------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
U.S. Sees Increased Potential for Nuclear Attack
State Dept. official worried about nuclear weapons
Nuclear attack a real, if remote, possibility
Feds: Terrorists Would Have Used Nukes
Pakistani Nuke Scientist in Hospital
Bush - Putin May See Highlights
Experts Urge Putin and Bush to 'De - Alert' Missiles
National Guard Deploys to More Nuclear Power Plants
Committee Considers Nuclear Liability
Nuclear Power Plants Tighten Security
States Assign More Troops After U.S. Terror Warning
Private Flights Are Halted Near Nuclear Installations
U.S. Sees Increased Potential for Nuclear Attack
Report shows risks to southern Idaho water supply
Negotiators cut proposed spending for Yucca Mountain
Reid gets his way on Yucca budget
Attacks heighten nuclear waste worries
ORNL restricts truck traffic from its main roadway
Congressional committee approves Hanford funding
Administration Defends Issuing Attack Warning

MILITARY
Blair Campaigns For War Support
The Case for Ground Troops
Veterans Since Boyhood At Home on Front Line
What the Disease Is, and How to Identify and Treat It
New mysterious anthrax cases raise questions
The ex-presidents' club
The One-Eyed Man
Committee: Pull CIA from Peru anti-drug flights
Saddam urges U.S. to stop attacks on Afghanistan
Israeli Forces Kill 4 Palestinians
Vieques: MORATORIUM ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS OVER
War on terrorism to top U.N. agenda
U.S. troops on the ground
Concern grows over pace of U.S. campaign
U.S. Troops Coordinating Airstrikes

ENERGY AND OTHER
New England's EMI plans 420 MW Nantucket wind farm
LONG ISLAND UTILITY INSTALLS FUEL CELLS
UNION BUILDS GREEN HEADQUARTERS
ENERGY DEPARTMENT CELEBRATES WEATHERIZATION DAY
ALASKA TIGHTENS SECURITY ON HAZMAT SHIPMENTS

POLICE / PRISONERS
FBI Subpoenas Labs, Schools in Anthrax Probe
Unleashing the CIA
Pentagon Seeks Tinkerers Against Terrorism
Bin Laden Met With CIA Agent in July
Anti-Terror Efforts Revive Interest in an Old Enemy
Canada puts counterterror effort on fast track

ACTIVISTS
Hartford Police Crush The Right To Dissent
PILGER: THIS WAR IS A FARCE



-------- NUCLEAR

U.S. Sees Increased Potential for Nuclear Attack

Reuters
Wednesday October 31
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011031/wl/attack_nuclear_usa_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 attacks have increased concerns that extremists would use weapons of mass destruction -- including possibly nuclear weapons -- against the United States, Undersecretary of State John Bolton said on Wednesday.

Answering questions at a breakfast with defense writers, Bolton predicted that if extremists possess weapons of mass destruction -- a term that encompasses nuclear, biological and chemical arms -- they will use them.

``I'm concerned about weapons of mass destruction everywhere and my concern about weapons of mass destruction everywhere has gone up since the (U.S.-led anti-terrorism) war began,'' he said.

Bolton, the State Department's top official dealing with arms control and international security affairs, said he was worried ``there will be use of a weapon of mass destruction.''

Sept. 11 proved that anybody willing to fly a jet airplane into the World Trade Center is ``not going to be deterred by anything,'' he said. ``Had these people had ballistic missile technology, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it.''

``If they could couple that with a weapon of mass destruction -- nuclear or whatever -- and dropped it on lower Manhattan, as tragic as the destruction of the World Trade Center was, the loss of lower Manhattan or any comparable place would obviously be a lot worse,'' he said.

Referring to the U.S. struggle with a spreading incidence of infection with the potent germ warfare agent anthrax, Bolton said ``we're having use by somebody of a weapon of mass destruction now, so it's not a hypothetical concern.''

``If the terrorists who launched the attacks on September 11 had had weapons of mass destruction and they thought they could have used then, the horror of what they did demonstrated they'd be prepared to use them as well. So I think it is obviously a national priority,'' he said.

NUCLEAR QUESTION MARK

He refused to say if the United States knew whether Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and his al Qaeda network of Islamic extremists -- blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed an estimated 5,000 people -- were in possession of nuclear weapons.

But he said one consequence of the U.S. attacks was a heightened awareness of the interrelationship between nonproliferation and terrorists and that as a result, efforts to halt the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological arms will receive more attention in coming months.

``Essentially every state on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism is also an aspirant to obtain weapons of mass destruction or may already have them,'' he said.

``So dealing with global terrorism ... will inevitably get us into the business of dealing with weapons of mass destruction proliferation,'' a topic now under discussion with Russia and China, he added.

Iran, Iraq and North Korea (news - web sites) have long been key states of U.S. concern in regard to both weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Some administration officials have urged including Iraq as a target in the war on terrorism but so far they have not prevailed.

Bolton sidestepped a direct answer on whether the United States believed Pakistan could lose control of its nuclear arsenal in any political instability that might result from its alliance with Washington in the anti-terrorism war.

He noted a recent statement by Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, who said he believed Pakistan does have adequate control over its nuclear weapons.

``I can't think of anyone who would be more concerned about that question than the defense minister of India,'' he said.

India and Pakistan are bitter nuclear rivals.

Bolton said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had made ''courageous decisions'' in supporting the anti-terrorism effort and the United States has taken steps, including financial assistance, to support his government.

He added: ``The question of stability on the subcontinent was something we were concerned about before the attacks of September 11 and what's happened after that, including the military operations in Afghanistan (news - web sites), have not reduced those concerns.''

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State Dept. official worried about nuclear weapons

USA TODAY
10/31/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/31/terrorists-nukes.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior State Department official said Wednesday he was convinced if the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in New York had possessed nuclear weapons they would have used them. "Had these people had ballistic missile technology, there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it," John R. Bolton said. And "if they could couple that with a weapon of mass destruction, nuclear or whatever, and dropped it on lower Manhattan, as tragic as the destruction of the World Trade Center was, the loss of lower Manhattan or any comparable place would obviously be a lot worse," he said.

The undersecretary of state for arms control and international security said the Sept. 11 attacks underscored a need to deter the spread of nuclear technology and a need for an American defense against missile attack.

"It is obviously a national priority," Bolton said. But, he said, "it's hard to see how people with that belief system could be deterred."

Describing himself as deeply concerned, Bolton said the pursuit of ways to avert terrorists' use of nuclear or other devastating weapons was "a national priority."

"Had these people had ballistic missile technology and nuclear weapons there isn't the slightest doubt they would have used it," he said.

President Bush will try again next month to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to cut off the spread of sophisticated technology and conventional weapons to Iran when they meet next month in Washington and at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bolton said.

"It would go a long way to improve the strategic structure if Russia's behavior was more like ours," he said.

Senior Israeli officials raised their concerns about Iran in talks last week at the White House and State Department, he said.

The issue is likely to be on the agenda for talks Secretary of State Colin Powell will hold in Washington on Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

Bolton said in a breakfast meeting with military and diplomatic reporters that the anthrax breakout has already put the United States under terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction. Bolton said he could not shed any light on the source of the anthrax.

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Nuclear attack a real, if remote, possibility
US eyes Pakistan, former Soviet Union as likely sources of weapons-grade material.

Christian Science Monitor
October 31, 2001
By Brad Knickerbocker bradknick@aol.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1031/p2s1-usmi.html

WASHINGTON - As the story goes, Osama bin Laden offered criminals in Chechnya $30 million and two tons of opium in return for 20 Russian nuclear warheads.

The chilling account, contained in a 1999 Arab-language news report, may be apocryphal. But what is certain is that for most of the 1990s, Mr. bin Laden has been trying to get materials to make a nuclear bomb. Acquiring weapons of mass destruction, he has said, is a "religious duty" necessary "to terrorize the enemies of God." Some of his associates (now in prison or witness-protection programs) have recounted efforts to obtain weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.

Today, as the United States bombs terrorist sites and other targets in Afghanistan, the prospect of a nuclear terrorist attack looms larger as a domestic security concern. The likelihood of such an attack, government officials and experts say, may be small - but the possible consequences are too horrific to ignore.

Among the major concerns:

• The political instability of Pakistan, a nuclear power in the region that - more so than Russia and former Soviet states - could be Mr. bin Laden's source of nuclear materials. The Pakistani intelligence service used to work closely with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, and many in Pakistan (including, perhaps, military and intelligence sources) support the Taliban and bin Laden. Last week, Pakistan detained for questioning two of its former senior nuclear-weapons scientists - men who have expressed sympathy with the Taliban cause.

• Knowledge that with relatively little radioactive material - even low-level waste from a power plant or medical facility - terrorists could construct a "dirty bomb" using simple explosives rather than the more sophisticated and difficult-to-build nuclear weapons. Such devices, hidden in a truck or ship-borne cargo container, could inflict considerable casualties followed by widespread radiation poisoning.

• Vulnerability of 10 major nuclear-weapons plants in the US, several of which are near major cities. In mock attacks, the "terrorists" were able to acquire weapons-grade nuclear materials or otherwise achieve their goals in more than half the cases.

In the face of such threats, the US is considering several options.

These include strengthening nuclear-nonproliferation treaties, increasing security at US nuclear-weapons facilities, and buying Russia's leftover nuclear materials. More immediately, some experts suggest preparing US Special Operations Forces to unilaterally disable or seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons. (In the New Yorker magazine this week, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh writes that US military and intelligence agents are training with an Israeli special-operations unit for such a mission.)

In addition, several US lawmakers have said America should be prepared to use its tactical nuclear weapons to prevent or respond to another domestic terrorist attack. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - repeating long-standing US military doctrine - has not ruled that out.

While the former Soviet Union has been a top concern - officials there can't account for all nuclear-weapons items, and many now-jobless nuclear scientists may be susceptible to bribery - much of the focus is now on Pakistan.

"Pakistan's military government is walking a tightrope between pressure from the Bush administration on one side and anti-American Islamic militants on the other," says Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information here. "Growing street opposition from the latter could certainly destabilize or even topple the regime, and in the midst of such dissolution, the weakening of nuclear security would inevitably occur."

"The ranks of government and military personnel are also fairly riddled with sympathizers of the radical Islamic faction, posing a distinct risk of insiders colluding to spirit away a bomb or two for bin Laden and other terrorists," says Dr. Blair, a former US Air Force nuclear-missile launch control officer.

Intelligence sources believe that Pakistan has enough plutonium and weapons-grade enriched uranium to make 30 to 50 nuclear bombs or warheads.

"Whether or not all of Pakistan's nuclear explosive material has been converted to nuclear weapons is unknown, leaving the possibility that many kilograms of bulk material may be poorly protected," warns the Institute for Science and International Security. "Security forces at storage sites may be unable to thwart a determined attack by extremist groups allied with bin Laden or the Taliban, particularly if even a small number of guards are sympathetic to the Islamic fundamentalist cause. In the extreme case - should extremists take over the Pakistani government - control over Pakistan's nuclear explosive materials and weapons could be lost irretrievably."

Testimony in the trial of men charged with the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania revealed that bin Laden associates in Sudan may have tried to obtain uranium for a radiological weapon - material that may have originated in South Africa.

Meanwhile, concern for the safety of US nuclear-weapons plants is mounting. A recent report by the Project on Government Oversight warned of "serious security flaws at nuclear- weapons facilities around the country." "When our security efforts do not protect our weapons-grade nuclear materials against over half the mock terrorist attacks, it is well past time for a reassessment," says Danielle Brian of the watchdog group.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut, chairman of the House National Security Subcommittee, is planning to investigate. "In this critical environment," he says, "it is important for the Department of Energy [which oversees the US nuclear-weapons program] to assure the integrity of basic security measures for the protection of nuclear-weapon facilities ... against both internal and external threats."

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Feds: Terrorists Would Have Used Nukes

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Terror.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A senior State Department official said Wednesday he was convinced if the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in New York had possessed nuclear weapons they would have used them.

``Had these people had ballistic missile technology, there's not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it,'' John R. Bolton said.

And ``if they could couple that with a weapon of mass destruction, nuclear or whatever, and dropped it on lower Manhattan, as tragic as the destruction of the World Trade Center was, the loss of lower Manhattan or any comparable place would obviously be a lot worse,'' he said.

The undersecretary of state for arms control and international security said the Sept. 11 attacks underscored a need to deter the spread of nuclear technology and a need for an American defense against missile attack.

``It is obviously a national priority,'' Bolton said. But, he said, ``it's hard to see how people with that belief system could be deterred.''

