------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
France shuts 2 nuclear reactors for work Oct 14 week
Missiles to Protect La Hague
Japanese Citizens Fearful of Nuclear Imposing Law
Help stop radwaste import to Kazakhstan
Rep. Buyer Suggests Limited Nuclear Retaliation
U.S. Anthrax Scare Spreads to Nuclear Safety
Nuclear terrorists
NRC approves power increases for Texas, N.C. nukes
Pipelines, Nuclear Plants, Dams Seen Vulnerable
UT vice chancellor tapped for defense post
New York stations troops at nuclear power plants
Concerns Rise Over Safety of A-Plants
Nuclear Plant Threat Discredited
Three Mile Island Placed on High Alert After Receiving Threat
TERRORIST THREAT RAISES FEARS AT THREE MILE ISLAND
Buyer discusses U.S. use of nuclear device

MILITARY
Prepare to die, Taliban mullah tells troops
Afghans Now Question U.S. Strikes
Taliban Graduates Ready for Holy War
US 'planned attack on Taleban'
Russian military suspected as source of anthrax
US Germ expert says panicky people can iron mail
From the cold war, lessons in combating anthrax
Signs of a cunning bioterrorist
Doctor's trial reset for toxic stockpile
ABC'$ of the new 'Drug War' - Anthrax, Bayer, and Cipro
Iraq Says U.S. Navy Set Ship Ablaze in Gulf
Palestinian Militants Kill Israeli Cabinet Official
Vieques Referendum Ruled Unconstitutional
U.S. splits Afghanistan into 'engagement zones'
U.S. leaflets, radio get word to Afghans
Land-Based Fighter Bombers Join Airstrikes in Afghanistan
U.S. Arms Unmanned Aircraft 'Revolution' in Sky Above Afghanistan
Special Operations Troops on Call, Rumsfeld Says
Pentagon regroups for era of 'stateless' foes

OTHER
On Death Row, China's Source of Transplants
Afghan Food Delivery to Transit Iran
China Braces for Impact of Membership in W.T.O.
China Arrests 23,000 People
Amnesty Says Torture Rife in Brazil Police Routine
Call-up of reserves leaves gaps in many police forces
Beyond Carnivore: FBI Eyes Packet Taps
Russia to Dismantle Spy Facility in Cuba
NATION'S WATER CALLED UNLIKELY TERRORIST TARGET
Domestic terror not ruled out
Closure of House Unprecedented
The beginnings of justice against Al Qaeda
Foot soldiers propelled by dreams of conquering 'infidels'
The tenets of terror
Osama bin Laden followers sentenced to life in U.S. embassy bombings
The New War Against Terror

ACTIVISTS
GROUPS VISIT LAS VEGAS TO PROTEST NUCLEAR DUMP
Yucca Panel Tonight
Nationwide Anti-War Actions
Outcry Against War Grows Louder
NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN!
Berkeley Council Wants Bombing to Stop
U.S. bears sole blame for Sept. 11, Trask says



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- france

France shuts 2 nuclear reactors for work Oct 14 week

FRANCE: October 18, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICEhttp://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12856/story.htm

PARIS - France said two nuclear power reactors were shut last week for repairs, bringing the total number of plant outages to 13 out of 59 plants, the French industry ministry said.

The B1 reactor at the 1,400 megawatt Chooz plant in Chalons en Champagne in the northeast was shut on October 13 to inspect a primary pump joint, the ministry said in its data released for the week October 8-14. Its second reactor was working normally.

Also on the same day, the reactor no. 3 at 900 MW Tricastin plant in Lyon in the southeast, was shut for a 10-yearly check, refuelling and to replace a vapour generator. The other three reactors were still in service. The same week saw the restart at two plants, the ministry said.

Orlean's 900 MW Chinon plant restarted its B4 reactor on October 14 after it was stopped on October 4 to inspect its principal transformer, while in Lyon, the 1,300 MW St. Albans plant restarted after a 5-day shutdown.

--------

Missiles to Protect La Hague
A plan to defend sites of national interest

Ouest-France
October 18, 2001
By Edouard Maret
(NCI translation by Robert Uris)
http://www.nci.org/

Alain Richard, minister of Defense, confirmed to the newspaper Ouest-France that the government is going to reinforce protection at certain civil and military sites. Among them is the reprocessing center at la Hague, in Cotentin.

Ground to air missile are going to be deployed on the nuclear site at La Hague, in the Manche region. Some military personnel from the Air Force acknowledged this during the weekend, October 6 and 7.

France is studying a plan to defend key sensitive sites on the national territory. Even so, among those close to the Defense ministry, they are assuring that there is no indication that certain sensitive French sites are the object of terrorist threats. The public powers (government) undertook to confirm the security of these sites and to examine what position to take in case of a threat.

The idea is to organize a "bubble" of protection around sensitive sites, such as Paris during the World Cup or the G-7 summits. It concerns control measures and air defenses: limiting overflights, alerting the Air Force and deploying missile batteries.

This is being prepared for the la Hague site, in Cotentin. According to our sources, it concerns Crotale missiles, whose reach/capability is about 20 kilometers. Unless the choice is a system of ground armament, the Roland, whose characteristics are comparable, would require about 60 soldiers to be mobilized to get it started.

In both cases, these arms systems have radars that permit the detection of their targets at low altitude. Civil means don't have this in service and they are teleguided by the transponders on board airplanes.

Establishment of such a set-up in the heart of La Hague risks arousing questions as to the real risks of attacks. They are shared by certain military who, under their hats (secretly) confess regret at the slowness in putting in place a defense system near French nuclear sites. Some of them are openly critical of the politic silence of those in charge of the country (elected officials). "One loses the sense of operational effectiveness in order not to panic public opinion."

In the Channel, as elsewhere in France, a permanent concern motivates the representatives of the State and the public powers: do not contribute by any communication there may be, to the development of a psychosis.

This position was blown up by the Wise report, commissioned by the European Union, according to which "an airplane crash into the Cogema factory could have dramatic consequences. This was something that was refuted by the directors of Cogema. According to nuclear experts, overflights of La Hague being forbidden, our fighter planes would intercept immediately any suspicious plane.

But, at La Hague, one cannot ignore it. Cogema employs some 3,200 workers and nearly as many contract personnel. Enough "manna," especially from taxes, for an entire province. The Council General of The Channel receives in his money bag some 360 million francs by means of the professional tax. Within the same area, the agency for radioactive waste (ANDRA) stocks 933,000 tons of low level waste in a mixture that contains 100 kilograms of plutonium disseminated on the site.

Edouard Maret

-------- japan

Japanese Citizens Fearful of Nuclear Imposing Law

Thu, 18 Oct 2001
From: Mika Ohbayashi <mika@jca.apc.org>

Dear nuclear activists,

Here I send you an article written by a Phd. Student about the Law which is planned to submit to the Japanese diet by some strong pro-nuclear senators. This law does not clearly indecate about nuclear power, but it puts obligations to local authorities to follow the national energy policy. You may remember the Japanese MOX plan is currently halted by oppositions of local government. See the article.

Mika Ohbayashi

--

Japanese Citizens Fearful of Nuclear Imposing Law

Aki Suwa, Phd.
Student, the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London,
12 October 2001

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan is currently maneuvering to submit a new energy bill, the Basic Energy Law, to the Japanese Diet during the extra session which convened on September 27 2001.

According to a newspaper reports, the LDP has entered into negotiations with its coalition partners (the Komei Party and Hoshu Party), to prepare to submit a draft "Basic Energy Law" to the Diet during the next session (Denki Shinbun, 15 August 2001). The aim of legislators in the LDP Basic Energy Law Project Team is to submit the Bill as a private members bill, assumedly to avoid complicated negotiations with government departments.

The Basic Energy Bill has many controversial features from an energy market liberalization and local governance perspectives.

First, although the Bill does identify the value and necessity of energy market liberalization (Article 4, clause2), it has some contradictory requirements for further liberalization. For example, the Bill stresses the importance of national intervention in energy issues, in such fields as resource development and energy security (Article 2, Clause 1). Also, it seeks to further promote the use of non-fossil fuel energy sources (Article 3, Clause 1). In particular, since renewables are the not preferred generation sources (Article 2, Clause 2), the "encouragement of non-fossil fuel energy sources" practically means continuation, and possibly the expansion, of state subsidies to particular energy sources such as nuclear power.

Second, the Bill requires a National Energy Plan to be drafted (Article 12, Clause 1). The Plan must be consistent with the long-term policy to respect "foreseeability" of the future. The Long-term and foreseeable policy consideration may contradict with some unpredictability inherent to the further market liberalization.

Third, the Bill makes it an obligation for the prefecture and local governments, industry and the public to co-operate to implement the government policies (Article 9). This may conflict with possible voluntary decisions taken up by industry, local governments and the public in a fully liberalized market to act on behalf of their own interests.

A network of citizens organisations, including the high profile Citizens' Nuclear Information Center (CNIC), is deeply concerned with the implications of the Bill, as it might be established as a national intervention policy to against the ongoing energy restructuring programmes. Also, the citizens groups are fearful as it may give the ultimate supremacy to the central decisions over any local opposition. For example, if the Bill is enacted, local government and people may not be able to object the government imposition of nuclear facilities, including those related to spent fuel reprocessing.

If this Bill is submitted as a private member's bill, the chance of its getting parliamentary approval is high, because of the nature of the Japanese diet debate system. Also, it is the concern of the Japanese citizens groups that the LDP and its counterparts may take the opportunity to get the parliamental approval in the situation where the general public attention is diverted by the current turmoil over the US retaliation war.

-------- kazakhstan

Help stop radwaste import to Kazakhstan

Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001
From: "michael mariotte" <nirsnet@nirs.org>

Dear Friends

We have received this message from our friends at Ecodefense! and NIRS/WISE Russia. I hope you can take a few minutes to help out.

Michael Mariotte NIRS

Here is a statement by Kazakhstan groups opposing the import of low-level radioactive waste to this country. Can you please send it out and ask people across the globe to fax to kazakhstan letters of protest. it must be said there that dumping any radioactive waste in any country is crime against population of this country, Kazakhstan is very sensitive to international opinion.

Prime Minister of Republic of Kazakhstan - fax: 7(3172) 32-40-89, tel. 32-31-04 Upper house of the Parliament of RK - fax 7(3172) 33-38-92, tel. 33-38-92 Lowerhouse of the Parliament of RK - fax 7 (3172) 32-77-81, tel. 7 (3172) 15-30-19 Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of RK - fax 7 (31622) 50620, tel. 7 (31622) 5-42-65, 5-42-90 Ministry of Energy, Industry and Trade of RK fax 7 (3172) 31 71 64, tel. 7 (3172) 31-71-33,31-71-35

APPEAL of citizens and public organizations of the Republic of Kazakhstan according to the draft of Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan on submissions and addenda to some legislative acts of the Republic of Kazakhstan on issues of radiation safety

At present the deputies of the Lower Chamber of the Republic of Kazakhstan (RK) (Kotovich V. N., Abilov B.M., Amerguzhin Kh.á., Battalova Z.K., Erezhepov K.Zh., Cherkashina A.I.) are initiating the Law aimed at amending several existing legislative acts on the use of nuclear energy, environmental protection, and licensing in order to legalize the import, storage and burial ground disposal of low-level radioactive wastes from other countries on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The general public has noticed that the draft law contradicts the Constitution and current legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan, as well as international legislative documents ratified by Kazakhstan, in particular: 1. The Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan (article 31(paragraph 1); 2. The Law on Environmental Protection (articles 3, 5 (paragraph 1); 3. The Law on Radiation Safety of the Population (article 19); 4. The Law on Sanitary and Epidemiological Safety of the Population (article 3); 5. The Law on National Security of the Republic of Kazakhstan (article 21); 6. The Aarhus Convention; 7. The principles of Rio-de-Janeiro Declaration on Environment and Sustainable Development signed by the RK.

No information has been presented about the legal, scientific, sanitary and epidemiological expertise conducted on the proposed draft law. There is also no information on the Environmental Impact Assessment and State Environmental Expertise on the draft law, required by the Law on Environmental Expertise (article 14, paragraph 7, 16), as well as information on the radiation situation in the country. The deputies' statement on the inexpensive mechanism of the draft standards is not substantiated with exact economic grounds. The current situation, when citizens are not able to participate in the process of discussion and decision-making on the draft law, is a violation of articles 6 and 7 of the Aarhus Convention, and articles 3 and 21 of the Law on Use of Nuclear Energy. The same decisions should be taken under general public participation right up to the national referendum!

Citizens and public organizations of Kazakhstan are convinced that this draft law will infringe on basic human rights! The absence of reliable and complete information allows us to draw the conclusion that the draft law poses an environmental risk, is economically infeasible, and technically incomplete. This initiative is a striking example of the lack of acceptance of state environmental policy by the Parliament of the RK. We are appealing to the President, Deputies of the Parliament and the Government of the Republic Kazakhstan not to allow such amendments to the existing legislation!

October 5, 2001

The appeal is prepared at the Consultative Meeting of NGOs on issues of commercial importation and burial ground disposal of low-level radioactive waste on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Almaty, October 4-5, 2001)

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

Rep. Buyer Suggests Limited Nuclear Retaliation

Yahoo! News
Thursday October 18
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/wrtv/20011018/lo/929540_1.html

U.S. Rep. Steve Buyer says that the United States should use tactical nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden's terrorist network in Afghanistan if it is linked to recent anthrax incidents in the United States.

The Indiana Republican said that small, specialized nuclear weapons -- not as powerful as the atom bombs that were used in World War II -- could be used on the caves where members of bin Laden's network have taken shelter.

Buyer, a Gulf War veteran, said that the use of the weapons would be a proper response if bin Laden's people are linked to the anthrax cases in Florida, Washington, New York and elsewhere in the United States.

"Don't send special forces in there to sweep," Buyer said. "We'd be very naïve to believe that biotoxins and chemical agents were not in these caves. Put a tactical nuclear device in, and close these caves for a thousand years."

Buyer said that he hadn't talked with other lawmakers or the Bush administration about the idea, and didn't know how many in the government would support it.

Buyer stresses that he doesn't advocate the use of full-power nuclear bombs, but he acknowledged that much of the world wouldn't see the difference.

"I just want the (Bush) administration to know that I think the United States needs to send a message to the world that we are prepared to do that," Buyer said.

Forum: If You Were Bush, What Would You Do?

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

U.S. Anthrax Scare Spreads to Nuclear Safety

Thu, Oct 18
Reuters
By Randall Mikkelsen and Sayed Salahuddin
http://news.excite.com/news/r/011018/14/news-attack-dc

WASHINGTON/KABUL - U.S. fears of unconventional terrorist attacks spread from anthrax and germ warfare to nuclear safety on Thursday when a major power plant was put on top alert as U.S. planes pounded Afghanistan for the 12th day in their war on terrorism.

Although officials later dismissed the threat to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania after first calling it "credible," the incident further jangled American nerves already frayed by last month's mass killings in New York and Washington and three dozen subsequent cases of anthrax or exposure to the potential germ warfare weapon.

On the military front, U.S. planes in Afghanistan continued a fierce bombardment of targets of the ruling Taliban, who are sheltering Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks by hijacked airliners that killed nearly 5,400 people.

On the diplomatic front, President Bush arrived in China for an Asian summit, hoping to shore up support from countries as diverse as China, the world's largest remaining communist country, and Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation.

But it was the home front with anthrax and the latest nuclear scare that preoccupied Americans.

Harrisburg International Airport and Lancaster airport near the nuclear plant were shut for four hours and the plant itself, site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, was on heightened alert for about eight hours.

"We took the appropriate actions putting the reactor on a heightened state of alert last night following a report from the federal intelligence community of a threat to Three Mile Island," Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said.

"We no longer consider that threat credible," Sheehan said, adding it was "very specific" to the Three Mile Island facility. He declined to elaborate.

Equipment failure at the plant in 1979 caused a loss of cooling water, leading to the partial melting of the uranium fuel and release of a small amount of radioactive material.

Any attack whether by hijacked plane or other means on the plant, which has a heavily reinforced containment shell, would presumably seek to release deadly radioactivity into the air.

Local television stations said temporary flight curbs were put into effect for a 20-mile radius around the airports and military aircraft were sent to protect the plant.

All 103 U.S. nuclear power rectors, among the most closely guarded facilities in the country, have been on even higher alert after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

MILLION DOLLAR REWARD OFFERED

Although no hard evidence has been found linking anthrax-laced letters to bin Laden, Bush has said there could be a link.

The government offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for mailing anthrax, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced.

The spread of anthrax contamination by letter forced an unprecedented closing of part of U.S. Congress on Wednesday and spooked financial markets around the world.

The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives closed until Tuesday for anthrax testing on their side of the Capitol Hill complex, but the Democratic-controlled Senate remained in session under heavy security after 31 congressional staffers tested positive for anthrax exposure.

The contamination arrived in an anthrax-tainted letter at the office of senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Monday.

The closures marked an unprecedented halt to business for an environmental safety check. The last time there was such a closure was on the day of the September attacks when the Senate also shut down.

Despite the disruptions of the anthrax scare, congressional leaders said they had reached a compromise agreement on a broad anti-terrorism bill to expand the power of law enforcement to wiretap suspected terrorists, share intelligence information about them and track their Internet movements.

U.S. Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge said five people had tested positive for anthrax out of thousands tested after letters containing powder arrived at media offices in Florida and New York, Congress and many other addresses, some of them clearly hoaxes.

A CBS employee who works with TV News anchor Dan Rather in New York tested positive for skin anthrax, making the company the third major network to be exposed to the potentially deadly disease.

The anthrax scare has spread far beyond U.S. borders.

Security guards sealed off the mailroom of the lower house of the French parliament, and part of Australia's national parliament was evacuated after powder-laced letters arrived.

In Nairobi, a letter sent to an unidentified Kenyan businessman tested positive for anthrax. The letter was posted from Atlanta on Sept. 8 and passed via Miami.

In Japan, letters containing suspicious powder were delivered to the U.S. consulate in Osaka and three major Japanese newspapers.

In Afghanistan, the 12th day of air raids went ahead despite appeals from aid agencies for a break to get badly needed food into the country.

UNMANNED U.S. DRONES CARRY MISSILES

For the first time ever, the United States is flying armed, unmanned drones into combat. "Predator" spy planes, armed with anti-tank missiles are taking to the skies over Afghanistan, U.S. defense officials said on Thursday.

The remote-controlled RQ-1 aircraft have been modified by the Air Force to carry two Hellfire missiles. Defense experts called such a move a first step toward perhaps one day building unmanned, long-range bombers that can carry dozens of missiles and bombs to overseas targets without risking human crews.

The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan said more than 400 people had been killed so far in the U.S.-led strikes and confirmed the country was running short of food and medicines.

Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef's statement accused the United States of "committing state terrorism... under the cover of fighting terrorism."

More than 60 people have been killed in the bombardment of the capital Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar since Wednesday morning, the Afghan Islamic Press said

Thursday's morning raids hit targets around Kandahar and Jalalabad in the east -- the hub of Afghanistan's notorious guerrilla training camps, witnesses told Reuters.

At least seven civilians were killed and several injured by exploding ammunition after U.S. warplanes bombed a Taliban munitions dump to the north of Kabul, witnesses said.

But the Taliban, who have denounced the air strikes as a war on Islam, said all their leaders were alive and well and so was their guest bin Laden.

The military chief of bin Laden's al Qaeda network said Afghans would drag slain U.S. troops through the streets, rekindling memories of the doomed 1993 involvement in Somalia when 18 U.S. members of a U.N. peacekeeping force were killed and mobs dragged some of their bodies through the streets.

"America will only be certain about its mistaken calculations after its soldiers are dragged in Afghanistan as they were in Somalia," Egyptian radical Mohamed Atef, reportedly bin Laden's No. 2, was quoted as saying in a report by the London-based Islamic Observation Center.

In New York, four followers of bin Laden were sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, the first U.S. convictions linked to the Saudi-born militant.

With Bush keen to ensure global backing for his war on terrorism, latest developments in the Middle East threatened to complicate his task of selling the idea to skeptical Muslims.

Israel, incensed at Wednesday's assassination of right-wing cabinet minister and former general Rehavam Zeevi, threatened to invoke the war on terrorism to justify attacking the Palestinians if they fail to hand over Zeevi's killers. Any flare-up in the Middle East could alienate the very Muslim nations Bush is courting at his meetings in China.

---------

Nuclear terrorists

Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001
From: "Rosemary & Sal / Citizens Awareness Network" <ctcan@snet.net>
Rosemary Bassilakis & Sal Mangiagli Citizens Awareness Network 54 Old Turnpike Road Haddam, CT 06438 Ph/fax 860 345-2157 ctcan@snet.net www.nukebusters.org

from The Nation
FEATURE STORY
Special Report Nuclear Safety
by MATT BIVENS

What happens if a suicide bomber drives a jumbo jet into one of America's 103 nuclear power reactors? What happens if a fire fed by thousands of tons of jet fuel roars through a reactor complex--or, worse, through the enormous and barely protected containment pools of spent nuclear fuel found at every such plant?

These questions are even more obvious and urgent than they may seem at first glance. Russian television reported on Wednesday: "Our [Russian] security services are warning the United States that what happened on Tuesday is just the beginning, and that the next target of the terrorists will be an American nuclear facility." [see www.nci.org] Meanwhile, eight years ago,in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, the terrorists themselves wrote to The New York Times to warn that nuclear attack would follow.

That letter, judged authentic by federal authorities, talked of "150 suicide soldiers" who would hit "nuclear targets." As if to drive home the point, those same terrorists had trained beforehand at a camp in Pennsylvania 30 miles from Three Mile Island. U.S. law enforcement had them under surveillance at least a month before they struck--and at one point observed them conducting a mock assault on an electric power substation. That very same weekend, a man later judged to be mentally unwell drove his station wagon through the security barriers at Three Mile Island and parked next to a supposedly secured building. [see www.tmia.com/threat.html]

There are nuclear power plants outside many urban areas. There's Indian Point on the Hudson River, some 25 miles northwest of New York City; Limerick Plant some 20 miles outside of Philadelphia; Calvert Cliffs, 45 miles from the nation's capital; and a handful of nuclear plants ringing Chicago, from

Dresden to Braidwood. A terrorist strike at any such plant could not bring about a nuclear explosion--but there are a number of scenarios that would spread deadly radiation clouds across, in the NRC's famous phrase, an area the size of Pennsylvania. On top of the tens of thousands of eventual radiation-driven deaths, there is the mass panic such an attack might cause. And if we can clean up and rebuild after the World Trade Center bombing, a radiological attack would force us to write off huge swathes of land as national sacrifice areas. So given the extraordinary events of this week, we're taking extraordinary measures to protect our nuclear plants, right?

Well, in France, the defense minister has stationed troops around nuclear power plants...But in America, not much is being done. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday in a statement said it had "recommended" that plants tighten security. Bob Jasinski, an NRC spokesman, said Friday that nothing had changed since then. (What about Wednesday's Russian TV report? Or the repeated insistence by authorities that there are more terrorist cells out there?) The NRC also says there have been "no credible general or specific threats to any of these [nuclear] facilities"--and does not seem interested in reconsidering the specific and, it now seems, very credible "93 threats of 150 suicide soldiers" headed the

NRC's way. David Orrik, a former U.S. Navy Seal, until recently ran a program that tested the security at civilian nuclear plants by organizing mock attacks against them. His exercises don't sound terribly ambitious--they pit a small team, moving on foot, against a nuclear plant security force that would be warned six months in advance of the test. Even so, half of all plants tested failed--and in at least one case, Orrik's men were able to simulate enough sabotage to cause a core melt. And remember, these tests did not simulate, say, the Osama bin Laden truck bombs so successful in demolishing U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.

The nuclear industry did not enjoy failing, and did not enjoy shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for Orrik's tests--or to install security upgrades as the penalty for not passing. So it began to lean on the NRC to gut the program. This fall, the NRC is doing just that--phasing out Orrik's program in favor of one in which nuclear power plants will carry out "self-assessments." An NRC spokesman could not say if that plan would now be scrapped, and neither could Orrik. Asked on Friday if NRC was considering any dramatic new security measures, Orrik said he had "no sense at all" what would happen next. "I'm curious myself--will it be a sea change? Or business as usual?"

Ironically, one of the first real critical looks at the NRC's decision to let nuclear plants who failed security tests make up their own tests instead appeared in U.S. News & World Report's Monday edition--the day before, well, Tuesday.

That article quotes a representative of the Nuclear Enterprise Institute--the nuclear power industry's Washington-based trade group--as arguing that nuclear power plants "are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risk." On Friday, the NEI's offices were closed. But a statement on the NEI website [www.nei.org] trumpeted the "extensive security measures" insisted on by the NRC, including employee background checks. These are the same background checks that let a man named Carl Drega work at three nuclear power plants throughout the 1990s. Shortly after leaving the third plant, Drega went on a 1997 killing spree that left dead two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor. Nor did such background checks blackball a computer programmer who worked at the Maine Yankee nuclear plant and slept in

a coffin. That man goes on trial next year for the murder of seven co-workers at a Massachusetts technology company. The NEI statement on nuclear plant security states that the reinforced concrete containment buildings that surround U.S. reactors--they are there to prevent the spread of radiation in case of an accident--are "designed to withstand the impact of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and airborne objects up to a certain force." In reality, as even the NRC conceded on Friday, reactor containment buildings were not built with the idea of resisting an intentional assault by a modern-day jet--certainly not the monster 767s that crashed into the World Trade Center. The literature is actually strangely silent on this point--so much so that experts interviewed all named the same study, published in 1974 in Nuclear Safety, about probabilities of a plane accidentally hitting a nuclear reactor. That study concluded that some reactor containment structures had zero chance of sustaining a hit by a "large" plane, defined as more than 6.25 tons. The 767s that hit the trade center weighed 150 tons, and were probably moving at top speed. In fact, the security vulnerabilities at nuclear plants are so ghastly that almost everyone contacted for this article balked at discussing them in any detail. Paul Gunter, an expert with the anti-nuclear power Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), recoiled when asked about one possible scenario. "Oh, I don't want to prescribe that. It's too terrifying to imagine." NRC spokesman Jasinski also refused to discuss that scenario. Bennett Ramberg, author of a 16-year-old book called "Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy: an Unrecognized Military Peril," turned away some questions, saying, "I feel a little discomfort talking about that now." Later Friday, after Ramberg saw Wednesday's report of Pakistani terrorists threatening to target nuclear installations in India, and Tuesday's report of Israel thinking of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, he felt freer to talk.

"The cat's out of the bag," he observed. This week's events have changed the national landscape for nuclear power. For starters, they make the industry's gushy talk about the next-generation

Pebble Bed Reactor--the reactor so safe it won't even need a containment building--seem ghastly and ridiculous.

Terrorism also has implications for the Great Waste Debate. Our reactors have for 50 years been piling up vast quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. The question of what to do with all takes on a new urgency. Do we ship it all to a central site like the one proposed for Yucca Mountain--and create a spectacular series of terrorist targets for years, turning trains and trucks of waste into what critics deride as "Mobile Chernobyl"? Or do we keep waste in vast pools on site at reactor complexes--in buildings so frail that David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says they could be pierced "by a Cessna"--and also keep producing more such waste every day?

There is no easy answer--which may explain such a sluggish and bleary-eyed response to potential terrorism against nuclear targets: the NRC and others are in denial. Not so long ago, they were arguing that terrorism was not a very scientific probability, and that terrorists had a moral impediment against taking life on a mass scale. So much for that. But if terrorism is real, then a clear-eyed view would suggest nuclear power is done for. Nuclear power had been previously discredited on environmental grounds, on public safety grounds and even on financial grounds--don't be fooled, it's immensely costly, even with the public paying for both waste disposal and liability insurance. This week, nuclear power was also discredited on grounds of national security. A country that has nuclear power plants, it turns out, has handed over to "the enemy" a quasi-nuclear military capability.

We get 20 percent of our electricity from our fleet of enormously expensive and dangerous reactors. Regardless of what our vice president may think, through better energy efficiency and conservation alone we could reduce energy demand to the point of not needing any of those plants--of not even noticing that they had been shut down. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a prominent think-tank on energy matters, argues that "up to 75 percent of the electricity used in the United States today could be saved with energy efficiency measures that cost less than the electricity itself."

Given that our national will and purpose are now being mobilized, does anyone doubt that, properly channeled, we could succeed in this? Or that along the way we could also establish wind power, solar power and hydrogen fuel cells--and in so doing, completely wean ourselves from the oil of the Middle

East? Surely this--and not open-ended war against every nation that has every stamped bin Laden's passport--is the path to real victory and national security. After all, as Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, no one this week is calling his colleagues in the alternative energy sectors to ask about terrorist threats to windmills.

In the meantime, we can follow France's lead and post National Guardsmen around all nuclear facilities. We can restore the NRC's compulsory security drills, and make them even more demanding. Hey, we can even consider anti-aircraft emplacements at each power plant. And we can see how safe that makes us feel when the White House starts trying to punish Afghanistan.

--------

NRC approves power increases for Texas, N.C. nukes
The NRC solution -- increase power output rather than closing down?

Thursday October 18,
Reuters
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/011018/n18139617_1.html

NEW YORK, Oct 18 - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved requests for generating capacity increases to three of the nation's nuclear power plants. TXU Electric Co., a unit of Dallas, Texas-based TXU Corp. (NYSE:TXU - news), will increase the power output at its Comanche Peak 1 unit by 1.4 percent and the adjacent Unit 2 by 0.4 percent, the NRC said in a statement.

A spokesman for TXU told Reuters the uprates would account for an additional 15-20 megawatts (MW) at each unit. He added that Unit 2 had already undergone a 1 percent uprate.

Following the uprates, both units, located near Glen Rose, Texas, will produce about 1,189-MW at full power, or enough electricity each to power nearly 1.2 million Texas homes.

The power increase at Unit 2 will be immediate, the NRC said, with Unit 1 following with its uprate next spring.

The NRC has also approved a request from Progress Energy (NYSE:PGN - news) unit Carolina Power & Light Co. to increase the capacity of its Harris nuclear power plant by about 4.5 percent, or 51 MW.

The Harris plant, located in New Hill, N.C., near Raleigh, will increase the capacity of the reactor to about 968 MW, the NRC said.

The uprate at the Harris plant is planned for December.

Power uprates can come from a variety of methods including making turbines spin generators faster by removing heavy moisture from steam passing over a turbine's blades, building new cooling towers to improve plant efficiency on hot days, or using more precise measuring instruments so control room operators can run units closer to their peak capabilities.

Uprates have become increasingly common as operators, blocked partly by public opinion from building new plants, have attempted to squeeze more electricity out of existing nuclear plants in an effort to meet growing demand.

Nuclear power plants account for about 20 percent of the nation's total power output.

--New York Power Desk, 646 223-6074, fax 646 223-6079, e-mail Eileen.Moustakis@reuters.com

----

Pipelines, Nuclear Plants, Dams Seen Vulnerable

October 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-energy-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A threat against the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was seen Thursday as a potent reminder about the vulnerability of energy supplies that keep U.S. home computers humming, cars and trucks rolling down the highways, and manufacturers' assembly lines moving.

Some U.S. senators have urged billions of dollars be spent to protect American oil refineries, natural gas pipelines, hydropower dams and nuclear power plants. In the post-Sept. 11 world those facilities are highly desirable targets, they say.

Nuclear plants, which rank among the nation's most closely guarded facilities, are of particular concern because an attack could spew radioactive contamination over hundreds of miles.

The Three Mile Island plant -- the site of the worst U.S. nuclear accident a generation ago -- set off alarm bells throughout the industry after receiving what it called a ''credible threat'' late Wednesday. The plant gave no details.

Two Pennsylvania airports were closed until early Thursday and other unspecified precautions were taken until federal officials announced there was no longer any immediate danger.

NEW AIR, WATER RESTRICTIONS

Since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the federal government has imposed new restrictions on air space and waterways near nuclear plants.

Some advocacy groups say that is not enough.

``I hope this Three Mile Island threat will serve as a wake-up call,'' said Steven Dolley, research director of the non-profit Nuclear Control Institute. It has urged the government for years to impose stricter security at plants.

``We are especially concerned about the possibility of a commando-style ground attack to take over a nuclear plant with the assistance of an insider,'' Dolley said. ``There is also the risk of more conventional vehicle bomb attacks.''

The nation's 103 plants, which provide about one-fifth of U.S. electricity, are typically built near a lake, river or ocean for huge volumes of water needed to cool their reactors.

Nuclear plants have long been required to have armed guards, razor wire or fences, strict background checks of all employees and other monitoring devices.

Plants refuse to speak about new security precautions. However, it is known that since Sept. 11 governors in New York and New Jersey dispatched National Guard troops to protect nuclear plants. Massachusetts is considering a similar move.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission took the unprecedented step of halting Internet publication of its daily plant status report, fearing it could be used by terrorist organizations.

NEW ATTENTION TO PIPELINES, DAMS

``What we learned from the terrorist attacks in September is that we were much too trusting as a nation in protecting our assets and people,'' said Bob Cuomo, an energy expert with the consulting firm DRI-WEFA. ``Much of the security already in place is not going to work with a very determined terrorist.''

But extra protection for oil pipelines criss-crossing the nation would be costly, he said. Most already have surveillance equipment monitoring a handful of key locations.

The risk became clear on Oct. 4 when the huge trans-Alaska pipeline was closed for three days after it was pierced by a bullet, in what was described as an act of drunken mischief.

A spokesman for Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles said that it was impossible to defend the entire 800-mile-long pipeline, which carries about 1 million barrels of oil each day.

Dams, which are key sources of electricity in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast, are also difficult to protect.

At the Grand Coulee and other dams, visitor centers were closed, gates closely monitored, and all employees and contractors must show identification. The dams and ``ladders'' that let salmon swim upriver to spawning grounds are among the Pacific Northwest's favorite tourist spots.

``If somebody did try to take out part of the system, we are pretty confident we can go around the outage using backup systems,'' said Mike Hansen, spokesman for Bonneville Power Authority, a federal hydropower agency. It manages electricity lines stretching from the Canada border to Southern California, forming the backbone of the Western power grid.

Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stopped making public documents and maps that detail construction of interstate pipelines, power plants and hydropower dams.

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?

The waterways adjacent to many refineries and nuclear plants are also a concern.

The U.S. Coast Guard has imposed 94 off-limits zones for boaters in the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts as well as the Great Lakes. Fishing, recreation and other vessels face fines of $5,000 or more for entering the zones.

The biggest security zone extends one mile off California's biggest nuclear plant, PG&E Corp's Diablo Canyon station located midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At major ports, the U.S. Department of Transportation is evaluating security with an eye toward stricter measures. That has some companies worried about costs and red tape.

``In a free society with open trade, you cannot protect yourself against any potential scenario, whether it's a nuclear power plant, a dam or a truck,'' a shipping source said. ``You can make yourself crazy.''

Some shippers at the Port of Duluth on Lake Superior, who previously thought their biggest risk was from drug smugglers or thieves, have added guards to restrict traffic to the docks along 49 miles of shoreline in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

``The very word 'security' has changed dramatically where it's now synonymous with anti-terrorism,'' said port director Davis Helburg.

--------

UT vice chancellor tapped for defense post

Austin Business Journal
October, 18, 2001
http://austin.bcentral.com/austin/stories/2001/10/15/daily47.html

Dale Klein, vice chancellor of special engineering programs for the University of Texas System, has been tapped by President Bush to be assistant defense secretary for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs.

Klein is executive director and chairman of the National Resource Center for Plutonium, a university consortium that advises the U.S. Department of Energy and the Pantex weapons plant in Amarillo.

The consortium's work includes consultation on dismantling nuclear weapons and proper disposal or potential reuse of the plutonium. The consortium, formed in 1994, includes the UT System, the Texas A&M University System and Texas Tech University.

"This federal appointment is a challenging new assignment, and I look forward to this opportunity for public service and to make a contribution to our nation's policy and practice with regard to defense programs," Klein says in a UT statement.

In addition to his duties at the UT System, Klein is a professor of mechanical engineering at UT's Austin campus. He has been on the faculty since 1977 and has served as associate dean in the College of Engineering and head of nuclear programs at the Center for Energy Studies.

Klein's appointment by Bush, announced Oct. 17 by the White House, must be approved by the U.S. Senate.

-------- new york

New York stations troops at nuclear power plants

USA: October 18, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12862/story.htm

NEW YORK - U.S. National Guard troops this week patrolled six nuclear power plants in New York after Gov. George Pataki ordered their deployment to protect against potential attacks.

Already posted at tunnels, bridges, train stations, and airports, members of the National Guard will be stationed at the nuclear plants "as long as needed" to help state and local police guard the facilities, Pataki said.

The deployment comes as government officials and the public have become concerned about the safety of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants in the wake of the Sept 11. hijacked plane attacks on New York and Washington.

As a precaution, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has temporarily shut down its Web site to review its contents and remove anything that might prove a safety risk. New Jersey has also ordered National Guardsmen to protect its reactors.

But other states have yet to deploy troops at their reactors, experts said, warning that a successful attack on a plant could kill thousands and spread radioactive contamination over hundreds of miles (km).

Steve Dolley, the research director at the Nuclear Control Institute, a research center specializing in problems of nuclear proliferation and safety, said such an attack could come from a hijacked airplane, a truck bomb or a "commando style raid."

"It's very difficult to determine how safe these plants are right now, based on information in the public domain," he said, adding "we hope that governors in other states will take similar measures."

New York's troop deployment was not connected to any specific threat. But given "general threats being made by terrorist groups, it is a prudent action to augment and enhance the high level of security that is currently being maintained," Pataki said.

At the Indian Point nuclear plant, located about 20 miles (32 km) north of New York City on the Hudson River, the troops come in addition to a series of security measures taken since last month's hijacked airplane attacks on the United States.

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. which owns the Indian Point plant, would not comment on details of the additional security.

But he said, "Imagine every possible way you can get into this plant, as authorized personnel, a visitor, a member of the media, and understand that every way you could have gotten into the plant in the past has changed."

Along with Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant Reactors 2 and 3, troops are stationed at Nine Mile 1 and 2 Nuclear Power Plants, the James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant and Ginna Nuclear Power Plant.

Pataki ordered the deployment of troops from the National Guard's 27th Brigade over the weekend.

--------

INDIAN POINT
Concerns Rise Over Safety of A-Plants

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
New York Times
October 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/nyregion/18NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

The decision by the United States Coast Guard to end round-the-clock patrols off the Indian Point nuclear power plants has intensified mounting concerns over how well the plants are protected from terrorist attacks.

With boats and crew members strained by constant patrols since the Sept. 11 attack, the Coast Guard said this week that it would end 24- hour patrols in the Hudson River on Monday and instead periodically watch the plants by boat and air. The guard had been augmenting riverfront patrols conducted by Entergy Corporation , which operates the Indian Point 2 and 3 reactors along the water in Buchanan, N.Y., 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

That decision drew complaints from a broad range of people, including United States Representative Sue W. Kelly, a Republican whose district includes the plants; Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat; and Greenpeace, which has long raised questions about the safety of the nuclear industry.

"When the federal government says more terrorist attacks are likely, the Coast Guard decision is misguided and unwise," said Mrs. Kelly, who has written to the guard's senior commanders in protest.

After Sept. 11, a number of officials and nuclear watchdog groups called for stepped up security at Indian Point, which is in the most densely populated area around any nuclear power plant in the country. Some 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plants.

Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, a Rockland County Republican whose district is near the Indian Point plants, said the Federal Aviation Administration should bar flights at least over Indian Point, if not over all nuclear plants.

Immediately after Sept. 11, all of the nation's 103 active reactors were put on the highest state of alert. That meant more restricted access to the plants and more security patrols from teams of on-site armed guards.

As part of the response, Gov. George E. Pataki ordered National Guard troops to help patrol New York State's six nuclear reactors.

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing security at the plants and evaluating how safe they are from airborne attacks. Last Thursday, the N.R.C. shut down its Web site to remove information on nuclear plants that it believed a terrorist might find valuable.

A direct hit from a commercial jetliner would not cause a nuclear explosion, officials at the N.R.C. said. Rather, the danger would come from the release of high levels of radiation caused by a break in the protective barriers that seal in radiation produced by reactors.

The nuclear reactors are housed deep within containment buildings made of reinforced concrete several feet thick and designed to withstand a hurricane, earthquake or tornado. The N.R.C., however, said it had not analyzed how the containment buildings would hold up under a direct hit from a large commercial airliner.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group based in Washington, said a more pressing concern was not the containment building, but the less protected stockpile of spent radioactive reactor fuel stored at most plants. This fuel, stored in pools of water for cooling and containment of radiation, is typically in buildings not nearly as sturdy as containment buildings.

In a bulletin last month, the Union of Concerned Scientists said a crack in the pool lining from a missile or aircraft could cause the radioactive water to leak. Spent fuel is sometimes stored in dry casks, sometimes in plain view, and the group contends that these casks can be vulnerable to explosives and other weapons.

The N.R.C. said it was examining such concerns. Officials with Entergy, the operator of Indian Point 2 and 3 and owner of the long-defunct Indian Point 1, said they believed the containment buildings and the structures housing spent fuel could withstand an airplane crash.

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, said other security measures had been added to hinder an airborne attack, but he declined to discuss them in detail. "For people concerned about a plane crashing into Indian Point, they should know it is much less likely now than before Sept. 11, and certain protections by federal agencies have been implemented," Mr. Steets said. He said the company believed the spent fuel was adequately protected.

Questions also persist on how well the area around Indian Point could be evacuated if a major leak occurred. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave the plants passing marks on their most recent emergency drills, in May 1999. Critics, however, have long maintained that an orderly mass evacuation, which could include New York City, is virtually impossible.

-------- pennsylvania

Nuclear Plant Threat Discredited

By MARTHA RAFFAELE,
Associated Press Writer
Thursday October 18 10:10 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011018/us/nuclear_plant_threat_2.html

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - A threat against the Three Mile Island nuclear plant prompted two nearby airports to close for four hours, until the threat was discredited, a federal official said Thursday.

The plant remained on high alert, though the reactor was shut down earlier this month for maintenance. Military aircraft patrolled area skies and the FBI (news - web sites) and state police watched over the plant, site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident.

``It was a real threat, and we handle it the same way as if (the reactor) was up and running,'' said Maria Smith, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

Authorities said the threat came Wednesday night but released no other details.

Harrisburg International Airport and Lancaster Airport reopened at 1 a.m. Thursday.

Officials had no timetable to lift the additional security at Three Mile Island. Security had already been increased since Sept. 11 and was heightened again after Wednesday's threat.

Three Mile Island was the only nuclear power plant threatened, plant spokesman Ralph DeSantis said.

The airport shutdown had been part of a temporary flight restriction that extended for a 20-mile radius around the Harrisburg airport, FAA (news - web sites) spokeswoman Laura Brown said.

Three Mile Island is located just outside Harrisburg.

In 1979, the plant was the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident when about a third of the nuclear fuel melted inside a reactor and radiation leaked into the atmosphere.

----

Three Mile Island Placed on High Alert After Receiving Threat

October 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plant-Threat.html?searchpv=aponline

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A threat against the Three Mile Island nuclear plant prompted two nearby airports to close for four hours, until the threat was discredited, a federal official said Thursday.

The plant remained on high alert, though the reactor was shut down earlier this month for maintenance. Military aircraft patrolled area skies and the FBI and state police watched over the plant, site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear accident.

``It was a real threat, and we handle it the same way as if (the reactor) was up and running,'' said Maria Smith, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

Authorities said the threat came Wednesday night but released no other details.

Harrisburg International Airport and Lancaster Airport reopened at 1 a.m. Thursday.

Officials had no timetable to lift the additional security at Three Mile Island. Security had already been increased since Sept. 11 and was heightened again after Wednesday's threat.

Three Mile Island was the only nuclear power plant threatened, plant spokesman Ralph DeSantis said.

The airport shutdown had been part of a temporary flight restriction that extended for a 20-mile radius around the Harrisburg airport, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said.

Three Mile Island is located just outside Harrisburg.

In 1979, the plant was the site of America's worst commercial nuclear accident when about a third of the nuclear fuel melted inside a reactor and radiation leaked into the atmosphere.

---

TERRORIST THREAT RAISES FEARS AT THREE MILE ISLAND

AmeriScan: ENS
October 18, 2001
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-18-09.html

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania, The Harrisburg and Lancaster airports were closed for four hours yesterday after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant received what officials are calling a credible threat of a terrorist attack.

Federal officials declined to describe the nature of the threat, but said the warning, which was received Wednesday night from U.S. intelligence services, seemed credible. Although the plant's one functioning nuclear reactor was shut down earlier this month for routine maintenance, plant workers and local law enforcement remain on high alert.

Plant workers were not evacuated, and maintenance work continued throughout the night, said David Carl, spokesperson for Exelon Nuclear, which operates the plant.

The closures of two area airports were lifted at one o'clock this morning after federal authorities determined that there was no immediate threat to the Three Mile Island plant. No other nuclear power plants received specific threats, officials said.

Security at all of the nation's nuclear power plants - 103 reactors at 64 sites in 31 states - has been increased since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11. National Guard troops are on duty to protect reactors in some states, and the U.S. Coast Guard has created no entry zones around plants located next to water.

Three Mile Island, located outside Harrisburg, was the site of the nation's worst commercial nuclear reactor accident in 1979, when about a third of the fuel inside one of the plant's three reactors melted, and radiation was released into the atmosphere. Just one reactor is operational at Three Mile Island today.

-------- us nuc politics

Buyer discusses U.S. use of nuclear device

October 18, 2001
Published at http://www.indystar.com.

U.S. Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., said Wednesday that he would support limited use of a nuclear device under certain specific circumstances.

Speaking to reporters for WTHR (Channel 13) at Indianapolis International Airport, Buyer said that if the United States can prove a causal link between the anthrax and bin Laden's organization, "I would support the use of a limited precision tactical nuclear device. What does that mean? When there are hardened caves that go back a half a mile . . . don't send in Special Forces to sweep. We'd be naive to think biotoxins are not in there. Put in tactical nuclear devices and close these caves for a thousand years."

He added: "I am not a warmonger. I am not someone who says use offensive nuclear weapons. We're the ones attacked. This is a bio-attack. It's also important to figure out who is doing it. But I want you to know . . . if he (Bush) has to make difficult decisions -- like Truman did to save lives -- that he'd have support here."

Buyer added that he has yet to speak with anyone in the administration about the topic.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Prepare to die, Taliban mullah tells troops

October 18, 2001
By Willis Witter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011018-6381784.htm

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar urged his troops to fight to the death against U.S. forces yesterday as American jets targeted frontline Taliban positions north of Kabul for the first time.

Mullah Omar, in a speech to Taliban commanders by two-way radio, urged his troops to be prepared to die.

"The day for death is fixed, and we are not worried," the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news service quoted the bearded leader as saying.

The spiritual leader's message was directed at increasingly hard-pressed troops, who yesterday faced allied air strikes along their front lines against the opposition Northern Alliance.

Reports from within Afghanistan also said thick smoke hung over the cities of Kandahar and Kabul after the 11th day of the U.S. air campaign.

Western journalists with the alliance reported an increase in supply trucks moving northward from the capital, indicating the Taliban was reinforcing its positions outside Kabul.

However, the fire did not appear to be heavy enough to dislodge the Taliban troops and open the way for a direct assault on Kabul. Northern Alliance commanders have been growing frustrated with the failure of U.S. bombers to focus on the front line.

In his address to his backers, Mullah Omar told Taliban soldiers: "As Muslims, we believe in life after death, and all sacrifices should be for that ultimate life."

A belief that martyrs go to heaven helped motivate 19 Muslim fanatics to crash planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center on Sept. 11, killing more than 5,000 innocent civilians.

Mullah Omar has since protected the prime suspect in the attacks, Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, prompting the U.S. air strikes. The fatalistic tone in Mullah Omar's speech appeared to indicate the daily pounding has taken a heavy toll.

"I know people are in pain. But God has always put his beloved people to tests and we should pray to God to give us success," he said.

The speech, made by two-way radio presumably because Radio Shariat has been knocked out by the strikes, also served to show that Mullah Omar was still alive after repeated bombings of his compound in Kandahar. The reclusive Taliban leader has only rarely been photographed and few Westerners have ever met him.

The Taliban said more than a dozen people died in two separate strikes yesterday on Kandahar, one that hit two medical clinics, killing eight and injuring 26. The southern city, which serves as a stronghold for the Taliban, was reported to be deserted yesterday as thick smoke hung in the air.

In Kabul, jets hit oil depots at a Taliban military base, which burned out of control sending plumes of black smoke skyward. Taliban tanks raced out of the compound as firefighters struggled in vain to put out the flames, witnesses said.

In hospitals, a Reuters news agency reporter saw 10 wounded from the attacks. AIP reported that seven died in Kabul. Five wounded persons arrived at Hayatabad Hospital in Peshawar, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. They included a 5-year-old girl with broken bones and severe burns, who survived an attack that killed her parents and five brothers and sisters.

The Taliban claimed success on another battlefield, driving Northern Alliance forces away from the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

"The opposition ran away leaving 25 bodies and many injured," Taliban intelligence chief Qari Ahmad told AIP. A day earlier, alliance forces claimed to have moved within range of the city's downtown.

In Pakistan, which abandoned its longtime Taliban ally following the Sept. 11 strikes to join the U.S.-led anti-terror effort, speculation continued over a possible rift among Afghanistan's rulers.

Pakistan repeated its appeal, made a day earlier in a joint press conference with President Pervez Musharraf and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, for so-called centrist Taliban officials to help form a new Afghan government.

"We feel that most of [the Taliban] are not extremists and cannot be held responsible for the crisis," said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, a spokesman for Gen. Musharraf. "If they play some role to pull Afghanistan out of this crisis, we hope the Afghan people will be with them," he said.

A day earlier, Mr. Powell also said participation by some Taliban members in a new Afghan government would be acceptable to Washington.

---------

Afghans Now Question U.S. Strikes
Refugees Say Civilian Deaths Are Softening Opposition to Taliban

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12142-2001Oct17?language=printer

QUETTA, Pakistan -- The gourd was rolling toward an open goal in a park in the Afghan city of Kandahar on Monday morning. "I was about to kick it," recalled Ambia Agha, 10.

His friends and teammates were circling him and the makeshift ball. But Ambia said he had a clear shot.

"We heard the planes," the boy recalled. "We continued playing."

Then bombs hit. Shrapnel cut a hole in Ambia's head and spun through several of his teammates, leaving them crying in the dirt.

"The last thing I remember is lying on the ground looking at the gourd," he said, stretched out on a hospital bed in Quetta, his head wrapped in bandages. "It was broken, too."

As reports of civilian casualties and other mistakes mount in America's war in the skies over Afghanistan, a growing number of Afghans from different backgrounds and political persuasions are questioning whether the United States is conducting a war against terrorism and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia or against the Afghan people.

The distinction is important to the success of the U.S.-led coalition trying to defeat terrorism. President Bush has assured the world that his war is not against Islam or the Afghan people. For every bomb dropped on targets associated with Osama bin Laden or his Taliban protectors, U.S. pilots have dropped thousands of packets of food, radios and reading material to Afghans.

But interviews with a range of Afghan refugees, activists and tribal leaders who oppose the Taliban, and are in a position to benefit from a successful U.S. assault, indicate that America's hearts-and-minds campaign to woo the Afghan people away from the Taliban is running into trouble.

"We are worried about a backlash from people at home," said Gul Afgha, a senior official in the pre-Taliban government in Kandahar, who now lives in Quetta. "We want the Taliban to go, but this reckless bombing is actually giving the Taliban some support."

When the air campaign started on Oct. 7, many Afghans appeared unconcerned, recent arrivals in Pakistan have said. Residents of Kandahar, reached by telephone from Quetta, reported that life was continuing somewhat normally even though Kandahar, the spiritual center of the Taliban movement, had been pummeled from Day 1.

Bombs and cruise missiles have blasted the airport and surrounding military targets. Electrical installations have been leveled. Weapons depots have exploded. And caves above the city are now pockmarked with craters, witnesses said.

"Most of us thought this was an issue between the United States and Osama bin Laden," said Fareed Alim Shah, 32, an Afghan who came to Quetta on Tuesday.

But several widely reported American misses, along with frequent Taliban claims of heavy civilian casualties, have begun to change people's views, Shah said.

The Taliban says more than 300 civilians were killed in the first week of air attacks. The United States says that figure is inflated, and intended to inflame Muslim passions worldwide. But in Afghanistan, many people -- and not just Taliban supporters -- believe it.

The actual toll the airstrikes have taken on ordinary Afghans is practically impossible to determine, because information coming out of the country is severely limited. The Afghan-Pakistani border is sealed in both directions, so the only people leaving Afghanistan are those with proper papers and those who find their way across the frontier through remote mountain passes. In addition, the Taliban has denied journalists access to the country except for a few heavily restricted visits.

But the scope and scale of the U.S. military campaign, and the tactics of the Taliban, leave little doubt that bombs are hitting more than airfields and troops. The World Food Program said yesterday that Taliban troops had seized the agency's main warehouses in Kabul and Kandahar, commandeering 7,000 tons of food -- and turning the sites into potential targets. And because military officials say the Taliban's leaders are moving in and out of residential areas of several cities, targeting them could put civilians in harm's way.

In addition, a handful of well-documented accidents have made the danger to civilians clear.

Last week, four employees of a U.N.-sponsored demining agency were killed in Kabul, apparently by a cruise missile. To the east, outside the city of Jalalabad, a group of Western reporters was taken to a village where they were told that scores of people died when a 2,000-pound bomb hit the wrong target.

On Monday, an allied missile landed near a World Food Program warehouse in Afsotar, outside of Kabul, wounding a laborer and forcing the suspension of relief work there. On Tuesday, bombs from an F/A-18 Hornet hit warehouses in Kabul used by the International Committee of the Red Cross, gutting buildings and destroying supplies intended for refugees. One employee was injured.

Wednesday evening, a U.S. attack on an ammunitions dump outside Kandahar sparked a series of massive blasts. A rocket from the dump plowed into the house of Fazal Mohammed, killing his 5-year-old son, Taj, as he slept.

The impact of such incidents has deeply affected Afghans who oppose the Taliban and hoped some good could come of the U.S attack. Shah is an example. He said he saw the offensive as an opportunity for Afghanistan to "start anew." But after the ammunition dump exploded, Shah pulled his family out of Kandahar. Now they are living in an Afghan refugee settlement near Quetta.

"I guess I still have hope, but I can feel myself changing," he said. "After a while there is something in every Afghan which won't tolerate attacks on our homes."

Even the aid organizations that are attempting to feed hundreds of thousands of starving Afghans are complaining that they cannot do their jobs under the threat of attack from the skies. Yesterday, six agencies here called for a "pause" in the U.S. bombing, warning that about 400,000 Afghans would run out of food within a month if aid deliveries are unable to proceed.

"Food supplies are getting into Afghanistan, but it does no good if we cannot deliver them to areas where people need them the most," said Sam Barratt, a spokesman for Oxfam International. "If the bombing is halted, then our transporters could work without fear."

Faisal Gilani, an official with Islamic Relief, said the group has 1,000 metric tons of wheat, beans, sugar and other food waiting in Quetta but has not been able to deliver the supplies in Afghanistan.

"The truckers are hesitant to move," he said. "There are 50,000 people waiting for this food, and we are ready to deliver it. The ration cards have been issued and the surveys have been done. But the transporters are scared because people are being killed. We are stuck."

As opinions shift, Afghans say they are beginning to view the Americans in much the same way that they saw foreign invaders who have tried, and failed, to subdue the mountainous land.

"We are afraid the bombing will benefit the Taliban," said Sahar Saba, a spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a group that works undercover in Afghanistan to oppose Taliban rule. "The Taliban can now say they are defending Afghanistan against the foreigners. In my country, that is a powerful tool."

Afghans also seem to distrust the way the Americans are attacking, from the safety of the skies and ships.

"They are too high in the sky. Of course, they can't distinguish between the people and the Taliban," said Zia ul-Haq, 19. A U.S. bomb tore into a building near his house on Sunday, he said, and shrapnel injured two girls and ripped through his left calf.

Ambia's father, Sayed Nadir Shah Agha, brought his son to Quetta late Monday, spending what he said was the last of his savings for medical treatment.

He said that he, too, had changed his views about the Taliban.

"We are getting killed together," he said. "The Taliban are Afghans too."

Correspondent Pamela Constable in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

--------

Taliban Graduates Ready for Holy War

October 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Taliban-Graduation.html

AKORA KHATTAK, Pakistan (AP) -- Raising their right hands in the air under posters of Osama bin Laden, 1,100 students graduated Thursday from an Islamic religious school in Pakistan and swore oaths to join a holy war against the United States in Afghanistan.

The ceremony at Pakistan's most militant Islamic school, or madrassa, marked a milestone in the lives of the young scholars, who range in age from their late teens to mid-20s.

``I have completed my education and now I'm going to Afghanistan,'' said Abdul Manan, 25, his head draped in the new white turban bestowed on graduates. ``We are ready to sacrifice our lives for a noble cause.''

Drawing boys from mostly impoverished families, Islamic schools offer a curriculum heavy on the Quran, the Muslim holy book. The more hardline, such as the Haqqani school here, are recruiting grounds for militant groups seeking passionate young fighters.

Haqqani, in the Northwest Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan, claims among its alumni at least 17 regional leaders of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

Young Islamic scholars are known as ``Taliban'' -- a word that simply means ``students'' in local languages -- although the Islamic regime next door took the name as well.

Being a Taliban scholar doesn't mean a young man necessarily supports the regime in Afghanistan -- nor does swearing an oath mean all Thursday's students will necessarily take up Kalashnikovs.

But clearly, the 12-day-old air campaign against Afghanistan -- meant to force the Islamic regime to hand over terror suspect bin Laden -- has increased the zeal of many of the young students here.

Thursday's graduation played out under huge pictures of bin Laden, with a Kalashnikov placed below his image. Proud families draped some young sons with garlands after the ceremony.

Maulana Samiul Haq, leader of the Pakistan's pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema Islam group, handed out certificates of graduation.

The ceremony had some young men weeping with fervor as Haq prayed that God would punish the oppressors -- clearly, the United States.

More tears came as Haq evoked the struggle of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader in Afghanistan.

``On one side is (President) Bush, with all his military might -- and on the other is a poor man, Mullah Omar, who is on the side of God,'' Haq said.

``We are facing the worst kind of crisi# 1/2 h Xcause of the American attack on Afghanistan,'' Haq said.

Asking young men to raise their right hands, the c ,eric swore them to join the fight. ``It is the duty of all students to participate in holy war,'' he said.

--------

US 'planned attack on Taleban'
The wider objective was to oust the Taleban

Tuesday, 18 September, 2001,
By the BBC's George Arney
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm

A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.

Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.

The wider objective, according to Mr Naik, would be to topple the Taleban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place - possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.

Mr Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.

He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.

Mr Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.

He said that he was in no doubt that after the World Trade Center bombings this pre-existing US plan had been built upon and would be implemented within two or three weeks.

And he said it was doubtful that Washington would drop its plan even if Bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taleban.

-------- biological weapons

Russian military suspected as source of anthrax

By Anne Penketh,
UK Independent,
18 October 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=100124

The hunt for the source of the weapons-grade anthrax that shut down the heart of the American political establishment yesterday has already produced many false trails.

Much of the focus has been on Iraq, but according to the world's leading germ warfare experts the finger of suspicion points more directly at Russia's broken-down military industrial complex.

If the finger of suspicion falls on any one country "the obvious one is Russia, it's a league ahead of Iraq", said David Kelly, a senior adviser to UN weapons inspectors for Iraq.

Other countries that are thought to be working on a biological weapons programme include Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan.

Unemployed top Russian scientists who helped to run the Soviet Union's illegal and secret germ warfare programme appear to be a likely source of the anthrax outbreak in the United States. It is known that Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network has tried to buy ingredients for weapons of mass destruction in Russia in recent years.

The secret Russian germ warfare programme was set up in the 1970s to allow Moscow to cheat on its treaty commitments to destroy all its anthrax and other germ warfare stocks. Experts believe parts of the programme are still operating today.

Moreover, the scientists who worked on the programme until it was officially disbanded in 1992 may have sold their secrets on the open market. Mr Kelly said that of the 30,000 people who worked for the Soviet agency known as Biopreparat, "between three and four thousand were professional scientists. Some would be available to go elsewhere."

The al-Qa'ida network is known to be awash with funds, thanks to the fundraising activities of Saudi-based charities and Mr bin Laden's personal fortune.

The full extent of Russia's cheating was revealed to the CIA by Ken Alibek, the deputy director of Biopreparat, when he defected in 1992.

Mr Alibek has described how the Soviet Union churned out two tons of anthrax a day at Stepanagorsk in Kazakhstan and said the Russians covered up an outbreak of anthrax in the Urals in 1979. He told a United States congressional committee last week: "There are pieces of Biopreparat that are still running, some with a very high level of secrecy."

No one knows where up to 50 Russian scientists possessing secrets on weapons-grade anthrax may be today, he added.

The strain found to have affected the 34 staff members of the US Senate yesterday was a highly potent, finely milled weapons-grade powder.

Dick Spertzl, a biowarfare expert in America, said: "Any dedicated individual can learn how to make weapons-grade anthrax. If they had an adviser, it would be easier."

But turning the laboratory-produced liquid into the powder spores is much harder. "The knowledge of drying is not that common," Mr Spertzl said.

According to the experts, Iraq had concentrated on the liquid variety of anthrax, which could infect its victims via so-called "drop tanks" or aerosols.

Only three countries, Iraq, the United States and Russia, have turned anthrax into a weapon. Britain announced in 1956 that it was ending its offensive anthrax programme.

The US abandoned its own programme in 1969, and says it is concentrating on biodefence. But Russian scientists at Biopreparat continued to work clandestinely on the secret anthrax weapons.

Iraq is believed to possess at least 8.4 tons of concentrated liquid anthrax, despite telling United Nations weapons inspectors that all stocks had been destroyed in 1991. Ewen Buchanan, the spokesman for the UN inspectors responsible for disarming Iraq, says: "We had concerns that Iraq was attempting to store it as a dry product, but no hard evidence."

Mr Kelly also said that "we know that Iraq went to the British patents office in the dissemination area in the 1980s, or wet dissemination", but he cautioned against assuming that state-sponsored terrorism lay behind the outbreaks.

Three of the 19 hijackers of the 11 September attacks have been linked to Russia's rebellious republic of Chechnya and the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, twice met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. American officials say, though, that such meetings did not prove Iraq's involvement in any terrorist acts.

Mr Kelly said Iraq, which has won support from Arab states for its efforts to break out of the 10-year-old UN sanctions, has "too much at stake" to take part in such action.

The use of the term "high grade" anthrax could mean that it iseither more potent or easier to disseminate. British experts in biowarfare said the term probably means that it is of a genetic strain that is more infectious or that its powdered spores are in a form that is easier to inhale, so causing the most lethal form of anthrax.

The anthrax mailed to the Florida newspaper belonged to the standard Ames strain, which is not known to be significantly more virulent than others.

Professor Alastair Hay, a biowarfare specialist at Leeds University, said "high grade" anthrax suggests that it might be a strain that is more infectious, with a relatively small number of spores capable of causing a lung infection.

It normally takes between 2,500 and 10,000 spores to be inhaled to cause pulmonary anthrax, so a strain that could result in disease with fewer spores would be sought by biowarfare terrorists.

The other way of making anthrax more deadly is to grind it into a fine powder that easily floats in the air.

One of the greatest concerns is that anthrax, which is not contagious, may be genetically altered so that it is.

The different strains of anthrax

The use of the term "high grade" anthrax could mean that the bacteria possess one of a number of traits that makes the microbe more lethal as a terror weapon, either by making it more potent or easie to disseminate.

British experts in biowarfare said "high grade" or "military grade" anthrax are most likely to mean that the microbe is of a genetic strain that is more infectious or that its powdered spores are in a form that is easier to inhale, so causing the most lethal form of anthrax.

The anthrax mailed to the Florida newspaper belonged to the standard Ames strain which is not known to be significantly more virulent than other strains.

Professor Alastair Hay, a biowarfare specialist at Leeds University, said "high grade" anthrax suggests that it might be a genetic strain that is more infectious, with a relatively small number of spores being capable of causing an infection of the lungs.

It normally takes between 2,500 and 10,000 spores to be inhaled to cause pulmonary anthrax so a strain that could result in disease with fewer spores would be sought by biowarfare terrorists.

The other way of making anthrax more deadly is to grind it into a fine powder that easily floats in the air and which can be more easily disseminated.

One of the greatest concerns is that anthrax, which is not contagious, may be genetically altered to a form that can be passed on. Bacteriologists believe this cannot be discounted.

Steve Connor

----

US Germ expert says panicky people can iron mail

USA: October 18, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/12878/story.htm

WASHINGTON - A leading bioterror expert said this week people who feel panicky about opening their mail amid the anthrax scare can use a hot steam iron and a moist layer of fabric to kill germs.

Ken Alibek, a top former Soviet germ warfare scientist who is now a U.S.-based author and researcher trying to develop defenses against bioterror, told a surprised congressional briefing on nonproliferation that a hot, moist steam iron and moist fabric could kill anthrax spores.

Pressed by surprised lawmakers who were not sure if they had heard him right, he repeated that several tiimes.

"Iron your letters," he said, adding that a microwave oven was not as good as an iron and that including moisture was essential because spores could survive dry heat.

For large amounts of mail, in big cities or postal distribution centers, he recommended setting up portable gamma radiation units to sterilize letters. "This problem could be solved," he said.

Alibek repeated the advice of many other experts that people should not buy gas masks. But he said that if his biotech company and two others doing similar work got "significant funding," they probably could bring to market new antiviral drugs that would work against several potential bioterror weapons within two years. "We've had interesting results with animals," he said.

Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays, who convened the hearing, noted that the chances of anyone getting anthrax-contaminated mail were extremely small.

-------

From the cold war, lessons in combating anthrax
Russia offers stockpiles of vaccine and bioweapons research to the US.

Christian Science Monitor
October 18, 2001
By Fred Weir fweir@online.ru
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p7s1-woeu.html

MOSCOW - As fears of an anthrax outbreak grow in the United States, help and reassurance could be on the way from an unexpected source - Russia.

Drawing on experience from a vast Soviet-era biological warfare program and a cold war accident, Russia has more knowledge and practical tools for combatting anthrax than any other country. And it has offered those resources, including stockpiles of anthrax vaccine, to the US.

The USSR amassed enormous quantities of anthrax vaccine to protect its population in case of World War Three. The Soviet vaccine was based on live anthrax strains, and confers protection for up to one year. The variant used in the US is of chemical composition, lasts only a few weeks, and its short supplies are reserved for the military.

"Our production capabilities are very high, and I think we could quickly satisfy any level of need," says Anatoly Vorobyov, an anthrax specialist at the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, "There is no doubt that these US cases are the result of bio-terror. But Americans should understand that this particular threat, thankfully, can be easily contained."

About 30 people die annually in Russia from natural outbreaks of the disease. A current outbreak of natural anthrax in a remote part of Siberia has hospitalized about 40 people who came into contact with infected livestock.

"There are different types of naturally occurring anthrax, and we regularly encounter them all," says Viktor Ladny, a researcher with the Health Ministry's Institute of Epidemiology in Moscow. "What is happening in the US now is not natural, of course, but something engineered in a laboratory."

Engineered anthrax is ruefully familiar to some Russians. In 1979 a secret germ warfare facility in the Urals city of Sverdlovsk accidentally vented small amounts of artificial anthrax into the atmosphere, killing at least 66 people and sending hundreds more to the hospital.

