------- Index of Articles
NUCLEAR
Secret Trove May Resolve 'Copenhagen'
Frustrating U.S., China Balks at Pact to Stem Nuclear Sales
The Toxicity of Weapons and War
Coast Guard Will Not End Boat Patrols Near A-Plants
Nuclear Plant Surveillance Continues
MILITARY
Anti-Taliban Forces Get U.S. Assistance
Afghans Flee Heavy Airstrikes Thousands Cross Pakistan Border
Taleban recruit mercenaries
Global anthrax fears grow
Kennedy seeking more funds to combat bioterrorism
Saddam: U.S. Practicing Terrorism
Israeli Forces Move Into West Bank
Pakistani revolution predicted
Multinational Force New Focus of Talks
Armitage eyes major U.N. role in terrorism fight
Commandos fight Taliban
Rangers Hit Taliban in Ground Combat
Strike by Army Rangers Masked Raid by Elite Unit
OTHER
Sverdlovsk anthrax incident 1979
WHO fears TB outbreak in Asia
Lacking a Center, Terrorist Networks Are Hard to Find
ACTIVISTS
FREE SPEECH RADIO ANNOUNCES UNPRECEDENTED WAR COVERAGE
TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS LIFTED FOR GREENPEACE ACTIVISTS
Legislation Introduced to Create a Department of Peace
-------- NUCLEAR
Secret Trove May Resolve 'Copenhagen'
New York Times
October 20, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/science/20COPE.html?searchpv=nytToday
After more than half a century, historians and scientists still cannot agree on why the Nazis were never able to develop an atomic bomb, or on why the leader of their bomb program, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, visited his old mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark in 1941.
The uncertainty about that meeting is at the center of the award- winning Broadway play "Copenhagen," by the British playwright Michael Frayn. Now, partly as a result of the attention generated by the play's success last year, the Bohr family plans to release previously unpublished, and largely undisclosed, documents by Bohr about the meeting, including a strongly worded letter he wrote to Heisenberg about it but never sent.
Historians who have seen the letter hint that it suggests that Heisenberg was not quite the hero the play made him out to be. But they refuse to provide further details until the formal release, expected before the end of this year.
The uncertainty of the play, and the historical record, revolves around competing explanations for why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen for the meeting. Was he trying to pump Bohr for information about the Allied bomb program? Or did Heisenberg want to assure Bohr that he would stop the Nazi bomb program if Allied scientists agreed not to build one either?
Whatever Heisenberg said, Bohr was so shaken by the meeting that he never spoke publicly about it after the war. The answer to that question could shed light on why Heisenberg, one of history's greatest physicists, winner of the 1932 Nobel prize in physics and author of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, never succeeded in building atomic weapons for Hitler.
"Copenhagen" leaves those questions unresolved by what Heisenberg calls, in the last line of the play, "that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things." Also left open is whether Heisenberg sabotaged the bomb program, as some historians have maintained, or tried his best for Germany and simply did not succeed.
But at a conference on the play last month in Copenhagen, the Bohr family unexpectedly announced that it would release 11 unpublished documents written by Bohr about the meeting. Those documents include what is said to be an angry letter that Bohr, who fled Denmark in 1943 and joined the Manhattan Project in the United States, wrote to Heisenberg after the war but never sent.
"The Bohr family has come to regard speculation about the content of this material as more harmful than its actual release," said Dr. Finn Aaserud, director of the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen, who is a spokesman for the family. He said the release would probably take place by year's end.
The existence of that letter became generally known only last year at a conference on the play held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. There, Dr. Gerald Holton, an emeritus professor of physics and of history of science at Harvard, revealed that the Bohr family asked him and two others, now dead, to look at the letter in the 1980's and make recommendations on how to deal with it.
"We were all three of us astounded by the letter," Dr. Holton said in an interview, adding that the others were Abraham Pais, a physicist and historian, and McGeorge Bundy, an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Dr. Holton, who urged the family to preserve the document for history, said he would not reveal its precise contents before the impending release. But he speculated that the usually soft-spoken Bohr had decided not to send the letter because of its stiff language.
The letter contains "the missing part of the whole story," Dr. Holton said elliptically. The documents may be the last way to learn more about the meeting, since Bohr died in 1962 and Heisenberg in 1976.
Mr. Frayn has said his play was inspired by "Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb," a 1993 book by the journalist Thomas Powers, who maintained that Heisenberg threw the bomb program off course so that Hitler would not have atomic weapons.
In an interview, Mr. Powers said he believed Heisenberg traveled to Copenhagen to offer a quid pro quo: German scientists would not build a bomb if Allied scientists did not, either. "It was a crazy idea but a brilliant idea," Mr. Powers said.
Others are angered by the play and by Mr. Powers's book, saying that Heisenberg's attempt to play down his efforts for Hitler after the war may have been what upset Bohr.
"If you sup with the devil, you'd better have a long spoon," said Dr. Jeremy Bernstein, a theoretical physicist and author of "Hitler's Uranium Club," a 2001 book on secret recordings of Heisenberg and other members of the bomb program. "Those people collaborated with a vile regime."
Mr. Frayn said in an interview that he was well aware that some historians already believed there was no uncertainty at all about why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen.
"The only thing that reassures me slightly is when they then go on to say exactly the explanation they're certain of," Mr. Frayn said, "and it turns out to be mostly different from the explanation that somebody else is certain of."
-------- china
Frustrating U.S., China Balks at Pact to Stem Nuclear Sales
New York Times
October 20, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/international/asia/20CHIN.html
SHANGHAI, Oct. 19 - President Bush and President Jiang Zemin celebrated warming relations between their two countries today, but behind the smiles little of substance has yet changed.
In particular, the two sides remain in a standoff over implementation of a nonproliferation agreement signed nearly a year ago. The Bush administration had hoped that action on the issue would be the one concrete achievement the president could announce at the summit meeting today.
Yet despite what one senior administration official called a ``full- court press'' in the weeks leading up to today's meeting, China would not agree to what the United States considered a relatively simple deal. Chinese government officials could not be reached for comment, but American officials and Chinese arms control experts suggested that Beijing might want further concessions from the United States.
The lack of progress has frustrated administration officials, who said today that stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the missiles designed to deliver them is more important than ever.
Most of China's exports of nuclear weapons technology and missile- making equipment have gone to Pakistan, where simmering Islamic fundamentalism raises the concern that such technology could someday fall into the hands of extremists in the region. Pakistan relies largely on China for its weapons, which China has been willing to sell because it has helped create a counterbalance to India, with which China has longstanding territorial disputes.
But the American-Pakistan alliance formed after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States promises to reduce Pakistan's military dependence on China, at a time when China itself has begun to worry about the nuclear weapons program in what is a potentially unstable country.
This would seem to be an especially opportune time for China to follow through on its year-old nonproliferation agreement. That it has not underscores how the outlines of United States-China relations remain largely unaltered beyond Beijing's expressions of support for the American antiterrorism campaign.
``Despite the improved atmosphere, there remain a number of concrete areas in U.S.-China relations that won't be affected by the current cooperation against terrorism, such as missile defense, Taiwan and evidently nonproliferation,'' said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington.
The Bush administration wanted China to fulfill its November 2000 agreement today by handing over a list of missile parts and missile-making technology that it would ban from export to third countries, like Pakistan. As part of that agreement, China is also required to show how it would enforce such a ban.
In return, the United States promised to allow American businesses to resume launching satellites on Chinese rockets, a lucrative business for China that the United States has blocked since February 2000 because of the proliferation concerns.
Fulfillment of the accord was initially held up by the change of administrations at the beginning of this year and then by the crisis caused by the collision of an American surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet off China's southern coast in April.
In July, the United States formally complained about China's failure to follow through on the agreement, and experts from the two sides have met several times since then to try and resolve the issue. By last week, administration officials were saying that they expected a deal in time for today's meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Jiang. But by the end of last week, the talks had broken down. It is not entirely clear why.
China has threatened in the past to use proliferation to punish the United States for its arms sales to Taiwan or for the deployment of Washington's proposed missile defense shield.
China has made various nonproliferation commitments since it began raising alarm in the early 1990's with its sales of nuclear weapons technology, missiles and missile technology, but adhered to nobe of them. In June 1991, Mr. Bush's father barred the export of supercomputers, satellites and missile technology to China to punish it for transferring missile technology to Pakistan. Those sanctions were waived in March 1992. But a little more than a year later, the Clinton administration imposed new sanctions on China for again shipping missile equipment to Pakistan.
In November 1994, the United States waived the sanctions yet again after China signed a statement vowing not to export missiles capable of delivering a 1,100-pound warhead 180 miles or more. By the late 1990's, though, it became clear that China had shipped such missiles, called M-11's, to Pakistan.
Last November, the Clinton administration imposed sanctions for those sales. But it waived the sanctions in return for an agreement under which China would give the United States a list of missile components and technology that it promised not to export, and would explain how it planned to enforce the ban.
The Chinese never provided that list or the explanation and the United States says that earlier this year, the China Metallurgical Equipment Corporation delivered components for Pakistani two-stage, solid-fuel missiles. The United States warned China that it would again face sanctions if it did not carry out the 2000 agreement, but nothing was done.
On Sept. 1, the State Department imposed sanctions against the Chinese company and its Pakistani counterpart. The sanctions have the effect of once again blocking American companies from launching satellites on Chinese rockets.
The current sanctions are all the more galling for the Chinese because the United States has since lifted the companion sanctions against Pakistan's National Development Complex, the entity that the United States says received the Chinese missile parts. Those sanctions were lifted to encourage Pakistan's cooperation in the war in Afghanistan.
China has said that its own extensive investigation found that the Chinese company had not sold missile parts. It has said it will not carry out the November agreement until the new sanctions are lifted.
``Technically there should be no difficulty in making the list available, but politically China needs a U.S. quid pro quo,'' said Shen Dingli, an America-watcher at Fudan University in Shanghai. ``I can't understand why the U.S. could not implement its commitment of November 2000 to permit the Chinese launching of U.S.-made satellites.''
-------- depleted uranium
The Toxicity of Weapons and War
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001
From: "Leuren Moret" <leurenmoret@yahoo.com>
To the Mayor and City Council Members of Berkeley,
Margo Shafer is right - the bombing of Afghanistan by US government forces IS our problem. I commend Dona Spring for bringing this forward for debate. It is NOT TRUE that it is happening "over there" so that it DOESN'T AFFECT us "over here". Citizens must be informed with good information in order to make good decisions and participate fully to ensure a democratic government. We are part of a global community, and should be informed and interested in government policy which does not directly affect us in our local community.
The United States has hundreds of thousands of tons of depleted uranium piled in heaps outdoors at DOE facilities. It is 99.5% of what is left when the most fissionable isotope (one of three) is extracted from naturally occurring uranium. The extracted uranium is used in nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors. The 99.5% that is discarded cannot be put back into the mines it came out of because, after crushing and processing, the volume is greater than before it was removed from the mines.
The Dept. of Defense got the bright idea of using DU in weapons because (1) it is very dense which gives it greater penetrating power to destroy tanks etc. (2) it is pyrophoric which means upon impact, it explodes into fire and smoke creating submicroscopic radioactive particles which travel great distances and can remain suspended until it is "rained out" of the atmosphere, (3) it is radioactive and will continue acting internally long after the battlefield has been cleared - with delayed effects which continue acting on soldiers and civilians THE REST OF THEIR LIVES (4) it is cheap and passes the responsibility for disposal from DOE on to civilians (that means US) and the environment. The half life of uranium is 4.5 billion years - in ten half lives radioactivity becomes an insignificant amount. In 45 billion years it will no longer be a danger. In other words - it's "fun" for the DOD, it's "cheap" for the arms manufacturers (at good profits), and "good riddance" says DOE.
The US has manufactured, used, tested DU in 39 states. The cleanup bill - just for the DU - at the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana would be $7.8 billion... it has not been cleaned up, but DOD has closed it. Communities living near these test ranges will continue to be exposed and suffer health problems. The Sierra Army Depot in California, for 40 years, has burned millions of tons of old munitions - including 20 times more DU than was used in the Gulf War. The radioactive ash full of heavy metals, phosgene gas and dioxins contaminated local communities as well as many Native American communities that were downwind - especially the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation. The health problems in those communities has been horrendous. The Sierra Army depot burned old munitions in OPEN PITS - and was the single largest contributor to air pollution in California - 17-23%. Did anyone in this city know that, or do anything to inform the citizens? I doubt that anyone was aware or informed. Several months ago I made a short presentation to the Peace and Justice Commission, and they were willing to consider the problem in order to take some action. Norman Harry, former Pyramid Lake Tribal Chairman, and Senator Harry Reid worked with others to shut it down. Less than a month ago Lassen County refused to renew the burn permit for the Sierra Army Depot - finally.
The United States has used DU weaponry in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Serbia, Vieques Island, Torishima Island near Okinawa, Japan, and sold it to at least 23 countries. Israel uses it nearly daily on the Palestinians. It is in the arsenal the US is using on Afghanistan.
The DU which contaminates the Gulf States can be detected on gamma meters in Greece and Bulgaria on windy days. It's the weapon that "keeps giving"... and keeps moving.
DU is also used as ballast in commercial and military planes. On Sept. 11, I called a medical doctor who lives 7 miles from the Pentagon and warned her that DU could have burned in the hijacked jets that crashed (up to 3000 pounds were used in 747's). She turned on her gamma meter - radiation levels were 8 times higher than normal inside her house. She informed the National Radiation Information Service in Washington DC, and the EPA, FBI, HazMat and other emergency response agencies went to the Pentagon to investigate. A pile of rubble from the crash was radioactive, but the EPA rep said "oh... it's probably depleted uranium... it's not a health hazard unless you breathe it". Firefighters, Pentagon personel, and communities nearby DID BREATHE IT. There was no followup investigation, and what about the World Trade Center in NY? Radiation almost never gets into mainstream media. It is a taboo subject.
Karen Parker, International Human Rights Attorney, is calling for a UN resulution to ban DU internationally. Marion Fulk, retired Livermore Lab scientist who has worked on the tritium facility issue, and I are writing the science portion of the UN resolution banning DU. This problem is an issue we should all be concerned with: act locally, think globally.