Describing himself as deeply concerned, Bolton said the pursuit of ways to avert terrorists' use of nuclear or other devastating weapons was ``a national priority.''

``Had these people had ballistic missile technology and nuclear weapons there isn't the slightest doubt they would have used it,'' he said.

President Bush will try again next month to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to cut off the spread of sophisticated technology and conventional weapons to Iran when they meet next month in Washington and at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bolton said.

``It would go a long way to improve the strategic structure if Russia's behavior was more like ours,'' he said.

Senior Israeli officials raised their concerns about Iran in talks last week at the White House and State Department, he said.

The issue is likely to be on the agenda for talks Secretary of State Colin Powell will hold in Washington on Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

Bolton said in a breakfast meeting with military and diplomatic reporters that the anthrax breakout has already put the United States under terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction. Bolton said he could not shed any light on the source of the anthrax.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistani Nuke Scientist in Hospital

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Scientist-Detained.html?searchpv=aponline

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- A Pakistani nuclear scientist detained for questioning last week about his links with Afghanistan's Taliban has been hospitalized after complaining of chest pain during interrogations, his family said Wednesday.

Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mehmood was admitted to the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology on Tuesday, according to his son, Asim Mehmood, who is a doctor. Government officials confirmed the scientist was being treated.

Mehmood, who was first detained last week, was briefly released and taken into custody again this week. Six of his colleagues, including one other scientist, remained in custody Wednesday, government sources said.

U.S. intelligence officials have also interrogated Mehmood and his friends, according to a source at Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The source spoke on condition of anonymity

All those detained are members of a non-governmental organization, run by Mehmood, that works on development projects to help rehabilitate Afghanistan and stimulate its economy. The organization had operated inside Afghanistan with the backing of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

Mehmood, one of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists, played a crucial role in helping the nation become a nuclear power in the 1990s.

The international community is particularly concerned about Pakistan's nuclear weapons in recent weeks, given recent militant unrest related to the government's support of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan.

President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has repeatedly insisted that the country's nuclear arsenal is safe. Officials also have said they do not suspect Mehmood of leaking any nuclear information to the Taliban

-------- missile defense

Bush - Putin May See Highlights

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A boost in relations from unprecedented cooperation in the war against terrorism could lead President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to find common ground next month on trimming nuclear arsenals and defending against missile attack.

Diplomatic caution keeps American officials from predicting success in the Bush quest for leeway to proceed with a limited defense against missile attack and Putin's hope for substantial reductions in long-range nuclear arsenals.

``We will reach agreements with the Russians on what we can reach agreements on,'' Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton told military and diplomatic reporters over scrambled eggs on Wednesday.

``It would be premature to be optimistic or pessimistic,'' he said.

But Bolton and other administration officials are having trouble containing sunny expectations for the talks Bush and Putin will hold in Washington and at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, Nov. 13-15.

Statesmen, the sages say, are driven by national interests, not personal relations. But there was a noticeable improvement in the leaders'' personal chemistry in their two meetings before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

And then the curve shot upward as Putin called Bush to pledge his support -- the first foreign leader to get in touch -- and followed up by assisting the U.S.-led coalition in its campaign to uproot the al-Qaida terrorism network in Afghanistan.

Their meeting 10 days ago in Shanghai accelerated the momentum. According to the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, it ``opened the way for a possible agreement, perhaps even as early as Putin's visit, to the United States, on ... issues relating to strategic offensive and defensive arms.''

Putin has moderated his opposition to Bush's missile-defense program and the possible scuttling of a pivotal 1973 treaty that prohibits a national anti-missile shield and some of the tests on the Pentagon's drawing board.

Russia and some U.S. allies are concerned the structure of arms control could come tumbling down if the treaty is jettisoned. Last week, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a halt to elements of U.S. tests that might violate the accord.

``We don't want people to think we are playing fast and loose with the treaty,'' Bolton said.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is nearing completion of an analysis of U.S. strategic needs. It is likely to set a lower ceiling for U.S. nuclear warheads -- but perhaps not so low as the 1,500 to 2,000 limit that Russia has proposed for the two sides.

Summits sometimes produce trade-offs. If Putin went along with a limited U.S. anti-missile defense and Bush put on the table a proposal for small arsenals there could be such a deal.

At the very least, a senior U.S. official told The Associated Press this week, there is a clear path to cut offensive arsenals. And on the defensive side, the Russians have been clear that if the United States exercised its right to pull out of the treaty it would not be the end of the world, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Pre-summit talks are being held in Washington on Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, is going to Moscow to confer with his counterpart, Sergei Ivanov.

``I think we will be in a position to have discussions on offensive weapons levels even before Putin arrives,'' Bolton said.

Perhaps the touchiest item on the agenda will be Bush's attempt to try again to persuade Putin to cut off the spread of sophisticated technology and conventional weapons to Iran.

``It would go a long way to improve the strategic structure if Russia's behavior was more like ours,'' Bolton said.

``It's not that the Iranians don't have other sources, which they do, and some of them are not particularly ones we can influence. But the overall level of Iranian efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction is very disturbing and has not changed that I can see since Sept. 11,'' he said. The breakout of anthrax in the United States has already put the United States under terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction, Bolton said. ``I think there is a connection between terrorism and nonproliferation that troubles me very greatly,'' he said.

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

Experts Urge Putin and Bush to 'De - Alert' Missiles

October 31, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-russia-missiles.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Arms experts from the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences urged Russia and the United States on Wednesday to take their nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war.

Alexander Pikayev, one of the authors of a new report on the subject, said Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bush should discuss the issue at their summit later this month at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Currently, despite the end of the Cold War, both sides keep a number of intercontinental missiles armed and ready to go at three to five minutes' notice.

This is fast enough to respond to a pre-emptive strike aimed at their own missile silos. But it also gives them little time to check that a report of a hostile incoming missile is accurate, and not a false alarm or an accidental launch.

Pikayev said enlarging this decision window was an important pillar of talks on cutting the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and efforts to work out a deal on anti-missile defense.

``De-alerting could partially help to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear war and help end the current deadlock in U.S.-Russian strategic dialogue,'' Pikayev told Reuters.

``It's very likely that de-alerting will represent an important element of the U.S. nuclear posture review, and Russia needs to give a viable answer to that during, and after, the Crawford summit.''

AGEING MISSILES

The issue has risen to prominence over the past decade, as Russia's cash-strapped military has struggled to modernize its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal and satellite control systems, most of which are now well past their intended service life.

That has increased fears that an accidental launch or a false alert could spark a nuclear holocaust.

While the issue would not dominate the Crawford agenda, deep cuts in nuclear forces and the de-alerting of deployed rockets were an important element of ongoing U.S.-Russian nuclear talks and, indirectly, tricky missile defense talks, Pikayev said.

Bush wants to build an anti-missile shield to protect the entire United States but it would wreck the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Putin says is the cornerstone of strategic stability. The sides remain deadlocked though U.S. officials believe Russia is coming round to their view.

Pikayev said he expected the two sides to trade pre-agreed unilateral arms cuts without entering into lengthy negotiations.

But many security chiefs are hostile to Putin's overtures to Washington and fear that, in reducing its nuclear arsenal, Russia may be giving up its main source of global influence. Unless Putin can demonstrate a quid pro quo, he could be forced into a major U-turn in ties with the West, Pikayev said.

Among other things, at the nuclear level this would mean the kind of verification systems that would allow each side to be confident that the other was not reneging on undertakings.

RISK OF ACCIDENTS

Major-General Vladimir Belous, a co-author of the report, ''De-alerting Russian-U.S. nuclear forces and the path to lowering the nuclear threat,'' told a conference at Moscow's Institute of Global Economic and International Relations that thousands of missiles remained on high alert.

``A considerable threat exists of an unexpected outbreak of nuclear war because of possible mistakes by top officials...as a result of an inadequate evaluation of the situation, or receiving false signals from early warning systems,'' he said.

In 1998, General Alexander Yakovlev, then head of Russia's strategic rocket forces, admitted that 62 percent of Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal and 71 percent of its military control systems had passed their intended service life, he said.

Ira Shorr, director of the American pressure group ``Back from the Brink,'' which campaigns to raise the nuclear threshold, told the conference that the September 11 airliner attacks on U.S. landmarks had made defense forces more jumpy.

Shorr said the current U.S. nuclear posture gave less time to each president to decide on a nuclear launch that could wipe out both nations than Bush would have to mull an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger jet threatening to hit a building.

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

National Guard Deploys to More Nuclear Power Plants

October 31, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-nuclear.html?searchpv=reuters

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (Reuters) - U.S. National Guard troops have been deployed to boost security at nuclear power plants owned by Entergy Corp. in three southern states after the federal government issued a terrorism alert this week, the company said on Wednesday.

Entergy, the nation's third-largest power generator, said it had asked for the military back-up because of a generally heightened state of alert but added there was no specific threat against any U.S. nuclear power plants.

``This involves no specific threat but there is a general credible threat against nuclear facilities and we are taking what we believe are appropriate precautions,'' Entergy spokesman Phil Fisher said.

The deployments at four nuclear power stations in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi came after similar action earlier this month at three Entergy nuclear plants in New York and Massachusetts.

Entergy said the three southern governors acted after discussions with the company following a general alert on Monday by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who warned that terror attacks may be carried out in the next week against U.S. targets at home or overseas but said no specific targets were known.

``We have no reason to believe that any attack is planned against Arkansas Nuclear One or any other nuclear plant that we are aware of,'' Entergy's Fisher said.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said he deployed National Guard troops at Arkansas Nuclear One, a two-reactor plant in Dardanelle about 70 miles northwest of Little Rock.

``In response to concerns about terrorist threats, Entergy has requested assistance from Gov. Huckabee and the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management to increase security at Arkansas Nuclear One,'' the governor's office said in statement.

Officials in the governor's office did not elaborate on the reasons for Entergy's request and declined to say how many troops were deployed or how long they would remain on duty.

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Committee Considers Nuclear Liability

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Nuclear-Liability.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Legislation that would extend a law limiting nuclear power plant operators' financial liability in a major accident or terrorist attack advanced in the House on Wednesday. Some critics have said the limits amounted to an unwarranted government subsidy.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee by a voice vote approved an extension until 2017 of the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the amount of damages the nuclear industry must pay in case of an accident to $9.5 billion. The law, enacted in 1957, is set to expire next August.

Rep. Billy Tauzin, D-La., the committee's chairman, said he would ask that the legislation be given quick action by the full House. A similar provision is pending in the Senate.

The nuclear industry has maintained that some liability limits are needed for nuclear plant operators to obtain insurance and financing for nuclear reactors. Opponents argue that the industry is mature enough to get insurance without government help.

The law requires individual plants to have private insurance covering at least $200 million. In addition, the industry as a whole must have insurance for another $9.3 billion for an accident at any of the plants.

A major release of radiation, a reactor core meltdown, or a terrorist attack that might destroy a reactor could lead to damages much larger than that, the critics charge. Under the law the government is liable.

The House bill also requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reassess its security requirements for nuclear power plants -- something the NRC already has begun -- and directs the agency to more closely monitor and grade mock terrorist exercises performed periodically at plants to test security.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the NRC already has begun a review of its requirements for nuclear plant security.

The legislation was held up in the House committee in a dispute over liability of Energy Department contractors, who also are protected under the 1957 law. In a compromise, it was decided the DOE contractors would be liable for damages caused by intentional misconduct, but that their liability would be limited to a contractor's profit under a specific DOE contract.

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Nuclear Power Plants Tighten Security

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Nuclear-Security.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal officials have told nuclear power plant operators to ratchet up security in response to the alert this week of possibly another terrorist attack. Officials emphasized that there has been no specific threat against any of the country's 103 reactors.

At least six states, Arkansas becoming the latest on Wednesday, have dispatched National Guard troops to help private forces and police guard nuclear reactors. New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Arizona already had guardsmen on duty at reactors. There are 31 states that have nuclear power plants.

In a conference call with governors on Monday, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge told governors to consider deploying more police at nuclear power plants, but left it up to the states to decide on use of guardsmen, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday.

Ridge largely left it to the governors to decide which sites to protect more vigorously, but suggested they look especially at nuclear and other energy plants. ``Heighten your alerts and watch your vulnerable sites,'' Fleischer quoted Ridge as saying.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked power plant operators this week to take another look at their security although plants have been on high alert since the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks in New York and Washington. Many of the plants have added security guards and increased patrols this week, according to industry officials.

NRC spokesman Bill Beecher said that there have been no specific threats against a nuclear power plant. But he said the NRC issued another security advisory this week urging operators to keep in close communications with state officials in case additional security help was warranted. The NRC has left it to the states and plant operators to decide on whether National Guard troops are needed.

