it is even less true that all Germans agree to paricipation of the German military in this (or any other) war.

In peace

Regina Hagen Darmstaedter Friedensforum Teichhausstrasse 46 64287 Darmstadt, Germany Tel. [49] (6151) 47 114 Fax [49] (6151) 47 105 regina.hagen@jugendstil.da.shuttle.de

---

San Franciscans: Join us for a peace vigil against the war Wed. mornings in SF

Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2001 16:18:52 -0700
From: "Philip M. Klasky" <pklasky@igc.org>

The Agape Foundation and friends invite you to join us for a peace vigil against the war. It is held every Wednesday morning from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. at the corner of Van Ness and Market Streets in front of the BofA building. Bring your own signs and we have signs, including a hundred "Justice Not Vengeance" signs from Inkworks.

peace, Agape board of directors

----

GUATEMALAN TERRORISTS :
MILITARY AGENTS ARRIVE IN US AND THREATEN ACTIVIST

From: "GHRC" <ghrc-usa@ghrc-usa.org>
October 14, 2001

Dear Friends,

We are writing to ask for your very urgent assistance and support for Barbara Bocek, a U.S. citizen and human rights activist who is being stalked by Guatemalan military agents right here in the United States as a result of her tireless efforts on behalf of the Guatemalan people. Barbara began receiving death threats last May after her op-ed piece about the Gerardi case was published. The threats were very explicit and included warnings that if she returned to Guatemala she would be abducted, tortured and murdered. She nevertheless had the courage to travel to Guatemala in June with an Amnesty International research mission looking into the Gerardi murder trial and other ongoing abuses. She was attacked by two Guatemalan men at her hotel room door and told she was being taken away to be tortured and killed. Then she was forced at gunpoint down a stairwell, where she was bound, gagged, and left on the floor where her desperate friends found her two hours later. Despite this horrifying incident she has continued to work for Guatemala, but she is still regularly receiving threats here in the U.S.. Some threats are made by phone while others, disturbingly, left in notes at her home or on her car. One such note said that both she and her pet cat would be killed. Last week she returned home to find a knife imbedded in her window screen. Enough. This is a woman who has devoted herself to Guatemala and to Indigenous causes in the Americas. She currently works with Native peoples on a reservation in the United States. She has given her whole life to human rights. Now she needs our help and support.

The telephone calls you made earlier for Otoniel De La Roca Mendoza ( the Guatemalan witness living in the US who was receiving death threats against himself and his children a few months ago) were extremely helpful. Thanks to your endless calls a few years ago, Jennifer Harbury survived her hunger strikes in Guatemala. These calling session may seem tedious, but they work, and often make a life and death difference.

The abuses against Barbara are obviously coming from, or upon the orders of, Guatemalan military agents. The threats began in response to her op ed piece about the Gerardi case, when military officers were on trial for the Bishop's murder. Moreover, the style, methods, motives, and high level planning and coordination, as well as the continuity between the US threats and Guatemala attack, all make the military involvement more than clear. Whether they are sanctioned or not by Guatemalan civilian authorities makes no difference. We cannot allow Guatemalan military thugs to travel to the United States to hunt down and terrorize Guatemalans or U.S. citizens living here. They cannot be allowed to obstruct the international human rights campaign against impunity by committing acts of terror like the ones inflicted on Barbara. This is not the first time such actions have been taken here. Otoniel was threatened for months. Jennifer Harbury was notified by the FBI in 1995 that the Guatemalan military had hired a hit man to kill her. A year later, the religious community where she lived was shot at, and her lawyer, Jose Pertierra, had his car firebombed at his D.C. home. In 1995 the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA had its security door torn off its hinges, and their answering machine stolen, as they prepared for Jennifer's last hunger strike. The Guatemalan government cannot be permitted to shrug this off and tell us that this is a problem for the US police and not for them. Guatemalan agents are traveling to the US, using pay phones and hiring people to carry out criminal acts. US authorities are actively investigating Barbara's case. The Guatemalan government is still responsible for controlling their own agents, whether they choose to terrorize at home or here in the United States.