An excellent and new book on DU is online in Hiroshima Japan - in English. I wrote the Foreword and have copies available if anyone would like to read it, or if you would like to invite me as a speaker. You can read, email, download, pass on any of the 40+ interviews and photos in the US, UK, Gulf, Kosovo: http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html
The Foreword is below.
The true partiots in this country are two women: Barbara Lee for saying "no" to needless further devastation in an already war torn country, and Dona Spring who brought the issue to the table in Berkeley. I am proud to serve as Dona's representative on the CEAC and to support her important resolution. I hope the information I have provided will add to the discussion. And thank you Margo for bringing up the radioactive weaponry.
Best wishes, Leuren Moret Commissioner - CEAC President Scientists for Indigenous People
--
"DISCOUNTED CASUALTIES - THE HUMAN COST OF DELETED URANIUM"
June 2001
Foreword
I met Akira Tashiro last summer in Hiroshima, when I was invited by Gensuikin to speak about Yucca Mountain and high-level nuclear waste at the Plenary Session of the 2000 World Conference Against Atomic & Hydrogen Bombs. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki live with the aftermath of the horrific power and annihilation of nuclear bombs dropped on a civilian population, and the extreme cruelty of the lifelong effects of exposure to flash external gamma rays and internal low-level radiation from fallout. This reality has changed the lives of all those who have visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and learned not only about the hibakusha (survivors) of Japan, but of those around the world in Kazakhstan, the Pacific Islanders, and the Western United States. Radiation respects no borders. It is a slow, silent, global mutilator of all life.
In the 1970's I worked as an earth scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. There the transuranium elements were discovered for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the use of depleted uranium (DU) on the battlefield was first discussed. Later I worked at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, where the design of nuclear weapons continues. Radiation and nuclear weapons are seldom mentioned in a climate of secrecy and denial. Many scientists work in isolation and are only dimly aware of the larger project.
In the moment that I stood in the Hiroshima Peace Museum on the anniversary of the bombing looking up at "Little Boy," I was overwhelmed as a scientist. I realized that engineering and technology had built devices, through the misapplication of science, that could destroy all life on earth. I saw photos of women with vacant stares nursing dead babies. As a mother and giver of life I wondered how, without conscience, man could destroy 4.5 billion years of life evolving on this earth. The unbelievably dangerous powers of nuclear weapons have been developed by divorcing science from ethics, a Western phenomenon.
The Chugoku Shimbun, Hiroshima's newspaper, has published two award-winning series on exposure to radiation. The first book, EXPOSURE: Victims of Radiation Speak Out, is a powerful message about the detrimental effects that radioactive substances from nuclear testing and "peaceful uses" of nuclear energy have had on people and the environment. In this second book, Discounted Casualties, personal stories about DU reveal the unbelievable immorality and cruelty of this new radioactive weapon.
Radioactive waste from nuclear weapons development, mixed with high-level waste from nuclear reactors, becomes a lethal cocktail in DU ammunition. In recent reports the U.S. Department of Energy has admitted that military reactor waste has been mixed with DU. The waste contains plutonium, uranium-236, neptunium and other isotopes thousands of times more radioactive than DU. Disposing of dangerous waste at a profit benefits U.S. government agencies and the military industrial complex, while passing the liability for disposal and the biological and environmental damage to citizens around the world.
Tungsten is a biologically and environmentally safer alternative with greater density and penetrating power. DU bullets are pyrophoric and ignite on impact, producing a smoke that poisons life and travels great distances. The bullet fragments and dust left in the bodies of soldiers cause extended suffering, and cruel and inhumane deaths years after the war has ended. DU is radioactive, it is a toxic metal, and the toxicity is greatly increased when combined with chemicals. It disproportionately affects women and children.
DU munitions are illegal under international human rights and humanitarian law. Nevertheless, the US, the self-proclaimed "International Champion of Human Rights," has used this inhumane weapon on the battlefield, exposing its own soldiers, its allies, civilian populations, and future generations. DU testing in the U.S. continues to expose unsuspecting citizens and the environment. Pilots at Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada trained on nearby bombing and gunnery ranges for the Gulf War. Now, the "don't look, don't find policy" of the military has concealed the cause of a recent leukemia cluster in children in Fallon. Overseas, the use of radioactive trash in weapons has turned Gulf countries, the Balkans, Vieques Island, and Okinawa into dumpsites for the US government and the radiation industry. A single miscroscopic particle can cause a lethal disease. DU will continue to poison life from the dust and soils of the battlefields and testing grounds. In ten half-lives, or 45 billion years, the radioactivity will become an insignificant amount.
Which is worse, flash annihilation by nuclear explosions, or slow mutilation from low-level radiation, the result of radioactive contamination of the air, water and earth essential to life? Globally, we have been deceived about the health effects of radiation, by bureaucratized governments informed by the military industrial complex and scientific power. In the past half-century, 1.3 billion people have been killed, maimed, and diseased by nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Millions more will be killed, maimed and diseased unless the citizens of the world demand an end to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear waste, and the new radiological weapons.
As the bell tolls, we must honor and respect the hibakusha around the world, who are living reminders that we are pulling the rope of our own death knell. Let us thank the citizens of Japan, The Chugoku Shimbun, and Akira Tashiro, for making us aware of the most important issue of this century. And thanks to the veterans, whose stories make it clear that democracies as well as living bodies can develop malignancies.
Leuren Moret
Berkeley, California President, Scientists for Indigenous People June 2001 Past President, Association for Women Geoscientists
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
INDIAN POINT
Coast Guard Will Not End Boat Patrols Near A-Plants
New York Times
October 20, 2001
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/nyregion/20NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday
After a public outcry over security, Gov. George E. Pataki announced yesterday that the Coast Guard would not end round-the-clock patrols of the Indian Point nuclear plants until state authorities reviewed safeguards at the site.
Mr. Pataki, speaking at the plants in the village of Buchanan in Westchester County, said the state had reached an agreement with the Coast Guard, which said on Monday that it would withdraw a cutter that had been stationed in the Hudson River near the plants since Sept. 11.
The boat has been enforcing a restriction that prohibits vessels from passing within 500 yards of the plants. The Coast Guard has been gradually reducing its presence because of the strain on crews and boats and the need to make a long- term plan to improve patrols, said a spokesman, Chief Warrant Officer Steve Sapp.
James K. Kallstrom, the former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York and now the director of the state's new Office of Public Security, will lead a broad review of security at the plant, working in conjunction with the F.B.I. and the new federal Office of Homeland Security, Mr. Pataki said.
The governor said in a statement that there were no imminent security problems at the plant but that "Sept. 11 dictates that we take another look at the security plans at these important facilities."
Mr. Kallstrom said in an interview that he expected to complete the review within a month. He said the cutter might be most valuable to calm the nerves of a public anxious over the plants even in normal times.
"I think probably the biggest value at this time is it gives the public some comfort, so that's good," said Mr. Kallstrom, who added that as head of the F.B.I. in New York until four years ago he found the plant security "robust."
"I personally don't think the public should worry about it," he said. "I don't say that from a cavalier standpoint. Obviously a nuclear plant is a concern, but I don't think people should be overly concerned."
Mr. Pataki had already ordered the state police and National Guard to help patrol the four sites of the state's six nuclear reactors.
But a number of elected officials, including Representative Sue R. Kelly, whose district includes the plants; Senator Charles E. Schumer; and Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, complained to federal authorities about the Coast Guard's plans.
Officials at Entergy Corporation , which operates the two active reactors at the site, Indian Point 2 and 3, said yesterday that they believed their security measures were adequate but that they welcomed the additional help.
"These plants are well secured," said Jim Steets, a company spokesman. "We have responsibilities for providing protection of the plants, including the river. We are confident we can do that. But if that is further enhanced by the presence of the Coast Guard, we welcome it, and if people feel safer if the Coast Guard is there, we welcome it."
Mr. Steets said that Entergy, which acquired the reactors this year from Consolidated Edison, planned to go forward with a temporary shutdown of Indian Point 2 late next month to carry out numerous repairs. The reactor has been under the highest level of scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of a series of mishaps, including a small radioactive leak in February 2000 that caused the shutdown of the plant for 11 months.
Mrs. Kelly cheered the Coast Guard's decision to stay on duty. "I think the threat of terrorism is not going to disappear anytime soon," she said. "But residents in this community can feel safer today knowing that the government's commitment to protecting Indian Point is stronger than ever. It's a more dangerous world that we live in today."
--------
Nuclear Plant Surveillance Continues
October 20, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear-Plants.html?searchpv=aponline
NEW YORK (AP) -- Gov. George Pataki said around-the clock surveillance of the Indian Point nuclear power plants will continue, three days after the Coast Guard announced plans to halt the patrol on the Hudson River.
The governor, who visited the facility on Friday, said state and federal officials would continue to assess the long-term security needs at Indian Point and the Coast Guard will remain at the site until completion of the review.
``Sept. 11 dictates that we take another look at the security plans,'' Pataki said.
On Tuesday, Rear Admiral R.E. Bennis told Entergy Nuclear, the owner of the power plants, that the Coast Guard would no longer provide 24-hour security, ``and will be conducting only random patrols in the near future,'' starting Monday.
Entergy officials said the company was confident it could protect the plant.
But Rep. Sue Kelly, R-N.Y., whose district includes the two plants, called the Coast Guard's decision misguided and unwise.
In a letter to James Kallstrom, the state's new anti-terrorism coordinator, Rep. Nita Lowey, D-Harrison, wrote: ``Your security expertise is urgently needed at Indian Point. The public must be assured that Indian Point is secure on all fronts -- air, land and water.''
The nation's nuclear power plants -- 103 reactors at 64 sites in 31 states -- have been under heightened alert since the terrorist attacks. National Guard troops were assigned by Pataki to nuclear power plants across the state to provide additional assistance.
The National Guard also has been deployed to reactors in other states.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Anti-Taliban Forces Get U.S. Assistance
Opposition in Key City Describes Limited Aid
By William Branigin and Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23780-2001Oct19.html
JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan, Oct. 19 -- Afghan opposition forces squeezing the key northern city of Mazar-e Sharif are receiving assistance from at least eight U.S. military personnel, two senior commanders said today.
In an interview with reporters by satellite telephone from his base in Dara-i Suf, about 55 miles southeast of Mazar-e Sharif, Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum said "eight or nine" American military officials had been with him for the past week as his fighters have battled Taliban forces near the city. But he said the Americans had come to discuss food aid for the Dara-i Suf area, a pocket controlled by the rebel Northern Alliance that has major food shortages caused by drought.
Another Northern Alliance commander near Mazar-e Sharif, Attah Mohammad, told Reuters by satellite telephone that eight Americans had arrived by helicopter to meet with Dostum, apparently on an intelligence or reconnaissance mission.
The U.S. activities on the ground in Afghanistan came as American planes continued what Northern Alliance commanders described as a restrained bombing campaign against Taliban front-line positions north of Kabul. The bombing of those positions, which began Tuesday, apparently was aimed at command posts, but was not as intense as some Northern Alliance commanders had wanted.
The alliance, which has been fighting the Taliban for five years, has welcomed the U.S. military campaign against its enemy and asked Washington for assistance in its insurgency. Today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on his way to Missouri that the United States and the rebels are now working in tandem.
"What's different today is they are going to have some help," he said. "They're going to have some help in food; they're going to have some help in ammunition; they are going to have some help in air support and assistance."
But the limited U.S. bombing has left some Northern Alliance front-line commanders puzzled and angry as they watch Taliban fighters furiously digging bunkers, visitors to the front said. Northern Alliance officials said U.S. military planners may be building up their bombing campaign steadily or deliberately holding back to avoid a rapid opposition push toward Kabul before plans for a post-Taliban government are framed.
In an apparent effort to gather increased support for its political and military efforts, the Northern Alliance sent two high-ranking officials to Tehran today to confer with Iranian officials. The two men -- Gen. Mohammad Qassim Fahim and Abdullah, the alliance's defense and foreign ministers, respectively -- met earlier with Russian officials in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.
By the end of the day, Tajikistan, Iran, India and Russia -- all supporters of the Northern Alliance -- had declared that members of the Taliban must not be included in any future Afghan government. The statements appeared to reject an agreement by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, that moderate elements of the Taliban should participate in a post-Taliban government.
In northern Afghanistan, fighting is raging between the forces of Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who has switched sides many times in Afghanistan's 22 years of warfare, and the Taliban at the mouth of the Marmul Gorge south of the Mazar-e Sharif airport, Dostum said. He told Western reporters by satellite phone that the airport has been destroyed.
Dostum joined the Northern Alliance in October 1996 and is believed to have between 2,000 to 4,000 fighters under his command. Two other commanders allied with him, including Mohammad, reportedly have smaller forces.
Until 1997, Mazar-e Sharif was Dostum's base of operations, and recapturing the city would be a huge step for him and the alliance toward rolling back Taliban control in the north.
Because the city is only 38 miles south of the Uzbek border, taking it would allow the alliance to open supply routes running southeast to Kabul, instead of having to bring supplies through a treacherous trail farther east, over the Hindu Kush mountains and down the Panjshir Valley. The fall of Mazar-e Sharif is also seen as a potentially devastating blow to Taliban morale that could encourage wholesale defections.
Mohammad told Reuters that alliance forces planned to encircle Mazar-e Sharif within a few days.
"First, we want to surround Mazar-e Sharif, so that people there will remain calm and so that the Taliban has no way of escaping," he said from his position just southeast of the city, Reuters reported.
Mohammad told Agence France-Presse that his fighters were holding on to the strategic positions in the hills just a few miles south of the city, but a Taliban Information Ministry official in Kabul disputed that, saying the rebels had pulled back because of a counterattack. Akhamadullah, the Taliban's chief of military intelligence, was quoted as saying Taliban forces had driven the opposition fighters at least 15 miles south of Mazar-e Sharif.
A Northern Alliance official in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, said today that U.S. warplanes had supported their advance against Mazar-e Sharif by bombing three Taliban targets: a compound that held four helicopter, an administration building and fuel tanks at an airport.