``We've asked them to request additional security patrols or posts, using local law enforcement, state police or National Guard if needed, in addition to using all of their own people,'' said Victor Dricks, another NRC official.

In Arkansas, National Guard troops were deployed Wednesday at the state's only nuclear power plant, the Arkansas Nuclear One reactor near Russellville, operated by Entergy Corp. The troops were guarding the perimeter of the plant and making additional patrols near the facility ``to maximize our security effort,'' said Entergy spokesman Phil Fisher in Little Rock.

Fisher said the use of the guardsmen ``was prompted by the Justice Department warning this week'' that another terror attack of some kind -- although not necessarily directed at a nuclear facility -- could take place in the next week or so.

Fisher said that during Ridge's conference call Monday, ``there was a recommendation that governors deploy National Guard troops at nuclear plants in their states.'' Fleischer said no recommendation was made on use of guardsmen.

The latest alert has prompted many of the power plant operators to boost the number of guards on duty.

In Florida, three nuclear power plants, already on heightened alert following the Sept. 11 attacks, increased the number of security guards stationed around the plants this week, but no military troops have been called.

``We are coordinating very closely with all levels of law enforcement, including the FBI and military,'' said Rachel Scott, a spokeswoman for Florida Power & Light, which operators one of the plants, the Turkey Point facility 20 miles from Miami.

Underscoring the heightened security, two F-16 fighter jets escorted a private plane to an airport after it flew into restricted airspace near a former nuclear plant in Platteville, Colo. The Cessna 152 was being flown by a student pilot and his instructor.

On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration banned private planes from flying within 11 miles of nuclear plants. The U.S. Coast Guard last week began patrolling waters on the Great Lakes to keep ships away from several nuclear plants on the coastline.

Pentagon officials, meanwhile, left open the possibility that some additional reservists being called up for homeland defense might see duty at nuclear power plants or be on call to possibly intercept an aerial attack.

Gen. William F. Kernan, commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, told reporters he has considered ``the full array of air defense systems'' to protect potential terrorist targets sites. ``Most recently, some of the things we looked at are some of the nuclear power plants, some of the other critical infrastructure that supports the national and state governments,'' he said without elaborating.

A military jet recently was dispatched to protect the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa., after a threat was received. The threat later was found to be groundless.

--------

THE NATIONAL GUARD
States Assign More Troops After U.S. Terror Warning

New York Times
October 31, 2001
By PAUL ZIELBAUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/31/nyregion/31GUAR.html?searchpv=nytToday

State officials in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey have deployed more National Guard troops at transportation centers, water supplies and nuclear power plants after the federal government's warning of possible additional terrorist attacks.

In New York, the Pataki administration said it would put more than 400 Guard troops on active duty for 90 days, the longest call- up in decades, starting tomorrow to help patrol train stations, airports, bridges and tunnels. By the end of this week, more than 1,500 guardsmen will be stationed at sites in and around New York City, including the city's upstate reservoirs and the state's four nuclear power facilities, said Gov. George E. Pataki.

In Connecticut, Gov. John G. Rowland ordered Guard troops deployed on Monday night to two nuclear power plants, in Waterford and Haddam Neck. A Rowland spokesman, Chris Cooper, said the number of troops was being kept secret for security reasons. About three weeks ago, Guard troops were stationed at Bradley International Airport, north of Hartford, and about 11 smaller airports around the state.

In addition to its Guard deployments at nuclear power plants, Connecticut is using its one state police helicopter to patrol the coast of Long Island Sound, Mr. Cooper said. And, he said, the waters of the Sound are being patrolled by the United States Coast Guard and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

Nuclear plants around the region were experiencing heavy security. At Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pa., security personnel were a heavy presence at the entrance of the plant. In New Jersey, Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco has ordered more Guard troops deployed to bolster the more than 1,200 troops already in place to protect "critical assets" around the state, including its four nuclear reactors, said his spokeswoman Rae Hutton.

Besides these deployments, each state is setting up additional security measures.

Over the weekend, for example, New York National Guard members - one state official said 420; another said "just under 500" - were notified that tomorrow, they would have to leave their families, jobs and homes for 90 days. State officials said there had not been such a long call-up since at least the 1970's. The National Guard and Naval Militia troops deployed since the attack on the World Trade Center had been serving generally two weeks at a time, with units taking turns.

And now, some of them will be more heavily armed. Starting today, 1,000 of New York's guardsmen patrolling Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station and New York City's bridges and tunnels will carry sidearms, said Mr. Pataki's press secretary, Michael McKeon. Guardsmen patrolling airports and nuclear facilities are already armed with machine guns.

State officials want them armed with 9-millimeter pistols, not assault rifles.

"Familiarity and training with the 9-millimeter is not a skill set in abundance with Guard members," said Scott Sandman, spokesman for the state's Division of Military and Naval Affairs, which oversees the National Guard. So few soldiers are familiar with sidearms, he said, that rotating them frequently is not an option.

Only two units train with pistols, he said: the 101st Cavalry, headquartered in Staten Island, and the 442nd Military Police, based in Orangeburg, in Rockland County, and in Whitestone, Queens. He said they would learn policing techniques from the New York Police Department.

Guard members risk losing their employer-based health insurance during a long activation. Mr. McKeon said the state would ensure that the soldiers' families were covered.

Mr. Pataki has also ordered 140 state corrections officers to guard the city's reservoirs, supplementing the State Department of Environmental Conservation officers already there, Mr. McKeon said. About 470 state troopers are stationed in New York City, he added.

--------

THE SMALL AIRPORTS
Private Flights Are Halted Near Nuclear Installations

New York Times
October 31, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/31/business/31FAA.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - The government today temporarily banned private airplanes from flying within 11.5 miles of 86 nuclear power reactors and government nuclear sites "for reasons of national security."

Also today, the secretary of transportation scolded the airlines for the job they are doing in screening passengers at airports, and President Bush lobbied members of Congress for a new aviation security bill that would allow the federal government to take over responsibility but contract out the work.

The order banning private planes from 86 areas except at high altitude was issued by the Federal Aviation Administration using a list drawn up by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees power reactors, and the Energy Department, which makes nuclear weapons. The order is effective immediately and will last until midnight Tuesday, the F.A.A. said. It includes all the power reac- tors, several sites where the nuclear weapons are produced, a site where the Navy stores uranium fuel for its submarines, and the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear bomb tests were conducted.

The decision closes 84 airports and hundreds of private landing strips and heliports, said Warren Morningstar, a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. That includes Harrisburg airport, near Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, for private plane operations, and the Groton-New London airport near Millstone Point, in Connecticut.

Mr. Morningstar said, "We are certainly very cognizant of the national security alert and the notice from the F.B.I.," referring to a warning on Monday that more attacks might be imminent. "We understand the national security concerns on the macro scale," he said. "But on the micro scale, we have a very difficult time understanding how a general aviation aircraft is a significant threat." The planes are too small to do much damage, he said.

In a statement, the administrator of the F.A.A., Jane F. Garvey, said she understood the inconvenience but added, "We look for the understanding and cooperation of the general aviation community."

The list is available at http: //notamweb.nas.faa.gov.

Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont asked the F.A.A. last month to establish a permanent no-flight zone five miles in diameter around Vermont Yankee, in Vernon, just north of the Massachusetts border. But the agency has so far resisted any permanent rules. On Oct. 21, when the F.A.A. announced the resumption of private flying in 12 metropolitan areas where it had been banned since Sept. 11, it warned pilots not to "loiter" near reactors or other industrial plants.

The military has been studying ways to protect nuclear reactors and other important industrial plants from terrorist attacks, including from the air.

Soon before the F.A.A. made its announcement, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said in a speech to a transportation group that aviation security "must show improvement right away."

He cited the example of a passenger who inadvertently carried a gun on board a plane in New Orleans, and said such lapses were intolerable.

"An unacceptable number of deficiencies continue to occur," Mr. Mineta said. "The result is a growing lack of confidence and increasing criticism of the actions taken by the F.A.A."

He said that if secure areas in airports were compromised, then terminals would be evacuated and searched and the passengers again screened, delaying flights if necessary. That happened at Logan Airport in Boston on Sept. 29 and had occasionally occurred before Sept. 11.

The airlines soon seem likely to give up responsibility for security under a new security system being considered in Congress.

The House plans to vote on Thursday on a bill that would have the federal government employ the security screeners. It has already been passed unanimously in the Senate.

The House also plans to vote on another bill, written by Republicans, under which the screeners would continue as employees of private contractors, and the contractors would sign agreements with the government instead of with the airlines. President Bush called several members of Congress to the White House today to lobby for the House version.

At a news conference, the House majority leader, Representative Dick Armey, predicted that the Republican bill would pass. In the Senate, three Republicans - John McCain, John W. Warner and Kay Bailey Hutchison - joined Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Ernest F. Hollings on the Democratic side in urging the House to approve their plan.

--------

U.S. Sees Increased Potential for Nuclear Attack

October 31, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-nuclear-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Sept. 11 attacks have increased concerns that extremists would use weapons of mass destruction -- including possibly nuclear weapons -- against the United States, Undersecretary of State John Bolton said on Wednesday.

Answering questions at a breakfast with defense writers, Bolton predicted that if extremists possess weapons of mass destruction -- a term that encompasses nuclear, biological and chemical arms -- they will use them.

``I'm concerned about weapons of mass destruction everywhere and my concern about weapons of mass destruction everywhere has gone up since the (U.S.-led anti-terrorism) war began,'' he said.

Bolton, the State Department's top official dealing with arms control and international security affairs, said he was worried ``there will be use of a weapon of mass destruction.''

Sept. 11 proved that anybody willing to fly a jet airplane into the World Trade Center is ``not going to be deterred by anything,'' he said. ``Had these people had ballistic missile technology, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have used it.''

``If they could couple that with a weapon of mass destruction -- nuclear or whatever -- and dropped it on lower Manhattan, as tragic as the destruction of the World Trade Center was, the loss of lower Manhattan or any comparable place would obviously be a lot worse,'' he said.

Referring to the U.S. struggle with a spreading incidence of infection with the potent germ warfare agent anthrax, Bolton said ``we're having use by somebody of a weapon of mass destruction now, so it's not a hypothetical concern.''

``If the terrorists who launched the attacks on September 11 had had weapons of mass destruction and they thought they could have used then, the horror of what they did demonstrated they'd be prepared to use them as well. So I think it is obviously a national priority,'' he said.

NUCLEAR QUESTION MARK

He refused to say if the United States knew whether Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network of Islamic extremists -- blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 attacks that killed an estimated 5,000 people -- were in possession of nuclear weapons.

But he said one consequence of the U.S. attacks was a heightened awareness of the interrelationship between nonproliferation and terrorists and that as a result, efforts to halt the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological arms will receive more attention in coming months.

``Essentially every state on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism is also an aspirant to obtain weapons of mass destruction or may already have them,'' he said.

``So dealing with global terrorism ... will inevitably get us into the business of dealing with weapons of mass destruction proliferation,'' a topic now under discussion with Russia and China, he added.

Iran, Iraq and North Korea have long been key states of U.S. concern in regard to both weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Some administration officials have urged including Iraq as a target in the war on terrorism but so far they have not prevailed.

Bolton sidestepped a direct answer on whether the United States believed Pakistan could lose control of its nuclear arsenal in any political instability that might result from its alliance with Washington in the anti-terrorism war.

He noted a recent statement by Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, who said he believed Pakistan does have adequate control over its nuclear weapons.

``I can't think of anyone who would be more concerned about that question than the defense minister of India,'' he said.

India and Pakistan are bitter nuclear rivals.

Bolton said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had made ''courageous decisions'' in supporting the anti-terrorism effort and the United States has taken steps, including financial assistance, to support his government.

He added: ``The question of stability on the subcontinent was something we were concerned about before the attacks of September 11 and what's happened after that, including the military operations in Afghanistan, have not reduced those concerns.''

-------- idaho

Report shows risks to southern Idaho water supply

October 2001
U.S. Water News Online
Reply to: Editor@uswaternews.com
www.uswaternews.com

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho -- A report released by two watchdog groups renews the warning that the aquifer beneath the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory could be contaminated by nuclear waste percolating into the ground.

The report is based on federal documents and sporadic ``hits'' of plutonium and americium isotopes showing up in the aquifer. It urges immediate action to remove buried radioactive waste and to clean the earth down to the water table.

``Urgent action is needed in order to protect the Snake River Plain aquifer from long-term irreversible action,'' the report says.