URGENT ACTION STEPS :

1. We urgently need you to call the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington D.C. and DEMAND that these immediate steps be taken by their government to halt all threats and attacks against Barbara. Tell them that :

a. We will not tolerate any further terrorist style actions by Guatemalan military agents here.

b The Guatemalan government must take immediate steps to guarantee Ms. Bocek's personal safety and peace of mind. This is not just a US police problem. It is the responsibility of the Guatemalan government to control their agents.

c. We demand an end to all human rights abuses in Guatemala, as promised in the Peace Accords in 1996, as well as concrete steps by the Guatemalan government to assure these rights.

d. If these abuses do not halt we will demand that the United States Congress extradite the numerous Guatemalan military officials known by the DEA to be involved in the drug trade.

2. If you can make still more calls, please call any of the following Congressional offices, inform them of the case, and ask that they too call the Guatemalan embassy at once : Sen. Patty Murray, Sen. Leahey, Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Dodd, Sen. Torricelli, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Lantos, Rep. Jim McGovern, Rep. Rangel, Rep. Conyers, Rep. Serrano, Rep. Becerra, Rep. Steve Horne and Rep. Morella.

GUATEMALAN EMBASSY : TEL. 202-745-4952 FAX 202-745-1908

E-MAIL :

CONGRESSIONAL SWITCHBOARD : 202-224-3121

Lisel Holdenreid, Chairperson of Coalition Missing

Jennifer K. Harbury, Attorney and Human Rights Activist

----

No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak

by Barbara Kingsolver;
Sunday, October 14, 2001
Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1014-01.htm http://www.latimes.com/

TUCSON -- I cannot find the glory in this day. When I picked up the newspaper and saw "America Strikes Back!" blazed boastfully across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall--shouldn't they reserve at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war?--my heart sank. We've answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out. The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course--Afghanis have spent their lives learning terror of anything hurled at them from the sky. Meanwhile, the genuine food aid on which so many depended for survival has been halted by the war. We've killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee, plus four humanitarian aid workers who coordinated the removal of land mines from the beleaguered Afghan soil. That office is now rubble, and so is my heart. I am going to have to keep pleading against this madness. I'll get scolded for it, I know. I've already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I'm told I am dangerous because I might get in the way of this holy project we've undertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we've wiped out every last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country, to anywhere. I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure to the spirit of generosity in which they were offered. People threaten vaguely, "She wouldn't feel this way if her child had died in the war!" (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) More subtle adversaries simply say I am ridiculous, a dreamer who takes a child's view of the world, imagining it can be made better than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and drive.

I fight that, I fight it as if I'm drowning. When I get to feeling I am an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculous little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plain English that the last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling us we will win this war and not be "misunderestimated." We aren't standing apart from the crowd, we are the crowd. There are millions of us, surely, who know how to look life in the eye, however awful things get, and still try to love it back.

It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture and see that many nations with fewer resources than ours have found solutions to problems that seem to baffle us. I'd like an end to corporate welfare so we could put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have done before us. I would like a humane health-care system organized along the lines of Canada's. I'd like the efficient public-transit system of Paris in my city, thank you. I'd like us to consume energy at the modest level that Europeans do, and then go them one better. I'd like a government that subsidizes renewable energy sources instead of forcefully patrolling the globe to protect oil gluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil gluttony is what got us into this holy war, and it's a deep tar pit. I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland's.

How can I take anything but a child's view of a war in which men are acting like children? What they're serving is not justice, it's simply vengeance. Adults bring about justice using the laws of common agreement. Uncivilized criminals are still held accountable through civilized institutions; we abolished stoning long ago. The World Court and the entire Muslim world stand ready to judge Osama bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a few billion dollars into food, health care and education instead of bombs, you can bet we'd win over enough friends to find out where he's hiding. And I'd like to point out, since no one else has, the Taliban is an alleged accessory, not the perpetrator--a legal point quickly cast aside in the rush to find a sovereign target to bomb. The word "intelligence" keeps cropping up, but I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt."