Left untouched, though, were 10 tanks and 90 rocket-launchers, trucks or pieces of military equipment on a plain south of the city, said the official, Mohammed Hasham Saad.
LaFraniere reported from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
--------
Afghans Flee Heavy Airstrikes Thousands Cross Pakistan Border
By John Pomfret and Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23793-2001Oct19.html
QUETTA, Pakistan, Oct. 19 -- About 3,500 frightened Afghans poured into Pakistan today, U.N. officials and witnesses said, fleeing heavy nighttime attacks by U.S. aircraft on the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar that one refugee described as "horrible, horrible."
The refugees, mostly women and children, walked across the border at the Chaman crossing lugging suitcases and balancing bundles of clothing on their heads. They were allowed into Pakistani territory despite government orders that the border be sealed to everyone without travel documents.
The exodus marked the highest one-day refugee flow from southwestern Afghanistan since U.S. forces began bombing Taliban targets 13 days ago, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. It was seen as a dramatic measure of the ferocity of U.S. airstrikes against Kandahar, a city 120 miles northwest of here that has been the headquarters of Mohammad Omar, leader of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement.
As the attacks have intensified, the number of Afghans moving across the border has risen markedly, particularly in the past three days. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 10,000 have arrived here in Baluchistan province, opposite southwestern Afghanistan, in the last six days, including 2,700 who trudged to the border crossing on Wednesday and Thursday.
The U.N. agency estimated that, despite the border closure, 30,000 Afghans have fled to Pakistan since bombing began Oct. 7, many of them crossing on isolated tracks away from the heavily patrolled official crossings. They join more than 2 million Afghans already driven into Pakistan by the more than two decades of warfare that has torn the country apart.
Pakistan closed its border in an effort to prevent a flood of new refugees, which aid officials estimate could number a million or more if unchecked. As part of that effort, those who crossed today were not directed to any specific refugee camp by Pakistani authorities, but were left largely to fend for themselves or seek assistance from friends and relatives in Pakistan.
"Our border monitors reported that about 3,500 people, mostly women and children, entered Pakistan at the Chaman border crossing on Friday," said Fatoumata Kaba, a spokeswoman for the refugee agency.
At the United Nations, Ruud Lubbers, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said he expected the refugee flight underway to "grow exponentially" in the coming weeks, and he pleaded with Pakistan and Iran to open their borders.
"They are just too strict," Lubbers said. Blocking the refugees at the borders, he added, is "creating enormous misery, which is unacceptable."
News services quoted refugees as saying that thousands of people were still trying to enter Pakistan. The accounts could not be verified because the Taliban has largely barred journalists from Afghanistan.
Kaba and refugees interviewed at Chaman said the movement was caused by intense overnight military strikes on targets in and around Kandahar that appeared to have caused panic. Dad Mohammed, a 38-year-old driver who fled with his family, said he decided to leave Afghanistan today after seeing a U.S. AC-130 gunship fire at Taliban forces.
"It was flying low. It almost seemed to stop flying and float at one time," he said of the U.S. plane, a modified C-130 transport that carries a 105mm cannon and a Gatling gun that sprays 1,800 bullets a minute. "Then it began firing. It was like the plane was breathing fire. It was horrible, horrible."
Witnesses said the scene at the border crossing was chaotic. People were entering Pakistan with ashen faces. It seemed that many had fled hastily.
Agha Mohammed, a 45-year-old merchant, said he witnessed a U.S. strike on a telephone office in Kandahar. "At least 20 Taliban were killed there," he said. "All night the Taliban were driving back and forth in their pickup trucks with their rocket launchers and their AK-47s."
Mohammed said that despite the fear, the U.S. assault gave him hope that the Taliban will lose power in Afghanistan.
"They are all under Osama's control," he said, referring to the accused terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who is being harbored by the Taliban. "I am leaving until they kill him. Then I will go back and, no matter what, be a happier man."
Despite the signs of crumbling morale, the main Taliban envoy to the outside world said in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, that the movement's leadership remains unified, confident and determined never to turn over bin Laden no matter how long the United States bombs Afghanistan.
Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef, speaking on his return after a week of consultations in Kandahar, said that despite the U.S. airstrikes and the prospect of imminent ground assaults, the Taliban leadership has decided to hold firm against U.S. demands that it give up bin Laden, because of Islamic principles regarding a guest.
"We have no change in that," he told reporters gathered on the embassy lawn in Islamabad. "Osama is a faith issue, and we are not going to change our faith."
Zaeef discounted reports that some Taliban officials have indicated to Pakistani intelligence agents they are thinking of defecting. "There are no moderates, and there are no hard-liners," he said. "We are one."
He said the Taliban military has suffered few casualties despite the loss of its infrastructure and is awaiting with "patience" the arrival of ground troops to fight back on more equal terms. "We know this is going to be a long war," he said. "Therefore, we are going to safeguard our ammunition and our military capabilities."
Despite Zaeef's assertion that Taliban authorities retain control of the country, the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan reported that its aid centers in five Afghan cities have been looted by Taliban militia members and forced to close. Some staff members who sought to intervene were beaten, according to an official of the committee, Sidney Petersson.
Petersson told reporters the centers are in the northern cities of Mazar-e Sharif, which is under attack by forces of the rebel Northern Alliance; Pol-e Khomri; Kunduz; Taloqan, and Ghazni.
Zaeef also sought to underline Taliban reports that the U.S. bombing is taking a growing toll of civilian casualties. He said "the majority" of targets hit since Oct. 7 have been civilian, leading to the loss of innocent lives.
An embassy official said about 400 civilians have been killed. But in Afghanistan, Taliban spokesman Abdul Hai Mutmaen estimated the number between 600 and 800, including people killed today in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, the capital. Neither estimate could be verified.
Taliban officials have particularly denounced an attack Oct. 11 on the village of Kadam near Jalalabad, in northeastern Afghanistan across the border from Peshawar, where they said 160 to 200 civilians were killed. Foreign television crews were taken to the area several days later to interview people who said they lost their families.
An Afghan from the area who is hostile to the Taliban movement said Thursday, however, that a small number of people had died, most of them Arabs assigned to guard an ammunition facility. Taliban officials went to the village before the camera crews arrived to coach residents on what to say, he charged.
Cody reported from Islamabad. Special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
--------
Taleban recruit mercenaries
The Times (UK)
SATURDAY OCTOBER 20 2001
FROM OLIVER AUGUST AT KHOJE-I GHAR FRONT LINE
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001350020-2001364216,00.html
THOUSANDS of Pakistani mercenaries have been recruited to fight for the Taleban, according to a prisoner of the Northern Alliance.
About 2,000 recruits were reportedly transferred to Afghanistan in a single day earlier this month and promised £700 for a four-month spell fighting infidels and Americans.
The recruitment drive comes as Taleban commanders are said to be withdrawing all Afghan troops from the front line and replacing them with foreign fighters, who are deemed less likely to defect as defeat looms.
The prisoner, Mabu, 25, had been on his way to work at a Punjab textile factory 12 days ago when a recruiter approached him. Desperate to escape his back-breaking job, he accepted the offer to join the Taleban until February. In addition to the monthly salary of £175, the recruiter had promised him a new car as a possible bonus.
Mabu said: "Ten groups of 200 people were sent to Kabul from Lahore under the cover of darkness. I was moved immediately to Konduz where I had to dig my own trench. Life was miserable. We slept in an abandoned village and had to do four-hour shifts at a sniper position in a no man's land." When Mabu started his shift yesterday morning, he found that 12 Northern Alliance soldiers had surrounded the sniper position overnight. As he approached with two other Pakistani recruits, the 12 merely had to raise their guns to capture him.
Mabu said: "They didn't say anything and I knew the situation was hopeless. But the other two were able to run away."
Mabu crouches on the mud floor of a Northern Alliance command bunker, shivering with fear and cold, his hands and feet chained. "I had never used a gun before I came to Afghanistan," he said. "When I arrived the Taleban commanders showed me how to use it during a training exercise."
His captors do not believe he is a novice, however. Pointing to the callouses and sores on his shoulder and back, they accuse him of being an experienced fighter.
Commander Abdul Manon said: "These marks are from carrying ammunition and firing shoulder-held weapons. He must have been a fighter at some point in the past. This is not his first time on the front line. That's probably why they hired him." Mabu is also missing the index finger of his right hand, a typical injury for a tank gunner.
Four Northern Alliance commanders have confirmed the withdrawal of many Afghan Taleban fighters from the front line. Factional fighting in Afghanistan is notorious for its defections: individual Taleban soldiers as well as whole military regions are likely to cross over to the Northern Alliance if it wins more territory.
Sidik, 26, an Afghan Taleban fighter who defected this week, said: "The Taleban are afraid that people will just cross the line when nobody is looking."
-------- biological weapons
Global anthrax fears grow
USA TODAY
10/20/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/20/anthrax-global.htm
TOKYO (AP) - Anthrax scares stranded passengers, emptied buildings and mobilized biohazard teams around the world on Saturday as Argentina announced the second confirmed case outside the United States of mail contaminated with the bacteria. The New York Times also said its office in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, received a letter postmarked in New York City that showed traces of anthrax in preliminary tests, but Brazilian authorities on Saturday called it a false alarm.
Most of the hundreds of reports worldwide of tainted letters and suspicious powders have been quickly dismissed as false alarms, and pranksters have been detained in Australia, the Netherlands and Spain.
But on Friday, Argentine Health Minister Hector Lombardo held a nationally televised news conference to announce that a travel brochure mailed from Florida to a house in Buenos Aires tested positive for anthrax spores.
The brochure, which advertised a Caribbean cruise, was one of 600 letters turned over by residents for testing. Officials did not say when it was mailed or received, or what city it came from.
The recipient of the letter, who was identified only as "Patricia," said she thought it was suspicious that she would receive an advertisement by international mail. She was not infected.
The first such case was confirmed earlier this week in Kenya, where a doctor received an anthrax-tainted letter from Atlanta. The doctor and his family were in good health but were being treated with antibiotics.
In Australia, more than 100 passengers on a Virgin Blue flight were quarantined in Melbourne for over two hours after a powdery substance was discovered on an aircraft Friday night. An airline spokeswoman said the substance was removed from the aircraft but was later discovered to be harmless.
Backups at mail sorting centers were reported in New Zealand after white powder spilled from a postal bag at a center in Dunedin.
Firefighters, police and ambulance staff were called after two workers were exposed to the powder. The men were washed in a decontamination shower and taken to hospital by ambulance. The powder was later determined to be a harmless substance.
Malaysian postal officials planned to distribute gloves and masks to workers in some regions next week, media there reported.
Malaysia's home minister warned that the government would pursue pranksters blamed for anthrax scares that have sent six people to hospitals since Thursday. No one has tested positive for the bacteria so far.
"These people are taking advantage of the situation to create chaos," Deputy Home Minister Chor Chee Heung was quoted as saying by The Star newspaper. "Serious action will be taken, and this may not be limited to existing laws."
Elsewhere, police reported Saturday that a powder-laden letter sent to the U.S. consulate in the western Japanese city of Osaka was determined to be untainted.
Reports of suspicious letters revived fears in Japan, where 12 people died and thousands were sickened when a doomsday cult spread poison gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995. News media questioned Saturday whether authorities were prepared to fend off bioterrorist attacks.
"Delays in taking emergency countermeasures have been blatant," ran the headline in the mass-circulation Sankei newspaper, commenting on a government plan to earmark funds in next year's budget for smallpox vaccines and other treatments against biological weapons.
U.S. authorities disclosed two more cases of anthrax exposure this week - a New York Post newspaper employee and a New Jersey-area postal worker - bringing the total to eight.
Three staff members of the Rio de Janeiro office of The New York Times were being tested for anthrax and were receiving precautionary treatment after their office got a suspicious letter postmarked in New York, said Brazil's Health Ministry and Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis.
The letter, which was turned over to authorities unopened, was received by the office on Oct. 16. It was postmarked in New York City on Oct. 5 without a return address, the newspaper said.
The Times, citing Brazilian authorities, said that preliminary tests had suggested spores consistent with anthrax had been found on the letter. Brazilian health authorities contacted by AP were unable to confirm this.
In Croatia, employees were evacuated Saturday from a floor of the building housing Jutarnji list, the country's leading newspaper, after delivery of a letter containing a white powder. Another newspaper, Slobodna Dalmacija, was told by postal workers that an X-ray check showed a letter addressed to it contained a suspicious powder.
--------
Kennedy seeking more funds to combat bioterrorism
USA TODAY
10/20/2001
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/19/kennedy.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - After a week of disruptions caused by an anthrax scare, Congress is ready to take up legislation to better prepare the nation against bioterrorist attacks. Increased vaccine production, expedited drug approval and tighter surveillance of dangerous materials in Russia and other countries are being considered. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate health committee, is working on a plan costing $5 billion to $10 billion that the Senate could take up as early as next week.
Kennedy's spokesman, Jim Manley, said that plan, while not finalized, could include provisions that would make it easier for the government and the drug industry to cooperate to speed up research and production of new vaccines and drugs to combat bioterrorist threats.
Kennedy has already been working with Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., on a $1.4 billion measure, much of that going to local and state governments to upgrade computers, help communities plan for disasters, increase staffing, give training to more workers and improve health laboratories.
The Bush White House has put forth its own $1.5 billion plan that includes money to increase stockpiles of antibiotics and other medical supplies and pay for 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine.
Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Republican leader in the Senate. said Thursday that bioterrorism provisions could be added to a bill making it easier for law enforcement to pursue terrorists. That bill is likely to win approval next week.
The impetus toward a more comprehensive bioterrorism package comes after the delivery of an anthrax-contaminated letter to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., that exposed at least 31 staffers and police to anthrax and led to the closing of much of the Capitol.
The Senate met Thursday but all Senate and House office buildings and the House side of the Capitol closed Thursday so health officials could carry out inspections and decontamination. The Senate and House are scheduled to reconvene Tuesday.