Kathleen Hain, director of the Department of Energy-Idaho's Environmental Restoration Program, said it is not clear that the sporadic hits of plutonium and americium are indeed coming from the buried waste. Other possibilities include contaminated dust blowing into the water samples, laboratory errors, or pollution from other parts of the site.

The aquifer supplies drinking and irrigation water for much of eastern and southern-central Idaho. It covers 9,600 square miles and flows southwest from eastern Idaho to Hagerman, where it drains into the Snake River at Thousand Springs.

Arjun Makhijani, author of a report released by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Snake River Alliance, said the contamination is spreading fast.

``The current estimate is that it would take a few decades to migrate to the water table,'' Makhijani said. ``We're telling you that the government isn't telling you. For a quarter of a century, the government has allowed this problem to fester, and it should not delay anymore.''

However, there is scientific disagreement about whether or how fast various contaminants will spread. Hain said government models show that there will be no spread at all.

Joe Rousseau, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey's INEEL project office, said Makhijani drew from information that has been in the public domain for many years.

``My only concern is that the numbers may be misinterpreted to elevate their significance,'' Rousseau said.

The stat is continuously monitoring groundwater through wells on and around the INEEL, where radioactive and other hazardous waste was dumped during the 1950s and 1960s.

Six years ago, the state negotiated an unprecedented, court-enforceable agreement requiring that all waste be removed from the INEEL by 2036. Skeptics of that deal contend it does not cover all of the 2 million cubic feet of plutonium-contaminated material that was buried on the site over the course of two decades.

Hain said there are dozens of different cleanup programs already under way to address the concerns outlined in the report. She said the government will continue to gauge how sound its cleanup strategy is with any new information or research that arises.

``You make the decision, take an action, and keep verifying the action is sufficient. That's how you handle the uncertainty,'' Hain said. ``You make a decision with the information you do have. That's the only way I know to handle this.''

-------- nevada

Negotiators cut proposed spending for Yucca Mountain by $70 million

By STEVE TETREAULT DONREY
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Oct-31-Wed-2001/news/17347083.html

WASHINGTON -- Congressional negotiators on Tuesday night cut proposed spending for nuclear waste studies at Yucca Mountain by $70 million.

The move, which marked the seventh consecutive year of budget cuts for the project, came as the Energy Department prepares to decide whether the site should be recommended for a nuclear waste repository.

An energy spending bill completed by a conference committee and now heading for final passage grants the department $375 million for the coming year to complete site characterization of the mountain, which is 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Bush administration had requested $445 million, saying it would be spent to prepare a site recommendation and lay the groundwork for a possible repository license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Instead, the latest budget cuts might result in layoffs and schedule delays, an Energy Department spokesman said Tuesday night.

The conference committee increased Yucca Mountain spending over an earlier energy bill version, written by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., that cut the program by 38 percent, to $275 million.

Reid, chairman of the Senate energy and water subcommittee, led the meeting on Tuesday where the $24.6 billion bill was finalized by teams of 15 senators and 15 House members. The legislation sets 2002 spending for the Energy Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies.

The $70 million difference between what the Bush administration wanted and what Congress allocated is the deepest reduction in the nuclear waste program since 1996, when a $630 million budget request was cut in half, forcing a major redirection in the project.

The Energy Department will review the new bill before deciding its course, spokesman Allen Benson said.

"The administration asked for $445 million and at the $375 million level we're going to have to assess the impacts, but it most likely will have an impact on schedule and personnel levels," Benson said. "We will have to determine what the impacts are going to be."

Despite annual budget shortfalls since 1995, officials have sought to maintain a schedule that could see spent fuel stored in Nevada by 2010.

Program officials have said they expect to have gathered all the material necessary for Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to make a recommendation on Yucca Mountain late this year or early next year.

The nuclear energy industry believes the Energy Department "can make the adjustments necessary to keep the Yucca Mountain program moving forward," said John Kane, senior vice president of governmental affairs for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

"We are disappointed that the underfunding of the Yucca Mountain project continues to be problematic and contrary to the national interest," Kane said in a statement.

At $375 million, the Energy Department "is going to be able to do some of the work on some of the critical areas that need attention." said Bob Loux, head of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office.

But Loux questioned when the department will be able to finalize studies necessary to demonstrate whether the geology of Yucca Mountain, coupled with man-made repository features, could contain radiation from spent fuel rods for 10,000 years.

Loux also said the trend in Congress to tighten purse strings on Yucca Mountain spells trouble for the program in coming years, when more than $1 billion will be needed annually to meet licensing and construction schedules.

Reid, a persistent critic of the Yucca Mountain program, expressed satisfaction with the budget cut. He set the stage for the cut in July when he wrote an energy bill with deep cuts for nuclear waste.

Reid said after the session he was unconcerned about potential layoffs.

"They will talk about how bad it is, but when you think of the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent, I'm not going to lose one wink of sleep over this," he said.

It was not immediately clear how the $375 million was reached in negotiations. "That was just a number I picked," Reid said. The senator also suggested he tried to reduce funding further, but met resistance from House negotiators who were more supportive of the program. House lawmakers could not be reached Tuesday night.

----

Reid gets his way on Yucca budget

Las Vegas Sun
October 31, 2001
By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com> and
Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/oct/31/512557866.html

WASHINGTON -- Every year congressional lawmakers who want to bury the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada engage in a months-long tussle with Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., over the Yucca Mountain budget.

Reid, the influential No. 2 Senate Democrat and Appropriations Committee member, proposes a small budget for the nuclear waste project. Pro-Yucca lawmakers argue for a larger one.

The annual budget scuffle ended Tuesday with surprisingly little negotiating. Key lawmakers and their staffers did not haggle over the details, did not bicker about what budget cuts would mean to the project and did not swap favors over the Yucca plan, Reid and several aides said.

Reid simply proposed a budget he thought other key lawmakers could accept -- $375 million. The amount was a compromise: $100 million more than what Reid proposed in July but $70 million lower than what the Bush administration requested in April.

Key lawmakers Tuesday night agreed to it as part of a larger deal -- and that was that, Reid said.

"There was not a lot of discussion," Reid said. "I picked a number and they went with it."

Yucca Mountain is the proposed site of the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. The Department of Energy has been studying the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas since 1987 to determine if it is a safe site to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste from the nation's 103 active nuclear power plants and government storage areas.

About $7 billion has been spent on the 14-year-old Yucca project. It is expected to cost an estimated $58 billion upon completion.

It was not immediately clear how the $70 million budget cut would slow the project in the coming fiscal year.

The DOE will decide how to proceed with its ongoing Yucca studies depending on how the final budget is worded, DOE Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson said. "Sometimes Congress is very specific in what it wants done," Benson said.

The DOE is preparing to make a recommendation to President Bush about whether it is safe to bury nuclear waste at Yucca.

Scientists are still studying how fast ground water is flowing through the mountain; how much water Yucca's rock contains; whether water inside the mountain will corrode nuclear waste containers; and threats of a volcanic eruption from nearby lava cones.

Nevada lawmakers have been trying to kill the Yucca project for years.

Earlier this year Reid had slashed the Yucca budget to $275 million. The DOE had requested $445 million; the House approved $443 million. Congress last year gave the DOE a $391 million for Yucca projects.

Reid has an important perch as chairman of a panel of House and Senate lawmakers who have been meeting to work out the complicated details of a $24.6 billion appropriations bill that sets a budget for energy and water projects nationwide, including the Yucca project. Controversies arose over use of the Missouri River and giving money to Russia to better protect its nuclear materials from thieving terrorists, but not about Yucca Mountain, Reid said.

The House-Senate panel worked out a final agreement on the energy and water bill in a crowded room in the Capitol Tuesday night. The full House and Senate are expected to approve it soon, and President Bush is expected to sign it.

If Yucca is approved the DOE would need $1 billion a year to license, design and construct the repository, Lake Barrett, acting director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said earlier this year.

The DOE has asked Congress for more flexibility in spending a national nuclear waste fund, which has about $11 billion in it. Ratepayers nationwide who use nuclear-generated electricity pay taxes into the fund.

The DOE has suggested removing annual congressional budget caps on the Yucca project, which would allow the DOE more access to the fund to use money as needed. Nevada's lawmakers oppose that.

Nuclear energy officials who support the Yucca plan vowed to continue lobbying for bigger Yucca budgets and for more DOE access to the fund.

Yucca budget cuts by Congress continue to be "problematic and contrary to the national interest," John Kane, vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in a written statement.

"While the program is significantly under funded, we believe the Department of Energy can make the adjustments necessary to keep the Yucca Mountain program moving forward," Kane said. "We will continue working with Congress to see that the program is properly funded." The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state's Yucca watchdog, has been watching the budget process closely this year, Executive Director Bob Loux said. Final agreement on a $375 million budget didn't surprise him.

"It's pretty much what I expected," Loux said. "We think Senator Reid did a great job."

The state also will receive $2.5 million for technical oversight of DOE's activities at Yucca Mountain and local governments in Nevada will share $6 million for oversight.

----

Attacks heighten nuclear waste worries
Transportation of radioactive waste to Nevada a national concern, Bryan says

By KEITH ROGERS
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Oct-31-Wed-2001/news/17341822.html

With prospects for more terrorist attacks looming across the country, Nevada's Nuclear Projects Commission on Tuesday stressed the importance of building out-of-state opposition to federal plans for hauling the nation's most lethal radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain.

"Terrorism is now a part of the decision-making process that governs our daily conduct," Commissioner and former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan said after a two-hour meeting at the Clark County Government Center.

"It seems to me the dimension of the national debate has been greatly expanded," he said, referring to heightened awareness nationwide about nuclear waste transportation risks in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"It has been perceived as a Nevada issue. This helps makes the case; this is a national issue," Bryan said.

He said public outcry against rail and truck shipments of 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste, most of it spent nuclear fuel stored at some 100 reactor sites across the nation, "could absolutely delay" a decision by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on recommending Yucca Mountain for construction of a repository to entomb the waste.

The decision is expected late this year or early next year.

Yucca Mountain, a volcanic-rock ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under consideration for disposing of the nation's highly radioactive wastes.

Proponents of the plan have said leaving nuclear waste at reactor sites presents a greater risk than consolidating it at Yucca Mountain.

But critics argue that reactor sites still will be potential terrorist targets and a repository at Yucca Mountain simply would create one more in addition to greater risks posed by transporting the waste.

State Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux said that with some $5 million in reserve from the Legislature and local government contributions to battle the Yucca Mountain Project, he expects roughly $2.5 million will be spent this year on legal defense and a national public relations campaign.

About $1 million of that has been earmarked for a combination of media advertising and financial support for grass-roots anti-nuclear efforts in key cities and communities along transportation routes. The goal, Loux said, is to "get the campaign started in other states affected by transportation."

Twice since the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the federal government has suspended radioactive waste shipments nationwide, including some that were planned to haul spent nuclear fuel from a West Valley, N.Y., facility to a government site in Idaho.

Joe Strolin, Planning Division administrator for the State Nuclear Projects Agency, said preliminary findings of the July 18 train collision in a Baltimore tunnel show the fire that broke out was hot enough to breach a nuclear waste cask and release a cloud of suspended, radioactive particles. Contamination would spread over 28 square miles and cost more than $10 billion to clean up, he said.

Strolin raised questions about transportation safeguards that were considered to be adequate by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before Sept. 11. "They can no longer make that case," he said. "The risks of sabotage and terrorism are real."

Bryan told the commission that it is essential to find qualified, independent experts to verify transportation studies and scientific studies being conducted on the integrity of titanium shields the Energy Department plans to put inside Yucca Mountain.

The shields are being designed to deflect corrosive water away from waste packages during the repository's 10,000-year regulatory life span. One study shows water laced with fluoride and chloride could erode and crack a titanium shield in six months under accelerated conditions.

Susan Lynch, Technical Division administrator for the State Nuclear Projects Agency, said state scientists plan to collect water samples from soil on Yucca Mountain to determine what will be in water that first reaches waste canisters if they are put there. The ingredients, she said, could be quite different than what Energy Department contractors are using in their studies.

-------- tennessee

ORNL restricts truck traffic from its main roadway

By Frank Mungerand Laura Ayo,
News-Sentinel staff writers
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_863785,00.html

The main road to Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been closed to truck traffic indefinitely because of new terrorist concerns. The restrictions went into effect at 4 p.m. Tuesday. Dr. Bill Madia, the director of ORNL, said vehicles larger than pickup trucks or those pulling a trailer will be stopped at checkpoints on the east and west ends of Bethel Valley. Those with official business at ORNL will be allowed to proceed, and others will be turned back, he said.