I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt. We need to take a moment's time out to review the monstrous waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don't win this one, guys. When there are people on Earth willing to give up their lives in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it's clear that we can't out-technologize them. You can't beat cancer by killing every cell in the body--or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This is a war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It will only end when we have the guts to say it really doesn't matter who started it, and begin to try and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.

We have always been at war, though the citizens of the U.S. were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until Sept. 11. Then, suddenly, we began to say, "The world has changed. This is something new." If there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please, in the name of heaven, I would like to see it. I would like to see it, now.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of, among other books, "The Poisonwood Bible" and "Prodigal Summer." This article will appear in a forthcoming collection of essays.

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Surprise at large turnout for national anti-war rally

By Cole Moreton
14 October 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=99415

Old men in Islamic dress marched with former Greenham women and dreadlocked anti-capitalists who booed when they passed McDonald's. Yesterday's peace rally in London was the first major public show of strength for a diverse coalition of people opposed to war which has grown up by website and e-mail faster than in any previous conflict.

Even the organisers were surprised at how many people turned up. "The police expected 10,000 but we have far, far exceeded that,'' said Carol Naughton, chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which cancelled a planned demo against Star Wars in order to host the rally.

The police estimated 20,000 people were on the march from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square, while the organisers put the numbers at 50,000.

It was a noisy and unruly demonstration on a hot day but people danced in the fountains instead of causing trouble. Attempts by far-left groups such as the Socialist Workers' Party to dominate the gathering were thwarted by weight of numbers.

Salma Yakoob of the Stop the War Coalition in Birmingham addressed the crowd from the plinth in Trafalgar Square. "If only the leftists had been here today people would have said we were all lefties," she said. ''If only CND had been here they would have said it was the middle-class elite. If it was only the Muslims they would have called us extremists. If it was only Asians and black people they would have said it was the ethnic minorities. Tony Blair, we are here united against this war. You cannot dismiss us all.''

The poet Adrian Mitchell performed a piece which he had first read out in Trafalgar Square in 1964. "It is about Vietnam,'' he said. "But it is still relevant. It's about sitting faithfully in England while thousands of miles away terrible atrocities are being committed in our name.''

The Stop The War Coalition announced that it intended to hold another national rally on 18 November.

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Global Oppressors Can't Deliver Justice

Revolutionary Worker #1122,
October 14, 2001,
posted at rwor.org

The U.S. president is talking about justice. And the U.S. armed forces are waging war.

Where is justice? What does it look like? Does it look like the bombs falling on Afghanistan?

The U.S. power structure is talking about justice. And their cruise missiles and fighter bombers are raining death on the impoverished people of Afghanistan. Horror from the sky.

The same empire that has been responsible for a global economy where thousands of children die every day of hunger and disease; for a global network of regimes who can only perpetuate this poverty and inequality; for dropping bombs on people in Hiroshima, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Serbia; for plotting murderous coups from Chile to Iran; for backing brutal regimes where women cannot even show their faces and people get their hands cut off for stealing bread--now the same empire responsible for all of this misery demands that people unite with them in war.

This power structure--which has lied to the people about every war they have waged, which has backed the most despicable death squads, from the Christian fascists of Rios Mott in Guatemala to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban--now expects the people to give them a free hand to define who is "the enemy" and what it will take to "take them out."

We have seen the outlines of this kind of justice: in the hunched bodies of veiled women begging on the streets of Afghanistan; in Saudi Arabia, whose corrupt kings rule a system where women are the property of men and foreign workers are treated like slaves; in Pakistan, where U.S.-backed generals alternate between backing drug lords and waging drug wars; in the hospitals of Iraq, where more that half a million children have died because the U.S. has deliberately destroyed Iraq's water system with bombs and sanctions; in the bull-dozed homes of Palestinians in the West Bank.