Soviet authorities acted quickly, vaccinating about 50,000, scrubbing Sverdlovsk buildings with chlorine solution, and repaving roads. The KGB seized all medical records relating to the disaster. Soviet officials said at the time that the culprit was tainted meat, but Sverdlovsk's Communist Party secretary in 1979, Boris Yeltsin, admitted in 1992 that "our military developments were the cause."

"The Sverdlovsk accident had a big impact on Soviet civil defense policies," says Nikita Tyukov, a military expert with the independent Center for Political Information in Moscow. "Security was greatly improved at our biological warfare centers, and procedures were prepared to deal with future outbreaks."

A 1972 agreement between the US and Russia banned development, production and stockpiling of germ weapons for offensive purposes, but allowed research for defensive reasons. In the late 1980s, reformist communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the disposal of the country's stocks of biological weapons.

The Soviet military dumped tons of anthrax powder on Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, a site that now belongs jointly to the post-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. American researchers found live anthrax spores there in the early '90s. But Russian experts say the former Soviet germ warfare program is probably not the origin of the anthrax powder being sent through US mail.

"Anthrax is relatively easy to obtain, and doesn't require elaborate skills or facilities to work with," says Lev Fyodorov, an independent expert on biological warfare. "No one needs to hunt for anthrax on Vozrozhdeniya Island, it can be found in many places."

Anthrax was the Soviet biological weapon of choice because its spores are hardy, can be stored in various forms, and can be widely distributed in the deadly inhaled form by a missile or bomb, says Mr. Fyodorov. "Today's terrorists, thank goodness, do not have those means of delivery."

Suspect powder has turned up in Russia. A Moscow firm received an envelope with white powder, but tests showed no anthrax. On Tuesday, a Moscow newspaper received a bottle in a suspicious-looking package.

Mr. Vorobyov called the current anthrax scares "a wake-up call. We need to take common measures before terrorists lay their hands on some substance with the potential to kill millions."

---

Signs of a cunning bioterrorist
Tiny anthrax particles heighten concerns. Sweep of Capitol under way.

Christian Science Monitor
By Liz Marlantes | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p1s3-usmi.html

The high-grade form of anthrax in a letter sent to Sen. Tom Daschle may be the work of the Al Qaeda network, or it may have come from some other source. But either way, it has forced authorities to a sharp conclusion: The perpetrators are much more sophisticated than many originally believed.

The key here is particle size. The anthrax found in Senator Daschle's office was fine enough that it could float easily through the air, rather than simply falling to the ground. At least 31 people have already tested positive for exposure in Senate offices. In a chaotic morning yesterday, the US House of Representatives planned to shut down until next Tuesday, after a full sweep of the premises.

There are still many obstacles to carrying out an anthrax attack with, say, a crop-duster - such as getting hold of the right equipment, and overcoming weather conditions. But the ability to manufacture fine particles puts the terrorists one step closer to achieving that goal.

As a result, the United States is in what a number of experts have called a technological "race" - with terrorists closing in on better methods of production and dissemination of biological weapons, and the US government trying quickly to develop technology that could prevent such an attack.

"We are in a race with the terrorists to prevent them from getting the delivery system for biological and chemical weapons, and to stop them before they acquire nuclear waste, radioactive material, or heaven forbid, a nuclear device," says Rep. Christopher Shays (R), chairman of a House subcommittee on national security. "That's what this is about." Testing the response

Some sources suggest that, in sending anthrax through the mail on a limited basis, the terrorists may be conducting a sort of test - to see how the system responds, before they launch a bigger attack. On the other hand, they may just send a flood of letters - yesterday, New York Gov. George Pataki's office also tested positive for anthrax exposure and was closed.

Others worry that the anthrax episodes may simply be a deliberate distraction, diverting attention from a completely different kind of attack, such as a smallpox release. "It can become a distraction for a greater threat," says Representative Shays.

But even if no larger sort of attack is in the works, the highly refined anthrax found in Daschle's office is cause for concern, say experts, because it means it's much more likely to be lethal. Health experts say inhalation anthrax, which occurs when particles get lodged in the lungs, is far more dangerous than cutaneous anthrax, which is transmitted through the skin.

"The main source of worry is how refined [the anthrax] is, and the particle size being very small," says Leslie-Anne Levy, a research associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington.

"To aerosolize a biological agent requires a very small particle size that can actually hang in the air.... That's something that's pretty difficult to do." State-sponsored terrorism?

More troubling, the difficulty of manufacturing such a high-grade sample is leading some experts to believe it may in fact be a case of state-sponsored terrorism.

"The likelihood of state sponsorship goes up with the purity of the strain," says Raymond Tanter, a Mideast expert. "And the inference is, only Iraq and Iran could be the culprit - and Iraq seems to be the top candidate."

As of this writing, members of the Senate, while favoring environmental checks, were arguing on the side of not leaving unless absolutely necessary.

"The reaction in the House has been a little bit excessive," says Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts. "There is no scientific evidence at this point in time to not stay and do our work."

Pointing out that the number of letters containing anthrax is still extremely small, Senator Kerry adds, "This is not an epidemic. This is a blunt instrument to scare people into not doing their jobs."

Staff writers Francine Kiefer and Gail Russell Chaddock contributed to this report.

----

Doctor's trial reset for toxic stockpile

October 18, 2001
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011018-149462.htm

Federal authorities view Dr. Raymond W. Mettetal Jr. far more ominously than do patients who loved his bedside manner. FBI agents and prosecutors are trying to return the Virginia neurologist to prison for stockpiling biological weapons capable of killing at least 3,900 people.

Dr. Mettetal's conviction and 10-year sentence under a federal anti-terrorism law were overturned last year because evidence was seized illegally. Now, he says the anthrax scare will prevent him from getting a fair retrial next week.

"It defies common sense to think that a jury, operating in a climate of fear, could rationally distinguish between [anthrax] and ricin, the toxin that the defendant is accused of possessing," said his plea to postpone his retrial.

Dr. Mettetal has admitted under oath that he made enough of the poison ricin to fill a Mason jar two fingers deep after 11 years of nursing anger toward Vanderbilt University Medical Center official George Allen, whom he blamed for his failure to become a brain surgeon.

FBI witnesses said the toxin he distilled from castor beans is 30 times more potent than the sarin nerve gas used in the 1995 Tokyo subway attacks that killed 12 persons and injured more than 5,000. Ricin kills after about three days of violent vomiting when the victim is asphyxiated because his bloodstream clots.

"This gave him an opportunity to torture [Dr. Allen]," federal prosecutor Ray Fitzgerald said.

Defense papers filed in Charlottesville claim the anthrax attacks will be "indirectly associated" with him so the trial should be postponed or, at the least, his attorneys should be allowed to quiz prospective jurors about their prejudices.

Yesterday, an aide to Senior U.S. District Judge James H. Michael Jr. said the judge rejected those pleas. Dr. Mettetal's trial on charges of making the largest stash of biological weapons ever prosecuted in the United States remains set to begin Monday.

Conviction requires proof of possession "for use as a weapon," but the government need not prove an intent to kill.

Cornell University scientists say 1 milligram of ricin can kill an adult if it is injected as authorities claim Dr. Mettetal intended. FBI scientists made a more conservative estimate and assumed that, for use as a weapon, the poison would be inhaled instead. The 3,900 milligrams of ricin needed to kill that many people by injection would weigh less than a nickel.

Dr. Mettetal's Mason jar, found with other chemicals in a rented storage shed at Harrisonburg, Va., held 43.5 grams of fluid that was 1.9 percent pure, or about 8,265 milligrams of pure ricin.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission says the only other convictions under the federal law that bans possession of biological weapons (18 U.S.C. 175) involved five Minnesota men seized with 700 milligrams of ricin in 1992.

Dr. Mettetal, 50, who is described as timid and reserved, testified at his first trial that it was all a fantasy to help himself feel as though he had power over Dr. Allen. The neurosurgeon's 1984 criticism of Dr. Mettetal's skills drove the young resident to quit neurosurgery.

"I never intended to use that ricin on Dr. Allen or anybody," he testified in 1998. "I was just trying to see if I could make it. Some of the things I've done I don't know exactly why I've done them."

In 1995, Vanderbilt police arrested Dr. Mettetal at Dr. Allen's parking space in a Nashville, Tenn., garage, where he was found wearing an Abe Lincoln beard, carrying an 8-inch "Supervet" hypodermic, and stalking a target in what state and federal authorities called "a dry run."

After almost five years behind bars, Dr. Mettetal's conviction was reversed and he was freed on bail. He regained his Virginia medical license last year, at least temporarily. The Virginia Board of Medicine started a process in August to administratively suspend or revoke his license.

This time Assistant U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald will be able to introduce as evidence Dr. Mettetal's testimony from the first trial as well as admissions at his sentencing, Judge Michael ruled.

-------- business

ABC'$ of the new 'Drug War' - Anthrax, Bayer, and Cipro

by Brian Long
Thu Oct 18 '01
b.long@hushmail.com
http://www.dc.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=14322&group=webcast


With the arrival of anthrax at Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle's office through the mails, and the exposure of at least 31 Hill staffers to the deadly bacteria, much has been made of the wide-spectrum 'blockbuster' antibiotic CIPRO (ciprofloxacin HCl), the only approved treatment for the inhaled sort of the disease. Hospitals in the Washington DC metro area have been overwhelmed with Congressional staffers being tested for exposure to the disease and receiving a 60-day regimin of the drug. At $4.67 per pill wholesale and $5.32 retail, the question is: for whom is Cipro truly a "blockbuster?"

Bayer - Historically Looking Out for your Well-Being

Cipro is manufactured by Germany's Bayer AG, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical conglomerates and one with a very checkered past. Bayer shares with the Taliban and the CIA a history of profiteering in the heroin trade; in fact, Bayer was the pioneer. Chemist Heinrich Dreser, director of drug development at Bayer, conducted extensive tests of heroin on animals and himself before enthusiastically praising the new opium preparation as a near-panacea. Bayer began commercial production of heroin in 1898 and distributed it worldwide as "the sedative for coughs" until 1913. Bayer claimed that their heroin was non-addictive and even marketed the deadly drug to children as a cure for colic.

Bayer was also a component of the notorious German chemical cartel IG Farben during the Second World War. Not only did IG Farben support Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, in fact, documents uncovered long after the second world war by holocaust survivors indicate that Bayer encouraged and even funded Dr. Joseph Mengele's inhuman medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners. According to a report by ABCNews.com, "One of the SS doctors at Auschwitz, Dr. Helmut Vetter, a longtime Bayer employee, was involved in the testing of Bayer experimental vaccines and medicines on inmates. He was later executed for giving inmates fatal injections. 'I have thrown myself into my work wholeheartedly," he wrote to his bosses at Bayer headquarters. "Especially as I have the opportunity to test our new preparations. I feel like I am in paradise.' "

According to the Health Education Alliance for Life and Longevity:

"At the 1947 Nuremberg Tribunal 24 of the managers of Hoechst, Bayer and BASF and other IG Farben executives were accused of the following crimes against humanity: · planning and leading the war · mass murder · conducting criminal experiments on innocent inmates of concentration camps · grand theft and plundering · slavery and other crimes. The US lead prosecutor Telford Taylor said in the Nuremberg Tribunal against these IG Farben executives: "Not the Nazi lunatics but these accused are responsible for this war. And if they are not punished for these crimes the harm they will do to future generations is much greater than Hitler could ever have done if he were alive." The IG Farben Cartel was dismantled and split by the Nuremberg Tribunal into the daughter companies Hoechst, Bayer and BASF. With the help of Nelson Rockefeller, their former business partner and US Undersecretary of State after the war, all convicted IG Farben managers were released from prison already in 1952 and reassumed positions in the highest levels of German industry."

Bayer's only public statement in their defense was that they are not the same company now as during their perpetration of these atrocities, despite their ownership and use of the same patents, trademarks, and products.

"Today's Bayer AG is neither identical to, nor is Bayer the successor to IG Farben," said Bayer representative Thomas Reinert"... Asked repeatedly whether Bayer experimental drugs were tested on inmates at Auschwitz, Reinert refused to comment, saying only, "Bayer did not exist as a legal entity between l925 and l951."

Bayer Returns to it's War Profiteering

Cipro is Bayer's best selling product currently, with sales up 18 percent in 2000 to a total of 1.8 billion Euros, or $1.63 billion dollars. Now New York Senator Chuck Schumer wants to require Bayer to allow compulsory licensing of Cipro. Bayer's patent on Cipro expires December 2003- until then, the company enjoys a monopoly. Labs in Israel, India, and the U.S. have all indicated their ability to quickly produce large amounts of the drug, but are waiting for the legal go-ahead. Allowing generic versions of Cipro domestically would dramatically reduce the drugs' price, but the department of Health and Human Services has claimed that there is no need for this step despite HHS secretary Thompson's plan to spend $1.2 Billion on a massive expansion of the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile. The Government is currently charged $1.89 per pill of Cipro wholesale. The anthrax hysteria and media attention given to Cipro as the only approved treatment has also led to widespread hoarding and also the use of the drug as a prophylaxis among some in the Washington D.C. area, despite the drugs role as only a treatment, not a preventative.

Predictably however, Bayer has stepped up production of the medicine, with factories working constantly to triple production to 200 million tablets, no doubt to cash in again on disease and public fears before a remedy like Schumer's backlash is enacted. Additionally, with the widespread use and mis-use of these powerful anti-biotics, the spectre of drug-resistant strains of disease begins to emerge, as bacteria adapt to the drugs, thus requiring Bayer's development of new, more expensive, more profitable drugs (frequently in cooperation with government funded and run clinics and facilities). Even under compulsory licensing though, with shades of the public/private partnership Bayer enjoyed with the Third Reich, there is no doubt Bayer will receive a large share of both public funding and private monies as the anthrax frenzy mounts.

All this, despite many doctors' insistence that the reliance on expensive "patent remedies" is unnecessary. According to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center quoted on CBS Health Watch, "This endorsement is not based on medical experiments or a long history of successful treatments. For a disease as rare as anthrax, such information is simply not available. Instead, the recommendation for Cipro is based on the fact that the drug works well against most types of anthrax in the lab." It can also certainly be attributed at least in part to Bayer's bloated marketing budget and the pharmaceutical industries' powerful lobby.

Schumer's plan is a step in the right direction, but it may well be an unnecessary one. Several cheap, generically available alternatives to Cipro for treatment of anthrax are believed to be just as efficacious. Drugs in both the penicillin and tetracycline families (Amoxicillin and Doxycycline) are thought to have the same as-yet unproven effect in treating anthrax as Bayer's Cipro. Furthermore, Cipro exhibits both more and more serious side-effects than these cheaper, more widely available treatments.

So if any of this upsets you, take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

I am not a doctor, for medical advice please consult trained medical personnel.

-------- iraq

Iraq Says U.S. Navy Set Ship Ablaze in Gulf

By REUTERS
October 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-usa-ship.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq on Thursday accused the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of setting a civilian vessel ablaze near its southern port of Mina al-Bakr.

``A civilian vessel owned by an Iraqi citizen was attacked on September 26 by a unit of the American Navy in the Arab Gulf,'' a foreign ministry spokesman said in a statement carried by the state news agency INA.

The spokesman said the ship was forced to return to port after its bridge was badly damaged by fire.

``These acts are ... disapproved of by the international community and represent a blatant violation of the charter of the United States and basic principles governing relations between states,'' the spokesman said, adding Iraq ``reserved the right to respond.''

The U.S. Navy is policing the Gulf to prevent the smuggling of goods banned under United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

-------- israel

Palestinian Militants Kill Israeli Cabinet Official
Government Gives Arafat an Ultimatum

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12184-2001Oct17?language=printer

JERUSALEM, Oct. 18 (Thursday) -- Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, an extreme nationalist who advocated emptying Israeli-occupied territories of all Palestinians, was shot dead in a hotel hallway Wednesday by at least one Palestinian assassin. It was the first murder of an Israeli cabinet minister by Palestinians in the Jewish state's 53-year history.

The killers escaped, but the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) asserted responsibility, saying the murder was carried out to avenge Israel's killing of its own leader, Mustafa Zibri, in a missile attack on Aug. 27.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared hours after the killing that a "new era has begun." After a lengthy meeting of Israel's security cabinet, the government gave Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat an ultimatum: Hand over the killers and the PFLP's current leaders and dismantle terror organizations, or face a response more severe than any recent attack on the Palestinians.

"The time for words has ended and the time for deeds has come," said a formal statement from the government.

Arafat condemned the assassination and called for the arrest of the killers but had no immediate response to the Israeli ultimatum.

Zeevi's death dealt a new and serious blow to efforts by the United States to coax the Israelis and Palestinians to contain 13 months of violence, a task that has assumed added urgency for Washington as a means of helping hold together its coalition against international terrorism.

The assassination could trigger a fresh wave of violence in a conflict that has already left more than 800 people dead since September 2000.

[Early today, Israeli troops entered Palestinian-controlled territory on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Jenin, the Reuters news agency reported. Palestinian officials and witnesses said about eight tanks rolled about 2 1/2 miles into Palestinian-ruled territory, but stopped on the edge of Jenin.]

Unless the Palestinians comply with Israel's ultimatum, "our response will be much more severe than what we've done until now," said Uzi Landau, Israel's minister of public security.

In an emergency session of the full Israeli cabinet, Sharon blamed the assassination on Arafat, saying the Palestinian leader had failed to rein in terrorists. Several Israeli ministers likened the slaying to the Sept. 11 suicide airplane attacks in the United States, and said that Israel is justified in making a military response, just as the United States is doing in Afghanistan.

"We will wage all-out war on the terrorists, those who collaborate with them and those who send them," Sharon told a hastily convened special session of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, where Zeevi's empty chair was covered with a black sash. "His legacy we will fulfill. May God avenge his blood." A state funeral was scheduled for Thursday.

As an initial response, Israel reimposed a tight blockade on the Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah, after having relaxed it on Monday, and barred Arafat from using the Palestinian airport in the Gaza Strip.

Sharon spokesman Arnon Perlman indicated that armed strikes were an option being considered. "What happened today requires a reassessment in all fields -- military, political and international," he said. "This reassessment will have profound significance."

The U.N. special envoy for the Middle East, Terje Roed-Larsen, issued a statement on Arafat's behalf, saying the Palestinian leader condemned Zeevi's murder "in the strongest possible terms" and had instructed his security chiefs to arrest the killers. The Reuters news agency reported today that Israel knows the identities of the killers and will give Palestinian authorities their names. The statement also said Arafat pledged to prevent further "acts of violence and terrorism."

But several Palestinian officials said Sharon was to blame for having intensified Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian militants and political leaders. Palestinians, anticipating Israeli air and artillery strikes, evacuated security and government offices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Every time an incident like this occurs, Israel holds the Palestinian Authority responsible," said Jamil Tarifi, a Palestinian official. "It should be understood that the continuation of Israel's policy of assassinations . . . was bound to cause a reaction on the Palestinian street."

Some top Israeli officials demanded that Arafat find and extradite the killers, but the Palestinians have always refused Israel's extradition requests. Israel Radio reported that Arafat's security forces had arrested a high-ranking member of the PFLP in the West Bank, but Palestinian officials did not immediately confirm the arrest.

Zeevi was shot shortly before 7 a.m. as he was returning from breakfast to his room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in East Jerusalem, where he often stayed when the Knesset was in session. He was hit in the head and neck by two or three bullets, and his wife found his lifeless body sprawled in the corridor moments later.

Initial reports suggested there were no witnesses to the shooting, and no one who may have heard the gunshots came forward publicly. Police said the murder may have been the work of two assassins using pistols equipped with silencers.

Israel Radio reported that just before he was shot, Zeevi told his wife over breakfast that he was suspicious of an Arab in the dining room who seemed to be watching him. Police said they were interviewing the Hyatt Regency's 100-odd guests and its staff of 250, about 40 percent of whom are Arabs.

Zeevi, 75, a retired army general and perhaps the most hard-line nationalist in the Israeli cabinet, had announced on Monday his decision to quit the government to protest what he regarded as Sharon's timid military response to Palestinian attacks. By law, his resignation would have taken effect 48 hours later, this afternoon.

Although Zeevi usually carried a pistol, police said he was unarmed at the time of the attack. He had elected not to have a bodyguard, though his colleagues said he feared assassination. After the killing, Israel's General Security Service ordered bodyguards for all government ministers, as well as an internal review of security procedures.

It was not clear whether Zeevi was targeted because of his political views or because he was known to be relatively unprotected.

Shortly after Zeevi's death, the PFLP released a video asserting responsibility. Three men appeared in the video, two of them holding M-16 rifles, their faces masked with red-and-white checked headdresses. Standing next to a poster of Zeevi, one read a statement in the name of what he called the Brigades of the Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa, the nom de guerre of the leader who was killed in an attack by Israeli helicopter gunships.

"The assassination of the Zionist criminal Rehavam Zeevi is only the first step according to the principles of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and one head for three heads," said the man, reading. Addressing the group's late leader, who was hit by Israeli missiles, he said Zeevi's murder means "that you can rest in your grave."

The PFLP is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. It staged a number of spectacular attacks in the 1970s, including airplane hijackings. But its leadership had declared that the time for such operations had passed and the group was relatively dormant until the current round of violence erupted last year.

In recent months, it has staged a number of car bombings and other attacks around Jerusalem and elsewhere. In Palestinian politics, the PFLP functions as an opposition group, having rejected the 1993 Oslo agreement that created the Palestinian Authority. But Sharon's government contends that Arafat has in effect joined forces with the group and acquiesces in its bombings and other attacks on Israel.

Zibri, 64, who took over the group's leadership two years ago, was the most prominent Palestinian to be assassinated by Israel in years.

With the possible exception of Sharon, no one on the Israeli political scene so inflamed Palestinians' fury as Zeevi. A member of Israel's founding generation of Zionist fighters, he regarded Arabs simply as enemies, opposed all peace overtures and clung to the conviction that tough military action alone was the antidote to Israel's security problems.

Sharon told the Knesset today that Zeevi was "a Zionist in every limb of his body." Israelis of every political stripe agreed, and many cited as proof the names of three of his five children: Palmach, a Jewish militia that predated Israeli independence; Arava, a region of southern Israel; and Masada, a high plateau overlooking the Dead Sea where Jewish fighters held out for months against a far superior force of Romans 2,000 years ago.

As a former top general and a lawmaker who served in the Knesset since 1988, Zeevi was a household name in Israel, reviled for his views by the dovish left and regarded as something of a throwback even by his colleagues on the hawkish right. To one and all, he was known as "Gandhi," an improbable nickname he picked up as a teenager by dressing up on one occasion as the Indian pacifist.

"He represented the [Israeli] Mayflower generation, people who fought for Israel's creation," said Moshe Arens, a former defense minister. "And his political views were the very same ones on which he was educated."

Zeevi was the most prominent and passionate advocate of what he called "transfer." By that he meant the departure from the West Bank and Gaza Strip of more than 3 million Arabs, many of whose families have been on the land for centuries. He said the departure should be "voluntary," but Arabs believed be favored outright expulsion, and they cited his inflammatory rhetoric as proof.

"In this area can exist only one country," he once said. "This is our forefathers' land. We suggest that the Arabs will go back to the lands from where they came. [This] transfer ideology is not invented by me nor by the Israelis, it happens everywhere in the world. In the 20th century, 124 million people were transferred from one country to another."

This summer, he likened Palestinians working illegally in Israel to "lice" and a "cancer" that had to be eradicated. When the moderate Palestinian leader in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, died last spring, Zeevi scolded Israelis for mourning, insisting that Husseini was "an enemy."

Well-educated, eloquent and a stickler for grammar, Zeevi was a bibliophile whose home near Tel Aviv was stocked with thousands of volumes of history and literature, more than 60 of which he had edited. Some of his most ardent political rivals said he was civil in person despite political differences.

But he was also capable of coarse behavior and crude language.

In a dispute over expanding Jewish settlements, he once called the first President George Bush a liar and an anti-Semite. And in the Knesset four years ago, he called the then-U.S. ambassador, Martin Indyk, a "Jew boy" to his face; Indyk had been pressing Israel for concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians.

He made no bones about his distaste for Arabs, including Arab Israeli citizens who served as lawmakers in the Knesset. He often heckled their speeches and spoke of them derisively. In today's special Knesset session to commemorate Zeevi's death, most of the 10 Arab lawmakers did not show up.

"He was a racist, he was an extremist, he was a fundamentalist," said Issam Makhoul, a leftist Arab lawmaker who did attend the session. "I thought he was an obstacle to democracy in Israel."

His resignation from the government meant that six other lawmakers from his party, National Union, and members of a small bloc called Our Home Is Israel, would have followed him, split with Sharon and entered the opposition. But after Zeevi's death, the six announced they would reconsider the move and stay in the governing coalition for at least a week to give the government a chance to prove its mettle.

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Vieques Referendum Ruled Unconstitutional

By Ivan Roman
The Orlando Sentinel
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A32
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12475-2001Oct18?language=printer

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- A Puerto Rico judge has ruled that an unprecedented referendum on the Navy's future in Vieques is unconstitutional, complicating what seems to be an uphill battle to carry out the vote.

With the Nov. 6 referendum three weeks away, it looks unlikely that it will happen. Besides the judge's ruling, there is a congressional push to cancel the vote. The local head of elections, citing the legal wrangling, said it could be too late to hold the balloting.

In a seemingly contradictory stance, Gov. Sila Calderon (D) said she will appeal the judge's ruling immediately, but she will continue pushing for Congress to scrap the vote and write into law a May 2003 deadline for the Navy to leave Vieques and its controversial target range.

Calderon said she is supporting President Bush's position to lawmakers, who are trying to smooth out conflicting provisions on Vieques as they hammer out a compromise on defense spending this week.

"I don't want the referendum to go forward, but I'm defending it until it's replaced with a federal law protecting the 2003 date," she said.

In the federally mandated referendum, Vieques's 5,000 voters would decide whether the Navy should leave by May 1, 2003, or stay and conduct bombing exercises indefinitely using live fire in exchange for $50 million in economic aid.

Navy officials have long objected to the referendum, fearing it would set a precedent for military installations worldwide.

Puerto Rico Superior Court Judge Sonia Velez Colon ruled that federal law simply called for voters to say whether they would allow bombing to continue with live fire with no date attached, and that the local law setting up the referendum went much further.

Those inconsistencies render it invalid and nonbinding to Congress, she wrote, and the use of local public money for that nonbinding vote would be unconstitutional.

Stating that the judge is interpreting the federal law too literally, Puerto Rico Justice Secretary Annabelle Rodriguez said the government would ask the Puerto Rico Supreme Court to settle the issue quickly.

"We obviously disagree with her position," Rodriguez said. "That's precisely the importance of this referendum, that it provides for an exit date. It's the only thing we have with a set date."

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U.S. splits Afghanistan into 'engagement zones'

October 18, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011018-8486979.htm

U.S. war planners have sliced Afghanistan into zones of destruction and assigned fighter-bombers to patrol them on an incessant hunt for Taliban troops and Osama bin Laden's terrorists.

The Pentagon announced yesterday its 11-day air campaign shifted this week to the new tactic of "engagement zones." Confident that much of the ruling Taliban's air defenses have been subdued, U.S. pilots lowered their aircraft within their assigned geographic boxes to strike soldiers, tanks and convoys. They now have the ability to hit anything military that moves in Afghanistan 24 hours a day.

"Simply put, we now have the access to be able to do engagement zones that we might not have had with an air-defense capability that we've recently taken out," said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, the Pentagon's deputy director of operations. "We are systematically pulling away at those legs underneath the stool that the Taliban leadership counts on to be able to exert their influence and power."

The U.S. military also continued to ratchet up the punishment meter by sending at least two AC-130 gunships to unleash rapid volleys from 40 mm and 105 mm cannons on Taliban forces. The Pentagon initially sent the Spectre gunships into action Monday night against elite troops hunkered down in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in southeast Afghanistan.

With little resistance from anti-aircraft missiles or artillery, U.S. planners feel confident in sending night-fighting gunships on low-flying, terrifying assaults on troops below.

Built from the airframe of the venerable C-130 cargo turboprop, the Spectre is often deployed to provide rapid-fire suppression for commandos on the ground. The Washington Times reported this week that such an operation will occur "very soon." The paper quoted an Army source in yesterday's edition saying Army Special Forces soldiers, or Green Berets, are now onboard the carrier USS Kitty Hawk off the coast of Pakistan.

The Pentagon yesterday sent another wave of fighters and bombers over Afghanistan, marking three straight days of the heaviest bombing of the war. Adm. Stufflebeem said 95 fighters and heavy bombers hit 12 target areas of airfields, anti-aircraft artillery, armored vehicles, ammunition depots and training camps.

At a Pentagon press conference, the admiral displayed a video of a bomb striking a 2nd Taliban Corps garrison and a bivouac. Officials say the Taliban military numbers from 20,000 to 40,000 troops, armed with Soviet-era weapons, tanks and missiles.

On one major front in the battle by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to seize the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, Adm. Stufflebeem described clashes as "back and forth, or ebbing and flowing."

He said the opposition was near the city's airport, which could prove to be a valuable launching pad for U.S. forces to strike other targets.

He said the Pentagon is focused on its own objective of destroying the Taliban military and bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, and not on specifically helping the anti-Taliban rebels. Mr. Bush wants bin Laden "dead or alive" for masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 5,000, the vast majority of whom were civilians.

The Bush administration, at least publicly, has put some distance between U.S. policy and the fate of the Northern Alliance. Officials say they do not want to be viewed as "installing" a regime amid anti-American sentiments in the region. The White House is working to aid the formation of a postwar coalition government comprised of various ethnic groups including the dominant Pashtuns who make up the Taliban regime.

What the admiral called "engagement zones," and what many pilots call "kill boxes" began Tuesday as Taliban air defenses went limp. Forward air controllers patrol the zone eyeing targets, positively identify them and then authorize a pilot to begin an attack.

"An example would be tanks, artillery, surface-to-air systems that are mobile," he said. "When they can be positively identified, the aircraft are in these engagement zones and they are directed to those targets. So there is not a free-fire, free-target environment."

He added: "I would not want to characterize how many [engagement zones] we had done, because it can broadcast the capability of how much we are able to do or want to do. But let me put it this way. As a doctrine, as a tactic of interdiction, there isn't any part of the country that couldn't be under an engagement zone."

The Pentagon is also using the tactic of "flex-target." A pilot who cannot find his primary site is authorized to veer off to stalk another one. Bombers can hit one target, get aerial refueling and re-enter the country to strike a second target.

Mr. Bush vowed before the bombing started Oct. 7 that his war on terrorists would "smoke them out."

Adm. Stufflebeem said the bombing was doing just that, "forcing the targets out, to be able to attack."

The target selection works down the chain of command. The "CINC" - in this case Army Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command - approves sites. Planners write them into an Air Tasking Order and munitions and aircraft are picked to match the target.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that its warplanes had "eviscerated" the Taliban military, while the strategy shifted from bombing mostly fixed targets to moving ones.

An official also said for the first time that four Navy carriers were operating in the region, including the Kitty Hawk. Most missions have been flown by carrier-based F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets. The Air Force has supplied B-1B, B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers.

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U.S. leaflets, radio get word to Afghans

October 18, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011018-21299250.htm

Saying terrorists in Afghanistan "will pay with their blood," the U.S. military is broadcasting radio messages urging the Afghan people not to help the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and to stay away from possible bombing targets.

Another message to the Taliban warns, "You have guaranteed your own demise."

The messages are being transmitted by Air Force EC-130 "Commando Solo" aircraft flying over the country.

"It is not you, the honorable people of Afghanistan, who are targeted, but those who would oppress you, seek to bend you to their own will and make you their slaves," says a broadcast aimed at the Afghan population.

There are several such messages being disseminated as part of an information campaign under way by the military, which also dropped leaflets over sectors of Afghanistan this week with much the same message.

The broadcast tells Afghans that the United States was the target of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, "leaving no choice but to seek justice for those horrible crimes," according to a transcript of the English translation released by the Pentagon.

"It will take the combined efforts of the international community and you to remove these evil people from Afghanistan," the transcript said.

"Take the following action: Do not give food, shelter or any type of aid to the Taliban or Osama bin Laden. This will be a great help in the effort."

It also warned Afghans to "stay away from military installations, government buildings, terrorist camps, roads, factories or bridges."

"If you are near these places, then you must move away from them ... we do not wish to harm you," it said.

Military planes began dropping leaflets over Afghanistan on Sunday - one showing a Western soldier in camouflage and helmet shaking hands with a man in traditional Afghan dress in front of a mountain scene.

"The partnership of nations is here to assist the people of Afghanistan," the leaflet said.

Another alerts people to tune to what it calls "Information Radio," and has sketches of a transmitting tower and radios.

The broadcasts started earlier, but the leaflets telling people to listen were delayed because of windy conditions last week, a Pentagon official said.

The message to the Taliban warns that by harboring bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, "you have declared war on the United States."

"Our military is bigger, faster and stronger, with more modernized weapons and better-trained troops," it says.

"You will be attacked by land, sea, and air."

The message to civilians says the United States does not want to "spill the blood of innocent people."

"We will hunt down and punish these terrorists," it says. "They will pay with their blood."

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Land-Based Fighter Bombers Join Airstrikes in Afghanistan

By Karen DeYoung and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12176-2001Oct17?language=printer

The United States attacked Taliban positions with land-based fighter bombers for the first time yesterday, as heavy fighting was reported on the ground between Taliban and opposition Northern Alliance forces near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif.

Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, flying from bases in the Persian Gulf region from which they normally enforce the southern no-fly zone over Iraq, joined dozens of bombers, AC-130 gunships and carrier-based strike aircraft in the 11th day of the air assault. Defense officials said U.S. pilots hit targets in most major Afghan cities.

Pentagon officials said the air campaign will increasingly focus on frontline Taliban troops, hinting that additional operations involving special forces were imminent. But they made no comment on Northern Alliance reports that U.S. jets had begun striking Taliban lines just north of the Afghan capital of Kabul, where the opposition forces are stalled.

President Bush, speaking at Travis Air Force Base in California on his way to China to attend a meeting of Pacific Rim nations, said: "We're making progress. . . . We're paving the way for friendly troops on the ground to slowly, but surely, tighten the net" around the Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan and the al Qaeda forces of Osama bin Laden.