"I know it's an extra burden in getting here, but it's the right thing to do," Madia said. State troopers will assist with the checks, he said. The decision to limit trucks on Bethel Valley Road was made after ORNL officials reviewed the Monday advisory from U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who warned of the potential for new terrorist acts this week.

That same advisory prompted local law enforcement agencies, as well as local offices of federal law enforcement agencies, to remain on heightened security status Tuesday. Spokespeople for most of the agencies reported they have been at their highest security status since Sept. 11, when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked by terrorists.

"We've never stepped back from our heightened state of awareness," said Knoxville Police Department spokesman Darrell Debusk. FBI Special Agent Scott Nowinski said the Knoxville office of the FBI has re-established its 24-hour command center in response to Monday's announcement.

"We have an agent on duty at the office 24 hours a day," he said. Becky Huckaby, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Knoxville Airport Authority, said no changes in security had occurred at McGhee Tyson Airport since Ashcroft's latest alert. Security at the airport is "already at highest alert and has been since the bombing in Afghanistan began," she said.

Madia said he had not received any complaints from laboratory employees about the road restrictions, even though it may slow their commute to work. "There are a lot of concerned people out here," he said. Meanwhile, Steven Wyatt, a U.S. Department of Energy spokesman, said other security precautions have been enacted in Oak Ridge, but he declined to be specific.

Bill Wilburn of BWXT, the managing contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, said an existing checkpoint on the east end of Bear Creek Road will remain in operation 24 hours a day and another check point has been established on New Hope Road - which provides secondary access to the plant.

"All personnel are asked to be especially observant and to report anything suspicious to their supervisor or security," Wilburn said.

Frank Munger may be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net. Laura Ayo may be reached at 865-342-6341 or ayo@knews.com. News-Sentinel business writer Stan DeLozier also contributed to this report.

------ washington

Congressional committee approves Hanford funding

Hanford News
Wed, Oct 31, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1031-1.html

A joint U.S. House-Senate committee approved Tuesday spending almost $1.818 billion on Hanford's cleanup in fiscal 2002.

That theoretically is enough to keep all of Hanford's cleanup projects on their legal timetables through fiscal 2002, which began one month ago. That also includes $690 million to keep Hanford's top-priority waste glassification project on schedule.

The House and Senate expect to soon approve that compromise budget coming out of the joint committee.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of that joint committee, said President Bush has given no indication that he might veto the compromise energy and water appropriations bill, which includes Hanford's cleanup budget.

"It would be very foolish for him to veto this bill," Murray said.

The $1.818 billion is $418 million more than the Bush administration wanted to spend on Hanford's 2002 cleanup. And it is $362 million more than what the federal government spent for fiscal 2001.

DOE's calculations said Hanford needs $1.832 billion in 2002 to meet all its legal cleanup obligations. Before the compromise talks began, the Senate wanted to spend $1.834 billion on Hanford, while the House pushed for $1.814 billion.

"This is really good news that both the House and Senate are passing (the $1.818 billion Hanford budget) because it will make it difficult for the administration to act contrary to it," said Mike Wilson, nuclear program manager for Washington's Department of Ecology.

The Bush administration, including Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, originally had proposed cutting DOE's nationwide nuclear cleanup budget and Hanford's budget from their fiscal 2001 levels. The rationale has been that the national long-range nuclear cleanup plans are too expensive, and the cleanup budget should be trimmed until the new DOE leaders review all of the agency's cleanup programs.

In an Oct. 19 memo to all DOE field offices and laboratories, Abraham said this "top-to-bottom" review should be done by the end of 2001. Then DOE will tackle producing a plan to speed up its cleanup efforts, the memo said.

Meanwhile in May and June, the administration, including Abraham, renewed its opposition to raising the nationwide nuclear cleanup budget to the levels sought by Congress. However, since June the administration has been mum on the subject.

The state of Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and most Northwest Hanford interest groups opposed the administration's proposal to slash the site's cleanup budget, contending that would create inevitable delays in projects that already have trouble making their deadlines.

Murray credited bipartisan congressional caucuses -- senators and representatives from states with DOE cleanup projects -- with increasing nuclear cleanup funds from the administration's request. Murray is a co-founder of the Senate nuclear caucus. U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., is a co-founder of the House's nuclear caucus.

"The administration was not there (to push for cleanup dollars). It helped to have a strong voice in Congress," Murray said.

She hoped DOE would be more aggressive in seeking cleanup money for the fiscal 2003 budget.

The significant difference between what Congress and the administration wanted to spend on Hanford had clouded the site's future so much that no one in the Hanford universe could venture a good guess during the past several months on whether DOE could follow through on its plans for cleaning up the site.

For the past several months, the biggest question has been whether the site would receive the full $690 million needed to get the delayed tank waste glassification project back on schedule to meet its 2007 legal deadline to start converting wastes into a benign glass.

That's because the administration wanted to appropriate $500 million -- instead of $690 million -- to the glassification project in 2002.

The state has threatened to sue DOE if not enough money shows up for 2002 to enable the project to meet its 2007 glassification deadline. The project currently is about 15 months behind schedule.

Also, the state is fining DOE $10,000 a week for missing the July 31, 2001, deadline to begin building the glassification complex. That fine is to continue growing until DOE produces a catchup plan to meet the 2007 deadline, and it convinces the state it will provide enough money in 2002 to back up that plan.

Wilson noted that DOE allocates its nationwide nuclear cleanup money among its several cleanup sites after Congress appropriates the funds. Consequently, DOE can allocate Congress' overall nuclear cleanup appropriation in a different manner than congressional members envisioned.

So the state will wait until DOE actually allocates money to Hanford before Washington looks at lifting its weekly fines and lawsuit threat, Wilson said.

Meanwhile, the state is looking over DOE's catch-up glassification plan -- liking it on a broad basis but still examining some details, Wilson said.

-------- us nuc politics

Administration Defends Issuing Attack Warning
Some Criticize Nonspecific Alerts

By Dan Eggen and Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14734-2001Oct30?language=printer

Faced with complaints that a second FBI terrorism alert was sowing confusion, Bush administration officials said yesterday they had decided to issue the warning only after concluding there was an imminent risk of more attacks connected to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

The warning, issued late Monday, was based in part on information given to the United States by the Canadian intelligence service, U.S. and Canadian officials said yesterday. It was further spurred by fears that terrorists might carry out attacks in the run-up to Ramadan -- the holy month of fasting in Islam -- and by indications that bin Laden followers no longer needed approval from above to carry out operations, U.S. intelligence officials said.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said late Monday that the FBI's alert to 18,000 law enforcement agencies was meant to put the nation on guard, and he warned against "a false sense of indifference" to the danger of attacks.

The FBI issued a similar general alert Oct. 11, and has sent out a flurry of other warnings to police and industry groups about truck bombs, hazardous materials haulers, crop-dusters and other potential tools of terrorism. In response to the new alert, the Federal Aviation Administration yesterday temporarily bannedprivate planes from approaching within 12 miles of nuclear power plants unless they are flying above 18,000 feet. Security was also beefed up for sports events, particularly the World Series game attended by President Bush last night.

But several senators yesterday questioned the wisdom of issuing vague alerts without information about potential targets or types of attack.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said the administration had to make a "judgment call" about what to do with the intelligence it had received. But, he asked, "how many times can you cry wolf if nothing happens?"

"We don't want the American people to become complacent," said Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "If we become more complacent, we become more vulnerable."

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) also expressed frustration over the alert. "It's crazy to make those kinds of statements," he said. "Imaginations run wild."

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge acknowledged that the administration was walking a "difficult and fine line" in deciding whether to issue warnings based on intelligence reports that are both classified and nonspecific. But he said there was a "unique convergence of sources" indicating possible attacks.

"I think America understands and, hopefully, appreciates that when there's that kind of information available to us, we just share it with America, as incomplete as it might be," Ridge said.

Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said, "The administration is in a very understandable dilemma. Under the circumstances, I really don't know that they could have made any other choice."

Canadian Solicitor General Lawrence MacAuley told reporters in Ottawa yesterday that key information from Canada's Security Intelligence Service led to Monday's warning. In Washington, however, Justice Department officials said the Canadian information was only part of the intelligence that led to the alert.

Intelligence analysts over the weekend realized they were receiving a large number of credible reports "indicating threats in the same time frame," a senior intelligence official said yesterday. When such a spurt takes place, he said, analysts not only look at the quality of the reports, but also measure "the externals," meaning other issues that may be related.

In this case, an important "external" was the start on Nov. 17 of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, which is observed by fasting from sunrise to sundown. U.S. analysts concluded that al Qaeda might be planning attacks against U.S. targets to force a military response during the holy month, which in turn could sow dissension with Muslim leaders. Some U.S. allies, notably Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, have called for a halt to the bombing in Afghanistan during Ramadan.

But the decision to issue a public alert was clinched by late-breaking information that was added Monday morning to the situation report shared by intelligence agencies, an administration official said. The new information indicated possible attacks within a few days or a week, the official said.

Bush was told about the threats Monday morning, but it was not until the middle of the day that administration officials decided to make an announcement.

Top officials, meeting without the president, concluded that the intelligence justified alerting law enforcement agencies across the country. They also agreed that it was better for Ashcroft to make the alert public, rather than have it leak out, officials said.

"We do think we have an obligation, when we have information, even when it's general in nature, to share it," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said. "Obviously, the law enforcement agencies have a better understanding of what it means to go on high alert."

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer likened the alert to those sometimes issued before Sept. 11, such as one last summer warning of possible terrorist attacks aimed at U.S. embassies in the Middle East. The difference since Sept. 11, he said, is that the new threats are inside the United States, rather than abroad.

"Every day reams of intelligence information arrive on desks of the CIA and other intelligence agencies," Fleischer said. "It is unusual to alert law enforcement. Clearly the sources and the credibility behind this alert differ from most intelligence received. That's why . . . the FBI took the action it did."

Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said that in addition to putting citizens on alert, the warning could help dissuade terrorists from acting. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said Monday that the earlier alert on Oct. 11 "may well have helped to avert such an attack."

"There's an intended deterrent there, but we'll probably never know if we've stopped something," Tucker said. "We'd rather go down the road of prevention and alert everyone rather than worrying about whether we'll be accused of crying wolf."

A growing number of local law enforcement officials, already frustrated with what they consider to be lack of cooperation from the FBI, complained that the vague warning was not useful. Assistant D.C. Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said, "It's just not the way you run an army or run a war."

Daniel J. Oates, a 21-year veteran of the New York Police Department who now heads the police department in Ann Arbor, Mich., said there was little more that local officials could do without more specific information. His officers were already working overtime and running special patrols, he said.

"The government must know more than it's putting out to law enforcement," said Oates, who was in charge of the NYPD's intelligence unit. "You can only ratchet us up so much and so often before the heightened awareness loses its effectiveness. It's hard to maintain a constant state of vigilance."

Staff writers Dan Balz, Helen Dewar, Allan Lengel and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Blair Campaigns For War Support
Wavering Britons Urged to 'Never Forget'

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page A10

LONDON, Oct. 30 -- Facing some erosion of popular support for the bombing of Afghanistan, an emotional Prime Minister Tony Blair told British citizens today that they must "never forget" the mass killings on Sept. 11 and warned that "the terrorists will kill again unless stopped."

A weakening in the will to fight would amount to victory for the killers, Blair said. "They have one hope -- that we are somehow decadent, that we lack the moral fiber or will or courage to take them on; that we might begin, but we won't finish; that we will start then falter; that when the first setbacks occur, that we will lose our nerve. And they are wrong."

Parliamentary debate and a new public opinion survey suggest that concerns about the killing of Afghan civilians have undermined British support for the allied war against the Taliban authorities and the al Qaeda organization of Osama bin Laden. Britain is the United States' closest ally in the fight. It has fired missiles at targets in Afghanistan, provided refueling for U.S. jet fighters and pledged 600 commandos to conduct ground operations.

A poll by the research firm ICM and published in today's Guardian newspaper showed that public approval of the military action has fallen from 74 percent to 62 percent since the bombing started. Twenty percent of those surveyed expressed disapproval, and 18 percent said they were unsure.

The Guardian poll also asked whether respondents would favor a pause in the bombing "to allow aid convoys to go into Afghanistan." Those surveyed responded favorably by a margin of 54 to 29 percent, with the rest undecided. U.S. and British military leaders have rejected this suggestion on the grounds that a pause would allow the Taliban to build up its defenses.

There has also been growing opposition to the military campaign among some members of Blair's Labor Party. "Tony has a problem," said Peter Kilfoyle, a Labor member of Parliament who has backed Blair on the war. "Almost everybody agrees with the ends, but people are worried about the means. Every time they hit a civilian target, it cuts into his support."