While the bombs rain down on Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists claim that this war is not aimed at the Afghani people. The U.S. generals claim that their bombers are "clearing the way" for a humanitarian mission to free the peoples of Afghanistan from the Taliban. Do they imagine that the masses of people in Afghanistan will thank them as they scramble for food rations amidst the shattered bones of their children, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers?

No. No. No.

Every U.S. military intervention only leads to death and destruction for the people. In the 1980s there was a just struggle in Afghanistan against a Soviet invasion.

But the U.S. intervened, backing forces like Osama bin Laden and the oppressive mujahedeen. More than a million people in Afghanistan died in that war, the country was devastated by thugs and warlords, and with the support of the rotten regime in Pakistan and millions of dollars in funding from Washington, the brutal Taliban rose to power.

And anyone who thinks that the armed forces of the U.S. ruling class can play a positive role in defending "secular democracy" should consider that president of the U.S. ruling class regularly consults with Christian fascists and fundamentalists like Ralph Reed and claims to be on a mission from god.

No. There is no justice in the house of the U.S. ruling class. We need to be crystal clear on the nature of these oppressors who have launched a new war: these arrogant lying creatures do not rule in the interests of the people of this country or the world. Their nature can be seen in the kind of military actions they take--their long-standing military mottos like "death from above" and their covert "special ops"--like the Green Berets in Vietnam whose actions were accompanied by napalm and carpet bombing.

Many conscious people see this and see that this planet does not need another unjust war. But some have suggested that instead of war, there should be legal justice--that the perpetrators of September 11 should be tracked down and brought to trial.

Who are the perpetrators? As the Committee of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement has said: "In the murky waters of terrorism and the intelligence services, where intrigue and double-dealing are the currency, it may never be possible to know exactly who organized the attack, or their motives. But two things are clear: first, the victims in New York join the millions of direct and indirect victims of the policies and actions of the U.S. ruling class. Second, even greater crimes are in preparation."

And even if the perpetrators could be identified, who would track them down and what court would try them? Clearly, whoever committed the acts of September 11 will not submit to a trial without a fight. And who would bring them in? Do the advocates of a "fair trial" really believe that U.S. imperialist armed forces could be an instrument for such a process? Where is the regime on this planet whose soldiers could be the instrument of justice in this case? And does anyone familiar with the workings of the U.S. justice department and its death-penalty president seriously believe that a just trial could occur on U.S. soil? Or that U.S. imperialism would allow such a trial to occur in a world court?

And more to the point, is it not clear from the words and actions of the U.S. power structure--from their massive acts of war--that they are not just moving to respond to the events of September 11. They are not seeking "justice." Rather their aim is to use this war to forcibly recast the world to protect their ability to dominate and exploit the planet and the people--to more firmly secure their grip on the rich oil resources of the Middle East. Behind the talk of "Operation Enduring Freedom" are the aims of unjust empire.

If we think clearly and soberly about the situation, there is no way within the confines of the present world order for justice to be delivered--not by any of the existing world powers, and least of all the U.S. power structure. They can and will do nothing but act against the interests of millions and millions of people, seek to enforce the oppressive and unjust order that serves their interest, and generally make all manner of things worse.

So, our problem, our historic task, is to stand together against this unjust war and to bring about the revolutionary transformation of this world. Only the revolutionary people, rising up in their millions--with a clear program and plan to kick out imperialism and make new democratic revolution--can bring justice in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and other countries of the Third World. And those who live within the U.S. itself have a responsibility to support the people rising up against oppression around the world and to do our part to make revolution in the belly of this beast.

Then, and only then, will the children of the planet know where justice is and what it looks like.