Manley said the legislation Kennedy is considering would create a biowarfare security program with Russia, which has the world's largest supply of dangerous pathogens. The plan would be similar to the U.S.-Russian program to ensure that Russia's nuclear arsenal doesn't fall into the wrong hands.
It would also increase security at U.S. facilities where biological agents are stored, provide funds for local emergency response efforts and speed up Food and Drug Administration procedures for studying and approving vaccines and other treatments.
Manley said Kennedy, who met several pharmaceutical executives Wednesday, was still studying how best to cooperate with the drug industry in identifying priorities for research and development. Any discussions of a division of labor in the fight against bioterrorism could require changes in antitrust laws.
Frist spokeswoman Margaret Camp said the Tennessee senator hopes to work on a bipartisan approach and will study the details before committing to a significant increase in spending.
-------- iraq
Saddam: U.S. Practicing Terrorism
October 20, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Saddam Hussein accused the United States of 11 years of terrorism against Iraq, and the government newspaper claimed Saturday that the U.S. government organized the global anthrax scare to gain support for its war on terror.
Saddam's comments came in what the official Iraqi News Agency said was a response to a letter from an American who asked him to try to improve Iraqi-U.S. relations in order to solve disputes and fight terrorism.
``Do you know that your administration has been promoting terrorism against us, calling for ending our regime by force and allocating funds for this purpose,'' the agency quoted Saddam as saying in his response.
The Iraqi president said the United States, which regards his regime as a sponsor of terrorism, targets Iraq because it refuses to comply with U.S. policies in the Middle East.
He also denounced the U.S.-supported U.N. trade sanctions imposed on his country after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to Iraq's defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led coalition the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Saddam accused successive U.S. administrations of ``committing acts of genocide against Iraq by imposing the 11 years of sanctions that led to the killing of 1.5 million people.''
Iraq has repeatedly claimed the sanctions have killed more than 1 million people. However, Iraq is allowed to use oil revenues to buy humanitarian goods, and U.S. officials say Saddam has let is own people go hungry by failing to take full advantage of that.
Saddam also said the United States has failed to provide proof linking Osama bin Laden to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and denounced the U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan.
``Those who attack people with missiles should expect someone to try to seek revenge for his people and dignity,'' the agency quoted Saddam as saying. It said the letter to Saddam was from Christopher J. Love, of Pennsylvania.
In an editorial, the Iraqi government daily Al-Jumhuriya accused the U.S. administration of being behind the global anthrax scare, saying that ``America is in need for any new pretext to continue its aggression.''
U.S. officials have not determined the origin of anthrax that has infected several people in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks, and say there is no evidence so far that it is associated with a weapons program. Iraq is believed to have experimented with anthrax as a weapon.
-------- israel
Israeli Forces Move Into West Bank
Escalation in Violence Threatens U.S. Diplomatic Efforts With Arab Countries
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23747-2001Oct19.html
BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Oct. 19 -- A mile from Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity, a clutch of Palestinian boys, aged 8 to 16, fired slingshots and whipped stones today at an improbable target: Israeli tanks idling in the middle of Yasser Arafat Street.
Palestinian gunmen, their faces masked, walked briskly down stone-faced alleys to snipe at the new Israeli positions. Alone and in pairs, they squeezed off a few rounds from Kalashnikov assault rifles, then melted away before Israeli tank gunners could draw a bead on them.
Israel's overnight advance into Bethlehem, the adjacent Palestinian town of Beit Jala and on Thursday, two other major Palestinian towns, signaled a sharp escalation in fighting here as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon intensifies pressure on the Palestinians to crack down on terrorists or face military consequences.
Sharon has given Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat until the middle of next week to crush militant groups and hand over the killers of Rehavam Zeevi, the anti-Arab hard-liner who was assassinated by Palestinian militants on Wednesday. The Palestinians, who have never extradited a suspect wanted by Israel, say they would not do so now even if they knew who killed Zeevi.
Zeevi's assassination, Israel's ultimatum and the Palestinians' refusal all promise a far more intense Middle East war and threaten U.S. diplomatic efforts to restore calm in the region. For the Bush administration, more violence here could crack the already tentative Arab support for U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan.
But the conflict here is driven by its own internal dynamic, nearly impervious to the entreaties of outsiders. Six more Palestinians were killed in fighting in Bethlehem and elsewhere today, raising to 11 the number who have died violently since Zeevi was shot to death in the hallway of a Jerusalem hotel. An Israeli was also shot to death by Palestinians late Thursday as he returned from a hiking trip in the Jordan Valley.
Headlines in this morning's Israeli newspapers reflected the widespread sense that the two sides were edging toward a new abyss. "On the Brink of Conflagration," said the banner headline in Yedioth Aharonoth, the country's mass circulation daily.
Undaunted, the Palestinians buried their dead and vowed fresh attacks. In Bethlehem, several thousand Palestinians chanted "revenge, revenge," as they marched through the center of town and jammed Manger Square for the funeral of a well-known militant.
The dead man, Atef Abayat, leader of the Palestinians' Tanzim militia in Bethlehem, was killed Thursday by an explosion of a Mitsubishi Pajero he had just received as a gift. Palestinians said the jeep was booby-trapped and blamed the blast on the Israelis, who have assassinated several dozen Palestinian militants and had Abayat near the top of their most-wanted list. Israel declined to say whether it had killed Abayat but said he was responsible for the deaths of five Israelis, including a mother of three who was killed in a road ambush last month.
Kamel Hamad, a leader of Arafat's Fatah movement, addressed mourners in Manger Square, in front of the Church of the Nativity, considered the birthplace of Jesus. He said Palestinians would continue to struggle "as long as there is one soldier or one settler in our land."
Abayat's death triggered Palestinians to open fire on Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood on Jerusalem's southern fringe built on land captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war. Israeli forces responded, and heavy fighting continued on and off for hours, until Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers roared into the outskirts of Bethlehem and the center of Beit Jala at about 2 a.m.
The two adjacent towns have been under Palestinian control since peace deals with Israel took effect in the mid-1990s. They had been relatively peaceful until the current wave of fighting broke out in September of last year.
Israel said its move into Bethlehem, Beit Jala and other Palestinian areas was designed to prevent Palestinian attacks. But the incursions did not halt the violence. In a joint statement, representatives of various Christian churches in Jerusalem criticized the Israeli incursion into Bethlehem, saying it subjected Palestinians there to "terrorism."
In Bethlehem, firefights raged sporadically all day and Palestinian children joined in, hurling stones at Israeli troops. The doors to the town's tourist shops, hotels and restaurants, painted bright green for millennium celebrations in 2000, were shuttered and locked.
"This is holy land," said Yussef Issa, 15, a fresh-faced Palestinian Christian. "I'm here to defend our land -- to throw stones or do anything I can."
Among the Palestinian dead was Maryam Isbeih, 36, who was in her house in the village of al-Khader near Bethlehem when she was struck in the chest by a bullet, according to Palestinian medical officials. Several dozen Palestinians were wounded in the fighting, at least four of them critically. Four Israeli soldiers also were wounded, one seriously.
Israelis were infuriated by Zeevi's murder and ongoing Palestinian attacks. Women in Green, an extreme rightist group, called on Sharon's government to end its "sad appeasements of Arafat." In a statement, the group said that Zeevi's murder presented "an opportunity" that "should be seized" by reoccupying Palestinian land from which Israel has withdrawn in recent years under the terms of the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
In a poll conducted before Zeevi's assassination and published today in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, nearly three-quarters of Israelis said they favored the policy of assassinating Palestinian militants. In a separate survey by Yedioth Aharonoth, this one carried out after Zeevi's murder, 62 percent of Israelis said the assassinations should target Palestinian leaders.
Polls also indicated a surge in support for former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a hard-liner who has slammed the government for acting too timidly to contain Palestinian violence. Roughly equal numbers of respondents in the Maariv poll now support Sharon and Netanyahu, a sharp improvement in Netanyahu's political standing from previous surveys.
Amid the furor, and signs that Israel is preparing to deal the Palestinians a major military blow, the dovish Israeli group Peace Now announced it would hold a "Stop the War" rally Saturday evening outside Sharon's Jerusalem residence. Peace Now activists, aware they were going against the grain of public opinion, said they hoped 100 people would attend.
"The Israeli consensus has moved even farther to the right," said Noam Hoffshteter, a Peace Now organizer. "People are becoming more and more deaf to the voice of reason, and they are more tired of trying to think of a complicated solution, which is a peaceful solution. . . . The assassination [of Zeevi] drives people farther down this road."
The sudden spike in violence this week followed what had been several days of relative calm prior to Zeevi's assassination. Under intense U.S. and Western pressure, Arafat had ordered a handful of arrests of Palestinian militants in territory under his control and issued general orders for a suspension of attacks on Israelis. Although firefights persisted in Israeli-occupied portions of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, their severity had slackened and so had casualties.
At the outset of this week, Israel killed at least one Palestinian under its track-and-kill policy, and a second died in a car bombing that the Palestinians blamed on Israel. On Wednesday Zeevi was murdered. Today the Tanzim militia, which Arafat had ordered to hold its fire, announced that as a result of Abayat's killing it would no longer be bound by any cease-fire.
"If there is no quiet for us, then there will be no quiet for the settlers," the militia said in a statement.
-------- pakistan
Pakistani revolution predicted
October 20, 2001
By Willis Witter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011020-69500946.htm
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Pakistan's leading Muslim cleric, moments after addressing the largest anti-American rally yet, said yesterday that an Islamic revolution had begun in Pakistan that would eclipse the 1979 revolution in Iran that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
"It's bigger, no doubt, than in Iran. Everything is prepared," said Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of Pakistan's largest religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami.
The difference, he said, is that the Muslim leadership in Pakistan is divided and "we don't have the symbol of hatred the Iranians had with [Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]."
The Khomeini revolution replaced a secular monarchy in Iran with an Islamic fundamentalist state hostile to the United States. In contrast, Pakistan has been under military rule since a 1999 coup, but its passionately Muslim population's views often do not reflect the moderation of its ruling elite.
Asked if America was in danger of becoming that present-day object of Muslim hate, the cleric simply warned that anti-American sentiment has grown since the military action against Afghanistan's Taliban regime began.
Despite opposition within Pakistan, the U.S.-led operations within Afghanistan continued with air assaults, special-forces operations and broadcast messages urging ordinary Afghans to stay out of the way of the effort to root out Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks .
U.S. forces last night launched and completed the first ground combat mission, as a team of crack Army Rangers was dispatched into southern Afghanistan to attack a Taliban target, a U.S. official said.
U.S. warplanes also dropped four bombs on the capital of Kabul and attacked Kandahar, the southern stronghold of the ruling Taliban.
As the United States, Great Britain and the international community grow confident the Taliban regime will soon fall, discord about what sort of government should take its place has emerged.
Russia, India and Iran all expressed dismay with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's statement that there may be room for some Taliban "moderates" in a new power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan. The Iranian foreign minister yesterday spoke against the proposal, while India and Russia also rejected the idea in a joint statement.
Mr. Powell made the assertion after a meeting last week with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in which he also said that any future government would have to be acceptable to Afghanistan's neighbors. Pakistan is a one-time ally of the Taliban, while Russia, India and Iran have all supported Afghanistan's opposition forces of the Northern Alliance.
Mystery surrounded the visit to Pakistan of Taliban tribal-affairs minister Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful leader of Afghanistan's dominant ethnic Pashtun majority and commander of five southeastern provinces.
There were suggestions that Mr. Haqqani might have met Pakistan officials or representatives of exiled King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who is being touted as a possible unifying figure in any post-Taliban government. Analysts say it is significant that in 13 days of U.S. bombing, the raids had not targeted some of the main provinces that make up Mr. Haqqani's power base.
As the military campaign continues, the humanitarian effort to assist the people of Afghanistan intensified despite serious disruptions caused by the Taliban.
The U.N. World Food Program has said Taliban forces were still occupying its food depot and office in Kandahar. Earlier this week, Taliban activists also seized control of an office and warehouse of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the northern city of Kunduz. The IOM told its staff to stay at home and wait for clear directives.
Almost 18,600 tons of food have been handed out to Afghans by the U.N. food program since the Sept. 11 attacks, while American cargo jets continue to drop food packets. More than 500,000 food rations have been dropped so far.
Still, unrest in Pakistan demonstrates the potentially explosive public suspicion that the U.S.-led military action in Afghanistan is directed against Islam. Yesterday's rally in Peshawar drew at least 100,000 people, with posters of bin Laden held high, one proclaiming "Americans to your death." One speaker chanted "revolution" to roars of approval.
"We will teach American a lesson," Mr. Ahmad told the crowd. "We are ready for jihad. We give full support to the Taliban. We stand with them and will help any way we can."
The turnout was far bigger than party leaders had expected and the crowd dispersed peacefully under the eye of a heavy police and army presence manning roadblocks and sandbag bunkers.
-------- u.n.
Multinational Force New Focus of Talks
U.S., U.N. Officials Differ on Next Step in Afghanistan but Agree Time Is Short
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23778-2001Oct19.html
The focus of talks on the future of Afghanistan has shifted from the possible deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force to a U.S. proposal to send a limited, multinational force that would provide enough security to establish an interim government, U.N. sources said yesterday.
The idea of a multinational force, a "coalition of the willing," as a European official put it, is favored by the United States and Britain, the closest U.S. ally in the military campaign in Afghanistan.
In discussions this week with U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, Bush administration officials have raised the possibility that such a force could be composed mostly of troops from Islamic nations, which would presumably be more acceptable to the Afghans and the rest of the Muslim world. Under this scenario, a U.N. civil administration would be put in place until a representative Afghan government is ready to take over.
Brahimi has publicly scoffed at the idea of a Muslim force, noting there have been few countries -- Muslim or otherwise -- offering to participate. Backed by France, he favors the creation of a national Afghan peacekeeping force that would draw fighters from the various military factions that have been at war with one another since the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989. An Afghan government would be in charge, with what a U.N. official called "a certain degree of [U.N.] string-pulling" behind the scenes.