Blair's government has also run into public disagreements between the cabinet and the military. After the defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, indicated that British marines would soon be "smoking out" the enemy in Afghan caves, a marine general quickly responded that his troops were not ready yet.

In a long-scheduled address in Cardiff to the legislature of Wales, the prime minister hit hard on the "evil" that was done by the attackers on Sept. 11, the reason for the current military campaign. In a step to bolster the war on terrorism, he left afterward for talks in Syria, becoming the first British prime minister to visit that country in more than 30 years.

"It is important we never forget why we are doing it," Blair said in Cardiff. "Important we never forget how we felt watching the planes fly into the twin towers. Never forget those answering machine messages. Never forget how we felt imagining how mothers told children they were about to die.

"If we do not act against al Qaeda and the Taliban, al Qaeda will have perpetrated this atrocity, the Taliban will have sheltered them and we will have done nothing. We will have done nothing despite the fact, also inescapable, that they intend to commit more atrocities."

----

[Please respond to the Wall Street Journal with your opinion!
Mine was published (see below the article). et]

HOW TO WIN -
The Case for Ground Troops; air power and special ops aren't enough to win this war

BY MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS
Wednesday, October 31, 2001 12:01 a.m.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001398

RESPOND TO THIS ARTICLE http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001398 (end of page)

READ RESPONSES http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/responses.html?article_id=95001398

During the Clinton years, the preferred military instrument was the occasional cruise missile "drive-by shooting." Policy makers were enamored of air power and long-range precision strikes. They believed that air power and high-tech weaponry were the silver bullets that would allow the U.S. to defend its interests without endangering American soldiers.

In the "war on terror," the Bush administration has rejected the view of air power as panacea. In the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "Cruise missiles and bombers are not going to solve this problem." Unlike their predecessors, Bush administration military planners envision a role for ground forces in Afghanistan. But so far, the administration seems to be counting on another silver bullet--Special Operations forces. Despite the undeniable capabilities of such forces, known as SOF, there are good reasons also to employ conventional ground troops.

The SOF--Delta Force, Rangers, Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs and Air Force Special Operations Wings--consist of highly trained and motivated men, specially equipped and psychologically prepared for the protracted small-scale operations that will be instrumental in defeating al Qaeda.

Yet Special Operations forces have limitations. Total SOF personnel number only about 45,000, of which 25% are in the reserve or National Guard. Small numbers are a reflection of high standards, so it would be difficult to increase the size of SOF without compromising standards. This means that priorities must be set in order to avoid wearing out such forces. SOF cannot be expected to carry the entire burden of the war in Afghanistan.

But there are also critical diplomatic reasons for employing conventional forces. The first is to shore up and reassure the Northern Alliance. The second is to make it more likely that a postwar settlement will leave Central Asia more stable rather than less.

Conventional wisdom holds that we should count on the Northern Alliance to provide the major effort on the ground. But it's doubtful the opposition forces can win without substantial help. To begin with, the Taliban forces outnumber those of the Northern Alliance. If the latter are to have any hope of success, they must be reinforced with armor, artillery and helicopters. On the other side, the Taliban are proving to be more resilient than expected by U.S. planners, who reckoned that the Northern Alliance would have wrested the four main Afghan cities--Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Herat--from the Taliban before the winter. But the opposition has yet to capture even the northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif.

In addition, many of the Northern Alliance distrust the U.S., believing that it left them high and dry once they had served their purpose against the Soviet Union. They remember that we provided training and equipment to fight the Soviets but were unwilling to put U.S. lives on the line. So far, they have no reason to believe that anything has changed. The deployment of ground forces to operate in conjunction with the Northern Alliance would go a long way to convince the opposition Afghan fighters that the U.S. will not leave Afghanistan to its own devices once again.

Relying on the Northern Alliance also places the U.S. in a diplomatic dilemma. The Alliance is made up primarily of Uzbek, Hazara and Tajik fighters. A government dominated by these groups is unacceptable to Pakistan, which includes a sizable minority of the Pashtun, the same ethnic group from which the Taliban in Afghanistan draw their main support.

A Northern Alliance government that excludes the Pashtun altogether could destabilize Pakistan. The Taliban are popular among the Pashtun of Pakistan, and the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf is already shaky. Were a Taliban-like force able to seize power in Pakistan, both the U.S. and India would confront a hostile, nuclear-armed state. Osama bin Laden or his successor would then be able to portray any combined response by the U.S. and India as an assault on Islam not only by "Crusaders and Jews," but also by Hindus. This might enable bin Laden to achieve his goal of uniting the Islamic world, leading to a wider war in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The end of the war will require a coalition of the Northern Alliance and the Pashtun. Such a general agreement, whether it involves the return of the former King Zahir, or some other arrangement, e.g. a U.N. mandate, will require a substantial U.S. ground presence to make it work.

There are many objections made to the deployment of ground forces, but none are insuperable.

First there is the logistical challenge. America's preferred way of supplying war is by sea, but Afghanistan is landlocked. So any buildup of ground forces, particularly heavy forces, will take a long time and depend greatly on the cooperation of the Russians. This will be complicated by the approach of Afghanistan's formidable winter. But given sufficient time and determination, the "tyranny of distance" can be surmounted.

In addition to logistical problems, critics of this course of action point to the British and Soviet experiences. During the First Afghan War of 1838-42, the British suffered perhaps their greatest imperial disaster when the Kabul garrison was wiped out during an attempted winter retreat to India.

The Soviet case, more pertinent, provides important lessons. The Soviets faced a united Afghan front, substantially supported by the U.S. They then deployed a force that was much too small to deal with such a threat. While Spetsnaz (commandos), airborne, and air assault troops were generally well-trained and motivated, the bulk of the Soviet ground forces were composed of conscripts who were not psychologically prepared for the war. And the Soviets were slow to adapt their tactics to the requirements of a guerrilla war.

U.S. forces would have a number of advantages over their Soviet counterparts. Our soldiers are volunteers. The quality of unit training is high, and they possess high-tech equipment that enables them to negate the guerrilla tactics that worked against the Soviets, by engaging, for instance, in night operations.

How large a force should we deploy? One think tank has estimated that it would take 300,000 men to do the job. This organization points out that the Soviets failed with less than half that force. (Soviet personnel strength in Afghanistan varied from 90,000 to 104,000, compared to a high of 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, one-fifth the size of Afghanistan.) But this is misleading. The Soviets confronted a unified Afghanistan; the U.S. has substantial Afghan allies in a war against one faction.

Given the limitations imposed by logistics, terrain and the possibility that ground forces will be needed elsewhere, e.g. Iraq, we should consider deploying two light infantry divisions, probably the 10th Mountain Division and the 25th Infantry Division (Light), along with a corps headquarters--about 35,000 to 40,000 men in all. (Elements of the 10th Mountain are already in theater). Such an effort would still be daunting. It is unlikely that these divisions could be deployed before the onset of winter. This means a winter offensive, or scaled-back operations until spring.

Neither option is appealing. But the benefits in terms of reassuring the Northern Alliance and enabling a stable postwar settlement outweigh the costs. This would entail a long-term commitment of the sort that policy makers have sought to avoid. But, given the so-far sluggish pace of a campaign relying exclusively on air power and commandos, do we really have any other choice? Mr. Owens is a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College and a fellow at the Claremont Institute.

---

I Know How to Win

Ellen Thomas - Washington
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/responses.html?article_id=95001398

Forget this guise of world-wise, and stop making war. Be willing to negotiate the arrest of bin Laden, collect his kidney-failing body and get out. Stop bombing, particularly with cluster bombs. Feed the enemy as well as the friends; this may turn enemies into friends.

----

Veterans Since Boyhood At Home on Front Line

Wednesday, October 31, 2001
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15063-2001Oct30?language=printer

KALAFGAN, Afghanistan -- All of the resistance fighters on the front line at Kapahasan Hill have been wounded two or more times. Mostly it has to do with longevity. Most Afghan men of this region -- survivors of enemy fire and land mines -- have been involved with war since they were boys.

Hadeel Shah, 23, first reported to duty when he was 13. Today, he is in charge of a four-man tank squad. "If you can carry a gun, you can fight," he says. When the war is over, he wants to go to school and learn English.

Abdul Razaq, 25, the radio operator, talks with a Taliban counterpart about nine bodies that lay in the valley following three days of fighting. After 10 minutes, Razaq recognizes the voice of his enemy. He inquires about the safety of the man's family in Kandahar and signs off, wishing him peace.

-------- biological weapons

Anthrax Q & A
What the Disease Is, and How to Identify and Treat It

ABC News,
October 31, 2001
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom

Photo: baby with skin form of anthrax http://i.abcnews.com/@v=0151214@/media/2020/images/abc_2020_baby_011018_nh.jpg

As anthrax fears continue across the United States, many people are asking what they need to know about the disease, its symptoms and how to protect themselves. Here are some answers.

What is anthrax?

Anthrax is a colorless, odorless, tasteless bacterium that protects itself from sunlight, heat and disinfectant by forming a protective coat. With this coat, the bacterium is called a "spore." The spores are so small that even an infectious dose - between 8,000 and 10,000 spores - is smaller than a speck of dust.

If inhaled, anthrax spores can germinate and lead to infection within one to 60 days. This is pulmonary anthrax, which usually causes death.

Less lethal forms include cutaneous infections, which occur if anthrax spores come in contact with a cut or other opening in the skin.

Another form of anthrax develops in the intestine of those who eat improperly cooked meat of animals that have been infected with anthrax.

All three forms of anthrax disease can be caused by the same bacterium - Bacillus anthracis.

Is anthrax contagious?

Inhalation anthrax does not spread from person to person. It is a "one-time agent" - to catch it a person must come directly in contact with the bacterium. Cutaneous anthrax can be transmitted in the rare instance that a cut or other opening in a person's skin comes in direct contact with the drainage from an open sore.

What are the symptoms of anthrax?

Symptoms of pulmonary anthrax are very similar to the flu, which can make an initial diagnosis somewhat difficult. However, in light of recent events many doctors have a heightened awareness of the possibility, and are therefore more likely to diagnose it.

Symptoms of the disease vary depending on how the disease was contracted, but usually occur within seven days. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control list the following:

Cutaneous: Most (about 95 percent) anthrax infections occur when the bacterium enters a cut or abrasion on the skin, such as when handling contaminated wool, hides, leather or hair products (especially goat hair) of infected animals. Skin infection begins as a raised itchy bump that is dark in color and resembles an insect bite but within 1-2 days develops into a vesicle and then a painless ulcer, usually 1-3 centimeters in diameter, with a characteristic black area in the center. Lymph glands in the adjacent area may swell. About 20 percent of untreated cases of cutaneous anthrax will result in death. Deaths are rare with appropriate therapy.

Inhalation: Initial symptoms may resemble a common cold. These symptoms may actually then retreat for a short period. But after several days, the symptoms progress to severe breathing problems and shock. Inhalation anthrax is usually fatal.

Intestinal: The intestinal disease form of anthrax may follow the consumption of contaminated meat and is characterized by an acute inflammation of the intestinal tract. Initial signs of nausea, loss of appetite, vomiting, fever are followed by abdominal pain, vomiting of blood, and severe diarrhea. Intestinal anthrax results in death in 25 percent to 60 percent of cases.

How is anthrax infection diagnosed?

For people with suspected anthrax disease, the CDC lists a number of laboratory testing that can identify the disease. Tests can include:

Taking cultures of blood and spinal fluid to detect antibodies to the disease. These tests should be done before antibiotic treatment has been initiated.

Cultures of tissue or fluids from affected areas, which could include fluid from a skin sore or sputum coughed up from the lungs.

A PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that amplifies trace amounts of DNA to detect if the anthrax bacteria is present.

How is anthrax exposure detected?

The most common way to detect anthrax exposure is to take samples swabbed from the nose to detect any anthrax spores present there. The CDC emphasizes, however, that nasal swabs cannot rule out exposure but are helpful because they can provide clues to help investigators assess where spores may have traveled.

What is the treatment for anthrax?

Antibiotics, including Ciprofloxacin (sometimes shortened to "Cipro") and penicillin can be effective, especially for cases of cutaneous anthrax. For pulmonary anthrax, the drugs must be administered before or very soon after infection to be effective.

Should people who were not exposed take antibiotics?

No. Only those persons determined by health officials to be at risk of exposure should take antibiotics. Taking antibiotics unnecessarily can be dangerous. The course of antibiotic treatment to prevent anthrax infection is long (60 days), and many people experience side effects.

Although most side effects are mild, severe ones may occur, such as diarrhea, abdominal symptoms, rash, and allergic reactions, and the use of antibiotics may dangerously interfere with other medications. In addition, the inappropriate use of antibiotics may cause the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of common bacteria.