------

Hundreds protest bombing by U.S.
Racism also focus of anti-war march, rally held in Balboa Park

By Terry Rodgers
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
San Diego Union-Tribune
October 14, 2001

Hundreds of demonstrators opposed to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and concerned about racism rallied for peace, love and understanding yesterday in Balboa Park.

Leaders of the rally condemned the terrorist attacks of Sept.11 while expressing anxiety over the rise in hate crimes and the movement to curtail civil liberties.

Martin Eder, director of Activist San Diego, one of the groups that organized the march, said 390 people participated in the march and 100 more attended the rally.

"Now more than ever we are best served to focus our energy on love rather than on fear. If we surrender to hate, we've already lost," said Laurie Crystal, who spoke to the crowd gathered on the! grass near Laurel Street and Sixth Avenue.

"We can grieve together, but let's not be ignorant," she said.

Another speaker, Ahmad Kiyam, an Afghan-American, said he and other Muslims oppose the Taliban extremists.

Instead of launching missiles against terrorists and their sympathizers, the United States should conduct a propaganda war to win over people in the Middle East who don't understand America, he said.

The demonstrators, who seemed a bit lethargic in the brilliant sunshine and balmy weather, were briefly invigorated when an organizer led them in a chant: "This is what democracy looks like!"

Carol Jahnkow, director of the Peace Resource Center, told reporters she believes the military action is doing more harm than good.

"The bombing is not only hurting the people of Afghanistan, but it's also creating a breeding ground for more terrorists," she said.

"War makes it worse!" the marchers chanted as they crossed the L! aurel Street bridge. Another organizer, Steven Skoczen of Escondido, said the bombing has increased the suffering of innocent people in Afghanistan, where three years of drought has created widespread famine.

"The American people are accepting what they're being told rather than looking at the underlying issues," Skoczen said.

Although some opinion polls show up to 85 percent of Americans approve of the military strikes, the anti-war demonstrators drew mostly neutral reactions from onlookers as they marched about a mile across the park without incident.

One exception came from a man who yelled "cowards!" at the demonstrators through the rolled-down window of his car as he passed by.

Another man who disagreed with the protesters held up a sign that read: "Our freedom has a price."

"Being anti-war does not make us anti-American," said Roberto L. Martinez, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a migrant farm worker advocacy group.

"The war against terrorists is not a war against immigrants. We must not let that happen," Martinez said.

Civil liberties also should not be sacrificed while the country increases security against terrorism, rally organizers said.

Those participating in the march were a mix of young and old. William E. Claycomb, 74, wore a green sport coat and tie. But Jill Mangino took the prize for most noticeable attire with a long white dress and a pair of feathery angel's wings attached to her back.

"I wanted to represent the angel of peace and hope," she said. The cardboard sign in her hand read: "God Bless Humanity."

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Striking the match, starting the fire

www.onlinejournal.com
By Chris Grant
10-14-01

October 14, 2001-I'm sitting here looking at the people with sick smiles on their faces, the bloody drool hanging off the corners of their mouths.

I'm looking at the illegal Bush administration as I write this, making smart ass comments like, "We're not running out of targets. Afghanistan is."

I'm looking at the 90 percent of the American public who have a whole country's worth of blood on their hands, gleefully aiding and abetting war crimes. Go read the Geneva Convention Accords.

I'm thinking about someone who claimed to be my friend and then, with the reading of my Manufacturing Dissent commentary, asked me if I was sure that I wasn't "from the Middle East."

I'm sitting here thinking about the people who are being killed in Afghanistan, people that had nothing to begin with, now without their lives.

I'm sitting here thinking all the innocent people that have been discriminated against, threatened, attacked, beaten and killed right here in the supposedly "freedom loving" U.S. by a public that believe that they have carte blanche to put action to the xenophobia that has always been there. Remember, Bush said it himself, "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." To brain-addled Americans, that's all the permission they needed to act out their racist fantasies.

I'm wondering what the people who were killed in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania would think about war being waged in their names, and am pretty damn sure that they would be ashamed.