The military progress Bush described did not appear to be matched by progress on a separate U.S. effort to determine how any future peace in Afghanistan would be kept, even temporarily. In seemingly conflicting statements, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy to Afghanistan, offered different views on who would oversee an interim administration after the U.S. airstrikes end.

Speaking to reporters as he flew to Shanghai from New Delhi, Powell strongly endorsed a prominent U.N. role, including the possible establishment of a peacekeeping force. While there may be a short-term political vacuum, Powell said, the United Nations could assist political and tribal leaders in crafting the shape of a new, representative government in Kabul.

Citing U.N. successes in post-conflict Cambodia and East Timor, Powell said he believes "there will probably be a role for peacekeepers of some kind." Powell added: "There are examples of the U.N. having successfully done this kind of thing in the past. And, therefore, they bring qualifications to this kind of a situation to do it again in the future."

But Brahimi sharply questioned the wisdom of dispatching any U.N. military force to Afghanistan, telling reporters in New York that the Afghans would probably oppose any attempt to send foreign troops to their country. "They don't like being ordered around by foreigners . . . especially in military uniforms," Brahimi said. "The United Nations can't go everywhere, and it must select the places that it goes with care."

Asked if the United Nations would be involved in a transitional government or in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, Brahimi said: "I very firmly said that the United Nations -- and this is as a consequence of discussion with the secretary general this morning -- is definitely not seeking anything of that sort."

While Powell spoke of U.N. successes in Cambodia and East Timor, U.N. officials recalled the failures in Somalia and the Balkans -- poorly conceived missions in which U.N. forces were attacked by combatants inside the country, caught between opposing forces, and criticized for failing to prevent human rights abuses and humanitarian disasters.

"Nobody mentions Somalia," said one senior Afghan official. "It's a much more precise example." More than six years after U.S. and U.N. forces withdrew from Somalia, after years of trying to distribute humanitarian aid and fashion a durable peace, fighting there continues among warring clans.

Before the Taliban took over most of Afghanistan beginning in 1996, civil war raged among many of the same ethnic and tribal groups that are now expected to join together in a post-Taliban unity government. Each of those groups, along with the majority ethnic Pashtuns from which the Taliban forces are drawn, has backers in countries bordering Afghanistan.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that led to the U.S. military campaign, U.N. officials and some U.S. allies expressed concern that Washington viewed the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of minority ethnic warlords that is riven with divisions, as the basis of a temporarily viable post-Taliban government. There was a nearly audible sign of relief when the Bush administration indicated that it would put off attempts to destroy Taliban front lines near Kabul, which might allow the Alliance to seize the capital.

But having seen the wisdom of delay, the United States is now eager for the international community to move quickly toward facilitating an interim political solution for Afghanistan, as the air assault and fighting on the ground escalate.

"There is a major American concern about what's going on in the future," said a knowledgeable Bush administration official. "People are meeting all over the place, and there are all kinds of position papers being written."

Richard N. Haass, the State Department director of policy planning whom Powell has assigned to work on the problem, is due to meet with Brahimi in New York today. Brahimi will fly to Washington on Friday for further consultations with U.S. officials.

"We're trying to nudge everybody to focus their energies on this," the administration official said, "to think, to act, to move on it. There is inertia to overcome." Despite the increasingly urgent situation on the ground, he said, "we're still in the relatively early stages of figuring out what to do."

Brahimi hopes to convene a loya jirga, or conference of Afghan elders and tribal leaders, and get an agreement on an interim administration. Among the difficulties is the lack of movement among Pashtun tribal leaders in the southern part of the country. Although they represent the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, and many have been uncomfortable with the Taliban's strict Islamic fundamentalism, the Pashtun leaders have not contested Taliban rule in the past.

U.S. officials believe it is possible to bring the Pashtun tribal leaders into a broad political coalition, along with other ethnic groups and the Northern Alliance. But "right now, they're talking more than they're moving," the administration official said of the southern groups. "They're still waiting to see in which direction things start crystalizing."

Meanwhile, opposition forces in the north are also trying to push the process. Northern Alliance fighters said the United States had begun the long-awaited assault against the Taliban front lines near Kabul. The first, they said, came late Tuesday night with a brief airstrike about 25 miles north of the capital. U.S. aircraft struck again, the opposition said, early yesterday morning.

Since the air assaults began on Oct. 7, they have been concentrated on fixed Taliban targets, including air defense and communications installations. U.S. defense officials, while not confirming the attacks claimed yesterday by the Northern Alliance, indicated that a frontline assault on the Taliban would be the next order of business.

In London, a British defense official said the air effort was "switching toward Taliban troops employed in the field -- those facing the Northern Alliance," although he noted that there are no plans to provide the opposition with close air support, Reuters reported.

While they said they share the U.N. and coalition concern about a Northern Alliance takeover of Kabul, some U.S. officials said it would take more than a direct air assault on the Taliban front lines outside the city to clear the way for Alliance forces to enter the capital.

Pentagon and other officials noted that the lines themselves appeared to be thin, with many Taliban forces dispersed outside the city and prepared to engage in guerrilla battles. "They are leaving the cities because they feel like they're targets," said one U.S. official. "They are out in the countryside, toting around guns."

While they acknowledged the symbolic and strategic value of the capital, these officials said that the northern opposition would be far from taking over the country even if they managed to enter Kabul. Elements of the same Afghan coalition, they pointed out, had held Kabul for more than two years in the early 1990s before being ousted by the Taliban militia, which moved north from its stronghold in Kandahar and seized power in 1996.

"In two and a half years of holding Kabul, they never went more than 20 miles south of it," an official said. "Well over half the country was not in their control."

In the far north, opposition forces were engaged in pitched ground battles with Taliban forces, U.S. officials said. Control of the Mazar-e Sharif airport, about six miles outside the city, was "going back and forth, ebbing and flowing between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance," said Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, the Joint Staff's deputy director of operations.

Briefing reporters at the Pentagon, Stufflebeem called the capture of the airport "extremely significant," noting that it would enable U.S. and other coalition forces to move inside Afghanistan.

"Whether or not it would be used or will be used, I don't know," Stufflebeem said.

Staff writers Alan Sipress in Shanghai and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington and special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

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U.S. Arms Unmanned Aircraft 'Revolution' in Sky Above Afghanistan

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12129-2001Oct17?language=printer

The United States is for the first time flying armed, unmanned aircraft into combat and controlling them with operators in the United States thousands of miles from the battlefield in Afghanistan, Defense Department officials said yesterday.

The use of the armed RQ-1 Predators is a revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare. The slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft have been flown by the Air Force for six years to gather intelligence, most recently in combat during the Kosovo war in 1999. But now the Air Force has outfitted them with Hellfire antitank missiles, powerful weapons usually carried on helicopters, the officials said.

Not much is known about how the armed Predators have been used in Afghanistan, but a government official said they have fired their missiles several times. The attacks by the Predators mark a turning point in military history because they signal that the Air Force is now able to survey and then shoot at ground positions from lower altitudes without putting pilots at risk.

The armed drones also give the military enormous reach and flexibility, creating the real possibility that the United States could someday fly combat missions without having to put large numbers of military personnel on nearby land bases or aircraft carriers.

Military strategists said the Bush administration's war on terrorism could lead to the use of additional new technologies and methods, some of them still secret.

"I think this war is going to give you the revolution in military affairs," said Eliot Cohen, an expert in military strategy at Johns Hopkins University.

The Air Force is also believed, for example, to be trying to weaponize the RQ-4A Global Hawk, a much longer-range unmanned surveillance aircraft that might eventually be able to carry weapons from the continental United States to targets around the world. In April, the craft -- which has a longer wingspan than a Boeing 737 -- flew 8,600 miles from California to Australia.

Predators are usually operated by the Air Force. But in the Afghanistan conflict, the day-to-day operation has been handled by the Central Intelligence Agency because of its ongoing effort tracking accused terrorist Osama bin Laden, according to a source familiar with the operation. After the Predators take off, control is turned over to Air Force personnel in the United States. In case the satellite link is lost, the CIA has backup operators standing by to take over control.

"The more bouncing you have to do off of satellites and relay stations, the more potential trouble you have to prepare for," one official said.

Cohen, who has written extensively on military innovation, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have altered the way the Defense Department thinks about technological change by injecting new funding and clearing bureaucratic obstacles. Most important, he said, the shock from last month's attacks has shattered the Pentagon's sense of the United States' military invincibility.

Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tried to force change on the military as part of a broad, strategic review. But he was rebuffed by top generals who argued essentially that the armed forces were so busy dealing with current threats that they did not have the resources to meet other, hazily defined future threats.

The deployment of the armed Predators was first reported in the Oct. 22 edition of the New Yorker magazine. At first Pentagon officials dismissed the report, saying that the Air Force was still experimenting with putting weapons aboard the aircraft.

Publicly, that is still the Air Force's position. Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, was asked at a congressional breakfast on Tuesday about putting weapons on drones. "We will have armed unmanned air vehicles in due course," he responded. "We don't want to push it any faster than it can reliably perform."

Tests on the unmanned aircraft run by the Air Force's Air Combat Command, which Jumper commanded until recently, culminated last February with a successful shot of a live Hellfire missile from a Predator against a discarded Army tank in the Nevada desert. At the time, officials said the test was artificial because the Hellfire is designed to be launched by an attack helicopter flying at treetop levels, while the Predator usually flies at 10,000 feet and would fire its missiles from a relatively high altitude as well.

Another impediment to flying an armed drone aircraft was that some State Department officials objected to the Pentagon effort, arguing that "weaponizing" any drone aircraft constituted a violation of the U.S.-Soviet treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That 1987 accord calls for the elimination of, among other things, all ground-launched cruise missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Some State Department officials argued that an armed drone was essentially a recoverable cruise missile.

But it emerged yesterday that soon after the Air Force test in Nevada was completed, the CIA took control of two armed Predators and began using them in its intelligence-gathering effort aimed at bin Laden. Photographic images taken by the Predators are routinely transmitted back to analysts in the United States.

The New Yorker article, by Seymour M. Hersh, said the Predator was tracking a convoy carrying Mohammed Omar, leader of the Islamic Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan. A request for an airstrike was turned down by officials at the Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, the magazine said. Instead, it said, the CIA was asked to have the Predator fire a missile just outside the building where the convoy stopped.

That account could not be confirmed.

--------

THE MILITARY
Special Operations Troops on Call, Rumsfeld Says

October 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Military.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. airborne broadcasts and leaflet drops inside Afghanistan have scored some successes in encouraging Taliban fighters to defect or surrender, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday.

``The hope is that those Taliban people will in fact move over and support the northern alliance and the tribes in the south,'' Rumsfeld said in a CNN interview. ``That is something that is taking place as we speak.''

He was asked whether it was likely that U.S. troops would be on the ground to accept Taliban surrenders. He replied that it was far more likely that defecting Taliban troops would join opposition forces like the northern alliance.

Rumsfeld also said he feared that terrorist networks in the future will use chemical, biological or radiological weapons. He said some already are seeking such weapons through their associations with certain nations, which he did not identify.

Gen. Richard Myers, speaking at a Pentagon briefing, told reporters that the military campaign -- now well into its second week -- has ``made progress in destroying or degrading the Taliban infrastructure in setting the conditions for future operations.''

The four-star chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday's airstrikes were handled mostly by carrier-based jets, which struck in more than a dozen target areas.

He said they hit terrorist camps and forces as well as Taliban airfields; command-and-control facilities; troops and their garrison sites; and missile, vehicle and armor storage and maintenance areas.

Myers aid a small number of F-15E strike Eagles took part, as well as long-range bombers and the AC-130 turboprop gunship. The general said many of the aircraft came from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of the four aircraft carriers now in the region, but Myers did not say from which land bases in the region the F-15E strikes originated.

Meanwhile, U.S. special operations troops trained for covert missions are in position aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, ready for search-and-destroy missions in Afghanistan, military officials say. U.S. radio broadcasts are telling the Taliban: Surrender or die.

The helicopter-borne special forces were put aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean several days ago, military officials said on condition of anonymity. That puts them within striking range of Afghanistan, home to terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaida network and the Taliban regime that shelters them.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that special operations forces would play a large part in America's military response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He and other U.S. officials have declined to discuss when such operations would be launched, however.

Meanwhile, two defense officials confirmed reports that an unmanned American spy plane armed with missiles has been used for the first time in combat missions over Afghanistan.

The low-flying RQ-1 Predator, previously used only for reconnaissance, is carrying Hellfire anti-tank missiles, two officials said on condition of anonymity.

Several top military officials have said publicly in recent days that upcoming operations in Afghanistan will include both visible and invisible elements.

Several days before the United States and Britain began airstrikes in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, a top administration official said some U.S. special operations troops had slipped in to conduct scouting missions.

The Kitty Hawk had left Japan without its full complement of airplanes, leaving its flight deck open for use as a secure, floating base for special forces raids.

The officials speaking Wednesday, who offered no details on the mission, cautioned against the interpretation that the troops now aboard the Kitty Hawk were necessarily about to enter combat.

U.S. military radio broadcasts into Afghanistan by Air Force EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft are warning the ruling Taliban they will be destroyed not only by U.S. bombs and missiles but also by American helicopters and ground troops.

``You will be attacked by land, sea and air ... Resistance is futile,'' one message says in two of the local Afghan languages, according to transcripts provided by the Pentagon. ``Our goals will be achieved, if not willingly, then by overwhelming force.''

``You have only one choice: Surrender now and we will give you a second chance. We will let you live. If you surrender, no harm will come to you,'' another message said.

The messages also gave precise directions to troops on the ground: ``When you decide to surrender, approach United States forces with your hands in the air. Sling your weapon across your back, muzzle towards the ground. Remove your magazine and expel any rounds. Doing this is your only chance of survival.''

The Pentagon has not acknowledged the presence of any U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan. Officials have said for weeks that troops would be needed to root out leaders of bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

President Bush, traveling to a conference in China, said the war on terrorism may take a long time.

``You mark my words: People are going to get tired of the war on terrorism. And by the way, it may take more than two years,'' he said in an interview with Asian news editors.

--------

Pentagon regroups for era of 'stateless' foes

Christian Science Monitor
By Brad Knickerbocker bradknick@aol.com
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p3s1-usmi.html

WASHINGTON - It used to be called simply "war." Armies lined up across a battlefield, navies projected forces over oceans, and air forces bombed industrial sites and other strategic targets. All of it clearly involved enemy nations, and, for most of US history, took place on other continents.

In the 21st century, say military experts, the United States is more likely to face what some are calling "post-modern terrorists" with no particular national ties, attacking Americans and American society directly. In that sense, this century may be said to have started with the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The urgent questions now are: How far along is the US in meeting this new challenge? How much has been learned since a generation of officers, seared by their early experience in Vietnam, climbed the career ladder to become today's generals and admirals?

US officials acknowledge the new complexities and dangers. "All of us are having to adjust the way we are thinking about this new war," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers said at a recent Pentagon briefing. Last week, President Bush acknowledged the need to "configure our military ... so that we more effectively respond to asymmetrical responses from terrorist organizations."

But while US military forces have moved in the direction of preparing for unconventional warfare - or "asymmetric conflict," to use the current jargon - the changes have been more incremental than fundamental.

Until last month, the Pentagon spent most of its annual budget of more than $300 billion training and equipping to fight two major conventional wars at a time.

"At root, the 'American way of war' remains focused on a paradigm variously known as attrition, second-generation, or Industrial Age warfare," observes the Center for Defense Information, a private organization here headed by retired senior military officers. "This style of war-fighting tends to be linear and slow moving, relying on masses of men and material."

This is not a new criticism. Some 20 years ago, a group of young lawmakers (Al Gore and Newt Gingrich among them) formed the Military Reform Caucus on Capitol Hill to look at how the US military could better prepare for future wars. Meanwhile, as the cold war ended, the nation turned more toward defending its interests abroad (as in the Gulf War) or to taking the lead in settling regional conflicts (as in the Balkans). At the same time, terrorist attacks against US targets - mostly abroad - came with troubling regularity.

Now that those attacks have been directed at the homeland, military experts warn, the US - now the lone superpower and therefore more likely to be seen as either protector or adversary - is likely to find itself drawn into regional conflicts with connections to terrorist groups headed by "stateless actors"

In such cases, warns former Afghan Army Col. Ali Ahmad Jalali, "armed struggle is not an instrument of a clearly defined policy, but a means for open-ended gains in a volatile environment." (Mr. Jalali, a top planner with the Afghan resistance following the 1979 Soviet invasion, is now chief of Farsi language broadcasting for Voice of America.) "The trend defies classic norms of warfare and widely accepted military concepts," writes Jalali in Parameters, a War College quarterly.

It is now generally acknowledged that those norms and concepts will have to change to meet the challenge of international terrorism. This war "is not, as were previous wars, being fought over territory, nor is it a war of nation against nation," writes British military historian John Keegan in the Los Angeles Times this week. "The enemy is difficult to identify, much less conquer. And technological innovations have given birth to an entirely new set of weapons, which demand an entirely new set of responses."

Among the responses favored by military reformers: less emphasis on hardware (especially "big-ticket items" such as tanks, ships, and planes favored by weapons-makers and their congressional supporters) and more emphasis on smaller, more agile units, unit cohesion, and the initiative of individual commanders.

"Understand that success in conflict depends most upon people, then ideas, and least upon hardware," says Marcus Corbin, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information.

"Fix fraying leadership and cohesion in the military," he says, "in part by ending constant personnel rotation among units, halting the system of premature discharging of mid-level officers, and training and empowering officers to exercise more initiative. End a fixation on complex hardware, which is not only unreliable and expensive, but also creates complex bureaucracies to build, deploy, operate, supply, and fix it - bureaucracies that are unsuited to exercising the most important components of third- and fourth-generation warfare strategy: agility, quickness, flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, initiative."

It's a tall order - one that the Pentagon is aware of and in some ways already is following. But as senior officials from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on down acknowledge, much remains to be done.

"The world changed on September 11," says Keegan. "Now the nature of war must change to keep up with it."


-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

CHINA
On Death Row, China's Source of Transplants

New York Times
October 18, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/international/asia/18ORGA.html

SHANGHAI, Oct. 17 - Sitting in a dimly lit Russian hotel room last month, Huang Peng, a Chinese prison official who had fled across the border just hours before, spoke matter-of-factly about the supply of human organs for the vast majority of transplants in China.

"Executed convicts are basically the only source for transplants," Mr. Huang said, explaining how hospitals and government detention centers work with courts to coordinate the killing with life-saving operations so that organs are transplanted fresh from the condemned.

The practice is so common and demand for organs so pressing that few checks exist to ensure that the executed are even dead before their organs are removed. One Chinese doctor claims to have witnessed the removal of a prisoner's kidneys while the man was still breathing.

The Chinese government denies involuntary harvesting organs. But credible and detailed accounts from Mr. Huang and others interviewed sketched the outlines of a vast system in which kidneys, livers, lungs, corneas and other organs are stripped from executed prisoners and then transplanted into wealthy patients in operations that bring Chinese hospitals tens of millions of dollars a year.

There were more than 5,000 reported kidney transplants last year in China, where such an operation costs about $6,000 for Chinese residents - a tenth of the price in the United States. Foreigners are charged anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000.

Mr. Huang did not have a direct hand in turning prisoners into unwilling donors, but he worked with people who did. He said the practice was common knowledge among people in the police and the penal system of Liaoning Province, where until last month he was an official at the province's largest penitentiary, Shenyang No. 2 Prison.

He left China because he feared arrest for his role in falsifying documents to help another person leave the country. He is now in Russia hoping to find a safe haven in the West.

While there is no evidence that the high number of death sentences handed down by Chinese courts are linked to the high demand for organs, the organ supply is growing.

China executes more prisoners each year than all other countries combined, and by some estimates 10,000 people will be put to death this year as the government pursues one of its most intense crackdowns on crime in the last 25 years.

Many of those who die and become unwitting donors may be innocent, human rights groups say, because they are convicted after hurried trials based on confessions extracted under torture.

Families are rarely told that their loved ones' organs may be removed, and prisoners are not asked for their consent, Mr. Huang says. Voluntary donations are rare in China, because of a lack of public education about organ donations as well as traditional beliefs that say the body must be kept whole after death.

"Definitely, there is no family willing to have their loved ones' organs taken," Mr. Huang said. "And there is no such thing as a prisoner who volunteers."

Once organs have been removed after an execution, the body is cremated immediately, before the family has a chance to see what has been done.

That is what appears to have happened to Zhao Wei and Wan Qichao, executed in the central Chinese province of Henan in August 1999 for the murder of Mr. Zhao's estranged wife 10 months earlier.

Mr. Zhao's mother, a frail white- haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses and an educated air, said court officials had visited both families and asked for consent to use their sons' organs, but that the families had refused. The executions took place months later without warning. "It was like a knock on my head," Mr. Zhao's mother wrote later of the shock when a friend called to say he had just seen her son in the back of a truck bound for the execution ground. "How could it be that I wasn't notified?"

Lu De'an, a friend of the condemned men, rushed to the execution ground on a sidecar motorcycle with his wife and saw Mr. Zhao's body and Mr. Wei's being loaded into a white van. A third body was put into an ambulance. Both vehicles had white paper covering their license plates, Mr. Lu said.

He drove alongside the ambulance and van as they crept toward the local crematory. He could not see into the ambulance or the van's side windows, which were covered. But through the van driver's window he could see men and women wearing surgical gloves working in the back.

"I didn't know what they were doing," he said, recalling the scene in an interview this month. "I saw one man, stripped to the waist and pulling off surgical gloves. His face was big and swarthy and sweating profusely, and the driver gave him a towel to wipe the sweat away."

Later, when Mr. Lu returned to a spot on the road where he had seen things being thrown from the van, he found bloody cotton wool, an empty box of surgical gloves and several empty plastic bags. His wife gave him a tissue to pick up one of the bags. It was labeled "kidney preservative fluid."

"Now I know their kidneys were taken," Mr. Lu said.

The prison official, Mr. Huang, says that families of the condemned are often asked in advance whether they want to claim their family member's body after the execution, but that many decline because they are told that they would have to pay large fees.

That makes the harvesting legal under central government rules that allow organs to be taken from executed prisoners whose bodies are not claimed.

Military and paramilitary hospitals dominate the harvesting and transplanting, because they have close ties to the prosecutors and court officials who supervise executions. The hospitals obtain the organs almost free, usually by paying court officials a nominal sum, and charge thousands of dollars per transplant.

It is a boom industry. The number of transplant operations has soared in the last decade, and modern new transplant centers have opened around the country. One center established earlier this year in Hang zhou, south of Shanghai, specializes in multiple organ transplants for individual patients.

-------- human rights

Afghan Food Delivery to Transit Iran

October 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Iran.html

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran has agreed to allow the delivery of U.S. food aid through its territory to Afghanistan and the construction of a refugee camp on its soil near the border, relief officials said.

The United States and Iran have not had diplomatic relations since the 1979 Islamic revolution. But as Washington has been putting together an anti-terror coalition the past month, delicate communications have been passed between the two countries.

Marius de Gaay Fortman, a coordinator for the World Food Program, said 45,000 tons of American wheat will arrive in Iran in early November to be delivered to the Afghan people through Iran.

A U.S. ship delivering the wheat will not come to Iran, he said, but rather the supplies will be transferred to another ship provided by the agency in international or Pakistani waters.

Fortman told reporters that another 20,000 tons of wheat donated by the United States will arrive in Pakistan early November, and by December there will be a consignment of 100,000 tons of American wheat for Afghanistan through Iran and Pakistan.

Iran accepted U.S. relief for itself -- delivered through international agencies -- after destructive earthquakes in 1997 and 1990. This was the first time the government has accepted to open the way for U.S aid on route for Afghanistan. On Tuesday, a senior U.S. official said in Washington that Iran has conveyed to the United States through Swiss intermediaries that it would try to rescue any American military personnel it found in distress on its territory.

Tehran has also allowed refugee camps to be set up on its territory just along the border with Afghanistan in case of an influx of people fleeing the fighting, a Red Cross official said. Iran, already home to some 2 million Afghan refugees, has resisted accepting more in the current crisis.

Setting up the camps at the border will allow easy access to refugees and facilitate relief operations, Astrid Heiberg, president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told a news conference.

Heiberg said concern is growing that a large number of Afghans will head to the Iranian border as fighting escalates inside Afghanistan and winter approaches. She did not elaborate.

Iran's top decision-making body, the Supreme National Security Council, made the decision on the camps Wednesday after the Taliban refused to allow the camps in Afghanistan, Ahmad Ali Norbala, head of the Iran Red Crescent Society, said at the news conference.

International aid workers pulled out of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States, leaving local staffers to try to run the operations.

In Vienna, Austria, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, said Thursday that so far Afghans have not fled in high numbers into neighboring nations, rather they have been fleeing cities to hide in the countryside

But the commissioner is preparing for the worst case scenario of 1.5 million refugees as the crisis sharpens. So far, bout 50,000 Afghan refugees have arrived in Pakistan since Sept. 11.

-------- imf / world bank /wto

China Braces for Impact of Membership in W.T.O.

New York Times
October 18, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/business/worldbusiness/18YUAN.html

SHANGHAI, China - China is girding itself to defend its huge yet fragile economy from an invasion by foreign companies once its membership in the World Trade Organization is ratified.

Many Chinese applauded the completion of talks on China's entry to the global trading system, which were overshadowed by the terrorist attacks on the United States. After 15 years of on-and-off work, the talks were scheduled to wrap up in Geneva the week of Sept. 10; the attacks pushed them back a week. The formal gathering set to ratify China's accession, scheduled for Doha, Qatar, in November, seems likely to be relocated and perhaps postponed because of security concerns.

But China's membership is now certain by early 2002, starting a process that will transform its economy in ways that are already causing anticipation and anxiety among those who expect to be affected.

"Friends, you clap, but even I don't yet know how big the competition is that we'll face after we enter the W.T.O.," China's prime minister, Zhu Rongji, told a gathering of private businessmen in Nanjing the week the Geneva talks concluded. "My heart isn't yet very settled."

The market-opening process will be gradual, taking at least five years as threatened industries find ways to thwart W.T.O. rules. But there is no doubt about the course China has set, one the leadership hopes will ultimately strengthen the economy despite the dangers encountered along the way.

China's beleaguered farmers are among those most threatened by the changes the country agreed to make to become a W.T.O. member. Duties on imported agricultural products are to be reduced over time to 17 percent from an average of 22 percent now, and the reduction will be even greater for some American farm produce. Import quotas will be relaxed. Both changes will greatly increase the competition farmers face from imports.

Already, Chinese farm incomes are falling, and poverty is spreading in some areas where rural households depend on money sent home by relatives working on construction sites in cities. Labor is plentiful and cheap in the countryside, but total production costs on China's small farm plots are actually higher than in the West, where large mechanized farms provide economies of scale.

China dropped a ban on imports of American wheat last year, and it can now be bought in China for about $36 less a ton than can domestic wheat, putting downward pressure on local prices. That pressure will intensify after China raises its ceiling on wheat imports from the current 2 million tons annually, to 9.3 million tons by 2004.

Competition from efficient foreign agriculture is expected to hasten the already huge migration of people from the countryside into China's cities. The influx will strain urban social services and worsen urban unemployment, which has already risen sharply in recent years as the country has shaken up its industrial sector. China's state-owned industrial concerns have already shed about 35 million jobs the last five years, and government-controlled collectives laid off 16 million more. Economists estimate that another 30 million jobs are in jeopardy after China joins the W.T.O.

Competition for talent will also pose a problem, as many of the best and brightest managers and experts gravitate to multinational companies.

Among manufacturers, the country's fledgling automobile industry may be most vulnerable. Domestically built cars are sold for more than twice what similar models fetch in other countries, in large part because of high production costs. But by 2005, the quotas that limit competition from imports will be abolished, and tariffs are scheduled to slide steadily from as high as 100 percent now to just 25 percent. It is hard to imagine how domestic carmakers, few of which are profitable now, will be able to compete with cheaper, higher-quality imports.

Foreign companies threaten to grab vast chunks of the Chinese market in other fields where, despite years of government goading, domestic businesses are highly inefficient by global standards.

China's banks, for example, may lose as much as half of the market for fee-based banking services to foreign competition once foreign banks begin handling trade financing, credit card transactions and cash management. Foreign banks will be allowed to offer all of those services to both corporate and individual customers anywhere in the country five years after the country's membership becomes effective.

"Given the weak self-discipline and self-development mechanism, the weak infrastructure and the heavy historical burden, domestic institutions are not in an advantageous position," Dai Xianglong, China's chief central banker, said last month.

Foreign financial institutions will be allowed to own stakes of up to 49 percent in fund management companies within three years, and up to one-third in Chinese stock and bond underwriters.

Foreign companies are also expected to build their own modern retail and wholesale distribution networks that could quickly come to dominate distribution of many products, both domestic and imported.

Today, foreign companies may not legally distribute products in China other than those they make here. Nor can they own or manage distribution networks or wholesaling outlets.

China has promised that once it is a member of the W.T.O., those restrictions will be phased out within three years for most products.

-------- police / prisoners

China Arrests 23, 000 People

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Crime-Crackdown.html

BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese police have arrested more than 23,000 people in a monthlong nationwide crackdown on crime, and have plans to arrest more, a state-run newspaper said Thursday.

Those detained since Sept. 20 include suspects in bombings, murders, kidnappings and robberies, the China Daily said. Nearly 1,300 people, some of them escaped convicts, voluntarily surrendered to police, the newspaper said. One man arrested in the northern port city of Tianjin is suspected of killing his wife and nephew, it said.

``Another round of crackdown is coming soon,'' the newspaper quoted a Ministry of Public Security official, Huang Zuyue, as saying.

The newspaper said 109 ``outstanding policemen'' and members of the public who provided tips for the crackdown were rewarded from a $133,000 fund. Police bureaus also posted information about wanted suspects on the Internet, it said.

--------

Amnesty Says Torture Rife in Brazil Police Routine

By REUTERS
October 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-brazil-torture.html

SAO PAULO, Brazil (Reuters) - Police torture remains widespread and systematic in Brazil despite government attempts to stamp it out, Amnesty International said on Thursday.

Calling torture one of ``the essential tools of everyday policing,'' the human rights group cites in a new 70-page report dozens of examples of abuse that plague Brazil's justice system 16 years after a military dictatorship gave way to democracy.

The report is entitled ``Brazil: 'They treat us like animals''' after the oft-heard complaint by prisoners in Brazil's overcrowded penal system.

Despite a 1997 law aimed at breaking the torture culture, Amnesty International said the practice is common and victims all too often lack access to the justice system.

``The biggest problem that Amnesty is highlighting today and that we see as the principal problem with torture is impunity,'' said Tim Cahill, a Amnesty researcher in Brazil.

``The failure to implement the law ... is the main reason why state employees, the armed forces and security forces continue to use torture.''

The report cited a February case in Sao Paolo, where a man was arrested, blindfolded and hung upside down from a metal swing called the ``parrot's perch'' while he was beaten and given electric shocks on his genitals for hours. The man said he was forced to sign a confession that implicated him in the shooting of a police officer.

According to Amnesty International, police were never charged in the case.

JUST PUBLICITY?

Brazil, the world's fourth-largest democracy, owned up to the problem last year before the U.N. Committee Against Torture, promising to take new steps to wipe it out. It is expected to unveil a new media campaign urging citizens to report crimes of torture.

But Amnesty said the government was still not doing enough to protect Brazilians against torture.

``We respect the work the government is doing to increase accusations, but we are worried that if it is not accompanied by more concrete measures, of which we haven't seen any so far, it will be mere publicity,'' Cahill said.

Aside from a full implementation of the 1997 law, Amnesty International recommends better training and resources for Brazil's police force, more effective complaint mechanisms and reforming the prison system.

--------

Call-up of reserves leaves gaps in many police forces
Many reservists are public-safety workers whose jobs at home may be just as crucial to national security.

Christian Science Monitor
By Kris Axtman axtmank@csps.com
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p2s2-usmi.html

HOUSTON - It's happening in the hospitals of California, on the highways of Colorado, and in the prisons of Texas. All across the country, military reservists are being called away from their 9-to-5 jobs to help in the war on terrorism.

While these citizen soldiers can be found in all types of jobs, a large number tend to be in public safety: law-enforcement officers, border-patrol agents, prison guards, and medical personnel.

And while police chiefs and prison wardens say they are proud their employees are serving America during such a trying time, they are also quietly worrying about their personnel situations, many of which are becoming more desperate by the day.

Indeed, activation of military reserves comes at a time when protecting the country internally is as crucial as its external battles - and some experts worry that the diminishing ranks of cops and security guards could leave the nation more vulnerable during the crisis.

"Depending on how many are activated, it could have a significant impact," says William Bratton, former police commissioner of New York. He remembers how some security agencies suffered during the Gulf War, when a quarter of a million reservists were called to duty. "It isn't until you lose those people that you understand the importance of them."

Take Crystal River, Fla., for instance. This beach community sits about an hour north of St. Petersburg and is home to about 4,000 residents. The police department has 21 sworn officers, five of whom are in the reserves. So far, two have been called up - including the department's only full-time detective.

Not only has the town lost police officers, but it also has had to extend its patrol routes to cover important infrastructure features such as water reservoirs and natural-gas facilities. "Now we have more work, and less officers to cover the field," says city manager Philip Lilly.

The possibility that Crystal River could lose a quarter of its police force is forcing city officials to come up with creative solutions. They've rehired, under contract, a former police officer who was working for a local retailer. They've asked reserve officers to work more hours each week. And they're petitioning the government to relieve their officers of their reserve duties.

Nationally, 1.3 million people serve in the reserves; together they account for nearly half of the US armed forces. So far, military officials have said they need 35,000 reservists, and President Bush authorized the activation of 50,000.

But asking a reservist not to serve is difficult - especially at a time like this, says Larry Todd of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Austin.