Each side believes the other's scenario borders on the impossible. But despite the wide gulf between them on a number of issues, U.S. and U.N. officials agree that time is growing short to come up with a plan. Afghanistan's heavy winter snows are due in the middle of November, making military ground operations and the delivery of crucial humanitarian aid to the Afghan population more difficult. U.S. officials also believe that continued bombing during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins Nov. 17, could inflame passions in the Islamic world.
U.N. officials acknowledge that any decision will be made by the Security Council, which has followed the U.S. lead since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. But they are not happy at the prospect of taking an administrative role that many believe will be difficult for the Afghans to accept. "I resent it," said one U.N. official.
Brahimi met in Washington yesterday with Vice President Cheney, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage and other senior State Department officials. The Bush administration characterized the talks as a "discussion of common goals."
The goals are the easy part. "Everyone agrees on the endgame," said a second U.N. official. "It's the establishment of a broad-based government for Afghanistan. No bin Laden. No drug trafficking. No threat to Afghanistan's neighbors. . . . The whole discussion is over the means, not the end."
"We're casting around," he said of the U.N. position, "going between what we think is doable and what we think we might be expected to do. There is a difference between the two."
All parties believe that some sort of force will be required to keep the peace in Afghanistan while a civil administration is established, and they agree that deployment of a formal, "blue-helmet" U.N. peacekeeping force is not feasible. The United Nations sets a minimum of 90 days to go through the consultative, budgetary and bureaucratic formalities for such a force, even when there are countries willing to contribute troops.
A multinational force, such as the one NATO has established in Kosovo with a U.N. civil administration, requires only that two or more governments agree to send troops. Although not required, it has also become accepted practice for multinational forces to get Security Council approval.
The United States has made clear it has no interest in participating in such a force. "Everybody agrees you couldn't have the U.S. or U.K. -- anybody actually doing the bombing -- there as an occupation force," the Western European official said. "That would be the kiss of death."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's point man on the issue, Richard H. Haass, raised the idea of an Islamic force headed by Turkey in talks with Brahimi in New York on Wednesday. Turkey, the sole country so far to express any interest in participation, has made clear that it would only commit to a non-combat, peaceful role in specified areas of Afghanistan.
Pakistan and India, which are major contributors of troops to a number of formalized U.N. peacekeeping forces around the world, are not seen as neutral parties in Afghanistan; Jordan, which also contributes troops around the world, is thought to be reluctant to tempt anti-U.S. passions at home. Outside the Muslim world, France, Germany and Canada are among those who have offered to assist the U.S. military campaign, but they have said nothing about participating in an interim peace force in Afghanistan.
The security conditions under which an interim force would operate, not to mention a civil administration, have loomed large in U.N. discussions with both the United States and Britain. A British proposal circulated at the United Nations last week began with the assumption that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban militia had been removed from the scene.
"If you start with that assumption, it's a very rosy world," a U.N. official said. "But if . . . a substantial portion of the Taliban survive and go underground, that's a totally different scenario."
"It all depends on who is where when the music stops and everyone sits down in a chair," the official said.
Any proposal must consider where the opposition groups are and how much territory each claims in relation to the others. If there are Taliban left, it is important to know whether they are all in one area, in the cities or scattered around the country.
If the United States has determined a point at which it will declare its military campaign over, it has not revealed it to the United Nations, officials there said.
Both sides, however, feel that time is running out. "The question is how you get from A to B," the European official said. "We need to work through this urgently with Brahimi. I don't know what prescription we'll come up with in the end [but] we've got to be ready to move on to the next stage."
Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance, a key Afghan opposition group, voiced growing concern that the United States was planning its future without taking its wishes into consideration. Haron Amin, the alliance spokesman in Washington, said the opposition leaders -- who have been fighting the Taliban since the mid-1990s -- are growing increasingly concerned that the United States "will sell us out to Pakistan."
"The major fear we have is that there is no strategic alliance between us and the United States," Amin said. "We want that, but is the U.S. ready?"
He said Northern Alliance leaders have agreed to American requests not to move on the Afghan capital of Kabul before an interim Afghan government can be created. He also said there is good but limited cooperation between the U.S. military and alliance fighters. "They listen to what we have to say, but they don't target what we ask," Amin said.
Hostile relationships among various Afghan factions and neighboring countries are another complicating factor in efforts to plan for future peace. Pakistan has only recently abandoned its backing for the Taliban and supports the ethnic Pashtun, the majority group in the southern part of the country. It views the Northern Alliance, which has been supported by Iran, Russia and India, as hostile to its interests.
Staff writer Marc Kaufman and special correspondent Colum Lynch contributed to this report.
--------
Armitage eyes major U.N. role in terrorism fight
USA TODAY
10/20/2001
Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/19/armitage.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Afghanistan's postwar future was on the agenda as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met Friday with Lakhdar Brahimi, who is in charge of all U.N. operations in Afghanistan. President Bush was holding parallel talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Shanghai, China, trying to coordinate their positions with his. Brahimi had talks in Washington with Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and Richard Haass, who is plotting U.S. postwar policy, as well as Armitage, and with officials at the National Security Council. The Bush administration is looking to the United Nations to take on a major role. While Brahimi made no statements in Washington, he had already registered skepticism.
After peacekeeping disasters in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda, he urged the Security Council this week not to rush in with peacekeepers when the U.S.-led military campaign ends.
"Afghanistan is a very difficult country," Brahimi said. 'It's a very proud people and they don't like to be ordered around by foreigners. They don't like to see foreigners there, especially in military uniforms."
On another troubled front, an Afghan opposition leader said Thursday he vehemently opposes Secretary of State Colin Powell's suggestion that moderate elements of the ruling Taliban militia might have a role in a future government in Kabul.
The Taliban should be tried in court - not allowed to govern, said Ravan Farhadi, Afghanistan's U.N. ambassador, who represents the former Afghan government.
Farhadi stated the opposition's position in a note to Richard N. Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, who is Powell's coordinator for Afghanistan.
"The Taliban have given not only shelter to (Osama) bin Laden but they facilitated his international terroristic acts," Farhadi told reporters after handing the note to Haass in a U.N. corridor in New York. "We don't agree with Mr. Powell because we think that the Taliban leaders ... need to be (on) trial in a court."
The paper accused the Taliban of committing genocide and crimes against humanity and of providing training centers and safe haven for terrorists.
"In no way they could be considered as eligible for the future political setup of a democratic Afghanistan," the statement concluded.
Farhadi represents the ousted Afghan government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, which is still recognized by the United Nations but not by the United States.
It is part of the northern-based opposition alliance fighting the Taliban.
On the U.S.-led coalition that is on the offensive against the Taliban, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday defended the secondary roles played by some NATO allies.
The coalition is unlikely to unravel, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference. But he said the campaign is a flexible one, involving "different nations at different times doing different things."
"As far as we're concerned, that's fine," Rumsfeld said.
And yet, he told reporters, "A month from now, I expect someone somewhere might report that a particular nation is not doing something or has stopped doing something."
As a result, Rumsfeld said, "The speculation could be: Is the coalition coming apart or unraveling?"
Britain has been most visibly alongside the United States, joining in missile attacks on the Taliban.
Robert Bell, an assistant secretary-general of the NATO military alliance, told reporters Thursday that Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Spain and Italy all are actively participating in the U.S. military campaign.
Bell, a former National Security Council official, said some elite U.S. peacekeeping units in the Balkans may be assigned to the campaign in Afghanistan.
The NATO allies would pick up any slack in the region.
But while Bell described the allies' support as steadfast, he said if the United States takes military action against terrorism in other countries, NATO support would depend on the kind of evidence the United States provided.
At the State Department, Philip Reeker, the deputy spokesman, said the United States was already sharing with NATO allies information and intelligence about terrorism beyond Afghanistan.
Reeker said the sharing would continue.
In the meantime, former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy was sharply critical of the dominant U.S. role in the campaign. He said in New York that it was not acceptable for all decisions to emanate from the United States.
Axworthy said the key nations in the coalition should meet soon and review the mission against the Taliban, its duration and an "exit strategy" - a plan to leave the South Asian country.
-------- u.s.
Commandos fight Taliban
October 20, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011020-12648599.htm
America last night started the ground war against terrorism, sending a team of Army commandos into southern Afghanistan to attack a Taliban target.
A senior U.S. official said elite Army Special Forces fought Taliban troops around an airfield south of Kandahar, the regime's stronghold.
The commandos completed their mission and withdrew late last night, the official said. There was no confirmation of the mission from the Pentagon, which had made no public statement on the raid last night.
Also last night, a helicopter supporting the military campaign crashed in neighboring Pakistan, killing two American soldiers.
"Two U.S. military personnel were killed today in Pakistan as a result of a helicopter accident while supporting Operation Enduring Freedom," the Pentagon said in a brief statement that did not name the soldiers.
Military sources told The Washington Times that the accident was not related to the commando operation.
Two U.S. military officials said the operation was executed by a mixed team of about 100 Rangers, Green Berets and Delta Force commandos.
President Bush approved the mission. He was briefed on it early today while attending an economic summit in China.
The president declared war on international terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. His objectives include toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, destroying the al Qaeda terror network that regime shelters and eliminating its notorious leader, Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.
There were no immediate report late last night on any other casualties or the mission's success.
The mission called for hitting a target near Kandahar, the political and military headquarters of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia, the senior U.S. official said. The commandos were inserted into the area around 7 p.m. EDT, or about 3 a.m. today in Afghanistan.
The nighttime raid came on the 13th day of the around-the-clock U.S.-led air assault on Taliban and terror targets in Afghanistan. The campaign has badly damaged enemy air defenses and made air operations safer for American aircraft, which likely supported last night's action.
The official said last night's operation is the first in what likely will be scores of covert operations aimed at killing members of the Taliban militia and the al Qaeda network throughout the country. He predicted the clashes would be "fierce and bloody."
U.S. special-operations soldiers have moved in and out of Afghanistan for several weeks in preparation for what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said will be "sustained" anti-terrorism operations there.
The senior U.S. official said last night's raid was not the first one planned. He said Army commandos had planned to attack a Taliban target near Kabul earlier this week. Commanders scrubbed the mission due to poor weather - a dust storm.
"The plan was to kill Taliban," said the official, referring to the canceled raid.
The Washington Times quoted an official Monday as saying the Pentagon had picked the first target for the ground phase of the war and it would happen "very soon."
That day, the Pentagon began sending into battle low-flying AC-130 gunships, in a sign that Taliban air defenses were so weak the U.S. aircraft could drop lower and specifically go after enemy ground troops. It was also a sign that the landscape is becoming less threatening to helicopters, a commando's main means of transportation.
To finish the Pentagon's stated job of destroying bin Laden's al Qaeda network of about 3,000 soldiers, air power now shares the stage with ground action.
Army commandos, working off exact intelligence on Taliban and al Qaeda troop locations, will move in under cover of darkness to quickly attack and then retreat.
At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, a deputy director for operations, seemed to lecture the press corps for reporting movements of special-operations troops, who rely on absolute operational security.
"As capable as these forces are, I think the reason is clear," the admiral said. "If or when they are on the ground, being there would make them the most vulnerable individuals engaged in this campaign. And I will not discuss any matters that could possibly put our people at risk. I hope that you will understand. I'm sure that the families of those brave young warriors will understand."
This week, Mr. Rumsfeld began preparing the public for the inevitable insertion of ground troops.
"Warplanes can't crawl around on the ground and find people," the defense secretary said, drawing an image of the dirty war it will take to uproot terrorists in the mountainous, cave-laden country.
Mr. Bush has said he wants bin Laden "dead or alive" for masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed more than 5,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
"The military role will be over there when the Taliban and the al Qaeda are gone," Mr. Rumsfeld said yesterday. "That's what this is about."
The USS Kitty Hawk, one of four Navy carriers operating near Afghanistan, has becoming a floating commando base. Army Green Berets, Navy Seals and Black Hawk helicopters are on board. Commandos are also expected to launch raids from Oman in the south and Uzbekistan in the north.
While U.S. Army commandos fought in the south, Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance kept up the fight north of the capital, Kabul.
The Pentagon seemed to send conflicting signals yesterday on whether targets are picked by planners to help the anti-Taliban Alliance seize the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul.
Mr. Rumsfeld, en route to the B-2 bomber home of Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "There is good coordination from the air with the ground in some places, particularly in the north."
But Adm. Stufflebeem said, "When the time would appear right, we'll do what is necessary to get rid of those military portions of Taliban that may or may not be directed against Northern Alliance."
On the overall campaign, the United States continued Thursday to mount heavy, 24-hour-a-day bombardments, Adm. Stufflebeem said.
More than 90 strike aircraft went after targets that included military storage facilities, surface-to-surface missiles, troop deployments and airfields. The 18 target areas did not include so-called "emerging targets" of moving troops and vehicles that pilots strike from their geographic "kill boxes."
The admiral showed a video of a strike on a garrison near Kandahar.
U.S. forces pummeled the site this week, sending in the AC-130 gunships to spray cannon fire on what is considered elite Taliban forces. The Pentagon strategy is to disperse and drive the Taliban and al Qaeda from the key city. The exodus deprives them and supreme ruler Mullah Mohammed Omar, of any cohesive central command.
Asked if any troops inhabited the garrison, Adm. Stufflebeem contended their presence or absence did not matter.
"That is part of systematically taking away that military capability," he said. "There now is not a garrison at that location to come back to, to refresh, to retrain and re-equip in."
Adm. Stufflebeem also claimed the bombing has accomplished an important milestone.
"We are confident that their communications have been severed" between the Taliban leadership, he said. U.S. munitions have hit numerous command and control centers and knocked out Kabul's Chinese-built telephone exchange.
But Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, who has emerged as the radical Islamic group's public face, told reporters the bombing has done little damage and failed to kill any leaders.
--------
Rangers Hit Taliban in Ground Combat;
Related Helicopter Crash Kills Two GIs
By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 20, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23389-2001Oct19.html
More than 100 Army Rangers and other Special Forces swept into southern Afghanistan yesterday and engaged in a combat operation near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, U.S. officials said, the first known action involving American ground troops in the 13-day-old war.