I'm sitting here wondering how a nation, one that claims to be peace and freedom loving, could allow a man (term used loosely) with the I.Q. of wallpaper to be selected by a corrupt group of judges and pretend to be president, knowing it's because we are an arrogant, ignorant flock of sheep.

I'm wondering about how long the suffering is going to last, knowing that one minute is one minute too long.

I'm wondering how many women are going to give birth to children that have left feet missing and brains malformed, only to die of cancer themselves months later, insuring that the circle of blood will continue, in the name of revenge.

I'm wondering how long the radiation is going to sit in the country of Afghanistan (and others if we are to believe that this is just the first country we will attack), watching as the American sheeple and the government shrug and say, "Who cares?"

I'm wondering whether or not Afghanistan will even be habitable after the last bomb drops and knowing full well that it won't and that, again, the sheep do not care.

I'm sitting here listening to how we must be patriotic and if you say even the slightest word in the way of criticism, you are un-American. Jingoism at its finest.

I'm listening to how we must trust the very same people who allowed September 11 to happen in the first place, looking at New York and wondering what the next time we trust these Emmy Award winners will look like.

I'm watching people saying that "humanitarian aid" actions are being taken at the same time military action is being taken and that makes it okay. Thanks for the radiation, America; it was a big help in locating the food. How many of you know that that "humanitarian aid" is being dropped into areas that are mined halfway to London?

I walk around and see American flags everywhere, including on the doors of public restrooms, and I know that the sheeple use this symbol as some kind of rallying point, even though they don't know (or refuse to know) its history and how it's been used to justify mass oppression and murder.

For those of you that have decided that it's your "patriotic duty" to fly the flag, I would ask you the following: if you had two minutes to say something to a child in Afghanistan before the bombs and missiles came in again, what would you say? Would it sound something like this, "I know that you're about to choke on your own blood and you are about to watch your mother die before your eyes and I know that you know you will die shortly thereafter. Don't worry, though. To your west, in my country, we have a flag that symbolizes freedom and peace. And as long as that flag flies, we'll keep dropping bombs and sending missiles at people like you." Would it sound something like that?

I walk into places of business and hear cashiers and customers on the current events and they don't know what they're speaking about because they are uneducated about what the real truth is and what the filtered truth is.

I'm ready to vomit.

The media allows the information to be suppressed. The media has its collective tongue up the ass of the illegally appointed Bush administration.

I'm ready to vomit.

The people shake in their boots and piss their pants, afraid of a tinhorn Resident and willing to give up their rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

I'm ready to vomit blood.

And I'm ready to declare war.

Unlike the current crimes being committed in Afghanistan, my war is justified. Ignorance is a crime. Arrogance is a crime. Unlike the crimes being committed in Afghanistan, unless you stand really close to the computer screen, my war will not kill you.

This war will be aimed at the sheep that are willingly following an unelected boy king, the Boy King himself and all of his horses and all of his men. I will explode the myths and the outright lies that you are expected to suck up and believe. Humpty Dumpy will not be able to be put back together again when all is said and done.

I gave all of you plenty of time to pour the gasoline. I'm striking the match now, starting the fire. Those of you, who wish to remain untouched by the flame, if you are not educated, get that way. Those of you who wish to remain ignorant will no longer be given the luxury of escaping my scorn. You will be touched and touched often by the fire.

"It is in moments of violence that we have confrontation, that we find out what we believe in, whether we have soul and spirit. They are the pivotal points in our lives." ~Harlan Ellison

I have soul.

I have spirit.

I know what I believe in.

This is going to be one hell of a confrontation.

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Thousands in Berlin peace march against Afghan bombing, unrest in Nigeria

Sunday, October 14, 2001
http://www.brecorder.com/story/000000/200110/20011014/200110140120.shtml

BERLIN: Thousands joined a peace rally in Berlin on Saturday, Germany's biggest protest so far against the bombing of Afghanistan. There were modest anti-war rallies in other parts of the non-Islamic world. In largely Muslim northern Nigeria, violent unrest erupted for a second day running and police issued a shoot-on-sight order after eight people were killed by rioters following anti-American protests on Friday.