"We do it because we're patriotic," says Mr. Todd, who is in the National Guard. "If we are needed to answer the country's call, then, by golly, we are going to do it."

He is one of 763 Texas prison-system employees who serve in the reserves or National Guard. Almost 100 have already been activated, and 172 are on standby.

Todd says there is no threat to public safety, but some cutbacks have already been made within the prisons. For instance, outside work details and other activities for prisoners that require a personal escort have been limited.

"It's a strain, especially since we are already 3,000 officers short," says Todd. "We are just sucking it up like everyone else and having to work around it."

Many of these same sectors were struggling with worker shortages long before Sept. 11. So calling away large numbers of staff for military duty is causing even greater hardships. Houston, for example, recently became the latest city to approve the use of 18-year-old turnkeys because of its inability to adequately staff the jails.

Moreover, many of these jobs are fairly high skill, and thus not readily replaceable. "We are not like an accounting firm that can go out and hire a temporary accountant," says Jim Wolfinbarger with the Colorado State Patrol. "A level-one sergeant requires a great deal of training, and they can't be replaced that easily."

Ten percent of the Colorado State Patrol is in the reserves, 52 people out of a staff of 528. And while only seven have been activated so far, the department has already begun discussing cutbacks. "We are tightening our belt, and focusing on our primary objective: traffic safety," says Captain Wolfinbarger.

Some public-safety sectors are not only losing workers to military service, but to more attractive security jobs as well. The US Border Patrol, for instance, is watching anxiously as thousands of its agents apply for the newly created sky-marshal jobs.

"We are continuing to recruit, with the anticipation that we may experience losses or long-term absences," says Nicole Chulick with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

The FAA hasn't finalized the exact number of sky-marshall positions that will be created, but estimates are as high as 12,000. Some 37,000 applications have already been received.

Even for those who aren't in the reserves, says Ms. Chulick, "the idea of giving back to the country is very appealing right now."

-------

Beyond Carnivore: FBI Eyes Packet Taps
Expect the FBI to expand its Internet wiretapping program, says a source familiar with the plan.

Interactive Week
October 18, 2001
By Max Smetannikov
http://www.interactiveweek.com/article/0%2C3658%2Cs=605%26a%3D16678%2C00.asp

Stewart Baker, a partner with law firm Steptoe & Johnson, is a former general counsel to the National Security Agency. He says the FBI has spent the last two years developing a new surveillance architecture that would concentrate Internet traffic in several key locations where all packets, not just e-mail, could be wiretapped. It is now planning to begin implementing this architecture using the powers it has under existing wiretapping laws.

The FBI has acknowledged a program called Carnivore, which sniffs e-mail messages, but the new program is more extensive, Baker says.

"The FBI has been gradually developing a set of guidelines, standards - call it what you will - a list of what law enforcement wants from packet data communications systems," Baker said. "And they are in the process of unveiling that over the next few months to ISPs and router manufacturers and the like."

ISPs, Web hosters, vendors and other firms handling critical Internet infrastructure should expect the FBI trying to schedule meetings to deliver the details of their offering, and show the document containing the technical specifications, Baker said. He indicated that details of what this new surveillance architecture should look like are not clear. It is also possible the FBI has retained some well-known data infrastructure consulting firms to develop its new technology.

The new architecture is different from Carnivore because it would likely ask for certain types of data communications to be centralized, he said.

"The goal might be to get companies that use packet data to have those packets go to one place for purposes of wiretap and other intercept capabilities," Baker said. "It's clear they [the Bureau] have decided that in the next year or so they are going to make a big push on packet data and they are going to use whatever leverage they can to get people to cooperate and to build a set of packet data systems that are more wiretap friendly than the ones we have today."

The FBI spokesman overseeing Carnivore and other wiretapping issues didn't immediately return calls seeking comments.

Whatever the new initiative ends up looking like, the Internet service provider community could be more likely to cooperate, shaken up by Sept. 11, said industry executives. But no one has heard of the FBI going beyond Carnivore at this point.

"The FBI are trying to get Carnivore with a lot more ISPs," said Patrick Sweeney, president and chief executive of ServerVault, a Web hosting firm specializing in secure hosting.

Reportedly, the FBI is trying to use sections of Title 18, the wiretapping law, to extend its eavesdropping coverage to e-mail, Sweeney said. While he was not familiar with the initiative Baker described, Sweeney said Bureau's interest in tracking data communications is not shocking, and might go beyond the FBI.

"There are so many agencies that are working on procedures where they can make sure than entire comprehensive wireless and wireline tapping can be put into place if need be," he said.

-------- spying

Russia to Dismantle Spy Facility in Cuba
Cold War Base Strained U.S. Relations

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 18, 2001; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12027-2001Oct17?language=printer

MOSCOW, Oct. 17 -- President Vladimir Putin announced today that Russia will close its major eavesdropping center in Cuba, a significant concession to the United States that will save the cash-strapped Russian military $200 million a year.

In withdrawing from the Lourdes base, Putin is putting to rest one of the major relics of the Cold War still in operation in Cuba. The base, built by the Soviet Union in 1964, continues to house an estimated 1,500 military personnel, and its role as a significant electronic intelligence center has been a major point of contention with the United States in recent years.

Congress passed a bill last year seeking to prevent the United States from rescheduling hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian debt unless Lourdes were closed. At the time, Russia insisted that it needed to gather intelligence from the base to ensure U.S. compliance with international arms control treaties.

Putin visited Lourdes in December, meeting with President Fidel Castro, hailing the importance of the spy center and telling those stationed there that "your work is not in vain. Its results are being used. Not only the military but the political leadership of the country need them, especially at the moment when Russia is rising to its feet again."

All of this made Putin's about-face today particularly striking, offering a vivid illustration of how Russian-U.S. relations have been reshaped since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in ways that would have seemed unlikely a few months ago.

President Bush welcomed the announcement, calling it another indication the Cold War was over. "President Putin understands that Russia and America are no longer adversaries; we do not judge our successes by how much it complicates life for the other country. Instead, both nations are taking down relics of the Cold War and building a new, cooperative and transparent relationship for the 21st century," he said in Sacramento, en route to an economic summit in China.

Putin announced the withdrawal at a meeting with top military officials at the same time he vowed to step up defense spending in response to the new U.S.-led war in Central Asia, near Russia's southern borders. Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the Russian armed forces general staff, said the Russian withdrawal from Cuba would save at least $200 million a year. "For that $200 million," Kvashnin said, "we can buy and launch 20 communications and intelligence reconnaissance satellites, as well as purchase about 100 of the most up-to-date radars."

Putin also restated plans to end the Russian presence at another former Soviet base, in Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay, by Jan. 1.

"This is a very big and very difficult decision given what a unique role Lourdes plays for Russia as an electronic reconnaissance and eavesdropping center," said Alexander Pikayev, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "President Putin clearly wants to capitalize on the quick improvement in relations between the United States and Russia since Sept. 11."

While sudden, the pullout from Cuba was not entirely unexpected. In August, the Russian newspaper Novye Izvestia reported that the Russian withdrawal had already begun, a decision the paper said was made due to the spying center's high cost, declining significance and negative impact on relations with the United States. It said that Putin made the decision when Castro refused to cancel rental charges for the base as partial payment for Cuban debts to Moscow.

"We owed money to the USSR, not to Russia," Castro reportedly said.

Staff writer Mike Allen in Sacramento contributed to this report.

-------- terrorism

NATION'S WATER CALLED UNLIKELY TERRORIST TARGET

October 18, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-18-09.html

SILVER SPRING, Maryland, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Whitman today attempted to allay fears about the security of the nation's water systems during a visit to the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission Consolidated Laboratory in Silver Spring.

Whitman said the EPA believes the possibility of successful contamination of a water system is small.

"As someone who drinks water at home from the tap - as does my family - this is a concern I certainly understand. People are worried that a small amount of some chemical or biological agent - a few drops, for instance - could result in significant threats to the health of large numbers of people. I want to assure people ... that scenario just can't happen," said Whitman.

"It would take large amounts of contaminants to threaten the safety of a city water system," Whitman explained. "Because of increased security at water reservoirs and other facilities around the country - and because people are being extra vigilant as well - we believe it would be very difficult for anyone to introduce the quantities needed to contaminate an entire system."

The Administrator explained that systems already in place for treating drinking water before it comes out of the tap will, in many cases, remove the immediate threat to public health. The EPA has worked with partners like the Association of Metropolitan Water Authorities, (AMWA), to make sure water utilities receive information on the steps they can take to protect their sources of supply and their infrastructure.

"For more than 80 years, our mission has been to supply safe, clean water to our customers," said Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission general manager John Griffin. "Since our nation's recent tragedies, we've strengthened our already solid foundation of safety and security measures."

Sandia National Laboratories is working with the EPA to develop training materials for water companies so they can conduct thorough assessments of their vulnerable points.

"Several weeks ago I directed that these materials, originally scheduled to become available next year, be put on a fast track. I'm pleased to announce that training using these materials will begin for water system operators early next month," Whitman said.

The EPA has worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigations to advise every local law enforcement agency in the country of steps they can take to help watch for possible threats to water systems.

But Whitman noted that despite small probabilities and stepped up prevention, there are no "iron clad guarantees." Should an attack succeed, the EPA is ready to respond , Whitman said.

"Our experts are ready to provide guidance. Our federal labs are ready to provide analysis. And our specialists are ready to assist in recovery," said Whitman.

----

Domestic terror not ruled out

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 18, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011018-16031925.htm

Federal officials yesterday described the anthrax that forced the closing of much of the U.S. Capitol as a strain of the bacteria common to the United States, while 31 Senate staff members and others tested positive for exposure to the disease.

An FBI manhunt for those who sent anthrax-laced letters to government, media and private offices in three states has expanded to include a look for possible domestic terrorists, as House and Senate leaders sought to downplay earlier public statements suggesting a probable biological attack on the Capitol by foreign-born terrorists.

The FBI investigation has developed what one federal law enforcement official described as "some very substantial leads," based on the testing of anthrax samples from letters that went to New York, Florida and Washington, D.C.

The probe also has focused on the letters themselves, two of which were postmarked in Trenton, N.J. Agents have examined the postal bar codes to determine from which of 46 post offices in central New Jersey the letters originated.

Agents also are checking post office surveillance videos and DNA samples from the pre-stamped envelopes the senders used, which have to be moistened before they are sealed.

Although the samples taken from the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and the Senate mailroom included a professionally made, finely milled airborne strain of the disease, it has been determined through testing to be a variety common to the United States.

"Of all the briefings we have had on this matter, not once has anyone used the term 'weapons-grade' to describe the anthrax found in the Senate," the South Dakota Democrat said at a late-afternoon briefing. "The good news it that it is eminently treatable."

Twenty-three members of Mr. Daschle's staff tested positive for exposure to the anthrax bacteria. Also testing positive were three members of the staff of Sen. Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, and five U.S. Capitol Police officers.

None has developed the disease, and all are being treated with antibiotics.

Maj. Gen. John Parker of the Fort Detrick military lab, whose technicians performed tests on the Senate samples, told reporters yesterday that the bacteria was found to be "pure spores" and while not as potent as first suspected - or claimed by Senate and House leaders - they are potentially lethal.

"It's a common variety from all our testing at this point," he said, adding that the samples appeared to be sensitive to all major antibiotics.

Law-enforcement authorities said the anthrax sold by governments who sponsor terrorism, most notably Iraq, and others who sell the bacteria to terrorists for profit, including the Russian mafia, generally deal in a strain of the bacteria that has been manipulated to resist antibiotics. That form of the bacteria is known as a "weapons-grade" biological substance.

Authorities yesterday also said that preliminary tests have determined that the anthrax mailed to NBC News in New York and to American Media Inc. in Florida were similar to each other. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reached the conclusion after extensive tests.

There was no information on whether the samples taken from Capitol Hill matched the New York and Florida strains, although authorities said tests were continuing. They also noted that matching strains need not mean the anthrax came from the same source.

However, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that the NBC and Daschle letters both contained the message: "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great."

The FBI search for the anthrax culprits began Oct. 4 when Bob Stevens, the photo editor at the Sun supermarket tabloid, which is published by American Media, was diagnosed with an airborne form of anthrax and died a day later.

The hunt has focused on three major possible sources of the bacteria:

• If the anthrax bacteria sent to Florida, New York and Nevada were produced in this country by a domestic terrorist or terrorists who took advantage of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington that killed more than 5,000 people.

• If the anthrax was processed in this country by members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, including the 19 terrorists who hijacked four jetliners and crashed three into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Several hijackers were college graduates and students, and six lived in New Jersey, the source of two of the letters.

• If the anthrax was processed in a foreign country and given or sold to terrorists who transported it to the United States as part of a bioterrorism conspiracy in connection with al Qaeda or other terrorists. The likeliest sources, Iraq and the Russian mafia, have long-standing ties to bin Laden.

The FBI has not found any "conclusive evidence" linking the anthrax exposures nationwide to the Sept. 11 attacks, but has not ruled out that possibility.

In the case of the Stevens death, authorities noted that Mohamed Atta, 33, named as the pilot aboard the American Airlines flight that first struck the World Trade Center, lived near the photo editor's Florida office and that Mr. Stevens lived about a mile from an airstrip where flight school owner Marian Smith said Atta rented planes.

Authorities said Atta sought treatment for "abnormally red" hands from a Florida pharmacist in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

An airborne infection of anthrax can be fatal 90 percent of the time. Less-lethal forms include cutaneous anthrax, which occurs if the bacteria come in contact with the skin. That form of the disease is curable 80 percent of the time. Eleven of the 13 persons who have tested positive for the anthrax disease have contracted the cutaneous strain.

In the latest finding, New York Gov. George E. Pataki said the anthrax bacteria had been detected in his midtown Manhattan office, although no one was believed to have the disease. Eighty persons in the office were relocated and tested for the bacteria.

Also yesterday, a federal complaint charged William Sylvia, 34, of Portsmouth, R.I., with mailing a letter that purported to contain anthrax, although it actually contained talcum powder.

Authorities said he sent a letter to another person with a note saying "kaboom," and "if you weren't killed by the bomb, then you will be killed by the anthrax in the letter."

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Closure of House Unprecedented

October 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Anthrax-Congress-History.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Capitol building has experienced invasions, shootings and bombings, but never before Thursday had the House been closed because of an outside threat, the United States Capitol Historical Society said.

``Based on what we know, this event is unprecedented,'' society president Ronald Sarasin said in a statement. ``Terrorists have succeeded in doing what invading forces, major international powers and even a bloody and protracted civil war all have failed to do.''

The House side of the Capitol building and all House office buildings were closed Thursday for inspection following the discovery of anthrax in a Senate office building Monday. The Senate decided to meet Thursday but closed all its office buildings. The House is to reopen on Tuesday.

The society said Congress was not in session in 1814 when British forces, during the War of 1812, burned the Capitol and most other federal buildings in the city. Congress reconvened a month later, first in a local hotel and then in a temporary brick structure until reconstruction was completed in 1819.

Congress met at the Capitol throughout the Civil War even though troops were temporarily barracked in the House chamber and the Rotunda.

There were no interruptions of legislative business during World War I and II. Five House members were wounded on March 1, 1954 when members of a Puerto Rican nationalist group opened fire in the House chamber, but Congress returned to work the next day.

Bomb explosions in the Senate in 1971 and 1983 led to increased security, as did the shooting of two Capitol Police officers by a mentally disturbed individual in 1998, but Congress continued its normal operations.

The Capitol building and the adjacent office buildings were evacuated when terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, but legislative work resumed the next day.

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The beginnings of justice against Al Qaeda
Sentencing hearing is today for four men guilty in bombings of two US embassies.

Christian Science Monitor
By Alexandra Marks marksa@csps.com
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p2s1-usju.html

NEW YORK - For Americans who want to see Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers brought to justice, today is at least a start.

In a triumph for the US rule of law, four men tied to the Al Qaeda network will be sentenced for their roles in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. The sentencing in New York is the capstone of a painstakingly constructed prosecution - one that for the first time revealed the depth, complexity, and international reach of Mr. bin Laden's terrorist network. But it also serves as a bitter reminder of just how hard it is to anticipate the actions of a shadowy, far-flung group bent on destruction, no matter how much is known about its adherents in advance.

"The trial revealed some explosive information about Al Qaeda's loosely affiliated networks of radicals that share resources, pool intelligence and expertise, come together, and then disperse," says Frank Cilluffo, director of the counterterrorism task force at CSIS, a Washington-based think tank. "But to be able to know what, when, where, and how something is going to happen next is very different from understanding what the organization looks like."

For Howard Kavaler, whose wife was killed in the embassy blast in Nairobi, Kenya, it will be bittersweet to sit again in a Manhattan courtroom, just blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to hear the judge hand down the sentences.

On one level, the trial and sentencing are a "shining moment" for America, because the men, whom he calls "pariahs," had a fair trial with competent counsel. But they are also a pointed reminder of the urgent threat he felt in the wake of those attacks - and of his frustrations that other Americans did not take what happened in Africa more seriously.

"I find it distressing that it takes the World Trade Center and Pentagon catastrophes to get the body politic galvanized to do anything," he says. "The threat was out there all along."

The six-month-long trial, which ended in May with the men's convictions, is the result of the largest international criminal investigation at the time for the US. During the trial, prosecutors painstakingly "connected the dots," revealing the depth, complexity, and international reach of Al Qaeda long before Sept. 11.

Former CIA Director John Deutch admitted that the inability of the intelligence community to detect and prevent the subsequent Al Qaeda attacks was "one of the great failures of all time." But he also noted that by the very nature of intelligence work, there are many successes that the public will never know about.

"You have to look forward here. It doesn't help to spend time, on the occasion of such risk to all of us, assigning blame as much it is to say, 'How do we equip ourselves to do better in the future?' " says Mr. Deutch.

Still, that's a question Mr. Kavaler and other family members believe should have been asked long ago, particularly in light of the evidence brought out in the courtroom.

This was the first terrorist trial in the US that went beyond the men sitting there to outline bin Laden's terror network, how it worked, and what its fundamental, stated goal was: to kill Americans.

A main piece of evidence in the trial was a 108-page terror manual that, in retrospect, reads like a "how to" guidebook for the embassy bombings and the Sept. 11 attacks.

For the Al Qaeda operative who lives in the West, it recommends lying low, avoiding chatty conversations, and shaving one's beard. It gives explicit instructions on how to assassinate adversaries, build bombs, torture prisoners, and escape undetected after an operation.

"All documents of the undercover brother, such as identity cards and passport, should be falsified," it recommends in one of the early lessons.

Intelligence experts warn that information often looks much clearer in hindsight. Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. in Washington, says the intelligence community took bin Laden very seriously for years. The CIA had set up a special task force to focus on him in the mid-1990s.

"People knew he was going to strike. In retrospect, you can put the pieces together much more effectively, but we didn't know where or how," says Mr. Hoffman. "What we're seeing is the power of terrorism and why it's such an attractive weapon to our adversaries. They know that we can't defend every possible target everywhere all the time."

Even in hindsight, sorting out the knowledge of the terrorists' operations and the government's reaction is difficult. Hoffman points out that prior to the embassy attacks, American interests in Africa had not been targets of international terrorists, so the attacks came as quite a surprise.

But family members such as Edith Bartley, who lost her father - the consul general at the Embassy - and brother in the Nairobi attacks, doesn't buy that argument. Before the Aug. 7 blasts, the government knew a bin Laden terrorist cell was operating in Kenya. It was also fully aware that the Embassy there did not pass the minimum security standards required by law.

"Our government was clearly negligent," says Ms. Bartley.

The family members of the Americans killed have filed a multimillion-dollar liability suit against the State Department, contending that it didn't take the known threats seriously enough. Because they were never compensated, a move was made to include them in the compensation package for the Sept. 11 victims, but it failed.

"We just want the government to acknowledge those lives that were lost," says Bartley. "Before Sept. 11, terrorism and the loss of life abroad was given very little attention. It's been very difficult to grieve and have closure as a result."

---

Foot soldiers propelled by dreams of conquering 'infidels'

Christian Science Monitor
By Scott Peterson
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p14s1-wosc.html

DOUAB, AFGHANISTAN - Obaidur Rahman set out to fight a holy war five years ago, at the age of 17. But as he rushed from the Taliban trenches north of Kabul, he was captured by the rebel Northern Alliance.

Today the young man from Yemen sits in a remote prison in the rugged Panjshir Valley, legs hobbled by knee-high steel manacles.

But Mr. Rahman remains obsessed with his mission. God willing, he says, that his firebrand version of militant Islam - that shared with accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's radical Islamic Taliban militia - will be victorious in this long war.

God willing, he says again, fingering wooden prayer beads, he will be able to participate in the next big attack - such as the suicide hijackings that struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The first thing he will do if he is released or escapes, Rahman vows, is visit his family in the north Yemen area of Sada - a region known for its fundamentalist thinking - then join Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

"I became very strong [after hearing about the attacks]," he says, in a gentle, chilling voice, "because I know Muslims were very strong there."

The ultimate goal, he says without blinking, emanates from the teaching he received in Yemen of the Prophet Muhammad's words: that it is the duty of all Muslims to fight non-believers.

He contends that all Muslims think this way. While the majority of Muslims worldwide may not agree, it is common currency in this prison that the aims of the Taliban and the 10,000 or so Arab and other volunteers fighting with them are battling to turn Afghanistan into a center for exporting jihad throughout the region.

While the US labels that work terrorism, here it is seen as a religious imperative, conducted by men whose education and training under uncompromising clerics in their home countries have led them to join the fight with bin Laden and the Taliban.

Rahman's aim is to go everywhere there is Islamic fighting. "It is my idea, because of my religion, to make Afghanistan a center for jihad," he says.

That view echoes widely here. Inmates stare up at sheer rock walls towering over their cage. Few are manacled, and most are allowed to walk outside down to the Panjshir River, to wash before they pray, under the silhouettes of armed guards on the mountain tops.

"I am a fundamentalist," says Salahudin Khaled, a black-bearded Pakistani member of the militant Harakat ul-Mujahidin. "That catastrophe that occurred [in the US], if Islamic fundamentalists did that, then we are really happy," he says in broken English, sitting in a tight but relatively comfortable cell where the inmates sleep shoulder-to-shoulder on blankets spread on the floor.

"We chose the United State of America, to show that we can do any action in their face, that we are not under your influence, and that we are strong," he says, elbows resting thoughtfully on crossed legs.

The primary aim is a form of religious imperialism, he says, to form an Islamic government in Afghanistan that can help other Islamic countries and fundamentalist organizations from the Philippines and Burma to Kashmir, Chechnya, Algeria, and even Saudi Arabia.

"Our plan is [also] to help other Arab countries under the control of the US or Europe, to release them ... for freedom," Khaled says.

He argues that the question of killing innocent people is relative, to justify the deaths of civilians in the World Trade Center. The two atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan in 1945, at the end of World War II, he says, killed a lot of innocent people. Likewise, he argues, more recent US attacks and policies toward Israel, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, among others, result in the death of many innocents.

But how far can such militants take this holy war, when it sometimes involves fighting fellow Muslims? "Whenever we want the right [sic] of any Muslim country, that is holy war," says Khaled, justifying the Taliban's fight against the Northern Alliance, the rebel group that are also Muslims.

"Our objective [of spreading Islamic rule] is precious," he says, his voice deepening with a sense of seriousness. "If Muslims are obstacles and get in the way, we will kill them, or fight them, to get to our objective."

Many of these holy warriors tell similar stories about how they became steeped in militant ideology.

Rahman says he was influenced in his radical views by Sheikh Abdulmajid Zandani, head of the militant wing of Yemen's Islamic Islah Party.

Despite his high position, US investigators wanted to question Mr. Zandani about the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole a year ago.

"They said to us, you should go to Afghanistan to learn military arts, then you should go to Chechnya to fight the Russians, and Kashmir to fight the Indians," Rahman says about his Yemen teachers.

His journey began with three months of training in a bin Laden camp in Khost - a prime target of current US bombing raids. His penetrating eyes speak of a true believer, an ideologue who says Islam's war against the pagan West will continue. Every American is "guilty." "There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers," Rahman says, locking eyes on an American visitor.

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The tenets of terror
A special report on the ideology of jihad and the rise of Islamic militancy.

Christian Science Monitor
By Robert Marquand
October 18, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1018/p1s2-wogi.html

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN - Hailing from the pancake-flat terrain of Punjab in east Pakistan, Hasan Ali dreams of a Muslim Utopia.

The Islamic law student would like to create - through a holy war, if necessary - an Islamic state that spans the globe. All nations would be under the control of sharia (Islamic law), with the locus of authority in Saudi Arabia, "the center of Islam." And for the first act, he looks to Osama bin Laden, "our hero No. 1, our religious leader, our model, our general."

Hiding somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, the gray-bearded Ayman al-Zawahiri shares the same vision, and has been working side by side with Hasan's "hero No.1" for more than a decade. Mr. Zawahiri's life tracks the evolution of modern Islamic militancy - from his arrest at age 15 as a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to his place today as the guiding intellect of Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

Zam Amputan traveled across four time zones from the Philippines to attend a madrassah in Peshawar, Pakistan. He returned home, burning for a jihad. But now he has turned his back on Islamic militancy.

These future, present, and lapsed holy warriors have one thing in common: All are deeply etched by a steel-tipped Islamic fundamentalism that's now shaping international events - from the US-cratered roads of Kabul to clashes in Algeria's countryside to the carnage of Sept. 11 in New York.

President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair stress that the "war on terrorism" is not a battle between the West and Islam. But surely they mean mainstream Islam. If one listens to students, like Hasan, in Pakistan, or Osama bin Laden's latest video footage, one hears the language of a holy war, and the dark strains of a theology that is gaining popular acceptance. Some dub it Wahhabism. Others call it primitive Islam or Salafiyya.

Basically, Islamic experts say, it's a hybrid and simplistic blend of Islamic fundamentalism. This "Islam" seeks to eradicate all forms of Islam other than its own strict literal interpretation of the Koran. It comes packaged with a set of now well-known political grievances, often directed at US foreign policy, and justifies violence as a means of purging nations of corruption, moral degradation, and spiritual torpor.

In one sense, this strain of Islamic ideology has been around for at least the past two decades. It's been taught in the proliferating fundamentalist madrassahs in Pakistan. It has been fueled by petrodollars from Saudi Arabia, and preached in mosques from Egypt to Indonesia. And it continues to inspire militant groups such as Al Queda, the Taliban, Islamic Jihad, Abu Sayyaf, and many others.

What is new - and appears to be gathering momentum with every US air strike in Afghanistan - is the intensity of feelings this ideology has created among younger Muslims. Even in the traditionally more "moderate" Muslim nations of Southeast Asia, a culture of jihad is now spreading.

One's credentials as a "true Muslim" are increasingly based on a willingness to use violence. In just the past year, the walls of buildings throughout northern Pakistan have become hand-scrawled billboards for "jihadi training," complete with phone numbers. And people are calling.

"I never thought I would see a Pakistani or a Punjabi willing to kill himself for Islam," says a local Pashtun journalist, who has interviewed bin Laden. "You used to see a lot of boots, AK-47s, and flak jackets around here. But no jihad. The number of suicide bombers in a group like Lashkar [e-Tayyiba] used to be maybe 10 or 20. Now it is close to 400."

Vali Nasr, a specialist on Muslim extremists at the University of San Diego, Calif., (and a Shia Muslim) agrees. "I've been to Pakistan over the past 20 years, and the Pakistan I see today is unrecognizable to me, even though I've been working on fundamentalism from the beginning," he says. Speaking of the impact of Saudi funds for madrassahs, he says, "a madrassah ... was a seminary where a student spent years at the foot of educated scholars, ulema, and became well versed in all aspects of Islamic jurisprudence, law, philosophy, theology.... In recent years, some are just [run by] petty mullahs with a half-baked understanding [of Islam]."

This generation of poorly educated mullahs look at Islam through the lens of a violent jihad - rather than looking at jihad through the lens of Islam, experts say.

Many Muslim scholars rightly shudder at the free and loose use of "jihad" by the Western media - since they do not want the term, which means "internal struggle for a just cause," co-opted by extremists or used to negatively depict all of Islam.

At the same time, Khalid Ahmed, an editor at The Friday Times, a weekly in Lahore, Pakistan, points out that "jihad is precisely the term being used to captivate youth here. The moderates are going to have to start dealing with that."

CROSSROADS OF A HOLY WAR

If Afghanistan is the birthplace of this jihad, Peshawar is its staging ground. This dusty city of intrigue just east of the Khyber Pass is where many of today's Muslims came to pick up both the Koran and the Kalashnikov. Bin Laden and Zawahiri met here. Hasan Ali and Zam Amputan both studied at schools here funded by Saudi money.

When the Soviets attacked Afghanistan in December 1979, the initial prognosis in the West was that the native population lacked the unity to resist. It was felt that the proud ethnic groups in the country would never unify enough to drive out the communists. The answer, agreed to in Washington, the Middle East, and Pakistan was - Islam. The creation of the mujahideen warriors was the result - fighters that would come from around the Muslim world and take up arms in the name of a holy war.

The project succeeded quite well. A "pipeline" of weapons, warriors, and networks of engaged mullahs was established from the Middle East through Peshawar, Pakistan - and into Afghanistan. Money from the Middle East and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - funneled through the Pakistan Interservices Agency (ISI) - was used to buy food, clothing, supplies, weapons, and intelligence. Local madrassahs became ideological training grounds for those who were termed by everyone from President Carter to President Reagan as "freedom fighters."

Along with the new fervor to fight the Soviet infidels, a new set of insights and pan-Islamic ideals developed, capturing the hearts and minds of young Muslims, along with a powerful new interpretation of an old Islamic idea - jihad. Later, after the war, the Afghan Arabs would take their battle-tested skills and sharp-edged ideology home to Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Philippines, Kenya, and the United States. "Scratch an Islamic militant group today and you find Afghan Arabs behind it," says a Jakarta-based diplomat. City of hard stares

It was in this frontier city of hard stares and hospitals for wounded mujahideen, goatherds, and CIA agents, as well as shops lined with red and orange kilim carpets that, by all accounts, bin Laden first met Zawahiri in the mid-1980s.

But it wasn't Zawahiri's first trip to Peshawar. The eldest of five sons of a prominent Cairo family, the Egyptian surgeon spent half a year here in 1980, working in a hospital for wounded mujahideen, says Mohammed Salah, author of a soon-to-be-published book on Al Jihad, the Egyptian militant group. He showed the Monitor a copy of a frayed blue airmail letter sent from Peshawar, dated Nov. 24, 1980. In it, Zawahiri wrote an Arabic ode to his mother, a personal plea from a son longing for forgiveness, and some word from home.

She met my bad doings with goodness without asking for any return....

May God erase my ineptness and please her despite the offenses...

O God may you have pity on a stranger who longs for the sight of his mother.

At the time, Zawahiri was a principal member of Al Jihad, the radical Egyptian group. He closes the letter by sending hello to "Mr. Farrag," probably a reference to Mohammad Abd al-Salam Farrag, the leader of Al Jihad in the late 1970s.

Less than a year after the letter was written, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. Egyptian police scooped up 60 to 70 members of Jihad, including Zawahiri, and put them on trial.

It was Sadat's assassination that started to make Zawahiri a name known beyond the Egyptian secret police.

In the internecine squabbling among militant groups in Egypt, Zawahiri emerged as the chief spokesman to the media - known for the clarity of his thinking and for his good English. His pedigree probably helped, too.

His grandfather was the imam of Al Azhar Mosque, Egypt's most prestigious Islamic institution. At the time, Zawahiri also had a running discourse with Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now in a New York prison for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

"Within the prison walls, he began to campaign against Abdul Rahman's leadership [of Jihad], saying he wasn't a just leader," says Mr. Salah, the journalist. "He wanted to lead the group to greater power." And, more senior Jihad leaders had been sentenced to life in prison, whereas Zawahiri served three years, for possession of a gun, and was released.

A year after being released from prison, Zawahiri returned Peshawar, to care for wounded soldiers, with the Islamic Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross.

Bin Laden's spiritual leader

Just outside Peshawar, in what is today the Jalozai Afghan refugee camp, is the "martyrs graveyard." There lie some 6,000 mujahideen - most of whom died in the Afghan jihad. Among them is a small marker set with green words that read "star of the martyrs." This is Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, who, along with his two sons, was killed in a car bomb blast here Nov. 3, 1989. The assailants are still unknown.

But in the mid80s, Mr. Azzam was bin Laden's spiritual leader: Part cleric, part mujahed, and university professor, he is the author of a half-dozen books, and is widely regarded as the figure who was instrumental in introducing Arabs to the Afghan fight.

"Azzam was the man who developed the idea of jihad in a complete way," says Mukahil ul-Islam Zia, a professor at the Islamic Center at Peshawar University, who has a set of Azzam's works on the shelf behind his computer screen. "Azzam enshrines the need for armed struggle as part of daily life, to deal with problems deemed by Islamic legal scholars to be unjust. He first starts with an anti-Israel agenda. But then he takes it further."

Azzam's home was the first stop for many Arabs just off the plane. He worked to integrate them with the Afghan fighters, and helped start the Jihad Training University at the Jalozai camp. In 1984, bin Laden and Azzam worked together, setting up training camps in Afghanistan. By the time of Azzam's death, his Al Had group was in healthy Arab recruiting competition with another Peshawar-based group - bin Laden's Al Queda, which eventually absorbed part of his mentors group.

"Osama would have been nothing without Azzam," says a Taliban expert. "Before he came to Peshawar, Osama was a kind of playboy, a dilettante, not serious, not what we see today."

For years, Arab and Muslim intellectuals had dealt with the question of how their tradition and faith could survive the onslaught of a modern world, and of post-colonial anomie. There was disaffection with corrupt Arab tyrants running military states that dealt indifferently with Islam. With the Israeli project to take over Palestinian villages and later the West Bank. With a post-war America pouring out images of Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, and the bikini.

Nowhere did Islam seem "protected," flowering, safe from the influence of the modern world and the secular infidel.