The lightning raid, accomplished in several hours, was executed with an armada of helicopters that ferried the U.S. troops into Afghanistan and out under cover of darkness. Two U.S. military personnel were killed in a helicopter accident in Pakistan related to the operation, the Pentagon said. They were not part of the force that went into Afghanistan, a U.S. official said, but belonged to an "on-call assistance force."
President Bush said the forces were "encircling the terrorists so we can bring them to justice" and that the two soldiers in the helicopter accident "will not have died in vain."
Pentagon officials, speaking anonymously, provided only a few bare details last night about the raid, declining to specify the target, the identity of the American units involved or the extent of resistance from Taliban forces.
The substantial size of the airborne operation appeared intended as much to make a psychological and political point as to achieve some concrete military gain in an area that has been the object of withering bomb attacks since early in the U.S. air war.
By staging a sizable raid near the city that is the Taliban's spiritual birthplace, American authorities were clearly signaling Afghan tribal leaders who have supported the Taliban the extent of their ability to operate at will inside Afghanistan. The operation also served to underscore the Bush administration's determination to take the war to a new level of intensity in pursuing the Taliban and the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.
The attack followed by a day the reported arrival of the first U.S. Special Operations forces in Taliban-controlled territory in southern Afghanistan. While defense officials cautioned against expecting a surge of American troops into the country, yesterday's action heralded a new phase of the war, one likely to expose U.S. forces to greater risk of casualties.
In recent days, senior administration officials have made it increasingly clear that airstrikes alone would not root out the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership. That job, they have said, will have to be accomplished in a series of arduous ground actions, including reconnaissance missions, small commando raids and higher-profile helicopter assaults.
Bush, who was in Shanghai for meetings with world leaders in conjunction with this weekend's gathering of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, received an hour-long briefing on the ground action via a secure video link starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time.
"My heart goes out to the family and friends of those who lost their life," Bush said a few hours later. "It is hard to express my gratitude and proper words for people that are willing to sacrifice for freedom, and the nation feels the same gratitude. And I want to assure the loved ones that the soldiers died in a cause that is just and right and that we will prevail."
Yesterday's ground attack took place early Saturday morning in Afghanistan and followed a Friday of extensive bombing. U.S. warplanes did not pause for the Muslim sabbath, in contrast to a week ago, when U.S. commanders eased airstrikes for a day because of Muslim religious observances.
But Pentagon officials had made no commitment to honor every Friday that way. And indeed yesterday, with the onset of U.S. ground operations, the air campaign appeared calibrated to maintain maximum pressure on the Taliban and the al Qaeda network.
A senior defense official reported some reduction in planned strike missions compared with a sharp increase earlier in the week. But he said roughly the same number of U.S. attack aircraft had been sent aloft yesterday as in recent days -- about 80 or 90 -- with the expectation some would go after unplanned targets such as troop convoys that emerged.
"Today was nothing like last Friday," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.
Many details about the insertion of the first ground troops into southern Afghanistan were wrapped yesterday in a tight cover of secrecy, and defense officials said that was likely to remain the case.
In Islamabad, a Pakistan military official said that American officials had informed his government that U.S. Special Operations forces would be conducting "hit-and-run" actions in Taliban-ruled areas of Afghanistan in an effort to flush out Taliban and terrorist leaders, the Associated Press reported.
In Washington, the Pentagon declined to provide any details about the Special Operations forces. Such reluctance to discuss specifics was attributed to safety concerns as well as to a desire to preserve the deception and surprise critical to such operations.
"If or when they are on the ground, being there would make them the most vulnerable individuals engaged in this campaign," Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations on the Joint Staff, said at an afternoon Pentagon news conference.
Asked what Special Operations forces might bring to the particular problem of fighting terrorists in Afghanistan, Stufflebeem mentioned the commandos' expertise in three areas: training opposition forces; developing intelligence information; and conducting small-unit, quick-strike raids.
In addition to the ground action in southern Afghanistan, there were signs that small numbers of American troops had already been operating in northern Afghanistan. Two senior Afghan opposition commanders, whose forces are closing in on the key northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, said yesterday that they have been receiving assistance from U.S. military personnel.
In an interview with reporters by satellite telephone from his base in Dara-i Suf, about 55 miles southeast of Mazar-e Sharif, Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum said "eight or nine" U.S. military officials had been with him for the past week as his fighters have battled Taliban forces near the city. But he said the Americans had come to discuss food aid for the Dara-i Suf area, a pocket controlled by the rebel Northern Alliance that has major food shortages caused by drought.
Another Northern Alliance commander near Mazar-e Sharif, Attah Mohammad, told Reuters by satellite telephone that eight Americans had arrived by helicopter to meet with Dostum, apparently on an intelligence or reconnaissance mission.
Discussing U.S. military assistance to anti-Taliban forces, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld confirmed yesterday that the United States is supplying the rebel Northern Alliance with money and ammunition. He also said that American forces were coordinating with the northern rebels better than they were with opposition forces in the south.
"There is good coordination from the air with the ground in some places, particularly in the north," Rumsfeld told reporters who flew with him to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to visit with B-2 bomber crews who had flown some of the air war's first missions. "There is not that kind of coordination as of yet in the south."
As U.S. warplanes completed their 13th straight day of strikes, the list of targets suggested an air campaign still focused largely on pulverizing Taliban military facilities, whether they were occupied or not.
Providing a rundown of Thursday's action, Stufflebeem spoke of 18 planned "target areas" that included military training facilities, artillery camps, ammunition and vehicle storage depots and troop deployment sites. He also mentioned "dispersed armor and radar" around some antiaircraft batteries, and said that some airfields and air defenses -- the focus of the first week of attacks -- were still being hit.
He acknowledged that U.S. military planners did not know whether many of the facilities being targeted were occupied by Taliban or al Qaeda forces. But he indicated this was of little significance, saying that the aim of the strikes was to make the facilities "unavailable" during the coming winter months.
Another senior military officer explained that the bombing was intended more to deny refuge to Taliban troops than to kill them.
"Numbers of people isn't what we're aiming for, it's infrastructure," the officer said.
Rumsfeld took issue with suggestions that U.S. warplanes were not doing enough to support Northern Alliance forces trying to take Mazar-e Sharif. While alliance forces had been reported to be close to capturing it earlier in the week and severing Taliban supply lines to northern units, the town has remained in Taliban control.
Rumsfeld called reports of inadequate U.S. military assistance "confused" and "anecdotal." Stufflebeem, when asked about the situation in Mazar-e Sharif, described "an ebb and a flow from one day to the next" between the Taliban and the rebels that has been going on for a number of years "and probably will continue to for some time."
Stufflebeem indicated that U.S. targeting was following a pattern and timetable that had more to do with Washington's specific objectives than with those of the rebels or any other group.
"We're working on our campaign on our time line for our specific goals and objectives," he said. "We are not concerned at this point, necessarily, how that may appear to those in a particular spot on the ground."
As for what U.S. officials consider will constitute victory, Rumsfeld said the "military role will be over there when the Taliban and the al Qaeda are gone. That's what this is about." At the same time, he cautioned that the fighting in Afghanistan could last a while.
"It's a difficult set of problems that we're dealing with," he said. "It's not going to be fast. It's going to take time."
In a later session with reporters at Whiteman, Rumsfeld was asked whether the war against terrorism would have to be fought in countries outside Afghanistan in order to be successful.
"There's no doubt in my mind," he replied.
Staff writers Mike Allen, traveling with Bush, and Vernon Loeb, traveling with Rumsfeld, contributed to this report.
--------
GROUND WAR
Strike by Army Rangers Masked Raid by Elite Unit, Official Says
New York Times
October 20, 2001
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/international/asia/20CND-MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - The Army airborne raid into southern Afghanistan overnight Friday attacked Taliban military targets and masked a smaller and even stealthier mission by elite commandos to uncover Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, including their location and movements, a Defense Department official said today.
The overt goal of the airborne assault, executed in a hit-and-run strike over several hours by more than 100 Army Rangers and other Special Forces, was to destroy underground bunkers, arms storage sites and air defense locations in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, a Defense Department official said today. Operations were carried out at more than one location there, the official said.
But the covert action aimed at the Taliban leadership was shrouded from view. It may still be under way or could resume soon, spurred by intelligence gathered from the overnight raid or in anticipation of movement or other responses by the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the aftermath of the attacks, the official said.
Army Rangers have in the past operated in tandem with the Army's secret counterterrorist unit, Delta Force. For example, the Rangers, the service's elite infantry, can create a flashy diversion so small Delta teams can carry out their mission. Or they can execute a more forceful entry than the Delta commandos could do themselves given their small numbers.
As the war on terrorism entered a new and dangerous ground phase, Pentagon officials this morning would not say whether the overnight mission had met its goals, and released only sketchy details.
President Bush, speaking from an economic summit gathering in Shanghai, hinted at the true aim of the mission. "We are destroying terrorist hideaways," he said. "We are slowly but surely encircling the terrorists so that we can bring them to justice."
Mr. Bush said that he mourned the loss of two servicemen killed in a helicopter accident related to the mission.
"There will be moments of sacrifice," the president said late this morning, as he was about to begin a meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. "We've seen two such examples today."
The president held a secure video-teleconference this morning with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was at his ranch in Taos, N.M., and with Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs, participating from Washington.
Congressional leaders who were briefed by administration officials on the operation expressed support for the mission. "The military campaign has proceeded just as it should," Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the majority leader, said through a spokesman. "It's not an assault on Islam or the Afghan people, but on terrorists and those who harbor them."
Airstrikes resumed over Afghanistan today, as B-1 and B-52 bombers and carrier-based FA-18's and F-14's dropped laser-guided and satellite-guided bombs during daytime raids over Kabul, the Afghan capital, Kandahar and Herat. "It's the same level as it's been the past few days - robust," said Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.
The Pentagon said that the two American servicemen killed in a supporting rescue mission had not crossed into Afghanistan. Defense officials said today that at least one other person aboard the helicopter was injured in the accident.
They declined to say whether there were any American casualties in the commando raid, although all helicopters involved in the raid reported safely back to the carrier Kitty Hawk in the Arabian Sea.
A senior Defense Department official denied Taliban reports that the helicopter had been shot down. Military and Pakistani officials said the aircraft crashed while landing at the Dalbandin air base in Pakistan, about 60 miles from the Afghan border.
The crash was caused by "a brown-out," the Defense Department official said, and cited initial reports describing a huge cloud of dust kicked up by the wash of the rotor blades upon landing, which apparently disoriented the pilot or interfered with the equipment.
One officer said the helicopter that crashed was an Army Blackhawk, the main heavily armed troop carrier for all Army forces. The Special Forces use a specially equipped version that provides better capabilities at night and can be refueled in the air.
The accident brings to three the number of American troops killed since the United States-led military campaign began two weeks ago with airstrikes aimed at Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, and the government that is protecting him. A master sergeant was killed last week in a forklift accident while constructing an air strip in the Gulf state of Qatar.
Pakistan agreed today to allow American forces to use a fourth base, Shamsi, located near the convergence of the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The base was built for wealthy Saudi sheiks who indulged in world-class falconry there.
The United States is already using bases in Pasni, Jacobabad and Dalbandin for search-and-rescue missions and as staging areas for Special Forces.
The leader of the opposition Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, said today that he hoped for new assistance from the United States both along Afghanistan's northern borders and near Kabul. Reuters quoted him as saying that the resistance was "fighting well" in the north, where there has been an ebb-and-flow battle around the airport outside Mazar-i-Sharif, a strategic crossroads near Uzbekistan.
The United States has troops and aircraft stationed in Uzbekistan, and resistance forces have said that a few Special Forces troops are working with the rebel armies in the area.
"Now our commanders need to prepare and decide whether to take action in Kabul," Mr. Rabbani said. North of Kabul, the resistance faces dug-in Taliban troops whose front lines so far have been largely spared from American bombing.
At a briefing here today, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, discussed the future of Afghanistian in the event the Taliban were deposed. He spoke out against the idea of sending a United Nations peacekeeping force or any other armed foreign force to govern Afghanistan once the current military campaign ends.
"The Afghans wouldn't look fondly on foreigners with guns ruling them," Mr. Brahimi said.
Instead, he said, he reiterated in discussions with American officials here on Friday that the best solution would be for the United Nations to assist in negotiations with the warring parties to put together a council of national unity to govern the country.
He said that while the United Nations was committed to the rehabilitation, reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, it was "too early to say what formula would be suitable" for an international presence after the war ended.
Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he believes that he has weeks, not years, to help pull together a unified Afghan authority that could become a transitional government, bolstered by a huge committment of aid and expertise from the United Nations and member countries.
"Something is going to happen very suddenly and we won't have time to negotiate," said Fred Eckhard, the United Nations spokesman. "Unlike Cambodia, we don't have years to negotiate a settlement among the warring parties, we could only have weeks."
Mr. Brahimi said no group should be excluded from an Afghan transitional authority, especially since the current armed factions did not represent the vast majority of Afghan people.
"The 25 million Afghans have been hostage to these factions that don't represent more than 50,000, 60,000 maybe 70,000 people," he said.
Mr. Brahimi's top priority for the moment is getting food aid into the country in the next several weeks, before winter sets in and Muslim holy days of Ramadan begin.
"I think there are millions at risk not because of the bombing campaign but because of the drought and civil war," he said.
He also told the American officials in private meetings that the immediate problem for the humanitarianrelief effort is money. The United Nations has received only 10 percent of the $600 million pledged by countries for food relief to Afghanistan. In some instances, the U.N. has been unable to write the necessary checks for food and logistics expenses.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Sverdlovsk anthrax incident 1979
From: "David Hall" <d.q.hall@worldnet.att.net>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001
I had told some people about an incident of accidental release of anthrax in Siberia during the seventies as shown on a news show I turned on about 10:30 Thursday night. They interviewed a Russian doctor who investigated the incident. I found this web site with part of a book (pdf) about the incident. It is numerous pages in depth; I read about five to ten pages.