Should I keep a supply of antibiotics on hand, just in case?

No, storing a supply of antibiotics "just in case" can be dangerous. Antibiotics should only be taken under the supervision of a physician who has done an evaluation to minimize the potential for side effects or interaction with other medications.

Is there a vaccine?

Only one American company, BioPort Corporation of Lansing, Mich., is licensed to produce an Anthrax vaccine right now. Robert Kramer, President and COO of BioPort told ABC's 20/20 that they have enough vaccine to support the anthrax vaccination immunization program that is currently sponsored by the Department of Defense, and at some point in the future, they will have additional vaccine available for civilian use.

BioPort plans to file papers to ship new Anthrax vaccines next year, but the drug, as planned, would not be safe for children, pregnant women or the elderly. (See "full coverage" above, left.)

Critics of the vaccine have raised many questions about its safety. More than 400 members of the military have either quit or faced court-martial rather than take the anthrax vaccine for fear of side effects reported, such as extreme fatigue, headaches, muscular problems and insomnia.

Some strains of anthrax could be resistant to the vaccine. Someone with the proper knowledge and materials could try to culture such a strain. Vaccine- and antibiotic-resistant anthrax was one of the weapons being developed in the former Soviet Union. Still, there is little or no reason to believe that this particular material ever made it out of the laboratory.

Is household bleach effective against anthrax?

According to Good Morning America's Dr. Nancy Snyderman, bleach, even bleach diluted with water, can work to disinfect a surface from anthrax contamination.

How easy is it to launch an anthrax attack?

Experts say it remains very difficult to transform the deadly bacterium into a weapon that can be effectively dispersed and kill large numbers of people. To develop an anthrax strain in its most lethal form - pulmonary anthrax - spores have to be crafted to just the right size. If too small, a person will exhale the spores. If too large, the spores fall to the ground and become ineffective.

A bomb carrying anthrax would likely destroy the germ as it explodes. Dispersing the bacterium with aerosols is challenging because, unless it is in spore form, it is a wet substance and can clog sprayers. The Aum Shinrikyo cult, which released the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 12 people, repeatedly tried to produce and disseminate anthrax, but failed to hurt anyone each time, according to testimony of its members.

How easy is it to react to an anthrax attack?

Rapid detection of a disease outbreak remains a problem since many doctors have not been trained in how to recognize early symptoms of anthrax infection, though they have become much more alert in light of recent events. Emergency room doctors were quick to identify anthrax in the Florida cases.

There is new technology available that can help with detection. A portable DNA analyzer is available to quickly identify specific biological agents once an attack is suspected. Lawrence Livermore National Labs has invented a machine that tests air quality every half-hour and can sound an alarm if any of several pre-programmed biological or chemical agents are detected.

The machines can be installed at possible terrorist targets, including airports, subway stations, and government buildings.

Once detected, Anthrax is a relatively easy germ to handle, given that it is usually responsive to early antibiotics and is not contagious.

Healthology.com and ABCNEWS' Amanda Onion, Nicholas Regush and Jeff Carpenter contributed to this report.

--------

New mysterious anthrax cases raise questions about how the spores are spread

Montreal Gazette
JIM FITZGERALD
Canadian Press
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={66023A44-1091-4E3C-9ADA-4586D4EFBA04}

NEW YORK (AP) - Two anthrax cases detected in women with no connection to the postal service, government or media have investigators worried that the potentially deadly spores could be spreading from one piece of mail to another.

A 61-year-old New York hospital worker clung to life Tuesday with the inhaled form of anthrax, a day after a 51-year-old accountant in New Jersey was released from the hospital with the skin version of the disease.

Both cases raised the possibility that anthrax letters are contaminating other mail or that the spores are sickening people by means other than the mail. Hundreds of fellow hospital workers were being given antibiotics as a precaution.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the National Institutes of Health, said worries about "cross-contamination" - anthrax spores sticking to pieces of mail at postal facilities - have grown with the new cases.

Investigators are now asking, "Did they get infected from a piece of mail that went to their home?" Fauci said at the White House. "That is being intensively investigated right now."

The latest victims raised the number of confirmed anthrax cases to 17 countrywide since the outbreak began in the first week of October. Ten of the victims have the inhaled form, and three have died. Seven others have less-severe skin infections.

Word of the New York infection came with the country already on its highest stage alert after warnings of more potential terrorist attacks. Just a few kilometres away from the hospital where the woman worked, President George W. Bush threw out the opening pitch in the World Series at Yankee Stadium, where fans encountered especially tight security.

The spread of the disease - from mail carriers in New Jersey and Washington to media employees in New York and Florida and now apparently unrelated people - is giving investigators and researchers alike a painful real-world case study.

Contamination of postal facilities in Washington, New Jersey and Florida has altered investigators' assumptions about how easily the spores can be spread. Postal Service equipment and procedures, too, are under re-examination.

"It's been an eye-opener, to me at least, the amount of contamination possible from these letters," said Martin Hugh-Jones, an epidemiologist at Louisiana State University.

Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are now keeping an "open mind" about cross-contamination, a spokesman said - a stark change from a week earlier.

Health officials have offered assurances that relatively large numbers of spores are needed for an inhalation infection, citing one report that estimated 8,000 to 10,000 must be inhaled. Another study estimated as few as 2,500. But exactly where the dividing line is remains unclear.

"It's what's in-between," said Dr. Bradley Perkins, an anthrax expert at the CDC. "We're learning as each day goes by something about this, but unfortunately we just don't have an experience that can offer a clear-cut line."

For years, anthrax has been studied as a biological weapon with the potential to sicken tens of thousands. But those scenarios involved widespread distribution through the air, not a few letters sent through the mail.

In Washington, the postmaster general said several billion dollars are needed to safeguard the country's mail. Anthrax has killed two postal workers there, and officials closed two more post offices while planning a two-week decontamination of a Senate office building where the bacteria were found.

One of the centres of the investigation is a mail sorting centre near Trenton, N.J., that processed at least three anthrax-tainted letters sent to Senator Tom Daschle's office in Washington, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post.

In New York, the latest victim, identified as Kathy Nguyen by local media reports, worked in a hospital supply room, but Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said there was no indication she handled mail. CDC officials, however, said the hospital had recently combined its mailroom and stockroom.

The hospital was closed to patients Tuesday, and workers were taken elsewhere for testing. New York Health Commissioner Neal Cohen said other city hospitals had been told to take precautions.

The New York case "does appear to be different from the previous cases," said Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge.

Officials investigating the most recent New Jersey infection were searching for a link to earlier cases. The 51-year-old accountant identified with skin anthrax on Monday does not remember opening any suspicious mail. She has been successfully treated and released from the hospital.

On the Net: www.cdc.gov

-------- business

The ex-presidents' club

Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger
Wednesday October 31, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0%2C3858%2C4288516%2C00.html

It is hard to imagine an address closer to the heart of American power. The offices of the Carlyle Group are on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, midway between the White House and the Capitol building, and within a stone's throw of the headquarters of the FBI and numerous government departments. The address reflects Carlyle's position at the very centre of the Washington establishment, but amid the frenetic politicking that has occupied the higher reaches of that world in recent weeks, few have paid it much attention. Elsewhere, few have even heard of it.

This is exactly the way Carlyle likes it. For 14 years now, with almost no publicity, the company has been signing up an impressive list of former politicians - including the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker; John Major; one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi and several south-east Asian powerbrokers - and using their contacts and influence to promote the group. Among the companies Carlyle owns are those which make equipment, vehicles and munitions for the US military, and its celebrity employees have long served an ingenious dual purpose, helping encourage investments from the very wealthy while also smoothing the path for Carlyle's defence firms.

But since the start of the "war on terrorism", the firm - unofficially valued at $3.5bn - has taken on an added significance. Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president's father. And, until earlier this month, Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm's multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden.

The closest the Carlyle Group has previously come to public attention was last May, when a Seoul-based employee called Peter Chung was forced to resign from his £100,000-a-year job after sending an email to friends - subsequently forwarded to thousands of others - boasting of his plans to "fuck every hot chick in Korea over the next two years". The more business-oriented activities of Carlyle's staff have been conducted much more quietly: since it was founded in 1987 by David Rubenstein, a policy assistant in Jimmy Carter's administration, and two lawyer friends, the firm has been dispatching an array of former world leaders on a series of strategic networking trips.

Last year, George Bush Sr and John Major travelled to Riyadh to talk with senior Saudi businessmen. In September 2000, Carlyle hired speakers including Colin Powell and AOL Time Warner chair Steve Case to address an extravagant party at Washington's Monarch Hotel. Months later, Major joined James Baker for a function at the Lanesborough Hotel in London, to explain the Florida election controversy to the wealthy attendees.

We can assume that Carlyle pays well. Neither Major's office nor Carlyle will confirm the details of his salary as European chairman - an appointment announced shortly before he left the House of Commons after the election - but we know, for the purposes of comparison, that he is paid £105,000 for 28 days' work a year for an unrelated non-executive directorship. Bush gives speeches for the company and is paid with stakes in the firm's investments, believed to be worth at least $80,000 per appearance. The benefits have attracted political stars from around the world: former Philippines president Fidel Ramos is an adviser, as is former Thai premier Anand Panyarachun - as well as former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl, and Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, the US stock market regulator.

Carlyle partners, who include Baker and the firm's chairman, Frank Carlucci - Ronald Reagan's defence secretary and a former deputy director of the CIA - own stakes that would be worth $180m each if each partner owned an equal slice. As in many areas of its work, though, Carlyle is not obliged to reveal the details, and chooses not to.

Among the defence firms which benefit from Carlyle's success is United Defense, a Virginia-based contractor which makes vertical missile launch systems currently on board US Navy ships in the Arabian sea, as well as a range of other weapons delivery systems and combat vehicles. Carlyle's other holdings span an improbable range, taking in the French newspaper Le Figaro and the company which bottles Dr Pepper.

"They are big, and they are quiet," says David Mulholland, business editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. "But they're not easy to get information out of, [but] United Defense are going to do well [in the current conflict]." United also owns Bofors, a Swedish munitions manufacturer.

Carlyle has said that it does not lobby the federal government, thus avoiding a conflict of interest when, for example, Carlucci met Rumsfeld in February when several important defence contracts were under consideration. But critics see that as a matter of definition.

"It should be a deep cause for concern that a closely held company like Carlyle can simultaneously have directors and advisers that are doing business and making money and also advising the president of the United States," says Peter Eisner, managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit-making Washington think-tank. "The problem comes when private business and public policy blend together. What hat is former president Bush wearing when he tells Crown Prince Abdullah not to worry about US policy in the Middle East? What hat does he use when he deals with South Korea, and causes policy changes there? Or when James Baker helps argue the presidential election in the younger Bush's favour? It's a kitchen-cabinet situation, and the informality involved is precisely a mark of Carlyle's success."

The world of private equity is an inherently secretive one. Firms such as Carlyle make most of their money buying firms which are not publicly traded, overhauling them and selling them at a profit, so the process by which likely targets are evaluated is much more confidential than on the open market. "These firms certainly don't go out of their way to get into the headlines," says Steven Bell, chief economist at Deutsche Asset Management. "They'd rather make a splash in Institutional Pensions Week. The aim is to realise very high returns for your investors while exerting a high degree of control over the company. You don't want to get into the headlines when you force the management to fire a director."

The process has worked wonders at United, and this month the firm announced plans to go public, giving Carlyle the chance to cash in its investment.

But what sets Carlyle apart is the way it has exploited its political contacts. When Carlucci arrived there in 1989, he brought with him a phalanx of former subordinates from the CIA and the Pentagon, and an awareness of the scale of business a company like Carlyle could do in the corridors and steak-houses of Washington. In a decade and a half, the firm has been able to realise a 34% rate of return on its investments, and now claims to be the largest private equity firm in the world. Success brought more investors, including the international financier George Soros and, in 1995, the wealthy Saudi Binladin family, who insist they long ago severed all links with their notorious relative. The first president Bush is understood to have visited the Binladins in Saudi Arabia twice on the firm's behalf.

The Carlyle Group does not employ anyone at its Washington headquarters to deal with the press. Inquiries about the links with the Binladins (as most of the family choose to spell their name) are instead referred to someone outside the company, on condition he is referred to only as "a source familiar with the relationship". This source says: "I can confirm the fact that any Binladin Group investment in Carlyle has been terminated or is being terminated. It amounted to a $2m investment in the Carlyle II Fund, which was anyway a very small portion of a $1.3bn fund. In the scheme of the investments and in the scheme of the business of either party it was very small. We have to get this into perspective. But I think there was a sense that there were questions being raised and some controversy, and for such a small amount of money it was something that we wanted to put behind us. It was just a business decision."