It was not until the creation of the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s that the disparate elements, mullah and foot soldier, dreamers and doers, came together to be forged in a fighting force. Peshawar was the place where sweet Pakistani "milk tea" and an ethnic Pashtun brand of Islam, Deobandism, were served. Deobandism is a 19th-century Indian school of Islam that was tied closely to the anti-British movement, and that had always been more severe and strict than the milder South and Southeast Asian Islamic variants.

What Azzam did was to begin melding - in a practical ideology - the Arabic forms of Islam with the Deobandi versions. It was an ideology of jihad.

Azzam's own inspiration was an Egyptian writer, Sayyid Qutb, who in the 1950s began to divide the world into the sacred (a perfect Islamic state), and the profane (the non-Islamic world). Mr. Qutb, in works like "Signposts on the Road," and "A Muslim's Nationality and his Beliefs," confronted modernity. He read Freud, Darwin, and Marx. He visited the US in the 1950s, and found that Western ideas of commerce, civil society, the nation-state, and free expression couldn't be harmonized with absolute Islam. He opposed treaties, agreements, and other liberal forms of statecraft as weakness and capitulation. He began to articulate the need to overthrow Muslim rulers, and was executed in Egypt in 1966.

Like many of the students in today's Pakistani madrassahs, and many in the Taliban ranks, Qutb had a faith that Islam is peaceful and moderate - but that this needed Utopia, a world like the one the prophet administered for 30 years in Mecca and Medina, and must be achieved by force.

"In the world there is only one party of God, all others are parties of Satan and rebellion," Qutb wrote in "A Muslim's Nationality." "Those who believe fight in the cause of God, and those who disbelieve fight in the cause of rebellion."

Zawahiri, too, would have been quite familiar with Qutb. The year that Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser ordered Qutb hanged, Zawahiri was arrested for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Qutb's books became so popular on the university campuses of Cairo in the 1970s that the government banned them.

"Qutb is considered ... the founder of Islamic religious groups, especially the violent or jihadi groups," says Diaa Rashwan, a senior researcher of Islamic militant groups at Egypt's al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies. While other Islamists at the time were looking to change their societies from within, Qutb was an influence on Zawahiri and others like him, "to launch something wider."

Back in Pakistan in 1985, Zawahiri started calling on his cohorts from Egypt to join him. He sought out freelance mujahideen, mercenaries on the side of Islam against the Soviets. In Peshawar, sources say, Zawahiri became a natural magnet for the movement. It is there that he met bin Laden, though the two at first may have seen each other as competitors in the business of mujahideen training and succor. He put out a newspaper, Mujehedoon, to spread his ideas, and to keep a running commentary on the latest thinking on jihad.

Those newspapers became the forerunner of a variety of jihadi magazines that are now published and sold widely in Pakistan - and read the way American youth read "Boy's Life" in an earlier era. They tell of mujahideen battlefield feats and of the need for strict observance.

A 'MODERATE' STUDENT

One such reader today is Hasan Ali, the madrassah student who wants to one day be a lawyer in Islamabad. Short, chunky, bearded, Ali combines an intense demeanor with a mild-speaking tone, and he often lapses into a shy smile when teased by friends. (Ali has a wife and child in his Punjab village, and some classmates say he ought to either bring her to the college or move back to the village - rather than going home every weekend.)

Ali is "very social," meaning that he is constantly attending islamic functions and conferences, and is networking with other students. Some are Afghans who will not let him meet with a Westerner in his dorm room. All the students keep close tabs on what is happening in the jihadi subculture, and they see the Taliban as heroes. Ali is serious enough about his Islam to have attended three different madrassahs around Pakistan. He turns cold when asked if he has gone "for the training," the euphemism for military instruction that many madrassah students see as integral to their education. He will not say. He sips green tea, excuses himself partway through an interview to pray outside at dusk, and then returns.

Ali does say that the Islamic movement, which he sees as one single worldwide movement, needs a military wing. The companions of the prophet had a military wing, even when traveling in places that already had an army. In Pakistan, Ali feels that eventually, the tides of Islam, the feelings on the streets, will "absorb" the military, the army, and that there will be no need for a violent takeover.

"Unlike the West, religion and politics are the same thing in Islam," he says. "The mosque is the place where one worships, where government, legal and military decisions are made." Saudi Arabia, "the center of Islam," is the place where the authority for a single Islamic state - starting in the Middle East, moving to Central Asia, and then throughout the world - should be. Osama, he says, understands the "problems of the Muslims. If America is going to attack us, it will result in America's death," Ali says.

Ali is described by his fellow students as having a "moderate outlook."

The Wahhabi influence

Unquestionably, one strain of Islamic thought and practice is found, more than any other, in and around the new fundamentalism: Wahhabism. This is a Saudi Arabian variant of Islam. It follows a literal interpretation of Islam, as strict and forbidding as the baking desert sands of its origins. Saudi cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century sought to remove the multifarious readings of the Koran that evolved in the centuries after the prophet. He was backed by the House of Saud, which eventually took Wahhabist views as national policy. Infidels were to be dealt with harshly. Local customs, laws, saints, or rituals - anything not found in a literal reading of the Koran - were to be abandoned as idolatry. Saudi Arabia, especially, as the home of Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest sites, should free itself of any un-Islamic influence.

Today, Saudi oil wealth gives what would be a minority orthodox faction in the Muslim world a disproportionate amount of influence. Saudi funds pour out, officially and unofficially, across the globe - paying for new mosques from Bosnia to Boston, as well as Islamic centers, university chairs, conferences, and organizations for the promotion of orthodox Islam, primary schools, charities, and visiting scholars.

Exact figures on the petrodollars pushing Saudi orthodox Islam are hard to come by. But few experts say that Saudi funds are directly used for the export of militant training. Indeed, today, the Saudi government does not particularly want to fund fundamentalism that will turn on the government, as has bin Laden (In 1994, the Saudis revoked his citizenship). One of the original aims of funding orthodox Islamic institutions was to check the spread of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini's Shia fundamentalism in the Gulf region in the 1980s. Nor does Saudi money come labeled as "Wahhabi funding." (Wahhabism in many parts of the world is viewed suspiciously.) Rather, funding for mosques or schools simply comes with the requirements that certain teachings and practices be observed: Women should cover their heads and be subservient, students should focus more on the Koran and less on "worldly" instruction, Islamic law (sharia) should be taught as the only real law, and other forms of Islam should be abandoned. Yet in practice, and even if unintentionally, experts say, the spread of Wahhabist or revivalist Islam, has been a breeding ground for militant behavior, and for an assault on local traditional forms of Islamic practice.

In Central Asia, for example, "you have Tajiks and Uzbeks who haven't heard a sermon in 20 years, and now all they hear is about how fanatical they should be," says Professor Nasr. "Somebody from Southeast Asia ... with a much more culturally rich and syncretic Islamic tradition, with more coexistence between religion and culture, between Hindu, Buddhist, Christianity ... [goes to a Wahhabi-funded] seminary. And even if he doesn't get military training, returns home with the view that there should be no compromise, no cultural coexistence with non-Muslims."

"Osama and the House of Saud don't agree on very much," says a Pakistani human rights worker in Peshawar, speaking gingerly. "But they do agree on the spread of Wahhabism."

"From Algeria to Indonesia, what I see is a move to push sharia law," says Mr. Ahmed, the editor in Lahore, Pakistan. "The harder Arab strains of Islam are behind this move. Indonesia is nothing but a beautiful 'low church' version of Islam with lots of singing and dancing, mysticism. But this sharia movement will try to purge that Islam and make it as pure as everywhere else."

In the past 20 years, literally hundreds of mosques have been set up in Southeast Asia for the purpose of teaching "pure Islam." The move is fueled by Saudi funding, and by guerrilla fighters trained in Afghanistan who came back home.

The original leaders of Indonesia's Lashkar Jihad and Islamic Defenders Front, as well as Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, all fought with the mujahideen. All are now committing acts of violence in the furtherance of their aims - a sharia-based state.

Indonesia, though majority Muslim, has always been resolutely secular. The Wahhabi-influenced Muslims there feel like outsiders, and often preach that the nation's political elite are "infidels."

Militant Laskar Jihad leader Jaf'ar Umar Thalib dismissed both Megawati Sukarnoputri, the current president of Indonesia, and Abdurrahman Wahid, the past president, as "not real Muslims" when the Monitor met him last year. That may sound strange, particularly in the case of Wahid, who chairs Nadhlatul Ulama, an academic group that is the world's largest Muslim organization. But Wahid is resolutely a traditional Javanese Muslim who also prays to ancestors and ancient seers and visits holy places not mentioned in the Koran.

In the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Egypt, the return of the Afghan vets coincided with an upsurge of Islamic militancy in the 1990s.

When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, and the Afghan mujahideen began fighting among themselves, many Arabs left. Bin Laden moved to Sudan in 1991, and took up his campaign against the Saudi regime.

Zawahiri, according to press reports, shaved his beard, dyed his hair, and went to California and Texas for a few weeks in 1991. He visited mosques and community centers under an assumed name, raising money for "Afghan widows and orphans."

In the 1990s, flush with Afghan vets, the Egyptian Islamic Group, and Jihad (the militant group Zawahiri belonged to), launched a series of attacks on politicians and tourists. In 1997, six Islamic militants massacred 58 foreign tourists and at least four Egyptians in Luxor, Egypt.

The next year, Zawahiri and bin Laden publicly reunited, although terrorism experts say that the two were working together throughout the 1990s.

On Feb. 23, 1998, an Arab newspaper introduced to the world the "International Islamic Front for Combating Crusaders and Jews." The founding document was signed by "Sheikh" bin Laden, Zawahiri "Amir of the Jihad Group" in Egypt, and the leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan, and the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. It condemned the "sins" of American foreign policy for declaring "war on God, his messenger, and Muslims." And it called "on every Muslim ... to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."

Six months later, the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed.

On a different jihad

While the allure of jihad and defending Islam against America draws many today, not all the young men who are radicalized stay that way.

As a boy growing up as part of the 5 percent minority in the Philippines, Zam Amputan, remembers feeling that Muslims were destined to be forever marginalized unless they were governed by the Koran.

His father was a respected religious teacher, and the family, by Mindanao standards, was well off. Amputan attended a private Catholic school, and after college, the opportunity arose to attend a madrassah in Pakistan. At the height of the jihad against the Soviets, his trip to Peshawar in 1987, like those of other believers, was sponsored by the Saudi-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth. There he was exposed to the Wahhabi ideology, which he saw as a powerful tool against oppression.

He returned to Mindanao full of zeal, thinking of ways to create a separate Islamic state in the southern Philippines.

But as he matured, he says, his ideas changed. Amputan doesn't know exactly what altered his radical route, though he cites a 1995 trip to Iran, in which he began to believe it was a huge mistake to give clerics control over the temporal world.

"I always used my own reasoning, and it led me to a different understanding of the Koran," says Amputan. "The problem with the religious state is that they say religious teachers have the ultimate responsibility to interpret the Koran. I have a different reading: It's each individual's responsibility."

The views of this father of four put him at odds with the growing number of militants in the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a separatist group with whom he sympathized. (In March 2000, Amputan survived an assassination attempt by the MILF, while driving home from a radio talk show he hosted.)

"Extremist, intolerant views of Islam have come to monopolize the religious dialogue here, and the moderates have to do more to change that," Amputan says. "My personal jihad is to stop extremism. But few are fighting yet."

Reporting by staff writers Jane Lampman in Boston; Scott Peterson in Douab, Afghanistan; Ilene R. Prusher in Cairo; and Warren Richey in Amman, Jordan; as well as special correspondents Sarah Gauch in Cairo and Dan Murphy in Manila.

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Osama bin Laden followers sentenced to life in U.S. embassy bombings

Canadian Press
Thursday, October 18, 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={5F4E1646-1744-4272-AEDD-AAA329EE13C8}

NEW YORK (AP) - Three of four Osama bin Laden disciples convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa received life without parole Thursday in a city where terrorism is no longer a distant reality.

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 28, was the first of the four defendants to be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. He and Mohamed Rashed Al-'Owhali, 24, were sentenced to life without parole for direct involvement in the bombings. Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 36, of Jordan, received the same sentence for conspiracy.

Mohamed, convicted of helping to grind TNT and load the bomb that struck the Tanzanian embassy, declined to address the court.

He had faced a possible death penalty in the case, but the jury could not agree on that sentence. Through his lawyer, Mohamed said he "wishes to express gratitude to a jury that spared his life."

"The jury has found you guilty of crimes that mandate a life sentence, and I will of course impose a life sentence," Judge Leonard B. Sand told Mohamed.

Al-'Owhali rode the bomb vehicle up to the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya and tossed stun grenades at guards before fleeing.

Their six-month trial attracted little interest before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed more than 5,000 people.

On Thursday, security was tightened around the courthouse just blocks from the trade center rubble.

Wadih El-Hage, 41, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen from Arlington, Tex., was found guilty in May of conspiracy and was also to be sentenced Thursday.

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The New War Against Terror

Noam Chomsky
October 18, 2001 -
Transcribed from audio recorded at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT

Everyone knows it's the TV people who run the world [crowd laugher]. I just got orders that I'm supposed to be here, not there. Well the last talk I gave at this forum was on a light pleasant topic. It was about how humans are an endangered species and given the nature of their institutions they are likely to destroy themselves in a fairly short time. So this time there is a little relief and we have a pleasant topic instead, the new war on terror. Unfortunately, the world keeps coming up with things that make it more and more horrible as we proceed.

Assume 2 Conditions for this Talk

I'm going to assume 2 conditions for this talk.

The first one is just what I assume to be recognition of fact. That is that the events of September 11 were a horrendous atrocity probably the most devastating instant human toll of any crime in history, outside of war. The second assumption has to do with the goals. I'm assuming that our goal is that we are interested in reducing the likelihood of such crimes whether they are against us or against someone else. If you don't accept those two assumptions, then what I say will not be addressed to you. If we do accept them, then a number of questions arise, closely related ones, which merit a good deal of thought.

The 5 Questions

One question, and by far the most important one is what is happening right now? Implicit in that is what can we do about it? The 2nd has to do with the very common assumption that what happened on September 11 is a historic event, one which will change history. I tend to agree with that. I think it's true. It was a historic event and the question we should be asking is exactly why? The 3rd question has to do with the title, The War Against Terrorism. Exactly what is it? And there is a related question, namely what is terrorism? The 4th question which is narrower but important has to do with the origins of the crimes of September 11th. And the 5th question that I want to talk a little about is what policy options there are in fighting this war against terrorism and dealing with the situations that led to it.

I'll say a few things about each. Glad to go beyond in discussion and don't hesitate to bring up other questions. These are ones that come to my mind as prominent but you may easily and plausibly have other choices.

1. What's Happening Right Now?

Starvation of 3 to 4 Million People

Well let's start with right now. I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan. I'll just keep to uncontroversial sources like the New York Times [crowd laughter]. According to the New York Times there are 7 to 8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times reported, I'm quoting it, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population. As far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States or for that matter in Europe. I was on national radio all over Europe the next day. There was no reaction in the United States or in Europe to my knowledge to the demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people. The threat of military strikes right after September.....around that time forced the removal of international aid workers that crippled the assistance programs. Actually, I am quoting again from the New York Times. Refugees reaching Pakistan after arduous journeys from AF are describing scenes of desperation and fear at home as the threat of American led military attacks turns their long running misery into a potential catastrophe. The country was on a lifeline and we just cut the line. Quoting an evacuated aid worker, in the New York Times Magazine.

The World Food Program, the UN program, which is the main one by far, were able to resume after 3 weeks in early October, they began to resume at a lower level, resume food shipments. They don't have international aid workers within, so the distribution system is hampered. That was suspended as soon as the bombing began. They then resumed but at a lower pace while aid agencies leveled scathing condemnations of US airdrops, condemning them as propaganda tools which are probably doing more harm than good. That happens to be quoting the London Financial Times but it is easy to continue. After the first week of bombing, the New York Times reported on a back page inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible, continuing to quote, but with bombs falling the delivery rate is down to 1/2 of what is needed. Casual comment. Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that. On the same day, the leader of Western civilization dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for delivery of the alleged target, Osama bin Laden, and a request for some evidence to substantiate the demand for total capitulation. It was dismissed. On the same day the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I'm aware that was unreported. That was Monday. Yesterday the major aid agencies OXFAM and Christian Aid and others joined in that plea. You can't find a report in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about another topic, Kashmir.

Silent Genocide

Well we could easily go on....but all of that....first of all indicates to us what's happening. Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks....very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that's just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe. Not in the rest of the world. In fact not even in much of Europe. So if you read the Irish press or the press in Scotland...that close, reactions are very different. Well that's what's happening now. What's happening now is very much under our control. We can do a lot to affect what's happening. And that's roughly it.

2. Why was it a Historic Event?

National Territory Attacked

Alright let's turn to the slightly more abstract question, forgetting for the moment that we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder 3 or 4 million people, not Taliban of course, their victims. Let's go back...turn to the question of the historic event that took place on September 11th. As I said, I think that's correct. It was a historic event. Not unfortunately because of its scale, unpleasant to think about, but in terms of the scale it's not that unusual. I did say it's the worst...probably the worst instant human toll of any crime. And that may be true. But there are terrorist crimes with effects a bit more drawn out that are more extreme, unfortunately. Nevertheless, it's a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That's new. Radically new. So, take US history.

The last time that the national territory of the United States was under attack, or for that matter, even threatened was when the British burned down Washington in 1814. There have been many...it was common to bring up Pearl Harbor but that's not a good analogy. The Japanese, what ever you think about it, the Japanese bombed military bases in 2 US colonies not the national territory; colonies which had been taken from their inhabitants in not a very pretty way. This is the national territory that's been attacked on a large scale, you can find a few fringe examples but this is unique. During these close to 200 years, we, the United States expelled or mostly exterminated the indigenous population, that's many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, carried out depredations all over the region, Caribbean and Central America, sometimes beyond, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, killing several hundred thousand Filipinos in the process. Since the Second World War, it has extended its reach around the world in ways I don't have to describe. But it was always killing someone else, the fighting was somewhere else, it was others who were getting slaughtered. Not here. Not the national territory.

Europe

In the case of Europe, the change is even more dramatic because its history is even more horrendous than ours. We are an offshoot of Europe, basically. For hundreds of years, Europe has been casually slaughtering people all over the world. That's how they conquered the world, not by handing out candy to babies. During this period, Europe did suffer murderous wars, but that was European killers murdering one another. The main sport of Europe for hundreds of years was slaughtering one another. The only reason that it came to an end in 1945, was....it had nothing to do with Democracy or not making war with each other and other fashionable notions. It had to do with the fact that everyone understood that the next time they play the game it was going to be the end for the world. Because the Europeans, including us, had developed such massive weapons of destruction that that game just had to be over. And it goes back hundreds of years. In the 17th century, about probably 40% of the entire population of Germany was wiped out in one war. But during this whole bloody murderous period, it was Europeans slaughtering each other, and Europeans slaughtering people elsewhere. The Congo didn't attack Belgium, India didn't attack England, Algeria didn't attack France. It's uniform. There are again small exceptions, but pretty small in scale, certainly invisible in the scale of what Europe and us were doing to the rest of the world. This is the first change. The first time that the guns have been pointed the other way. And in my opinion that's probably why you see such different reactions on the two sides of the Irish Sea which I have noticed, incidentally, in many interviews on both sides, national radio on both sides. The world looks very different depending on whether you are holding the leash or whether you are being whipped by it for hundreds of years, very different. So I think the shock and surprise in Europe and its offshoots, like here, is very understandable. It is a historic event but regrettably not in scale, in something else and a reason why the rest of the world...most of the rest of the world looks at it quite differently. Not lacking sympathy for the victims of the atrocity or being horrified by them, that's almost uniform, but viewing it from a different perspective. Something we might want to understand.

3. What is the War Against Terrorism?

Well, let's go to the third question, 'What is the war against terrorism?' and a side question, 'What's terrorism?'. The war against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by "depraved opponents of civilization itself." That's a feeling that I share. The words I'm quoting, however, happen to be from 20 years ago. Those are...that's President Reagan and his Secretary of State. The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring that the war against international terrorism would be the core of our foreign policy....describing it in terms of the kind I just mentioned and others. And it was the core of our foreign policy. The Reagan administration responded to this plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world, primarily....well, partly nearby, but not only there. I won't run through the record, you're all educated people, so I'm sure you learned about it in High School. [crowd laughter]

Reagan-US War Against Nicaragua

But I'll just mention one case which is totally uncontroversial, so we might as well not argue about it, by no means the most extreme but uncontroversial. It's uncontroversial because of the judgments of the highest international authorities the International Court of Justice, the World Court, and the UN Security Council. So this one is uncontroversial, at least among people who have some minimal concern for international law, human rights, justice and other things like that. And now I'll leave you an exercise. You can estimate the size of that category by simply asking how often this uncontroversial case has been mentioned in the commentary of the last month. And it's a particularly relevant one, not only because it is uncontroversial, but because it does offer a precedent as to how a law abiding state would respond to...did respond in fact to international terrorism, which is uncontroversial. And was even more extreme than the events of September 11th. I'm talking about the Reagan-US war against Nicaragua which left tens of thousands of people dead, the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery.

Nicaragua's Response

Nicaragua did respond. They didn't respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They responded by taking it to the World Court, presenting a case, they had no problem putting together evidence. The World Court accepted their case, ruled in their favor, condemned what they called the "unlawful use of force," which is another word for international terrorism, by the United States, ordered the United States to terminate the crime and to pay massive reparations. The United States, of course, dismissed the court judgment with total contempt and announced that it would not accept the jurisdiction of the court henceforth. Then Nicaragua went to the UN Security Council which considered a resolution calling on all states to observe international law. No one was mentioned but everyone understood. The United States vetoed the resolution. It now stands as the only state on record which has both been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly where there is technically no veto but a negative US vote amounts to a veto. It passed a similar resolution with only the United States, Israel, and El Salvador opposed. The following year again, this time the United States could only rally Israel to the cause, so 2 votes opposed to observing international law. At that point, Nicaragua couldn't do anything lawful. It tried all the measures. They don't work in a world that is ruled by force.

This case is uncontroversial but it's by no means the most extreme. We gain a lot of insight into our own culture and society and what's happening now by asking 'how much we know about all this? How much we talk about it? How much you learn about it in school? How much it's all over the front pages?' And this is only the beginning. The United States responded to the World Court and the Security Council by immediately escalating the war very quickly, that was a bipartisan decision incidentally. The terms of the war were also changed. For the first time there were official orders given...official orders to the terrorist army to attack what are called "soft targets," meaning undefended civilian targets, and to keep away from the Nicaraguan army. They were able to do that because the United States had total control of the air over Nicaragua and the mercenary army was supplied with advanced communication equipment, it wasn't a guerilla army in the normal sense and could get instructions about the disposition of the Nicaraguan army forces so they could attack agricultural collectives, health clinics, and so on...soft targets with impunity. Those were the official orders.

What was the Reaction Here?

What was the reaction? It was known. There was a reaction to it. The policy was regarded as sensible by left liberal opinion. So Michael Kinsley who represents the left in mainstream discussion, wrote an article in which he said that we shouldn't be too quick to criticize this policy as Human Rights Watch had just done. He said a "sensible policy" must "meet the test of cost benefit analysis" -- that is, I'm quoting now, that is the analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end." Democracy as the US understands the term, which is graphically illustrated in the surrounding countries. Notice that it is axiomatic that the United States, US elites, have the right to conduct the analysis and to pursue the project if it passes their tests. And it did pass their tests. It worked. When Nicaragua finally succumbed to superpower assault, commentators openly and cheerfully lauded the success of the methods that were adopted and described them accurately. So I'll quote Time Magazine just to pick one. They lauded the success of the methods adopted: "to wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves," with a cost to us that is "minimal," and leaving the victims "with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations, and ruined farms," and thus providing the US candidate with a "winning issue": "ending the impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua." The New York Times had a headline saying "Americans United in Joy" at this outcome.

Terrorism Works ­ Terrorism is not the Weapon of the Weak

That is the culture in which we live and it reveals several facts. One is the fact that terrorism works. It doesn't fail. It works. Violence usually works. That's world history. Secondly, it's a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it's primarily a weapon of the strong, overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror doesn't count as terror. Now that's close to universal. I can't think of a historical exception, even the worst mass murderers view the world that way. So pick the Nazis. They weren't carrying out terror in occupied Europe. They were protecting the local population from the terrorisms of the partisans. And like other resistance movements, there was terrorism. The Nazis were carrying out counter terror. Furthermore, the United States essentially agreed with that. After the war, the US army did extensive studies of Nazi counter terror operations in Europe. First I should say that the US picked them up and began carrying them out itself, often against the same targets, the former resistance. But the military also studied the Nazi methods published interesting studies, sometimes critical of them because they were inefficiently carried out, so a critical analysis, you didn't do this right, you did that right, but those methods with the advice of Wermacht officers who were brought over here became the manuals of counter insurgency, of counter terror, of low intensity conflict, as it is called, and are the manuals, and are the procedures that are being used. So it's not just that the Nazis did it. It's that it was regarded as the right thing to do by the leaders of western civilization, that is us, who then proceeded to do it themselves. Terrorism is not the weapon of the weak. It is the weapon of those who are against 'us' whoever 'us' happens to be. And if you can find a historical exception to that, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Nature of our Culture ­ How We Regard Terrorism

Well, an interesting indication of the nature of our culture, our high culture, is the way in which all of this is regarded. One way it's regarded is just suppressing it. So almost nobody has ever heard of it. And the power of American propaganda and doctrine is so strong that even among the victims it's barely known. I mean, when you talk about this to people in Argentina, you have to remind them. Oh, yeah, that happened, we forgot about it. It's deeply suppressed. The sheer consequences of the monopoly of violence can be very powerful in ideological and other terms.

The Idea that Nicaragua Might Have The Right To Defend Itself

Well, one illuminating aspect of our own attitude toward terrorism is the reaction to the idea that Nicaragua might have the right to defend itself. Actually I went through this in some detail with database searches and that sort of thing. The idea that Nicaragua might have the right to defend itself was considered outrageous. There is virtually nothing in mainstream commentary indicating that Nicaragua might have that right. And that fact was exploited by the Reagan administration and its propaganda in an interesting way. Those of you who were around in that time will remember that they periodically floated rumors that the Nicaraguans were getting MIG jets, jets from Russia. At that point the hawks and the doves split. The hawks said, 'ok, let's bomb 'em.' The doves said, `wait a minute, let's see if the rumors are true. And if the rumors are true, then let's bomb them. Because they are a threat to the United States.' Why, incidentally were they getting MIGs? Well they tried to get jet planes from European countries but the United States put pressure on its allies so that it wouldn't send them means of defense because they wanted them to turn to the Russians. That's good for propaganda purposes. Then they become a threat to us. Remember, they were just 2 days march from Harlingen, Texas. We actually declared a national emergency in 1985 to protect the country from the threat of Nicaragua. And it stayed in force. So it was much better for them to get arms from the Russians. Why would they want jet planes? Well, for the reasons I already mentioned. The United States had total control over their airspace, and was using that to provide instructions to the terrorist army to enable them to attack soft targets without running into the army that might defend them. Everyone knew that that was the reason. They are not going to use their jet planes for anything else. But the idea that Nicaragua should be permitted to defend its airspace against a superpower attack that is directing terrorist forces to attack undefended civilian targets, that was considered in the United States as outrageous and uniformly so. Exceptions are so slight, you know I can practically list them. I don't suggest that you take my word for this. Have a look. That includes our own senators, incidentally.

Honduras ­ The Appointment of John Negroponte as Ambassador to the United Nations

Another illustration of how we regard terrorism is happening right now. The US has just appointed an ambassador to the United Nations to lead the war against terrorism a couple weeks ago. Who is he? Well, his name is John Negroponte. He was the US ambassador in the fiefdom, which is what it is, of Honduras in the early 1980's. There was a little fuss made about the fact that he must have been aware, as he certainly was, of the large-scale murders and other atrocities that were being carried out by the security forces in Honduras that we were supporting. But that's a small part of it. As proconsul of Honduras, as he was called there, he was the local supervisor for the terrorist war based in Honduras, for which his government was condemned by the world court and then the Security Council in a vetoed resolution. And he was just appointed as the UN Ambassador to lead the war against terror. Another small experiment you can do is check and see what the reaction was to this. Well, I will tell you what you are going to find, but find it for yourself. Now that tells us a lot about the war against terrorism and a lot about ourselves.

After the United States took over the country again under the conditions that were so graphically described by the press, the country was pretty much destroyed in the 1980's, but it has totally collapsed since in every respect just about. Economically it has declined sharply since the US take over, democratically and in every other respect. It's now the second poorest country in the Hemisphere. I should say....I'm not going to talk about it, but I mentioned that I picked up Nicaragua because it is an uncontroversial case. If you look at the other states in the region, the state terror was far more extreme and it again traces back to Washington and that's by no means all.

US & UK Backed South African Attacks

It was happening elsewhere in the world too, take say Africa. During the Reagan years alone, South African attacks, backed by the United States and Britain, US/UK-backed South African attacks against the neighboring countries killed about a million and a half people and left 60 billion dollars in damage and countries destroyed. And if we go around the world, we can add more examples.

Now that was the first war against terror of which I've given a small sample. Are we supposed to pay attention to that? Or kind of think that that might be relevant? After all it's not exactly ancient history. Well, evidently not as you can tell by looking at the current discussion of the war on terror which has been the leading topic for the last month.

Haiti, Guatemala, and Nicaragua

I mentioned that Nicaragua has now become the 2nd poorest country in the hemisphere. What's the poorest country? Well that's of course Haiti which also happens to be the victim of most US intervention in the 20th century by a long shot. We left it totally devastated. It's the poorest country. Nicaragua is second ranked in degree of US intervention in the 20th century. It is the 2nd poorest. Actually, it is vying with Guatemala. They interchange every year or two as to who's the second poorest. And they also vie as to who is the leading target of US military intervention. We're supposed to think that all of this is some sort of accident. That is has nothing to do with anything that happened in history. Maybe.

Colombia and Turkey

The worst human rights violator in the 1990's is Colombia, by a long shot. It's also, by far, the leading recipient of US military aid in the 1990's maintaining the terror and human rights violations. In 1999, Colombia replaced Turkey as the leading recipient of US arms worldwide, that is excluding Israel and Egypt which are a separate category. And that tells us a lot more about the war on terror right now, in fact.

Why was Turkey getting such a huge flow of US arms? Well if you take a look at the flow of US arms to Turkey, Turkey always got a lot of US arms. It's strategically placed, a member of NATO, and so on. But the arms flow to Turkey went up very sharply in 1984. It didn't have anything to do with the cold war. I mean Russian was collapsing. And it stayed high from 1984 to 1999 when it reduced and it was replaced in the lead by Colombia. What happened from 1984 to 1999? Well, in 1984, [Turkey] launched a major terrorist war against Kurds in southeastern Turkey. And that's when US aid went up, military aid. And this was not pistols. This was jet planes, tanks, military training, and so on. And it stayed high as the atrocities escalated through the 1990's. Aid followed it. The peak year was 1997. In 1997, US military aid to Turkey was more than in the entire period 1950 to 1983, that is the cold war period, which is an indication of how much the cold war has affected policy. And the results were awesome. This led to 2-3 million refugees. Some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the late 1990's. Tens of thousands of people killed, 3500 towns and villages destroyed, way more than Kosovo, even under NATO bombs. And the United States was providing 80% of the arms, increasing as the atrocities increased, peaking in 1997. It declined in 1999 because, once again, terror worked as it usually does when carried out by its major agents, mainly the powerful. So by 1999, Turkish terror, called of course counter-terror, but as I said, that's universal, it worked. Therefore Turkey was replaced by Colombia which had not yet succeeded in its terrorist war. And therefore had to move into first place as recipient of US arms.

Self Congratulation on the Part of Western Intellectuals

Well, what makes this all particularly striking is that all of this was taking place right in the midst of a huge flood of self-congratulation on the part of Western intellectuals which probably has no counterpart in history. I mean you all remember it. It was just a couple years ago. Massive self-adulation about how for the first time in history we are so magnificent; that we are standing up for principles and values; dedicated to ending inhumanity everywhere in the new era of this-and-that, and so-on-and-so-forth. And we certainly can't tolerate atrocities right near the borders of NATO. That was repeated over and over. Only within the borders of NATO where we can not only can tolerate much worse atrocities but contribute to them. Another insight into Western civilization and our own, is how often was this brought up? Try to look. I won't repeat it. But it's instructive. It's a pretty impressive feat for a propaganda system to carry this off in a free society. It's pretty amazing. I don't think you could do this in a totalitarian state.

Turkey is Very Grateful

And Turkey is very grateful. Just a few days ago, Prime Minister Ecevit announced that Turkey would join the coalition against terror, very enthusiastically, even more so than others. In fact, he said they would contribute troops which others have not willing to do. And he explained why. He said, We owe a debt of gratitude to the United States because the United States was the only country that was willing to contribute so massively to our own, in his words "counter-terrorist" war, that is to our own massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities and terror. Other countries helped a little, but they stayed back. The United States, on the other hand, contributed enthusiastically and decisively and was able to do so because of the silence, servility might be the right word, of the educated classes who could easily find out about it. It's a free country after all. You can read human rights reports. You can read all sorts of stuff. But we chose to contribute to the atrocities and Turkey is very happy, they owe us a debt of gratitude for that and therefore will contribute troops just as during the war in Serbia. Turkey was very much praised for using its F-16's which we supplied it to bomb Serbia exactly as it had been doing with the same planes against its own population up until the time when it finally succeeded in crushing internal terror as they called it. And as usual, as always, resistance does include terror. Its true of the American Revolution. That's true of every case I know. Just as its true that those who have a monopoly of violence talk about themselves as carrying out counter terror.