There might have been 50 - 1000 dead with spores remaining in the area for some years after the initial contamination. The news show indicated there were 5000 exposed and 70 dead of anthrax infection. The disease was more likely to affect older than younger people and apparently those closest to the release of spores may have been the hardest hit. On another web site there was unconfirmed information about an Iraqi site SW of Baghdad on the Tigris River where weapons grade anthrax was developed.
http://www.panmacmillan.com/PlagueWars/PDFs/PW_C09pp66_82.pdf
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WHO fears TB outbreak in Asia
October 20, 2001
By Osamu Tsukimori
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011020-94691384.htm
World Health Organization officials fear a tuberculosis catastrophe may soon grip south-central Asia in the wake of the U.S.-led anti-terror campaign against Osama bin Laden.
"The situation is pretty bad," said Mario Raviglione, WHO's coordinator for TB Strategy and Operations, based in Geneva. "Without sufficient medicine and in conditions of increasing poverty, we would certainly expect that TB will become even worse than it was already without war. Fifty-six percent of people who are infected will die."
WHO estimates Pakistan had 269,000 cases of TB in 1999 and ranks as the sixth-highest-incidence country; it estimates Afghanistan had 71,000 cases, which gives it the 20th-highest-incidence rate.
On Monday, representatives from the top 22 TB high-incidence countries will convene at the First Stop TB Partners' Forum in Washington. The two-day conference is to be attended by WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn and international financier and philanthropist George Soros. Its aim will be to detect 75 percent of all TB cases worldwide by 2005 and cure 85 percent of those cases. The 22 nations being represented at the conference are responsible for 80 percent of all TB cases.
Events in Central Asia, and how instability there might contribute to the spread of TB, are sure to dominate discussions at the conference. Health officials note that during war, the mortality rate from TB typically increases dramatically. Mr. Raviglione said the mortality rate from the disease increased seven-fold during World War II, killing nearly half of those infected.
The projected TB crisis is in addition to the health risks heightened by the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, which is endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan and which causes severe internal bleeding. About 35 percent of those infected die from the fever. Four cases of the fever were reported in Pakistan near the Afghan border.
Mr. Reichman, whose book "TB Time Bomb" was published this week, fears that a multidrug-resistant TB may be spreading throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the four drugs needed to treat TB in the crucial first two months are not available.
"An epidemic occurs in areas with a poor TB-control program," he said. "Here you have an unprecedented conference where all these people are getting together to stop TB globally, which is something we can do, and at the same time, these world events are accelerating the TB problem globally."
Some observers note that the physical strain on refugees and the cramped conditions at refugee camps will aid the spread of the disease. "Afghan refugees are presumably living together in very close proximity; they are probably not getting good diets and not getting enough exercise - none of these things promote good health," said Lee B. Reichman, director of New Jersey Medical School National Tuberculosis Center in Newark.
For effectively controlling TB, officials say WHO needs an additional $1.3 billion a year to augment its Directly Observed Therapy Short Course, or DOTS, program, which tries to avert the outbreak by wide distribution of drugs and health care infrastructure.
Diana Weil, World Bank senior public health specialist, said the key is the strong collaboration of Pakistan and Afghanistan with donor nations such as Britain, Italy and Japan, as well as the World Bank. With increased efforts, Pakistan strengthened its TB program last year, she said.
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Lacking a Center, Terrorist Networks Are Hard to Find, Let Alone Fight
New York Times
October 20, 2001
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/20/arts/20NET.html?searchpv=nytToday
He sits motionless like a spider in the center of its web," is one description of the villain, "but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized," though it is "impossible to get evidence which could convict in a court of law."
Such are the wiles of the evil Professor Moriarty, described by his nemesis, Sherlock Holmes, shortly before they plunge into Reichenbach Falls, apparently to their deaths.
This metaphor of a spider web with a masterly evil plotter at its center is appealing as a description of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, but it may also be incorrect. A web, after all, has crucial vulnerabilities. Eliminate its creator, and the threads weaken. Destroy a few crucial links, and the strands collapse.
But terrorist organizations are generally referred to as networks, which can be quite varied. Instead of being built around a controlling hub surrounded by terrorist cells, a network can be a sprawling, decentralized arrangement. In fact, the declarations that Americans are engaged in a different sort of war than ever before may have to do with this structure and not just with terrorism itself. Disabling a network often requires different strategies from those used to attack a nation or a hierarchical organization. The challenge may also be a distorted reflection of more profound shifts in culture and politics. For better or worse, the world has entered an era of networks.
In recent years, for example the idea of a network has received substantial attention in mathematics, computer science and sociology. A network is, to put it simply, a collection of connected points called nodes. A node can be a telephone connected to switching stations and other telephones. It can be a computer using the Internet. Or it can be an individual communicating with other individuals for a common purpose. Networks are being studied for their properties (in a mathematical field known as network theory), for their applications (as in the Internet) and for an understanding of social organizations (ranging from online newsgroups to terrorist groups).
The design of a network determines its resilience, its vulnerability and its power to expand. Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley, argues in a dense analytic trilogy, "The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture" (1998, Blackwell), that the development of computer networks, the Internet and banking networks has begun to affect the world order.
As has been argued by other scholars, Mr. Castells says that these networks are creating new social structures. Once commerce and communication take place beyond national control, the status of the state changes. Notions of sovereignty and self-sufficiency are weakened. These developments have been welcomed by many for their promise of new forms of governance. But at the same time, these wide-ranging networks inspire an opposing reaction. The more the state withers, the more anxious and rootless its citizens become. And so there is an increasing pursuit of identity and a stronger urge to assert distinctions that have nothing to do with the state.
In extreme form these network effects are reflected in the current situation. Technological networks helped terrorist networks flourish; agents could ignore national boundaries, rely on remote financial dealings and use the Internet to obtain news, send e-mail and book flights. (The hijackers even walked out of one hotel because it did not offer high-speed Internet access). Such international coordination and communication would have been far more difficult a decade ago. But these technological networks are also being used in fanatical pursuit of fundamentalist identity. The supranational network serves a supranational identity, creating a double threat to the state.
Purely apart from its fundamentalist fury, in fact, Al Qaeda's network is trying to undermine at least some aspects of the modern nation- state. But unlike those who welcome a world free of nationalism, Al Qaeda seeks an almost premodern form of association. The modern state is partly founded on rational principles and is given shape by bureaucratic hierarchies and evolving canons of law. The terror networks are after something different: the dissolution of such principles and hierarchies and the expansion of religious connections across all national boundaries.
In this case the attack had an archetypal quality, mounted against the most powerful nation-state on the globe. The vulnerability of the modern state is partly its transparency; its organization is based on interlocking webs, each dominated by a central authority. The sites targeted for the Sept. 11 attacks included crucial nodes of the state, the points required for maintenance of civic order: military and financial centers and possibly executive and legislative centers.
The difficulty is that now a state must fight a network, which is far from easy since a network can be made unusually resilient and need not be designed around dominant power centers. This was, for example, a characteristic of a computer network designed for the Defense Department in the 1960's. It was meant to be invulnerable to nuclear attack. There was no hierarchical organization. No single computer or computer site was the center for the transmission of communications. Every message was broken into "packets" that could take completely different paths to their goals. If one node - a computer system or communications center - was taken out, messages could continue unimpeded. The Internet is the heir of that early network and preserves the same resilient design, which is one reason it was so much less affected than local telephone and television service on Sept. 11.
It may be that Osama bin Laden's network and many others are built on similar principles. What if the network is designed so that if Mr. bin Laden were removed, the network would proceed unimpeded? What if the network is less hierarchical than it seems, so there are few if any agents with a complete overview of what is happening? Some people in intelligence have theorized that this was the case with some of the hijackers. How is this kind of network, a modified human version of the Internet, to be undermined, particularly given its intermeshing links with other terror networks with their own design?
The answers to these kinds of questions are undoubtedly being debated. But if an Internet-like network is the model, warfare will have to change its focus; the state will have to take on network capabilities that may include espionage as well as intricate coalitions and collusions. As has been emphasized, no single attack or approach will be sufficient.
In fact, one important strategy for bringing down a sophisticated network may be (as has been seen with the Internet) a metaphorical virus that could - confuse communications and connections with disinformation and covert and subtle disruptions. Such viruses may be in the process of development. But the outcome, as President Bush has already warned, is not likely to be a wrestling match with a single villain crashing to his death at Reichenbach Falls.
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FREE SPEECH RADIO ANNOUNCES UNPRECEDENTED WAR COVERAGE
Daily Cast Challenges Information Black-Out Led By Mainstream Press
PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 20, 2001
CONTACT: Pacifica Reporters Against Censorship:
Randi Zimmerman, 813-238-8205
Strike Background: www.fsrn.org
NEW YORK: Free Speech Radio News (FSRN) says that with hundreds of Afghani citizens killed in the first weeks of U.S./British-led bombing, it has positioned reporters across the Middle East and South Asia to cover this potentially global conflict--much of which is not accurately reported in the corporate press.
Flying routinely under government censors, and anchored by former Pacifica Network News veteran Verna Avery Brown, the newscast challenges the information blackout sweeping the mainstream media with a pool of over 100 progressive journalists around the world--filing from every continent except Antarctica.
In a climate of increasing political repression, FSRN is one of the few remaining independent sources for real information about the U.S. government's so-called war against terrorism--information not owned by a corporation, controlled by the Pentagon or vetted by the White House.
This daily, ground-breaking, half-hour newscast, airing on more than 50 community radio stations, over the Internet and beamed to 120 countries via short-wave, is proud to bring you:
--Fariba Nawa in Islamabad, providing first-hand accounts of U.S. air strikes, plus coverage of the Pakistani refugee crisis. --Jeremy Scahill, the youngest-ever Polk Award winner offering critical analysis of the political alliances being sought by the U.S. --Sputnik Kilambi reporting from South Asia, with deep contacts among Indian and Pakistani peace activists. --James Smoot on the ground in Istanbul, reporting on violent police repression of civilian protest.
Other international coverage includes Rafael Krafft in Occupied Palestine; Steve Negus in Egypt; Rory Mulholland in Turkminestan; Rupert Cook in the Sudan and Sam Olukoya in Nigeria.
Kata Mester on Capitol Hill covers the clampdown on civil liberties. An impressive pool of journalists, including Polk-Award winner Robert Knight, Geoff Brady, Miranda Kennedy and Eileen Sutton bring daily news from *the first ground zero* in New York. Susan Wood weighs in from the United Nations, while FSRN is also keenly focused on the U.S. peace movement and other domestic issues.
This daily newscast is breaking new ground with fresh, tough-minded reportage,* said media critique and syndicated columnist Norman Solomon. *Born out of the censorship of Pacifica's top managers, Free Speech Radio News shows that radio still has a chance to live up to its potential as a source of news and views connecting people--from the grassroots--across the country and around the world.
FSRN, which supporters say features the best of progressive reporting from around the country and around the world, is twenty months old and was first created by dozens of freelance reporters who struck Pacifica Network News (PNN) last year over rampant censorship.
Critics say PNN has long-abandoned its progressive mission in tone and content, often sounding indistinguishable from mainstream media. Most of the stations carrying FSRN are Pacifica affiliates, and most have cancelled PNN. (For a list of those stations, see www.fsrn.org.)
FSRN will continue to uplink to a satellite at 5:00 p.m., Eastern Time, at coordinates A72.7M [b67.4]. MP3 and Real Audio files are posted to the strikers' web site daily at www.fsrn.org.
FSRN is produced in Washington D.C., San Francisco and Tampa. Aaron Glantz produces the cast, Randi Zimmerman is Headlines Editor. FSRN also receives critical production support from the Independent Media Center in New York (http://www.nyc.indymedia.org) and community station WMNF in Florida.
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TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS LIFTED FOR GREENPEACE ACTIVISTS AND FREELANCE JOURNALISTS International Defendants Can Return to Home and Family Before November Trial
From: "stephanie mills" <stephanie.mills@dialb.greenpeace.org>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001
www.greenpeaceusa.org
LOS ANGELES, CA - A Judge ruled today that nine Greenpeace protestors and one freelance journalist, facing felony charges stemming from a peaceful protest against a missile defense test in California on July 14th, can travel home before returning to Los Angeles for trial currently set for November 20, 2001. Since July 14th the nine defendants have been restricted to the Central District of California.
"It has been too long and we're all looking forward to seeing our friends, family and the people who have supported us," said Nic Clyde of Australia. "However, I am also looking towards my return here and having my day in court when my integrity will become public record."
Today's hearing was the latest legal battle for 15 Greenpeace activists and two freelance journalists who were arrested by the F.B.I. near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California following a peaceful protest against the controversial missile defense program in July.
All 17, including the journalists, were charged with conspiring to violate a safety zone- a class D felony with a maximum six-year prison term and $250,000 fine. They were also charged with entering military property without permission- a misdemeanor with a 6-month maximum sentence and $5,000 fine.
While the six defendants from the United States were given immediate bail, the international defendants had their passports seized and all but one had their travel restricted to the central district of California. The international defendants are from Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
"Hopefully the public will get to know these defendants as we know them, individuals who have behaved with honor and courage." said John Passacantando, Greenpeace Executive Director in the United States. "Voicing dissent and engaging in peaceful, non-violent protest are the duties of responsible, engaged citizens in democracy."
During today's hearing, the defendants plead not guilty to the second superceding indictment.
CONTACT: Carol Gregory 202-251-3998 (cell/on location) Rose Young 202-431-3269 (cell/Los Angeles)
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Legislation Introduced to Create a Department of Peace
http://www.house.gov/kucinich/action/peace.htm
On July 11, 2001 Congressman Kucinich introduced H.R. 2459, a bill to create a Cabinet-level Department of Peace which embodies a broad-based approach to peaceful, non-violent conflict resolution at both domestic and international levels. The Department of Peace would serve to promote non-violence as an organizing principle in our society, and help to create the conditions for a more peaceful world. To read the text of the legislation, along with a current list of cosponsors click here.
Domestically, the Department would be responsible for developing policies which address issues such as domestic violence, child abuse, and mistreatment of the elderly. Internationally, the Department would analyze foreign policy and make recommendations to the President on matters pertaining to national security, including the protection of human rights and the prevention and de-escalation of unarmed and armed international conflict.