Berlin protest organisers said some 30,000 people turned out, while police put the figure at about 14,000. Protesters came from some 140 different groups, ranging from far-left Marxist parties to the far-right neo-Nazi NPD party.

Hundreds carried anti-war banners, thousands wore peace buttons and many chanted slogans criticising the United States and President George W. Bush.

"The horror of World War Two makes all of us in Germany leery of war," said Hannes Wand, a 54-year-old physician at the rally held under blue skies and unusually warm autumn weather. "I'm against this war because it's not justified and innocent people are being killed and forced to flee their homes."

The demonstrators marched through the government quarter in central Berlin and past the Brandenburg Gate, foreign ministry and city hall. There were occasional minor scuffles between police and protesters.

Banners read: "War is genocide", "War is not the solution" and "Stop Bush's war". Singers performed anti-war folk songs from the 1960s from the backs of flat-bed trucks.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder criticised the peace rally, saying the demonstrators were being misled.

"Turn your focus on those who started this conflict," Schroeder said in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel newspaper due to appear on Sunday.

An increasing majority of Germans back possible German involvement in US military operations after the September 11 attacks, according to a survey published on Friday.

All political parties except the reformed communist Party of Democratic Socialism have supported US military strikes and the possibility of German involvement.

But pacifism has been strong in Germany in the 55 years since World War Two. Some 3,000 marched in front of the American embassy in Berlin on Sunday after the first strikes on Afghanistan.

In Berlin, Dorothea Hampel, 42, was carrying a banner that read: "No Vietnam in Afghanistan."

"This is a stupid war and it doesn't make any sense to attack Afghanistan," said Hampel, a university professor.

Police said about 4,000 also protested in the southwestern town of Stuttgart.

In London, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said it expected more than 10,000 people to turn out for a march against the bombing of Afghanistan, but police estimated the number at around 3,000 before the march left Hyde Park and headed for Trafalgar Square under a sea of colourful banners.

About 2,000 Australians, including Muslims and Christians, marched from Sydney Town Hall to a tower housing the US consulate to protest against the war. Other peaceful peace rallies were held in Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide.

The Nigerian army moved into Kano's Sabon Gari market area early on Saturday after Christian churches and mosques were set on fire in rioting on Friday.

Community leaders said rioters killed at least six female school students on their way to take university entrance exams on Friday.

At least 12 people were injured in a clash between Hindus and Muslims after Hindus tried to burn portraits of Osama bin Laden, authorities in the eastern Indian state of Bihar said.

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'Stop bombing Afghanistan!' London protesters say

Sunday, October 14, 2001
http://www.brecorder.com/story/000000/200110/20011014/200110140126.shtml

LONDON : Thousands of people, including members of Muslim and Christian groups, staged a march through central London on Saturday to protest against the bombing of Afghanistan. "We're here because there are thousands of people across Britain who know that the bombing of Afghanistan is not going to put an end to terrorism," Carol Naughton, chairman of the protest organisers, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), told Reuters. "It's not going to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. People who commit terrorist acts must be brought to justice through international law," she said.

US-led air strikes on Afghanistan began last Sunday after the ruling Taleban refused to hand over Saudi-born fugitive bin Laden, the prime suspect behind the suicide hijack attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon last month.

"We need to stop the bombing and go right back to diplomatic ways to end this crisis," she said.

CND said it expected more than 10,000 people to turn out for the protest, but police estimated the number at around 3,000 before the march began in London's Hyde Park.

The march headed for Trafalgar Square in London's West End under a sea of colourful banners accompanied by chanting against the military strikes and calls for a halt to the bombing.

One tearful Muslim woman said: "They will answer for it on the day of resurrection. Shame on all of those who are dropping bombs.


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