The Coalition ­ Including Algeria, Russia, China, Indonesia

Now that's pretty impressive and that has to do with the coalition that is now being organized to fight the war against terror. And it's very interesting to see how that coalition is being described. So have a look at this morning's Christian Science Monitor. That's a good newspaper. One of the best international newspapers, with real coverage of the world. The lead story, the front-page story, is about how the United States, you know people used to dislike the United States but now they are beginning to respect it, and they are very happy about the way that the US is leading the war against terror. And the prime example, well in fact the only serious example, the others are a joke, is Algeria. Turns out that Algeria is very enthusiastic about the US war against terror. The person who wrote the article is an expert on Africa. He must know that Algeria is one of the most vicious terrorist states in the world and has been carrying out horrendous terror against its own population in the past couple of years, in fact. For a while, this was under wraps. But it was finally exposed in France by defectors from the Algerian army. It's all over the place there and in England and so on. But here, we're very proud because one of the worst terrorist states in the world is now enthusiastically welcoming the US war on terror and in fact is cheering on the United States to lead the war. That shows how popular we are getting.

And if you look at the coalition that is being formed against terror it tells you a lot more. A leading member of the coalition is Russia which is delighted to have the United States support its murderous terrorist war in Chechnya instead of occasionally criticizing it in the background. China is joining enthusiastically. It's delighted to have support for the atrocities it's carrying out in western China against, what it called, Muslim secessionists. Turkey, as I mentioned, is very happy with the war against terror. They are experts. Algeria, Indonesia delighted to have even more US support for atrocities it is carrying out in Ache and elsewhere. Now we can run through the list, the list of the states that have joined the coalition against terror is quite impressive. They have a characteristic in common. They are certainly among the leading terrorist states in the world. And they happen to be led by the world champion.

What is Terrorism?

Well that brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? I have been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That's terrorism. That's a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that. The problem is that it can't be accepted because if you accept that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism. When Kofi Annan got the Nobel prize the other day, you will notice he was reported as saying that we should stop wasting time on this and really get down to it.

But there's a problem. If you use the official definition of terrorism in the comprehensive treaty you are going to get completely the wrong results. So that can't be done. In fact, it is even worse than that. If you take a look at the definition of Low Intensity Warfare which is official US policy you find that it is a very close paraphrase of what I just read. In fact, Low Intensity Conflict is just another name for terrorism. That's why all countries, as far as I know, call whatever horrendous acts they are carrying out, counter terrorism. We happen to call it Counter Insurgency or Low Intensity Conflict. So that's a serious problem. You can't use the actual definitions. You've got to carefully find a definition that doesn't have all the wrong consequences.

Why did the United States and Israel Vote Against a Major Resolution Condemning Terrorism?

There are some other problems. Some of them came up in December 1987, at the peak of the first war on terrorism, that's when the furor over the plague was peaking. The United Nations General Assembly passed a very strong resolution against terrorism, condemning the plague in the strongest terms, calling on every state to fight against it in every possible way. It passed unanimously. One country, Honduras abstained. Two votes against; the usual two, United States and Israel. Why should the United States and Israel vote against a major resolution condemning terrorism in the strongest terms, in fact pretty much the terms that the Reagan administration was using? Well, there is a reason. There is one paragraph in that long resolution which says that nothing in this resolution infringes on the rights of people struggling against racist and colonialist regimes or foreign military occupation to continue with their resistance with the assistance of others, other states, states outside in their just cause. Well, the United States and Israel can't accept that. The main reason that they couldn't at the time was because of South Africa. South Africa was an ally, officially called an ally. There was a terrorist force in South Africa. It was called the African National Congress. They were a terrorist force officially. South Africa in contrast was an ally and we certainly couldn't support actions by a terrorist group struggling against a racist regime. That would be impossible.

And of course there is another one. Namely the Israeli occupied territories, now going into its 35th year. Supported primarily by the United States in blocking a diplomatic settlement for 30 years now, still is. And you can't have that. There is another one at the time. Israel was occupying Southern Lebanon and was being combated by what the US calls a terrorist force, Hizbullah, which in fact succeeded in driving Israel out of Lebanon. And we can't allow anyone to struggle against a military occupation when it is one that we support so therefore the US and Israel had to vote against the major UN resolution on terrorism. And I mentioned before that a US vote against...is essentially a veto. Which is only half the story. It also vetoes it from history. So none of this was ever reported and none of it appeared in the annals of terrorism. If you look at the scholarly work on terrorism and so on, nothing that I just mentioned appears. The reason is that it has got the wrong people holding the guns. You have to carefully hone the definitions and the scholarship and so on so that you come out with the right conclusions; otherwise it is not respectable scholarship and honorable journalism. Well, these are some of problems that are hampering the effort to develop a comprehensive treaty against terrorism. Maybe we should have an academic conference or something to try to see if we can figure out a way of defining terrorism so that it comes out with just the right answers, not the wrong answers. That won't be easy.

4. What are the Origins of the September 11 Crime?

Well, let's drop that and turn to the 4th question, What are the origins of the September 11 crimes? Here we have to make a distinction between 2 categories which shouldn't be run together. One is the actual agents of the crime, the other is kind of a reservoir of at least sympathy, sometimes support that they appeal to even among people who very much oppose the criminals and the actions. And those are 2 different things.

Category 1: The Likely Perpetrators

Well, with regard to the perpetrators, in a certain sense we are not really clear. The United States either is unable or unwilling to provide any evidence, any meaningful evidence. There was a sort of a play a week or two ago when Tony Blair was set up to try to present it. I don't exactly know what the purpose of this was. Maybe so that the US could look as though it's holding back on some secret evidence that it can't reveal or that Tony Blair could strike proper Churchillian poses or something or other. Whatever the PR [public relations] reasons were, he gave a presentation which was in serious circles considered so absurd that it was barely even mentioned. So the Wall Street Journal, for example, one of the more serious papers had a small story on page 12, I think, in which they pointed out that there was not much evidence and then they quoted some high US official as saying that it didn't matter whether there was any evidence because they were going to do it anyway. So why bother with the evidence? The more ideological press, like the New York Times and others, they had big front-page headlines. But the Wall Street Journal reaction was reasonable and if you look at the so-called evidence you can see why. But let's assume that it's true. It is astonishing to me how weak the evidence was. I sort of thought you could do better than that without any intelligence service [audience laughter]. In fact, remember this was after weeks of the most intensive investigation in history of all the intelligence services of the western world working overtime trying to put something together. And it was a prima facie, it was a very strong case even before you had anything. And it ended up about where it started, with a prima facie case. So let's assume that it is true. So let's assume that, it looked obvious the first day, still does, that the actual perpetrators come from the radical Islamic, here called, fundamentalist networks of which the bin Laden network is undoubtedly a significant part. Whether they were involved or not nobody knows. It doesn't really matter much.

Where did they come from?

That's the background, those networks. Well, where do they come from? We know all about that. Nobody knows about that better than the CIA because it helped organize them and it nurtured them for a long time. They were brought together in the 1980's actually by the CIA and its associates elsewhere: Pakistan, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China was involved, they may have been involved a little bit earlier, maybe by 1978. The idea was to try to harass the Russians, the common enemy. According to President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US got involved in mid 1979. Do you remember, just to put the dates right, that Russia invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Ok. According to Brzezinski, the US support for the mujahedin fighting against the government began 6 months earlier. He is very proud of that. He says we drew the Russians into, in his words, an Afghan trap, by supporting the mujahedin, getting them to invade, getting them into the trap. Now then we could develop this terrific mercenary army. Not a small one, maybe 100,000 men or so bringing together the best killers they could find, who were radical Islamist fanatics from around North Africa, Saudi Arabia....anywhere they could find them. They were often called the Afghanis but many of them, like bin Laden, were not Afghans. They were brought by the CIA and its friends from elsewhere. Whether Brzezinski is telling the truth or not, I don't know. He may have been bragging, he is apparently very proud of it, knowing the consequences incidentally. But maybe it's true. We'll know someday if the documents are ever released. Anyway, that's his perception. By January 1980 it is not even in doubt that the US was organizing the Afghanis and this massive military force to try to cause the Russians maximal trouble. It was a legitimate thing for the Afghans to fight the Russian invasion. But the US intervention was not helping the Afghans. In fact, it helped destroy the country and much more. The Afghanis, so called, had their own...it did force the Russians to withdrew, finally. Although many analysts believe that it probably delayed their withdrawal because they were trying to get out of it. Anyway, whatever, they did withdraw.

Meanwhile, the terrorist forces that the CIA was organizing, arming, and training were pursuing their own agenda, right away. It was no secret. One of the first acts was in 1981 when they assassinated the President of Egypt, who was one of the most enthusiastic of their creators. In 1983, one suicide bomber, who may or may not have been connected, it's pretty shadowy, nobody knows. But one suicide bomber drove the US army-military out of Lebanon. And it continued. They have their own agenda. The US was happy to mobilize them to fight its cause but meanwhile they are doing their own thing. They were clear very about it. After 1989, when the Russians had withdrawn, they simply turned elsewhere. Since then they have been fighting in Chechnya, Western China, Bosnia, Kashmir, South East Asia, North Africa, all over the place.

The Are Telling Us What They Think

They are telling us just what they think. The United States wants to silence the one free television channel in the Arab world because it's broadcasting a whole range of things from Powell over to Osama bin Laden. So the US is now joining the repressive regimes of the Arab world that try to shut it up. But if you listen to it, if you listen to what bin Laden says, it's worth it. There is plenty of interviews. And there are plenty of interviews by leading Western reporters, if you don't want to listen to his own voice, Robert Fisk and others. And what he has been saying is pretty consistent for a long time. He's not the only one but maybe he is the most eloquent. It's not only consistent over a long time, it is consistent with their actions. So there is every reason to take it seriously. Their prime enemy is what they call the corrupt and oppressive authoritarian brutal regimes of the Arab world and when the say that they get quite a resonance in the region. They also want to defend and they want to replace them by properly Islamist governments. That's where they lose the people of the region. But up till then, they are with them. From their point of view, even Saudi Arabia, the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, I suppose, short of the Taliban, which is an offshoot, even that's not Islamist enough for them. Ok, at that point, they get very little support, but up until that point they get plenty of support. Also they want to defend Muslims elsewhere. They hate the Russians like poison, but as soon as the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, they stopped carrying out terrorist acts in Russia as they had been doing with CIA backing before that within Russia, not just in Afghanistan. They did move over to Chechnya. But there they are defending Muslims against a Russian invasion. Same with all the other places I mentioned. From their point of view, they are defending the Muslims against the infidels. And they are very clear about it and that is what they have been doing.

Why did they turn against the United States?

Now why did they turn against the United States? Well that had to do with what they call the US invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, the US established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia which from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of Afghanistan except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That's the home of the holiest sites of Islam. And that is when their activities turned against the Unites States. If you recall, in 1993 they tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Got part of the way, but not the whole way and that was only part of it. The plans were to blow up the UN building, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the FBI building. I think there were others on the list. Well, they sort of got part way, but not all the way. One person who is jailed for that, finally, among the people who were jailed, was a Egyptian cleric who had been brought into the United States over the objections of the Immigration Service, thanks to the intervention of the CIA which wanted to help out their friend. A couple years later he was blowing up the World Trade Center. And this has been going on all over. I'm not going to run through the list but it's, if you want to understand it, it's consistent. It's a consistent picture. It's described in words. It's revealed in practice for 20 years. There is no reason not to take it seriously. That's the first category, the likely perpetrators.

Category 2: What about the reservoir of support?

What about the reservoir of support? Well, it's not hard to find out what that is. One of the good things that has happened since September 11 is that some of the press and some of the discussion has begun to open up to some of these things. The best one to my knowledge is the Wall Street Journal which right away began to run, within a couple of days, serious reports, searching serious reports, on the reasons why the people of the region, even though they hate bin Laden and despise everything he is doing, nevertheless support him in many ways and even regard him as the conscience of Islam, as one said. Now the Wall Street Journal and others, they are not surveying public opinion. They are surveying the opinion of their friends: bankers, professionals, international lawyers, businessmen tied to the United States, people who they interview in McDonalds restaurant, which is an elegant restaurant there, wearing fancy American clothes. That's the people they are interviewing because they want to find out what their attitudes are. And their attitudes are very explicit and very clear and in many ways consonant with the message of bin Laden and others. They are very angry at the United States because of its support of authoritarian and brutal regimes; its intervention to block any move towards democracy; its intervention to stop economic development; its policies of devastating the civilian societies of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein; and they remember, even if we prefer not to, that the United States and Britain supported Saddam Hussein right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, bin Laden brings that up constantly, and they know it even if we don't want to. And of course their support for the Israeli military occupation which is harsh and brutal. It is now in its 35th year. The US has been providing the overwhelming economic, military, and diplomatic support for it, and still does. And they know that and they don't like it. Especially when that is paired with US policy towards Iraq, towards the Iraqi civilian society which is getting destroyed. Ok, those are the reasons roughly. And when bin Laden gives those reasons, people recognize it and support it.

Now that's not the way people here like to think about it, at least educated liberal opinion. They like the following line which has been all over the press, mostly from left liberals, incidentally. I have not done a real study but I think right wing opinion has generally been more honest. But if you look at say at the New York Times at the first op-ed they ran by Ronald Steel, serious left liberal intellectual. He asks Why do they hate us? This is the same day, I think, that the Wall Street Journal was running the survey on why they hate us. So he says "They hate us because we champion a new world order of capitalism, individualism, secularism, and democracy that should be the norm everywhere." That's why they hate us. The same day the Wall Street Journal is surveying the opinions of bankers, professionals, international lawyers and saying `look, we hate you because you are blocking democracy, you are preventing economic development, you are supporting brutal regimes, terrorist regimes and you are doing these horrible things in the region.' A couple days later, Anthony Lewis, way out on the left, explained that the terrorist seek only "apocalyptic nihilism," nothing more and nothing we do matters. The only consequence of our actions, he says, that could be harmful is that it makes it harder for Arabs to join in the coalition's anti-terrorism effort. But beyond that, everything we do is irrelevant.

Well, you know, that's got the advantage of being sort of comforting. It makes you feel good about yourself, and how wonderful you are. It enables us to evade the consequences of our actions. It has a couple of defects. One is it is at total variance with everything we know. And another defect is that it is a perfect way to ensure that you escalate the cycle of violence. If you want to live with your head buried in the sand and pretend they hate us because they're opposed to globalization, that's why they killed Sadat 20 years ago, and fought the Russians, tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. And these are all people who are in the midst of ... corporate globalization but if you want to believe that, yeh...comforting. And it is a great way to make sure that violence escalates. That's tribal violence. You did something to me, I'll do something worse to you. I don't care what the reasons are. We just keep going that way. And that's a way to do it. Pretty much straight, left-liberal opinion.

5. What are the Policy Options?

What are the policy options? Well, there are a number. A narrow policy option from the beginning was to follow the advice of really far out radicals like the Pope [audience laughter]. The Vatican immediately said look it's a horrible terrorist crime. In the case of crime, you try to find the perpetrators, you bring them to justice, you try them. You don't kill innocent civilians. Like if somebody robs my house and I think the guy who did it is probably in the neighborhood across the street, I don't go out with an assault rifle and kill everyone in that neighborhood. That's not the way you deal with crime, whether it's a small crime like this one or really massive one like the US terrorist war against Nicaragua, even worse ones and others in between. And there are plenty of precedents for that. In fact, I mentioned a precedent, Nicaragua, a lawful, a law abiding state, that's why presumably we had to destroy it, which followed the right principles. Now of course, it didn't get anywhere because it was running up against a power that wouldn't allow lawful procedures to be followed. But if the United States tried to pursue them, nobody would stop them. In fact, everyone would applaud. And there are plenty of other precedents. IRA Bombs in London. When the IRA set off bombs in London, which is pretty serious business, Britain could have, apart from the fact that it was unfeasible, let's put that aside, one possible response would have been to destroy Boston which is the source of most of the financing. And of course to wipe out West Belfast. Well, you know, quite apart from the feasibility, it would have been criminal idiocy. The way to deal with it was pretty much what they did. You know, find the perpetrators; bring them to trial; and look for the reasons. Because these things don't come out of nowhere. They come from something. Whether it is a crime in the streets or a monstrous terrorist crime or anything else. There's reasons. And usually if you look at the reasons, some of them are legitimate and ought to be addressed, independently of the crime, they ought to be addressed because they are legitimate. And that's the way to deal with it. There are many such examples.

But there are problems with that. One problem is that the United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of international institutions. So it can't go to them. It has rejected the jurisdiction of the World Court. It has refused to ratify the International Criminal Court. It is powerful enough to set up a new court if it wants so that wouldn't stop anything. But there is a problem with any kind of a court, mainly you need evidence. You go to any kind of court, you need some kind of evidence. Not Tony Blair talking about it on television. And that's very hard. It may be impossible to find.

Leaderless Resistance

You know, it could be that the people who did it, killed themselves. Nobody knows this better than the CIA. These are decentralized, nonhierarchic networks. They follow a principle that is called Leaderless Resistance. That's the principle that has been developed by the Christian Right terrorists in the United States. It's called Leaderless Resistance. You have small groups that do things. They don't talk to anybody else. There is a kind of general background of assumptions and then you do it. Actually people in the anti war movement are very familiar with it. We used to call it affinity groups. If you assume correctly that whatever group you are in is being penetrated by the FBI, when something serious is happening, you don't do it in a meeting. You do it with some people you know and trust, an affinity group and then it doesn't get penetrated. That's one of the reasons why the FBI has never been able to figure out what's going on in any of the popular movements. And other intelligence agencies are the same. They can't. That's leaderless resistance or affinity groups, and decentralized networks are extremely hard to penetrate. And it's quite possible that they just don't know. When Osama bin Laden claims he wasn't involved, that's entirely possible. In fact, it's pretty hard to imagine how a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, who doesn't even have a radio or a telephone could have planned a highly sophisticated operation like that. Chances are it's part of the background. You know, like other leaderless resistance terrorist groups. Which means it's going to be extremely difficult to find evidence.

Establishing Credibility

And the US doesn't want to present evidence because it wants to be able to do it, to act without evidence. That's a crucial part of the reaction. You will notice that the US did not ask for Security Council authorization which they probably could have gotten this time, not for pretty reasons, but because the other permanent members of the Security Council are also terrorist states. They are happy to join a coalition against what they call terror, namely in support of their own terror. Like Russia wasn't going to veto, they love it. So the US probably could have gotten Security Council authorization but it didn't want it. And it didn't want it because it follows a long-standing principle which is not George Bush, it was explicit in the Clinton administration, articulated and goes back much further and that is that we have the right to act unilaterally. We don't want international authorization because we act unilaterally and therefore we don't want it. We don't care about evidence. We don't care about negotiation. We don't care about treaties. We are the strongest guy around; the toughest thug on the block. We do what we want. Authorization is a bad thing and therefore must be avoided. There is even a name for it in the technical literature. It's called establishing credibility. You have to establish credibility. That's an important factor in many policies. It was the official reason given for the war in the Balkans and the most plausible reason.

You want to know what credibility means, ask your favorite Mafia Don. He'll explain to you what credibility means. And it's the same in international affairs, except it's talked about in universities using big words, and that sort of thing. But it's basically the same principle. And it makes sense. And it usually works. The main historian who has written about this in the last couple years is Charles Tilly with a book called Coercion, Capital, and European States. He points out that violence has been the leading principle of Europe for hundreds of years and the reason is because it works. You know, it's very reasonable. It almost always works. When you have an overwhelming predominance of violence and a culture of violence behind it. So therefore it makes sense to follow it. Well, those are all problems in pursuing lawful paths. And if you did try to follow them you'd really open some very dangerous doors. Like the US is demanding that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. And they are responding in a way which is regarded as totally absurd and outlandish in the west, namely they are saying, Ok, but first give us some evidence. In the west, that is considered ludicrous. It's a sign of their criminality. How can they ask for evidence? I mean if somebody asked us to hand someone over, we'd do it tomorrow. We wouldn't ask for any evidence. [crowd laughter].

Haiti

In fact it is easy to prove that. We don't have to make up cases. So for example, for the last several years, Haiti has been requesting the United States to extradite Emmanuel Constant. He is a major killer. He is one of the leading figures in the slaughter of maybe 4000 or 5000 people in the years in the mid 1990's, under the military junta, which incidentally was being, not so tacitly, supported by the Bush and the Clinton administrations contrary to illusions. Anyway he is a leading killer. They have plenty of evidence. No problem about evidence. He has already been brought to trial and sentenced in Haiti and they are asking the United States to turn him over. Well, I mean do your own research. See how much discussion there has been of that. Actually Haiti renewed the request a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't even mentioned. Why should we turn over a convicted killer who was largely responsible for killing 4000 or 5000 people a couple of years ago. In fact, if we do turn him over, who knows what he would say. Maybe he'll say that he was being funded and helped by the CIA, which is probably true. We don't want to open that door. And he is not he only one.

Costa Rica

For the last about 15 years, Costa Rica which is the democratic prize, has been trying to get the United States to hand over a John Hull, a US land owner in Costa Rica, who they charge with terrorist crimes. He was using his land, they claim with good evidence as a base for the US war against Nicaragua, which is not a controversial conclusion, remember. There is the World Court and Security Council behind it. So they have been trying to get the United States to hand him over. Hear about that one? No. They did actually confiscate the land of another American landholder, John Hamilton. Paid compensation, offered compensation. The US refused. Turned his land over into a national park because his land was also being used as a base for the US attack against Nicaragua. Costa Rica was punished for that one. They were punished by withholding aid. We don't accept that kind of insubordination from allies. And we can go on. If you open the door to questions about extradition it leads in very unpleasant directions. So that can't be done.

Reactions in Afghanistan

Well, what about the reactions in Afghanistan. The initial proposal, the initial rhetoric was for a massive assault which would kill many people visibly and also an attack on other countries in the region. Well the Bush administration wisely backed off from that. They were being told by every foreign leader, NATO, everyone else, every specialist, I suppose, their own intelligence agencies that that would be the stupidest thing they could possibly do. It would simply be like opening recruiting offices for bin Laden all over the region. That's exactly what he wants. And it would be extremely harmful to their own interests. So they backed off that one. And they are turning to what I described earlier which is a kind of silent genocide. It's a.... well, I already said what I think about it. I don't think anything more has to be said. You can figure it out if you do the arithmetic. A sensible proposal which is kind of on the verge of being considered, but it has been sensible all along, and it is being raised, called for by expatriate Afghans and allegedly tribal leaders internally, is for a UN initiative, which would keep the Russians and Americans out of it, totally. These are the 2 countries that have practically wiped the country out in the last 20 years. They should be out of it. They should provide massive reparations. But that's their only role. A UN initiative to bring together elements within Afghanistan that would try to construct something from the wreckage. It's conceivable that that could work, with plenty of support and no interference. If the US insists on running it, we might as well quit. We have a historical record on that one.

You will notice that the name of this operation....remember that at first it was going to be a Crusade but they backed off that because PR (public relations) agents told them that that wouldn't work [audience laughter]. And then it was going to be Infinite Justice, but the PR agents said, wait a minute, you are sounding like you are divinity. So that wouldn't work. And then it was changed to enduring freedom. We know what that means. But nobody has yet pointed out, fortunately, that there is an ambiguity there. To endure means to suffer. [audience laughter]. And a there are plenty of people around the world who have endured what we call freedom. Again, fortunately we have a very well-behaved educated class so nobody has yet pointed out this ambiguity. But if its done there will be another problem to deal with. But if we can back off enough so that some more or less independent agency, maybe the UN, maybe credible NGO's (non governmental organizations) can take the lead in trying to reconstruct something from the wreckage, with plenty of assistance and we owe it to them. Them maybe something would come out. Beyond that, there are other problems.

An Easy Way To Reduce The Level Of Terror

We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously. But that you can't discuss. Well we ought to make it possible to discuss it. So that's one easy way to reduce the level of terror. Beyond that, we should rethink the kinds of policies, and Afghanistan is not the only one, in which we organize and train terrorist armies. That has effects. We're seeing some of these effects now. September 11th is one.

Rethink it.

Rethink the policies that are creating a reservoir of support. Exactly what the bankers, lawyers and so on are saying in places like Saudi Arabia. On the streets it's much more bitter, as you can imagine. That's possible. You know, those policies aren't graven in stone.

And further more there are opportunities. It's hard to find many rays of light in the last couple of weeks but one of them is that there is an increased openness. Lots of issues are open for discussion, even in elite circles, certainly among the general public, that were not a couple of weeks ago. That's dramatically the case. I mean, if a newspaper like USA Today can run a very good article, a serious article, on life in the Gaza Strip...there has been a change. The things I mentioned in the Wall Street Journal...that's change. And among the general public, I think there is much more openness and willingness to think about things that were under the rug and so on. These are opportunities and they should be used, at least by people who accept the goal of trying to reduce the level of violence and terror, including potential threats that are extremely severe and could make even September 11th pale into insignificance. Thanks.


-------- activists

GROUPS VISIT LAS VEGAS TO PROTEST NUCLEAR DUMP

October 18, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-18-09.html

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) spoke out today in Las Vegas on why Yucca Mountain should not be the nation's radioactive waste dump.

The Alliance is a coalition of grassroots organizations from around the United States that have served as the public's watchdogs on the Department of the Energy's nuclear weapons sites.

"For years the Department of Energy (DOE) has failed to protect the public at weapons sites around the nation, so that now nearly every site has some form of contamination moving into the public domain." said Susi Snyder, of the Shundahai Network, "Some of the radioactive waste slated for Yucca Mountain would come from these weapons sites. If Yucca Mountain is approved, it will be another leaky radioactive waste site."

ANA has come together in Las Vegas to argue that Yucca Mountain is not a suitable site for a permanent high level radioactive waste repository. The coalition wants the DOE to devote more resources to contain existing contamination at DOE laboratories and former weapons sites, and to develop safe short, intermediate, and long term plans to handle the nation's radioactive waste.

Friday, October 19 is the last day to comment on the Secretary of Energy's possible recommendation to President George W. Bush on whether the Yucca Mountain Project should move forward as a high level radioactive waste dump.

The DOE only held hearings on the plan in Nevada, though the coalition argues that people outside of Nevada have a stake in this process since wastes from reactors and other sites will have to pass through 43 states.

There was widespread criticism during the draft environmental impact statement hearings, calling the DOE's transportation analysis inadequate. Many people called for the DOE to redo the transportation study.

"The DOE and nuclear industry would like Americans to believe that Yucca Mountain and the site recommendation is only about Nevada, yet whether the highly radioactive waste can be safely transported across the nation clearly forms part of the basis on the recommendation to the President," said John Hadder, northern Nevada coordinator for ANA. "Despite the essential role the final EIS will play in the recommendation the public will not see it until it is too late."

To comment on the plan, visit the Yucca Mountain Project's website at: http://www.ymp.gov

----

Yucca Panel Tonight

From: "L.V. Citizen Alert" <lvcitizenalert@earthlink.net>

Tonight, October 18, from7PM - 9PM, at UNLV's Alumni Amphitheater just North of the Moyer Student Union, Students Conscious Of Protecting the Environment (S.C.O.P.E.) is sponsoring a Panel Discussion on why Yucca Mountain should not be the nation's radioactive waste dump with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA).

The Alliance is a coalition of grassroots organizations from around the United States that have served as the public's watchdog on the Department of the Energy's nuclear weapons sites.

Speakers will include: Don Hancock, Southwest Resource and Information Center (New Mexico), Judy Treichel , Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, John Wells, Western shoshone Nation, (Newe Segobia) Beatrice Brailsford, Snake River Alliance, (Idaho) the moderator will be John Hadder, Citizen Alert (Nevada).

This event is free and open to the public. It is an outdoor event so bring something warm to wear. Call your friends and let them know.

Kalynda Tilges Nuclear Issues Coordinator Citizen Alert - Las Vegas P.O.Box 17173 Las Vegas, NV 89114 702-796-5662 voice 702-796-4886 fax lvcitizenalert@earthlink.net

Citizen Alert "A Voice for the Land and People of Nevada"

------

Nationwide Anti-War Actions
AS BOMBS START TO FALL: NATIONWIDE ANTI-WAR ACTIONS SET FOR OCT. 27

Oct. 18, 2001
Workers World newspaper
By Sarah Sloan Washington, D.C.

As word spread around the country on Oct. 7 that the U.S. had begun to bomb Afghanistan, anti-war and anti-racist activists immediately went into action. Many of them had just one week before rallied in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities in the first national anti-war actions sponsored by the new International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) coalition.

The D.C. protests drew more than 20,000 people from as far away as California, Minnesota and Florida.

To continue the momentum from the Sept. 29 actions and the emergency response protests that have since taken place around the country, the International ANSWER has designated Saturday, Oct. 27, as an internationally coordinated day of action against racism and war. Rallies, marches, teach-ins and other actions will take place in cities around the U.S. and the world.

Nancy Mitchell, an ANSWER youth organizer who traveled from San Francisco to D.C. to help out in the last two weeks of the mobilization, told WW: "In the days before the September 29 demonstrations, we met with activists who had driven as long as 24 hours from Nebraska and Minnesota, who had flown in from the West Coast, and who had organized large contingents from the East Coast. They described the tremendous response they had found to organizing in the last weeks. In some cities, the recent organizing against racism and war had produced the largest protests and meetings to take place for literally decades."

Mitchell continued, "Activists traveled from around the country to D.C. for September 29 because standing among so many others gave them inspiration to continue to organize in their cities around the country. This internationally coordinated day of action on October 27 offers that same opportunity. For every city where hundreds or thousands march against the war, they can feel the strength of the anti-war movement around the country and know that they represent tens of thousands of people who are in motion against this war."

In New York City, organizers are planning a march beginning at the New York Times building. The march will be followed by a teach-in. In Washington, D.C., a rally is planned at the White House. In San Francisco there will be a major teach-in. Organizers expect activities to take place in 50 to 100 cities around the country.

For more information, see InternationalANSWER.org, email iacenter@iacenter.org or call 202-543-2777, 202-544-9355 or 212-633-6646.

-----

A YOUTHFUL MOVEMENT:
Outcry Against War Grows Louder

Workers World News Service
Oct. 18, 2001
By Gery Armsby

As the news came that U.S. bombs were falling on Afghanistan, people all over the world who oppose a new war made their way to the streets and main squares of countless cities, towns and school campuses.

In the United States, a tidal wave of pro-war and national- chauvinistic propaganda from the corporate media failed to stop many thousands, who came out in emergency protests against the bombing of Afghan cities and the massive police repression at home that has led to the detention of over 600 Arab people.

Marches, vigils, rallies, walk-outs, sit-ins and student strikes across the country urged an end to bombings, condemned the racist attacks and incidences of profiling, and expressed solidarity with the millions of besieged Afghan people.

In New York, just three miles from the "ground zero" of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, thousands gathered in Union Square on Oct. 7 within hours of the announcement of strikes against Afghanistan. A local coalition, "New York Not in Our Name," had already been planning a Sunday afternoon memorial prayer service and peace march.

This became a gathering point for New Yorkers who wanted to show opposition to U.S. retaliation. Speakers addressed the crowd demanding that no more innocent people be killed in the name of New Yorkers who suffered the brunt of the terrorist attack.

After a rally, the crowd of thousands poured into the streets and marched up Sixth Avenue to Times Square. Manhattan traffic was snarled for hours as anti-war, pro-peace messages echoed through the air in chants ranging from "Salaam, shalom, peace" to "U.S. hands off Afghanistan!"

On Monday, Oct. 8, about 700 people assembled in Times Square and marched to NBC's Rockefeller Plaza headquarters. Signs and banners proclaimed, "Stop bombing Afghanistan" and "No more war--no more racist attacks." The demonstration was organized on one day's notice by the International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) coalition, which had issued a call for emergency protests on the day after the first U.S.-led strike.

In Washington, D.C., protesters met in front of the White House on Oct. 7 and again on Oct. 8, growing to about 100. They were mostly high school and university students from School Without Walls, George Washington University, American University and other D.C. area schools.

The very multinational crowd of youths formed a picket line, waved signs and chanted, "George Bush, we want peace; U.S. out of the Middle East," "We remember Vietnam, U.S. hands off Afghanistan," and "No more tanks, no more bombs, no more unjust Vietnams."Ten were arrested Monday by D.C. cops for standing while they sang anti-war songs in front of the White House. Their crime? Police claim they violated a federal regulation that requires protesters to remain in motion on the sidewalk.

Two days of protests in Boston brought hundreds into Government Center plaza against war on Oct. 7 and 8. Fifty people assembled on Sunday, including students from Massachusetts College of Art, Lesbian Avengers, MIT, Emerson College, and Harvard University. Several hundred made it out on Monday. Protesters and rally speakers included Amer Jubran of the Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition, Harvard's Living Wage Campaign, the Boston Campus Anti-war Coalition and the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP). Mass Art students made banners and protest props.

ACROSS U.S.: DOZENS OF PROTESTS

Chanting "One world, no war," some 75 Princeton University students, staff members and Princeton, N.J., town residents marched together. "We're asking for the bombing to stop," said Zia Mian, a representative of the Princeton Peace Network that organized the protest.

One hundred or more protesters loosely organized by a pro-peace working group of the Vassar College Student Activist Union assembled at the college chapel in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and marched two-by-two through surrounding neighborhoods voicing opposition to U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan. They encouraged community members to join them along the way.

In Buffalo, N.Y., 50 people came out in Bidwell Park in the middle of driving wind and freezing sleet. A large banner stood out in street lights: "War is not the answer."

Protesters from the Northeast Ohio Radical Action Network at Public Square rallied in downtown Cleveland on Oct. 8 against the bombing. "One, two, three, four, our grief is not a cry for war," they shouted while carrying signs indicating that U.S. military action is not the answer. The group plans to continue speaking out against war until the military action stops.

Fifty protesters gathered in front of the University of Michigan library in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Oct. 8 armed with leaflets, petitions and information to share with each other about what the big media is leaving out. The protest and information session was organized by Students for a Peaceful Alternative.

On Oct. 7, 80-100 protesters in Atlanta held an emergency rally and vigil in Woodruff Park as bombs began to drop in Afghanistan. The event was coordinated by Georgians For Peace.