The Department would also have an Office of Peace Education that would work with educators in elementary, secondary and universities in the development and implementation of curricula to instruct students in peaceful conflict resolution skills. In addition, a Peace Academy, modeled after the military service academies, would be established to provide instruction in peace education and offer opportunities for graduates to serve in programs dedicated to domestic or international nonviolent conflict resolution.
I encourage you to review the Department of Peace legislation and share with me any comments you have on the legislation.
What Can You Do To Help
Hold "Teach-Ins" on the Issue of Peace. Holding a public "Teach-In" on the issue of peace and non-violence is a great way to get your community to debate the issues. You can do this by inviting a public official, religious leaders, educators, heads of organizations or local community leaders who have contributed to promoting peace and justice.
Contact your state representatives, city council, mayor and ask them to sponsor a resolution that promotes peace and justice on the local, national and international levels.
Write an opinion-editorial for your local paper and get it published, emphasizing the importance of local communities making efforts towards encouraging peace, tolerance and understanding.
Join an organization that has a campaign on the issue of peace and work with them, or start your own organization.
Circulate a petition to a local leader encourage them to keep the issue of peace and understanding on the local agenda.
Organize a peace rally to bring the issue of peace to the forefront of local community leaders and elected officials.
Organize a booth or a display case at local events. Your local library or community center are great places to set up an eye catching display about an issue that is important to you. Or you may want to reserve a booth at a highly attended event such as a concert, local sports event, rallies or community picnics.
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H. R. 2459 To establish a Department of Peace.
HR 2459 IH
107th CONGRESS 1st Session
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
July 11, 2001 - Mr. KUCINICH (for himself, Mr. CONYERS, Mr. LEWIS of Georgia, Mr. HINCHEY, Mr. RAHALL, Ms. LEE, Mr. CLAY, Ms. WOOLSEY, Mrs. MALONEY of New York, Mr. UDALL of Colorado, Mr. BROWN of Ohio, Ms. SOLIS, Mr. FARR of California, Mrs. JONES of Ohio, Mr. STARK, Ms. MCKINNEY, Mr. JACKSON of Illinois, Mr. PAYNE, Mr. SANDERS, Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas, Ms. WATSON, Mr. FILNER, Mr. DAVIS of Illinois, Ms. VELAZQUEZ, Mr. DEFAZIO, Mr. GUTIERREZ, Mr. HONDA, Mr. OWENS, Mr. EVANS, Ms. SCHAKOWSKY, Mr. TOWNS, Ms. CARSON of Indiana, Mr. SERRANO, Mr. BAIRD, Mr. HOLT, Mr. MCGOVERN, Ms. WATERS, and Mr. SCOTT) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Government Reform, and in addition to the Committees on International Relations, the Judiciary, and Education and the Workforce, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned
A BILL To establish a Department of Peace.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. FINDINGS.
Congress finds the following:
(1) On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously declared the independence of the 13 colonies, and the achievement of peace was recognized as one of the highest duties of the new organization of free and independent States.
(2) In declaring, `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness', the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World, derived the creative cause of nationhood from `the Laws of Nature' and the entitlements of `Nature's God', such literal referrals in the Declaration of Independence thereby serving to celebrate the unity of human thought, natural law, and spiritual causation.
(3) The architects of the Declaration of Independence `with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence' spoke to the connection between the original work infusing principle into the structure of a democratic government seeking to elevate the condition of humanity, and the activity of a higher power which moves to guide the Nation's fortune.
(4) The Constitution of the United States of America, in its Preamble, further sets forth the insurance of the cause of peace in stating: `We the People of the United States, in Order to Form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.'
(5) The Founders of this country gave America a vision of freedom for the ages and provided people with a document which gave this Nation the ability to adapt to an undreamed of future.
(6) It is the sacred duty of the people of the United States to receive the living truths of our founding documents and to think anew to develop institutions that permit the unfolding of the highest moral principles in this Nation and around the world.
(7) During the course of the 20th century, more than 100,000,000 people perished in wars, and now, at the dawn of the 21st century, violence seems to be an overarching theme in the world, encompassing personal, group, national, and international conflict, extending to the production of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction which have been developed for use on land, air, sea, and in space.
(8) Such conflict is often taken as a reflection of the human condition without questioning whether the structures of thought, word, and deed which the people of the United States have inherited are any longer sufficient for the maintenance, growth, and survival of the United States and the world.
(9) Promoting a culture of peace has been recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) through passage of a resolution declaring an International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children 2001-2010. The objective is to further strengthen the global movement for a culture of peace following the observance of the International Year for the Culture of Peace in 2000.
(10) We are in a new millennium, and the time has come to review age-old challenges with new thinking wherein we can conceive of peace as not simply being the absence of violence, but the active presence of the capacity for a higher evolution of the human awareness, of respect, trust, and integrity; wherein we all may tap the infinite capabilities of humanity to transform consciousness and conditions which impel or compel violence at a personal, group, or national level toward developing a new understanding of, and a commitment to, compassion and love, in order to create a `shining city on a hill', the light of which is the light of nations.
TITLE I--ESTABLISHMENT OF DEPARTMENT OF PEACE
SEC. 101. ESTABLISHMENT OF DEPARTMENT OF PEACE.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT- There is hereby established a Department of Peace (hereinafter in this Act referred to as the `Department'), which shall--
(1) be a cabinet-level department in the executive branch of the Federal Government; and
(2) be dedicated to peacemaking and the study of conditions that are conducive to both domestic and international peace.
(b) SECRETARY OF PEACE- There shall be at the head of the Department a Secretary of Peace (hereinafter in this Act referred to as the `Secretary'), who shall be appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate.
(c) MISSION- The Department shall--
(1) hold peace as an organizing principle, coordinating service to every level of American society;
(2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights;
(3) strengthen nonmilitary means of peacemaking;
(4) promote the development of human potential;
(5) work to create peace, prevent violence, divert from armed conflict, use field-tested programs, and develop new structures in nonviolent dispute resolution;
(6) take a proactive, strategic approach in the development of policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict;
(7) address matters both domestic and international in scope; and
(8) encourage the development of initiatives from local communities, religious groups, and nongovernmental organizations.
SEC. 102. RESPONSIBILITIES AND POWERS.
(a) IN GENERAL- The Secretary shall--
(1) work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
(2) serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
(3) call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
(4) monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.
(b) DOMESTIC RESPONSIBILITIES- The Secretary shall--
(1) develop policies that address domestic violence, including spousal abuse, child abuse, and mistreatment of the elderly;
(2) create new policies and incorporate existing programs that reduce drug and alcohol abuse;
(3) develop new policies and incorporate existing policies regarding crime, punishment, and rehabilitation;
(4) develop policies to address violence against animals;
(5) analyze existing policies, employ successful, field-tested programs, and develop new approaches for dealing with the implements of violence, including gun-related violence and the overwhelming presence of handguns;
(6) develop new programs that relate to the societal challenges of school violence, gangs, racial or ethnic violence, violence against gays and lesbians, and police-community relations disputes;
(7) make policy recommendations to the Attorney General regarding civil rights and labor law;
(8) assist in the establishment and funding of community-based violence prevention programs, including violence prevention counseling and peer mediation in schools;
(9) counsel and advocate on behalf of women victimized by violence;
(10) provide for public education programs and counseling strategies concerning hate crimes;
(11) promote racial and ethnic tolerance;
(12) finance local community initiatives that can draw on neighborhood resources to create peace projects that facilitate the development of conflict resolution at a national level and thereby inform and inspire national policy; and
(13) provide ethical-based and value-based analyses to the Department of Defense. (c) INTERNATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES- The Secretary shall--
(1) advise the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State on all matters relating to national security, including the protection of human rights and the prevention of, amelioration of, and de-escalation of unarmed and armed international conflict;
(2) provide for the training of all United States personnel who administer postconflict reconstruction and demobilization in war-torn societies;
(3) sponsor country and regional conflict prevention and dispute resolution initiatives, create special task forces, and draw on local, regional, and national expertise to develop plans and programs for addressing the root sources of conflict in troubled areas;
(4) provide for exchanges between the United States and other nations of individuals who endeavor to develop domestic and international peace-based initiatives;
(5) encourage the development of international sister city programs, pairing United States cities with cities around the globe for artistic, cultural, economic, educational, and faith-based exchanges;
(6) administer the training of civilian peacekeepers who participate in multinational nonviolent police forces and support civilian police who participate in peacekeeping;
(7) jointly with the Secretary of the Treasury, strengthen peace enforcement through hiring and training monitors and investigators to help with the enforcement of international arms embargoes;
(8) facilitate the development of peace summits at which parties to a conflict may gather under carefully prepared conditions to promote nonviolent communication and mutually beneficial solutions;
(9) submit to the President recommendations for reductions in weapons of mass destruction, and make annual reports to the President on the sale of arms from the United States to other nations, with analysis of the impact of such sales on the defense of the United States and how such sales affect peace;
(10) in consultation with the Secretary of State, develop strategies for sustainability and management of the distribution of international funds; and
(11) advise the United States Ambassador to the United Nations on matters pertaining to the United Nations Security Council.
(d) HUMAN SECURITY RESPONSIBILITIES- The Secretary shall address and offer nonviolent conflict resolution strategies to all relevant parties on issues of human security if such security is threatened by conflict, whether such conflict is geographic, religious, ethnic, racial, or class-based in its origin, derives from economic concerns (including trade or maldistribution of wealth), or is initiated through disputes concerning scarcity of natural resources (such as water and energy resources), food, trade, or environmental concerns.
(e) MEDIA-RELATED RESPONSIBILITIES- Respecting the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the requirement for free and independent media, the Secretary shall--
(1) seek assistance in the design and implementation of nonviolent policies from media professionals;
(2) study the role of the media in the escalation and de-escalation of conflict at domestic and international levels and make findings public; and
(3) make recommendations to professional media organizations in order to provide opportunities to increase media awareness of peace-building initiatives.
(f) EDUCATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES- The Secretary shall--
(1) develop a peace education curriculum, which shall include studies of--
(A) the civil rights movement in the United States and throughout the world, with special emphasis on how individual endeavor and involvement have contributed to advancements in peace and justice; and
(B) peace agreements and circumstances in which peaceful intervention has worked to stop conflict;
(2) in cooperation with the Secretary of Education--
(A) commission the development of such curricula and make such curricula available to local school districts to enable the utilization of peace education objectives at all elementary and secondary schools in the United States; and
(B) offer incentives in the form of grants and training to encourage the development of State peace curricula and assist schools in applying for such curricula;
(3) work with educators to equip students to become skilled in achieving peace through reflection, and facilitate instruction in the ways of peaceful conflict resolution;
(4) maintain a site on the Internet for the purposes of soliciting and receiving ideas for the development of peace from the wealth of political, social and cultural diversity;
(5) proactively engage the critical thinking capabilities of grade school, high school, and college students and teachers through the Internet and other media and issue periodic reports concerning submissions;
(6) create and establish a Peace Academy, which shall--
(A) be modeled after the military service academies;
(B) provide a 4-year course of instruction in peace education, after which graduates will be required to serve 5 years in public service in programs dedicated to domestic or international nonviolent conflict resolution; and
(7) provide grants for peace studies departments in colleges and universities throughout the United States.
SEC. 103. PRINCIPAL OFFICERS.
(a) UNDER SECRETARY OF PEACE- There shall be in the Department an Under Secretary of Peace, who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. During the absence or disability of the Secretary, or in the event of a vacancy in the office of the Secretary, the Under Secretary shall act as Secretary. The Secretary shall designate the order in which other officials of the Department shall act for and perform the functions of the Secretary during the absence or disability of both the Secretary and Under Secretary or in the event of vacancies in both of those offices.
(b) ADDITIONAL POSITIONS- (1) There shall be in the Department--
(A) an Assistant Secretary for Peace Education and Training;
(B) an Assistant Secretary for Domestic Peace Activities;
(C) an Assistant Secretary for International Peace Activities;
(D) an Assistant Secretary for Technology for Peace;
(E) an Assistant Secretary for Arms Control and Disarmament;
(F) an Assistant Secretary for Peaceful Coexistence and Nonviolent Conflict Resolution;
(G) an Assistant Secretary for Human and Economic Rights; and
(H) a General Counsel.
(2) Each of the Assistant Secretaries and the General Counsel shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.
(3) There shall be in the Department an Inspector General, who shall be appointed in accordance with the provisions in the Inspector General Act of 1978 (5 U.S.C. App.).
(4) There shall be in the Department four additional officers who shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The officers appointed under this paragraph shall perform such functions as the Secretary shall prescribe, including--
(A) congressional relations functions;
(B) public information functions, including providing, through the use of the latest technologies, useful information about peace and the work of the Department;
(C) management and budget functions; and
(D) planning, evaluation, and policy development functions, including development of policies to promote the efficient and coordinated administration of the Department and its programs and encourage improvements in conflict resolution and violence prevention.
(5) In any case in which the President submits the name of an individual to the Senate for confirmation as an officer of the Department under this subsection, the President shall state the particular functions of the Department such individual will exercise upon taking office.
(c) AUTHORITY OF SECRETARY- Each officer described in this section shall report directly to the Secretary and shall, in addition to any functions vested in or required to be delegated to such officer, perform such additional functions as the Secretary may prescribe.
SEC. 104. OFFICE OF PEACE EDUCATION AND TRAINING.
(a) IN GENERAL- There shall be in the Department an Office of Peace Education and Training, the head of which shall be the Assistant Secretary for Peace Education and Training. The Assistant Secretary for Peace Education and Training shall carry out those functions of the Department relating to the creation, encouragement, and impact of peace education and training at the elementary, secondary, university, and postgraduate levels, including the development of a Peace Academy.
(b) PEACE CURRICULUM- The Assistant Secretary of Peace Education and Training, in cooperation with the Secretary of Education, shall develop a peace curriculum and supporting materials for distribution to departments of education in each State and territory of the United States. The peace curriculum shall include the building of communicative peace skills, nonviolent conflict resolution skills, and other objectives to increase the knowledge of peace processes.
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