The Houston chapter of the International ANSWER coalition rallied against the U.S. attack on Central Asia. The group picketed in front of the Mickey Leland Federal Building on Monday afternoon.

Wesleyan University students in Middleton, Conn., walked out of their morning classes Monday, Oct. 8. Protesters showed solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and opposition to U.S. military retaliation.

Over 150 people marched against war in Denver Oct. 7, after President Bush announced "Operation Enduring Freedom." A vigil of almost as many people was held in nearby Boulder, Colo.

WEST COAST ACTIONS VS. U.S. WAR

Some 5,000 people assembled at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco Oct. 7 to denounce the U.S. bombs that began raining on Afghanistan that day. The gathering spot has become known as a site where demonstrations take place in response to U.S. aggression, going back to the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991.

The demonstration was organized by International ANSWER. The crowd marched behind a huge banner that read, "Stop bombing Afghanistan," and was carried by Afghan women and African American youths. Many students and youths attended from UC Berkeley, San Francisco State and San Jose State, including members of Berkeley's Students for Justice in Palestine and San Jose's Students for Justice, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

A diverse collection of photos posted to San Francisco's independent media center Web site show people reacting to the protesters as they marched by stores and residential areas. People came to their doors and windows and cheered for the anti-war message, most making the peace sign.

A final rally was held at the Mission High School, where an anti-war teach-in was being held.

The demonstration filled the surrounding streets and spilled into nearby Dolores Park, where it concluded with messages of determination to continue building an anti-war struggle and solidarity for the people of Afghanistan.

Significant demonstrations of several hundred to over a thousand were also held in Berkeley, Oakland and in Palo Alto. In the Westwood area of Los Angeles, 200-300 protesters picketed at the Federal Building during an emergency demonstration called jointly by CISPES, the Office of the Americas and the International Action Center.

Protests were held in other California cities and towns such as Fairfax, Huntington Beach, Irvine, San Diego, Sebastopol, Ukiah and Willits.

More small and large actions, protests, vigils, walk-outs, strikes and rallies were held in: Chicago; Detroit; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Seattle; Albuquerque, N.M.; Amherst, Andover and Northampton, Mass.; Dearborn and Marquette, Mich.; Roch ester, N.Y.; Charlotte, N.C.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Concord, Dover, Plymouth and Salem, N.H.; Des Moines, Iowa; Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.; Gainesville, Pensacola and Tampa, Fla.; Greensboro, N.C.; Hartford, Conn.; Jersey City, N.J.; Lewisburg and Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; Milwaukee, Wi.; Norfolk and Richmond, Va.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Portland, Ore.; St. Louis, Mo.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Yellow Springs, Ohio.

A listing of recent and upcoming anti-war protests is updated daily at: www.internationalanswer.org

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NO WAR AGAINST AFGHANISTAN!

By Prof. Francis A. Boyle
Speech at Illinois Disciples
18 Oct 2001
http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Boyle/nowar.html

Thank you and I'm very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation which has always been a center for organizing for peace justice and human rights in this area ever since I first came to this community from Boston in July of 1978 and especially under its former minister my friend Jim Holiman. And I also want to thank Joe Miller of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Jeff Machoda for inviting me to speak here this evening.

People of my generation still remember how important it was for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to be organized and to speak out against the Vietnam War and they continue to serve as a voice for peace in the world for the past generation and likewise for Jeff Machoda.

Whenever anyone calls me and asks say I want to organize something on peace, justice, human rights, social welfare - I always say talk to Jeff. He's the best in this entire area for something of that nature. I want to start out with my basic thesis that the Bush administration's war against Iraq cannot be justified on the facts or the law. It is clearly illegal. It constitutes armed aggression. It is creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the people of Afghanistan. It is creating terrible regional instability. Right now today we are having artillery barrages across the border between India and Pakistan which have fought two wars before over Cashmere and yet today are nuclear armed.

The longer this war goes on the worse it is going to be not only for the millions of people in Afghanistan but also in the estimation of the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world and the 57 Muslim states in the world. None of which believe the Bush administration's propaganda that this is not a war against Islam. Now let me start first with the facts.

As you recall Secretary of State Colin Powell said publicly they were going to produce a white paper documenting their case against Osama bin Laden and their organization Al Qaeda. Well, of course, those of us in the peace movement are familiar with white papers before. They're always laden with propaganda, half-truths, dissimulation, etc. that are usually very easily refuted after a little bit of analysis. What happened here? We never got a white paper produced by the United States government. Zip, zero, nothing.

What did we get instead? The only statement of facts that we got from an official of the United States government was Secretary of State Colin Powell himself. And let me quote from Secretary Powell. This is the October 3 edition of the New Speak Times. "The case will never be able to be described as circumstantial. It's not circumstantial now." Well as a lawyer if a case isn't circumstantial, it's nothing. That's the lowest level of proof you could possibly imagine is a circumstantial case.

Yes, the World Court has ruled that a state can be found guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence provided there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But here we have Secretary of State Colin Powell admitting on behalf of the United States that the case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is not even circumstantial.

If it's not even circumstantial then what is it? Rumor, allegation, innuendo, insinuation, disinformation, propaganda. Certainly not enough to start a war. In the same issue of the New Speak Times the U.S. Ambassador who went over to brief our NATO allies about the Bush administration's case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was quoted as follows: "One Western official at NATO said the U.S. briefings which were oral without slides or documentation did not report any direct order from Mr. Bin Laden nor did they indicate that the Taliban knew about the attacks before they happened."

That's someone who was at the briefings. What we did get was a white paper from Tony Blair. Did anyone in this room vote for Tony Blair? No. And the white paper is in that hallowed tradition of a white paper based on insinuation, allegation, rumors, etc.

Even the British government admitted the case against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda would not stand up in court and as a matter of fact it was routinely derided in the British press. There was nothing there. Now I don't know myself who was behind the terrorist attacks on September 11. And it appears we are never going to find out.

Why? Because Congress in its wisdom has decided not to empanel a joint committee of both Houses of Congress with subpoena power giving them access to whatever documents they want throughout any agency of the United States government including FBI, CIA, NSA, DSA. And to put these people under oath and testify as to what happened under penalty of perjury.

We are not going to get that investigation and yet today we are waging war against Afghanistan on evidence that Secretary of State Powell publicly stated is not even circumstantial. Now let's look at the law.

Immediately after the attacks President Bush's first statement that he made in Florida was to call these attacks an act of terrorism. Now under United States domestic law we have a definition of terrorism and clearly this would qualify as an act or acts of terrorism.

For reasons I can get into later if you want, under international law and practice there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism. But certainly under United States domestic law this qualified as an act of terrorism. What happened?

Well again according to the New Speak Times, President Bush consulted with Secretary Powell and all of a sudden they changed the rhetoric and characterization of what happened here. They now called it an act of war. And clearly this was not an act of war. There are enormous differences in how you treat an act of terrorism and how you treat an act of war. We have dealt with acts of terrorism before. And normally acts of terrorism are dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement.

And in my opinion that is how this bombing, these incidents, should have been dealt with. International and domestic law enforcement indeed there is a treaty directly on point. Although the United Nations was unable to agree on formal definition of terrorism they decided, let's break it down into its constituent units and deal with it peace-wise. Let's criminalize specific aspects of criminal behavior that we want to stop.

The Montreal Sabotage Convention is directly on point. It criminalizes the destruction of civilian aircraft while in service. The United States is a party. Afghanistan is a party. It has an entire legal regime to deal with this dispute. The Bush administration just ignored the Montreal Sabotage Convention. There was also the Terrorist Bombing Convention. That is also directly on point and eventually the Bush administration just did say, well, yes, our Senate should ratify this convention. It's been sitting in the Senate for quite some time lingering because of the Senate's opposition to international cooperation by means of treaties on a whole series of issues.

Indeed, there are a good 12-13 treaties out there that deal with various components and aspects of what people generally call international terrorism. That could have been used and relied upon by the Bush administration to deal with this issue. But they rejected the entire approach and called it an act of war. They invoked the rhetoric deliberately of Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941.

It was a conscience decision to escalate the stakes, to escalate the perception of the American people as to what is going on here. And of course the implication here is that if this is an act of war then you don't deal with it by means of international treaties and agreements. You deal with by means of military force. You go to war. So a decision was made very early in the process. We were going to abandon - junk - ignore the entire framework of international treaties and agreements that had been established for 25 years to deal with these types of problems and basically go to war. An act of war has a formal meaning. It means an attack by one state against another state. Which of course is what happened on December 7, 1941. But not on September 11, 2001.

And. again, I repeat here Secretary Powell saying there isn't even a substantial case.

The next day, September 12, the Bush administration went into the United Nations Security Counsel to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force and they failed. It's very clear if you read the resolution, they tried to get the authority to use force and they failed.

Indeed, the September 12 resolution, instead of calling this an armed attack by one state against another state, calls it a terrorist attack. And again there is a magnitude of difference between an armed attack by one state against another state an act of war and a terrorist attack. Again terrorist are dealt with as criminals. They are not treated like nation states. Now what the Bush administration tried to do on September 12 was to get a resolution along the lines of what Bush Sr. got in the run up to the Gulf War in later November of 1990.

I think it is a fair comparison Bush Jr. to Bush Sr. Bush Sr. got a resolution from the Security Counsel authorizing member states to use "all necessary means" to expel Iraq from Kuwait. They originally wanted language in there expressly authorizing the use of military force. The Chinese objected - so they used the euphemism "All necessary means." But everyone knew what that meant. If you take a look at the resolution of September 12 that language is not in there. There was no authority to use military force at all. They never got any. Having failed to do that the Bush administration then went to the United States Congress and using the emotions of the moment tried to ram through some authorization to go to war under the circumstances. We do not know exactly what their original proposal is at that time.

According to a statement made by Senator Byrd in the New Speak Times, however, if you read between the lines it appears that they wanted a formal declaration of war along the lines of what President Roosevelt got on December 8, 1941 after Pearl Harbor. And Congress refused to give them that. And a very good reason. If a formal declaration of war had been given it would have made the president a constitutional dictator. We would now all be living basically under marshal law. Congress might have just picked up and gone home as the House did today. Which, by the way, was encouraged by President Bush. It was his recommendation. And you'll recall, as a result of that declaration of war on December 8, 1941, we had the amphiumas Koromatsu case where Japanese- American citizens were rounded up and put in concentration camps on the basis of nothing more than a military order that later on was turned out to be a gross misrepresentation of the factual allegation that Japanese-Americans constituted some type of security threat. If Bush had gotten a declaration of war, we would have been on the same footing. And the Koromatsu case has never been overturned by the United States Supreme Court.

Instead, Congress gave President Bush Jr. what is called a War Powers Resolution Authorization. Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed over President Nixon's veto, namely 2/3rds majority in both houses of Congress and designed to prevent another Tonkin Gulf Resolution and another Vietnam war.

Now if you read the resolution, which he did get, and only one courageous member of Congress, Barbara Lee, an African-American representative from Oakland voted against it as a matter of principle. This resolution, although it is not as bad as a formal declaration of war, is even worse than the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. It basically gives President Bush a blank check to use military force against any individual organization or state that he alleges - notice hisipsa dictum - was somehow involved in the attacks on September 11 or else sheltered, harbored, or assisted individuals involved in the attacks on September 11.

In other words Bush now has a blank check pretty much to wage war against any state he wants to from the United States Congress. And it was then followed-up by Congress with a $40 billion appropriation as a down payment for waging this de facto war. Very dangerous - this War Powers Resolution Authorization. No real way it can be attacked in court at this point in time. In the heat of the moment, Congress gave him this authority. It is still there on the books. Again, let's compare and contrast this resolution with the one gotten by Bush Sr. in the Gulf Crisis. Bush Sr. got his security counsel resolution. He then took it to Congress for authorization under the War Powers Resolution and they gave him a very precise authorization to use military force for the purpose of carrying out the security counsel resolution - that is only for the purpose of expelling Iraq from Kuwait. And indeed that is what Bush Sr. did. He expelled Iraq from Kuwait. He did move north. He stopped short south of Bosra saying that's all the authority I have. I'm not here to approve what Bush Sr. did in that war but simply to compare it to Bush Jr. Now Bush Sr. has been criticizing saying well you should have marched all the way to Bagdad but he had no authority by the security counsel to do that and he had no authority from the Congress to do that either.

Again, compare that to Bush Jr.'s resolution of September 14 that basically gives him a blank check to wage war against anyone he wants to with no more than his ipsa dictum. It's astounding to believe. Even worse than Tonkin Gulf. In addition Bush Jr. then went over to NATO to get a resolution over from NATO and he convinced NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Pact. Article 5 of the NATO Pact is only intended to deal with the armed attack by one state against another state. It is not, and has never been, intended to deal with a terrorist attack. The NATO Pact was supposed to deal in theory with an attack on a NATO member state by a member of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, there was no real justification or pretext anymore for the continued existence of NATO.

Bush Sr. then in an effort to keep NATO around, tried to transform its very nature to serve two additional purposes. 1) - policing Eastern Europe and we saw that with the illegal war against Serbia and 2) intervention in the Middle East to secure the oil fields. And the NATO counsel approved this. The problem the NATO Pact, the treaty setting up NATO, provides no authorization to do this at all and indeed would have to be amended by the parliaments of the NATO member states to justify either policing Eastern Europe or as an interventionary force in the Middle East. The invocation of NATO Article 5, then, was completely bogus.

The Bush administration was attempting to get some type of multi-lateral justification for what it was doing when it had failed at the United Nations Security Counsel to get authorization. The Bush administration tried again to get more authority from the Security Counsel and all they got was a presidential statement that legally means nothing. They tried yet a third time, September 29, before they started the war to get that authorization to use military force and they got stronger language. But still they failed to get any authorization from the Security Counsel to use military force for any reason. Then what happened? The new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, sent a letter to the Security Counsel asserting Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Now some of us are familiar with Negroponte. He was U.S. Ambassador in Honduras during the Contra War. He has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands and the only way Bush could get him confirmed was that he rammed him through the Senate the day after the bombings. So whenever you see Negroponte on the television talking to you, remember this man has the blood of 35,000 people, most of whom are civilians, on his hands. That's seven times anything that happened in New York. Seven times. The letter by Negroponte was astounding. It said that the United States reserves its right to use force in self-defense against any state that we feel is necessary in order to fight our war against international terrorism. So in other words, they failed on three separate occasions to use to get formal authority from the Security Counsel and now the best they could do is fall back on another alleged right of self-defense as determined by themselves.

Very consistent with the War Powers Resolution authorization that Bush did indeed get from Congress on September 14. I was giving an interview the other day to San Francisco Chronicle and the reporter said is there any precedent for the position here being asserted by Negroponte that we are reserving the right to go to war in self-defense against a large number of other states as determined by ourselves. I said yes, there is one very unfortunate precedent. That's the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 where there the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defense under the Kellogg Breand Pact of 1928 - the predecessor to the U.N. Charter. And self-defense as determined by themselves.

In other words, no one could tell them to the contrary. So at Nuremberg, they had the hudspah to argue the entire second world war was a war of self-defense as determined by themselves and no one had standing to disagree with that self-judging provision. Well of course the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected that argument and said no - what is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law. That has to be determined by an international tribunal. No state has a right to decide this for themselves.

Clearly what is going on now in Afghanistan is not self-defense. Let's be honest. We all know it. At best this is reprisal, retaliation, vengeance, catharsis - call it what you want - it is not self-defense. And retaliation is never self-defense.

Indeed that was the official position of the United States government. Even during the darkest days of the Vietnam War when former Under Secretary of State Eugene V. Rosca tried to get the state department to switch their position, they refused and continued to maintain. No, retaliation is not self-defense. And this is not self-defense - what we are doing in Afghanistan. Since none of these justifications and pretexts hold up, as a matter of law, then, what the United States government today is doing against Afghanistan constitutes armed aggression. It is illegal. There is no authority for this.

Indeed if you read on the internet certainly not in the mainstream U.S. news media, you will see that is the position being taken in almost every Islamic country in the world. Where are the facts? Where is the law? They aren't there. This is apparent to the entire world. It's apparent in Europe. It's apparent in the Middle East. It is obvious to the 1.2 billion Muslims of the world. Are any Muslim leaders involved in military action against Afghanistan? Unlike what happened with Iraq - no. Have any of them volunteered military forces to get involved here. A deafening silence. They all know it is wrong.

Now the government of Afghanistan made repeated offers even as of yesterday to negotiate a solution to this dispute. Even before the events of September 11, negotiations were going on between the United States and the government of Afghanistan over the disposition of Bin Laden. They had offered to have him tried in a neutral Islamic court by Muslim judges applying the law of Shareel. This was before the latest incident. We rejected that proposal. After September 11 they renewed the offer. What did President Bush say - no negotiations. There's nothing to negotiate. Here is my ultimatum. Well the problem is again the United Nations Charter requires peaceful resolution of disputes. It requires expressly by name negotiations.

Likewise that Kellogg Breand Pact I mentioned under which Nazis were prosecuted at Nuremberg to which Afghanistan and the United States are both parties requires peaceful resolution of all disputes and prohibits war as an instrument of national policy. And yet that's exactly what we are doing today. Waging war as an instrument of national policy. And then again on Sunday as he came back from Camp David with the latest offer again by the government of Afghanistan - we are willing to negotiate over the disposition of Mr. Bin Laden. I don't know how many of you saw the President get off the helicopter. It was surreal. He went ballistic. There'll be no negotiations. I told them what to do. They better do it.

Again, those are not the requirements of the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg Breand Pact. Indeed, if you read the ultimatum that President Bush gave to the government of Afghanistan in his speech before Congress you will see it was clearly designed so that it could not be complied with by the government of Afghanistan. No government in the world could have complied with that ultimatum. And indeed, striking similarities with the ultimatum given by Bush Sr. to Tarik in Geneva on the eve of the Gulf War. That was deliberately designed so as not to be accepted - which it was not. Why?

The decision had already been made to go to war. Now that being said - what then really is going on here. If there is no basis in fact and there is no basis in law for this war against Afghanistan, why are we doing this? Why are we creating this humanitarian catastrophe for the Afghan people? And recall it was Bush's threat to bomb Afghanistan that put millions of people on the move without food, clothing, housing, water or medical facilities and that has created this humanitarian catastrophe now for anywhere for 5 to 7 millions Afghans. And all the humanitarian relief organizations have said quite clearly the so-called humanitarian food drop as doctors without borders Nobel peace prize organization put it, this is a military propaganda operation which it clearly is.

Bush calling for the children of America to send $1 to the White House. This is propaganda. This is not serious. And the winter is coming in Afghanistan. Latest estimate that I've seen is that maybe 100,000 or more are going to die if we don't stop this war. So what's really going on here? Why are we bombing Afghanistan? Why are we doing this? Is it retaliation? Is it vengeance? Is it some bloodless? No, it isn't.

The people who run this country are cold calculating people. They know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And during the course, now, since the bombing started in the last twelve days, it's become very clear what the agenda is. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld flew to Uzbekistan and concluded an agreement with the dictator who runs that country. Accused of massive violations of human rights that the United States government will protect Uzbekistan. Now first Secretary of Defense has no constitutional authority to conclude such agreement in the first place. Putting that issue aside, however, it's very clear what's going on here. The Pentagon is now in the process of establishing a military base in Uzbekistan. It's been in the works for quite some time. They admit, yes, special forces have been over there for several years training their people. Partnership for peace with NATO and now it's becoming apparent what is happening. We are making a long-term military arrangement with Uzbekistan. Indeed it has been reported, and you can get press from that region on the internet - India, Pakistan, tha area - that Uzbekistan now wants a status of forces agreement with the United States. What's a status of forces agreement. It's an agreement that permits the long-term deployment of significant numbers of armed forces in another state.

We have status of forces agreements with Germany, Japan and South Korea. We have had troops in all three of those countries since 1945. And when we get our military presence, our base, that is right now being set up in Uzbekistan it's clear we're not going to leave. It's clear that this agreement, unconstitutional agreement, between Rumsfeld and Karimov is to set the basis and say - we have to stay in Uzbekistan for the next 10-15-20 years to defend it against Afghanistan where we've created total chaos. This is exactly the same argument that has been made to keep the United States military forces deployed in the Persian Gulf now for ten years after the Gulf War. We are still there. We still have 20,000 troops sitting on top of the oil in all these countries. We even establish a fleet to police this region in Bahrain. More currently six to date. We never had any intention of leaving the Persian Gulf. We are there to stay.

Indeed planning for that goes back to the Carter administration. The so-called rapid deployment force renamed the U.S. central command that carried out the war against Iraq and occupied and still occupies these Persian Gulf countries and their oil fields and is today now executing the war against Afghanistan and deploying U.S. military forces to build this base in Uzbekistan. Why do we want to get in Uzbekistan? Very simple. The oil and natural gas resources of Central Asia. Reported to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf. There has been an enormous amount of coverage of this in the pages of the Wallstreet Journal not the New Speak Times.

The movers and shakers - they paid enormous attention to Central Asia and the oil resources there. Indeed shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the assent independence of the states in 1991. You saw all sorts of articles in the Wallstreet Journal about how Central Asia and our presence in Central Asia has become a vital national security interest of the United States. We've proceeded to establish relations of these states of Central Asia. We sent over special forces. We're even parachuting the 82nd Airborne in Kazakstan. All reported in the Wallstreet Journal. And in addition then since Central Asia is landlocked you have to get the oil and natural gas out. How do you do that? Well one way is to send it west but we wish to avoid Iran and Russia - highly circuitous route, costs a lot of money, very insecure.

The easiest way to do it - construct pipelines south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the Arabian Sea. Unocal was negotiating to do this with the government of Afghanistan. That's all in the public record. Just as the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was about oil and natural gas, I'm submitting this war is about oil and natural gas and also outflanking China and getting a military base south of Russia. We are going to be there for a long time. At least until all that oil and gas has been sucked out and it's of no more use to us.

In my opinion that's really what is going on here. We should not be spending a lot of time about who did what to whom on September 11. We need to be focusing on this war - on stopping this war. We need to be focusing on stopping the humanitarian tragedy against the millions of people of Afghanistan right now today. And third, we need to be focusing on what could very easily become a regional war.

The Pentagon launched this thing. Obviously they felt they could keep it under control. That's what the people in August of 1914 thought too when you read Barbara Tucuman's The Guns of August. Everyone figured the situation could be kept under control and it wasn't and there was a world war. 10 million people died. We're already seeing after President Bush started this war artillery duels between India and Pakistan.

Massive unrest in all of these Muslim countries and the longer the war goes on I submit the worse it is going to become, the more dangerous it is going to become, the more unstable it is going to become. In addition, finally, comes the Ashcroft Police State Bill. No other word to describe it.

Bush failed to get that declaration of war which would have rendered him a constitutional dictator. But it's clear that Ashcroft and his Federalist Society lawyers took every piece of regressive legislation off the shelf, tied it all into this antiterrorism bill, and rammed it through Congress. Indeed if you're reading any of the papers yesterday and the day before, members of Congress admit, yes, we didn't even read this thing. Another Congressman said, right, but there's nothing new with that. Except on this one - they're infringing the civil rights and civil liberties of all of us moving us that much closer to a police state in the name of fighting a war on terrorism, security, this, that, and the other thing. Notice the overwhelming message from the mainstream news media - well we all have to be prepared to give up our civil rights and civil liberties.

Even so-called liberals, Alan Dershowitz - oh let's now go along with the national identity card. Outrageous. Larry Tribe, writing in the Wallstreet Journal - well we're all going to have to start making compromises on our civil rights and civil liberties. That's what's in store in the future for us here at home; the longer this war against Afghanistan goes on and as Bush has threatened will expand to other countries. We don't know how many countries they have in mind. At one point they're saying Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia, Iraq, Libya. Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz talking about ending states which is clearly genocidal. I could take that statement at the World Court and file it and prove it as genocidal intent by the United States government. So the longer we let this go on the more we are going to see our own civil rights and civil liberties taken away from us.

As you know aliens - what we call aliens foreigners - their rights are already gone. We now have 700 aliens who've just been picked up and disappeared by Ashcroft and the Department of Justice. We have no idea where these people are. They're being held on the basis of immigration law, not criminal law.

Indefinite detention. What's the one characteristic they all had in common - these foreigners - they're Muslims and Arabs, the scapegoats for this. Everyone needs a scapegoat and it looks like we have one.

Let me conclude by saying that we still have our first amendment rights, despite Ashcroft's best efforts. Despite the cowardice of both houses of Congress where interestingly enough the so-called liberal democrats were willing to give Bush and Ashcroft more than the conservative republicans in the House. We still have our first amendment rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition our government for redress of grievances. We are going to need to start to exercise those first amendment rights now. For the good of the people of Afghanistan, for the good of the people of that region of the world and for the future of ourselves and our nature as a democratic society with a commitment to the rule of law and the constitution. Question and Answer

1) Many of the civil rights you say we must give up - I said we don't have to give them up - I'm sorry I didn't make that clear. It's the people in the mainstream news media who have said we must give up those rights and including so-called liberal law professors like Alan Dershowitz and Larry Tribe of my alma mater, Harvard Law School, who should be ashamed of the positions they have taken. So I don't believe we should be giving up any of these rights. Our law enforcement authorities, FBI, CIA, NSA, they have all the powers they need. They certainly don't need more powers than they already have. Indeed under the currently existing laws Ashcroft has already picked up 700 Arabs and Muslims. They disappeared somewhere. We have no idea where they are. Their families, and some have retained lawyers, are trying to find these people. Now, they are not U.S. citizens. It would be much harder to do that with United States citizens so I'm not advocating we give up any rights. I regret to say, however, that is the message coming out of the mainstream news media and even by self-styled liberal law professors like Dershowitz and Tribe. So I'm advocating that.

2) Many Middle Eastern countries harbor terrorists that pose a threat to the U.S. How would you suggest the U.S. deal with that threat - entice these countries to change their practices? This gets back to the problem I had mentioned before about the fact that there is no generally-accepted definition of international terrorism or terrorism as a matter of international law. The reason being is that most of the third world and when it did exist, the socialist world (there are still a few socialist countries), took the position that people fighting colonial domination, alien occupation or racists regimes were engaged in legitimate self-defense and not acts of terrorism. And therefore refuse to accept any definition that these people were terrorists. Now, note, the United States government - we're always on the other side. If you opposed us, you were terrorists. I remember in the 1980's and the struggle against apartheid and divestment and disinvestment which was run on this campus - the Regan administration for eight years telling us the ANC and Nelson Mandella were terrorists. How many of you remember that? They were terrorists. Black people fighting a white racist colonial regime for their basic human rights. And yet as far as the United States government was concerned, they were terrorists. Same in all the other colonial struggles in Africa typically we sided with white racists colonial settler regimes against the indigenous black populations of these countries fighting for their freedom and independence and we called them terrorists. The same in the Middle East. Those who have resisted our will or the will of Israel, we have called terrorists. The simple solution to deal with problem here on what's going on in the Middle East is simply to change our policies. If you look at the policies we had pursued in the Middle East for the last 25 years, it has been to repress and dominate, kill, destroy and exploit the indigenous people of this region. And what apparently the Bush administration seemed to call for is now we're going to wage war on anyone who disagrees with us. Well, the alternative is to reevaluate our policies and to put our policies on a basis of international law which I regret to say we haven't done in the Middle East. Why? Because our primary interest has always been oil and natural gas and we could not care less about peace, democracy or human rights for anyone in the Middle East. Remember Bush Sr. telling us that the war in the Persian Gulf was all about bringing democracy to Kuwait. Who did we put back in power in Kuwait? The Amir and cleptocracy who still deprive women of the vote. There has been no change. We couldn't care less about peace, justice, human rights and democracy any where in the Persian Gulf. You saw the other day Secretary of State Powell appearing with the military dictator of Pakistan, Mushara, who overthrew a democratically elected government talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Wasn't this truly welliant. He's there appearing with a military dictator and they're talking about bringing democracy to Afghanistan. Clearly we couldn't care less about democracy, peace, justice, humanitarianism in Afghanistan. We care that Afghanistan has in its own right large quantities of oil and gas and it has strategic location for oil and gas lines. That's what we care about. We could not care less about peace, democracy, justice in Afghanistan. Look at our guys, the Norther Alliance left over from the war against the Soviet Union. These were people we armed, equipped, supplied and trained and by the way, are still massively engaged in the drug trade. This is all propaganda. In any event, as a matter of law, it's not for the United States and the military dictator of Pakistan to determine what should or should not be the government of Afghanistan. What should the U.S. government have done after 9/11 as I said we should have taken the position which President Bush did originally. This was an act of terrorism and we should have treated it as act of terrorism which means the normal measures of international and domestic law enforcement that we applied, for example, after the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. After the bombings of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie. That is the way it should have been handled but a deliberate decision was taken by Bush in consultation with Powell to reject that approach and to deal with it by means of war. Again, let me repeat, Article 1 the Kellogg Breand Pact made it very clear prohibiting war as an instrument of national policy. It's very clear in my assessment of the situation - that what we decided to do right away.

3) A question about Middle East Policy. There are many things we could do. We could bring home those 20,000 troops that occupy all those states right now in the Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically here think that we're going to do that and forfeit our direct military control of 50% of the world's oil supply in the Persian Gulf/Middle East region? Of course not. We could dismantle the 5th Fleet which we set up in Barait to police, dominate and control the entire Persian Gulf. Does anyone realistically think we're going to do that? No. We could reevaluate the entire policy towards this region. I don't see any evidence at all, no one in any of the major news media, the government, is talking about why don't we just pick up and go home. Leave these people in the Middle East by themselves and support peace and development. That's not even on the agenda. We are now talking about more warfare, bloodshed, and violence. Today they said - well Somalia might be the next target. Well that's interesting because yesterday the New York Times had a big article on how much oil they've now found in Somalia. And indeed, back when Bush Sr. invited Somalia, it was reported in the International Herald Tribune - yes Somalia had already been carved up by U.S. oil companies and we know for a fact the Bush family has enormous investments in oil and oil companies. Cheney, too.

4) What can we do to prevent another September 11. I've already made some suggestions about different things I think we could do but realistically speaking I don't believe we're going to do them.

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Berkeley Council Wants Bombing to Stop

October 18, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

BERKELEY, Calif., Oct. 17 - The City Council approved a resolution last night calling for an end to the bombing in Afghanistan, despite death threats to some Council members and a raucous audience waving as many American flags as antiwar signs.

The resolution, passed 5 to 4, was a toned-down version of one in which Councilwoman Dona Spring called on the government to "take whatever action necessary" to stop the bombing and seek "a legal, nonmilitary resolution."

Last night's resolution sought, instead, to put the Council on record in asking to "break the cycle of violence," to stop the bombing quickly and to express sympathy for those who died in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The earlier effort brought Berkeley nationwide criticism, following as it did the Council's support of Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who cast the lone vote in Congress against authorizing President Bush to use force in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Berkeley also drew scorn for barring large American flags from being displayed on city fire trucks for fear of inciting antiwar demonstrations. Later, officials said they were concerned about the flags' posing a safety hazard.

Mayor Shirley Dean, who opposed the Spring resolution, said her mail had been running 2 to 1 in favor of the government.

"I feel as mayor that my job is to represent all the people of the city," she said. "I don't think the Council should have taken a position. We all have lots of venues for expressing our opinions, so it's certainly not a question of free speech."

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U.S. bears sole blame for Sept. 11, Trask says
Haunani-Kay Trask says America should focus on the needs of its own people

By Pat Omandam
Honolulu Star Bulletin
October 18, 2001

The United States has only itself to blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, said outspoken Hawaiian studies professor Haunani-Kay Trask. Moreover, Trask said, the United States should stop using its military might to police the world so it can open up foreign trade markets. It should stay out of the Middle East and elsewhere and instead focus on the needs of its own native and poor people, she said.

"The United States is angry because somebody came back and blew up their World Trade Center," said the University of Hawaii professor and sovereignty activist. "I would be angry, too. But what made them do that? It is the history of the terrorism that the United States unleashes against native people all over the world.

Trask's comments, which come at a time of increased patriotism across the country, were given yesterday at a University of Hawaii at Manoa forum sponsored by Professors Opposed to War and the University Peace Initiative, comprised of students, faculty and staff of the UH system.

Organizers say these public forums are meant to educate and stimulate critical thinking on why this war on terrorism is occurring and what it means in the long term for the United States. Members seek nonviolent, globally responsible and lasting solutions to end violence.

Trask was attending a U.N. conference on world racism in Durban, South Africa, Sept. 11, and said she was shocked and horrified watching the attacks unfold on television. The first words out of her mouth, she said, were what 1960s activist Malcolm X said when asked about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963: "Chickens have come home to roost."

"What it means is that those who have suffered under the imperialism and militarism of the United States have come back to haunt in the 21st century that same government," Trask said. "The Third World has responded to the First World, and it is bitter and it is hateful. It's crazy, that war out there."

Trask said the United States began the 20th century with the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and, a century later, it begins the next one trying to install a new government in Afghanistan. She said the United States' foreign policy of supporting state-sponsored terrorism to impose U.S.-friendly governments in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Guatemala and Vietnam led directly to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Everywhere, the United States has overthrown leftist governments. Everywhere, the United States has overthrown native governments," she said. "Why should we support the United States, whose hands in history are soaked in blood?

"About 100 students gathered on the Manoa Campus Center steps to hear the discussion and to be challenged by Trask and others to get involved. It remains to be seen whether such anti-war activism will rise to the level of protests found on the Manoa campus during the Vietnam War."Most of us swallow very easily what we're fed by our government and by the media," said Susan Hippensteele, a women's studies professor who also spoke at the forum. Hippensteele said there has never been good public dialogue on why these attacks occurred.

But a review of U.S. foreign policy shows why people have resorted to these desperate acts of violence against America. She said President Bush's war on terrorism is more a war on public opinion to generate irrational fear and panic among American citizens so they do not question the policies of the Bush administration.

Hippensteele and others urged students to seek alternative sources of information on the Internet so they can ask tough questions of elected officials and be the watchdog that the American public should be."Democracy can not be on cruise control," added Ruth Y. Hsu, an associate English professor and moderator of yesterday's event.



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