But if the Binladins' connection to the Carlyle Group lasted no more than six years, the current President Bush's own links to the firm go far deeper. In 1990, he was appointed to the board of one of Carlyle's first purchases, an airline food business called Caterair, which they eventually sold at a loss. He left the board in 1992, later to become Governor of Texas. Shortly thereafter, he was responsible for appointing several members of the board which controlled the investment of Texas teachers' pension funds. A few years later, the board decided to invest $100m of public money in the Carlyle Group. The firm's magic touch was already bringing results. Today, it is proving as fruitful as ever.

----

The One-Eyed Man

by Paul Krugman,
Wednesday, October 31, 2001
New York Times
http://commondreams.org/views01/1031-01.htm

Somewhere I read that to really understand legislation you have to look for the clause giving special consideration to one-eyesed by the House last week focuses on the huge benefits it lavishes on giant corporations. But that doesn't tell us much about the specific interests being served. What's good for corporate America is good for General Motors; it would be hard to devise a bill that consists mainly of corporate giveaways without giving a lot of money to the biggest companies. To understand what the bill is really about, you have to look at the big payoffs to not-so-big companies.

One piece of the bill is custom- designed to benefit a small group of multinational financial firms. Another is clearly there for the sake of certain health insurors. But the most remarkable thing is how much of the benefit from repeal of the alternative minimum tax - a measure that is also included in the Bush administration's supposed stimulus plan, and which seems to be one of the administration's key priorities - goes to companies that are not all that big.

For example, it's not too surprising that calculations by Citizens for Tax Justice show General Motors, with its 380,000 workers, getting a check for $800 million. But it's quite amazing that TXU (formerly Dallas Power and Light), a company with only 16,000 employees, would get a check for $600 million. And there are a number of medium-sized companies that, like TXU, are in line for surprisingly big benefits. These companies include ChevronTexaco, Enron, Phillips Petroleum, IMC Global and CMS Energy. What do they have in common?

Well, they tend to be in the energy or mining businesses; and they tend to be based in or near Texas. In other words, the one-eyed bearded man with a limp looks a lot like Dick Cheney.

There is almost certainly a lot of overlap between the companies that would derive large benefits from alternative minimum tax repeal and those that would have received large subsidies under the energy plan devised by Mr. Cheney's task force. You may remember that the administration, in apparent defiance of the law, refused to make the records of that task force's meetings available to Congress; that's one of those issues that seems to have been dropped after Sept. 11.

And I guess it's superfluous to point out that the big winners in all this seem to be companies that gave large, one-sided donations to the Republican Party in the last election. (This is not to suggest that Democrats are any less susceptible to the influence of money.)

To me, the story of the Bush administration is starting to look like the plot of "Victor/Victoria." First we had a candidate who was supposed to be a moderate. Then we learned, or thought we learned, that this was a mask; he was really a hard-line conservative who pretended to be a moderate in order to gain office.

But the latest economic proposals from the administration, like the Cheney energy plan, don't look as if they came from serious free-marketeers. They don't make sense in terms of either demand-side or supply-side economics, but they do give a lot of money to certain companies. So maybe ideology was just another mask for someone who was really the candidate of corporations - not corporations in general, but a small group of companies with a quite specific set of business interests - and who is only pretending to be a hard- line conservative who pretended to be a moderate in order to gain office.

It's an interesting and all too plausible picture. But it's a picture that most people will never see on their TV, and that many people would refuse to accept no matter how strong the evidence. That, of course, is what makes the whole thing possible. In the land of the blind, the one- eyed bearded man with a limp is king.

-------- drug war

Committee: Pull CIA from Peru anti-drug flights

USA TODAY
10/31/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/oct01/2001-10-31-cia-flights.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA should be taken off management of anti-drug interdiction flights over Peru should they resume, the Senate Intelligence Committee recommended in a report released Wednesday.

The report says that poor U.S. management of the program in part led to the April 20 accidental shootdown of a Baptist missionary flight in which two Americans were killed. It also blames mistakes made by the Peruvian military in a "precipitous rush to use lethal force."

"The primary culprit in this case was lax management," said Committee Vice Chairman Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., in a statement accompanying the release of the report. "Established safety procedures were permitted to erode unchecked for a period of years. CIA officials, from the program manager to the director (George Tenet), failed to properly manage the program, with tragic results."

On April 20, a CIA-operated surveillance plane initially identified the missionary plane as a possible drug flight. A Peruvian military jet then attacked it and shot it down. A Baptist missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her 7-month-old daughter Charity, were killed. Two other family members on board survived.

The program, which tracked flights in Peru and neighboring Colombia, was then suspended.

The report suggests that U.S. Customs or the military could take over the program because it is now known to the public, and the CIA is "normally associated with secret programs."

Inadequate Peruvian air traffic control, poor communications and chain-of-command networks, inadequate foreign language skills on both the CIA and Peruvian planes all contributed to the shootdown, the report says.

"The lack of judgment displayed by key individuals involved was the primary factor leading to this disaster," said committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a statement. His committee has primary oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. "Safety procedures, however, had degraded over time to the point where this kind of tragedy was almost inevitable."

Results of a joint U.S.-Peruvian investigation released Aug. 2 found similar problems but took a softer tone.

Since the suspension of the anti-drug interdiction flights, foreign officials say drug flights over Peru and Colombia have increased.

Peru and Colombia don't have the technology to resume flights without the United States. The U.S. military installs ground radar stations and provides aircraft with flying radar systems that form a web through which planes cannot move without being spotted. Once the radar picks up the planes, the information is passed to Peruvian and Colombian air force planes that then intercept the drug-smuggling aircraft.

Until the mid-1990s, Peru was the world's largest producer of coca, the raw material for cocaine, supplying Colombia's Medellin and Cali drug cartels before they started growing their own supply.

U.S. officials have largely credited the shift in coca cultivation from Peru to Colombia to the controversial policy of intercepting, and sometimes shooting down, small planes suspected of smuggling raw cocaine paste from Peru to its northern neighbor.

Last year, Washington approved a $1.3 billion aid package, Plan Colombia, providing the South American nation with helicopters, troop training and crop-spraying aircraft to help eradicate illegal drug crops, which are guarded and taxed by armed guerrillas and paramilitaries.

-------- iraq

Saddam urges U.S. to stop attacks on Afghanistan

USA TODAY
10/31/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/10/30/iraq-us.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - American aggression toward Afghanistan is pushing the world toward a pit "filled with blood and tragedies," Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said Tuesday. In his third open letter since Sept. 11, Saddam said U.S. foreign policy was to blame for the attacks on New York and Washington.

"The world needs to abort the United States' aggressive schemes, including its aggression on the Afghan people, which must be stopped," the letter said. It was addressed to people and governments of the West.

The United States is pushing the world toward a deep pit from which it will not leave until "that pit is filled with blood and tragedies," Saddam said.

He also called on the United States to eliminate its own weapons of mass destruction before demanding that of others.

The United States is the firmest backer of crippling sanctions against Iraq that cannot be lifted until the United Nations is satisfied Iraq has ceased making chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Also Tuesday, a newspaper owned by Saddam's son Odai Hussein predicted that the United States would attack Iraq by the year's end.

President Bush "will try to settle the unfinished business left by his father who was not able to overthrow Iraq's government during the 1991 Gulf War," the newspaper Babil wrote in a front-page editorial.

-------- israel

THE MIDEAST
Israeli Forces Kill 4 Palestinians

October 31, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- An Israeli helicopter rocket killed a Palestinian militant Wednesday, and three other militants died in clashes with Israeli troops, hours after Israeli forces entered a West Bank village and arrested Palestinians suspected of plotting suicide attacks.

The operations came amid heightened security in central Israel because of fears of attacks and as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel was ready to negotiate with the Palestinians.

``Myself, I am going to lead those negotiations. I really believe in that,'' Sharon told members of the World Jewish Congress meeting in Jerusalem.

Sharon has previously insisted on an end to violence before negotiations begin, but he did not mention that condition in Wednesday's comments. Many Palestinians and dovish Israelis charged that position showed he was trying to avoid negotiations.

In a targeted strike, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a rocket at a barn in the West Bank town of Hebron, killing Jamil Jadallah, the army said. Witnesses said he had been hiding out in the barn, which belonged to an aunt, knowing Israel considered him one of the most wanted militants.

Jadallah was planning an attack on Israel and had been involved in dozens of attacks in Hebron lately, an army statement said. He had links to senior members of the militant group Hamas responsible for previous suicide bombings, including the June 1 attack at a Tel Aviv disco that killed the bomber and 21 others, an army statement said.

He had escaped from Palestinian jails four times since he was convicted of killing two Israelis in 1998, the statement said.

The militant group Islamic Jihad called the killing an ``ugly assassination'' and said it would be avenged. Israel's army, however, had said Jadallah was a member of Hamas.

Two Palestinian policemen plotting to attack Jewish settlers were killed by Israeli soldiers near Bazaria, about 10 miles north of Nablus, officials from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement said. The army said it was checking the report.

In the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem, an Israeli tank fired on a Hamas member, Abdullah Jaroshi, 38, as he got out of his car, and he died in the hospital, Hamas members and doctors said.

Earlier, Israeli tanks backed by helicopters entered the northern West Bank village of Arrabeh, near Jenin, and surrounded the home of a suspected militant, witnesses said. The army said it arrested six people, two of them Jihad members planning a suicide attack in Israel.

The town's mayor, Anwar Izzadin, said eight people were arrested, including three Jihad members and one Hamas.

Three Palestinians were injured in gunfire exchanges as the tanks moved into the town, Izzadin said. One Israeli soldier was slightly wounded before troops pulled out, the army said.

Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a Sunday shooting attack in the coastal city of Hadera, which killed four Israeli women and the two attackers.

Israel has complained the Palestinian Authority is not doing enough to stop Palestinian militants, and says its hold on Palestinian towns is necessary to stop potential attackers.

Israel has insisted that Arafat's Palestinian Authority must pledge to stop attacks against Israelis and arrest suspected militants before it will withdraw its troops.

On Tuesday, the U.S. State Department renewed its call on Israel to move its forces out of Palestinian territory. Under strong U.S. pressure, Israel left Bethlehem and Beit Jalla on Sunday. But troops remain in four other towns.

Israeli forces started moving into the Palestinian towns after the Oct. 17 assassination of ultranationalist Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi, claimed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as revenge for Israel's killing of PFLP leader Mustafa Zibri. Israel accused Zibri of plotting attacks against Israelis.

In 13 months of fighting, 734 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 191 on the Israeli side.

In Gaza, Israeli tanks fired shells at buildings in the Rafah refugee camp near the Egyptian border, Palestinian security officials said, setting fire to three houses. Three people were injured, one critically, doctors said.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said he expected to meet Arafat in Spain during a weekend economic conference in the first high-level contact since the incursions began. But he said they would not conduct negotiations.

Peres told Israel TV that he has prepared a draft of a new peace plan that calls for immediate creation of a Palestinian state ``as soon as we can reach an agreement.''

He would not state directly that his plan calls for removing all Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip, as reported in the Israeli daily Maariv.

Peres said he would seek comments from Sharon and others in the government before making his plan public.

Peres represents the moderate Labor party in Sharon's broad-based coalition government. Sharon has also spoken of a Palestinian state, but is expected to be far less generous in any offers than Peres and his allies.

The Palestinians want to set up a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the Arab section of Jerusalem as its capital. Peace talks broke down in January after the Palestinians did not accept an Israeli proposal of a state in all of Gaza, more than 90 percent of the West Bank and control over parts of Jerusalem.

The Palestinians insisted that more than 4 million refugees and their descendants must have the right to return to their original homes in Israel.

-------- puerto rico

Vieques: MORATORIUM ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS OVER

From: kurttm@earthlink.net
Subject: [v-mgj]
Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques
PO Box 1424
Vieques, Puerto Rico 00765
Telefax (787) 741-1717
E mail: bieke@prdigital.com

31 de octubre de 2001
Report from the Vieques Peace and Justice Camp

With or without a referendum, civil disobedience will continue

The principal community organizations of the Vieques struggle - the Vieques Women´s Alliance, Vieques Youth United, Catholic and Methodist Churches, Popular Democratic Party, Monte Carmelo, los Jinetes por la Paz (Horsemen for Peace), Luisa Guadalupe Camp, Camp Milivy and the Committee for the Rescue and Devlopment of Vieques (CRDV), among others - work hard to improve the tools of the struggle before the threat of new maneuvers in November. The Vieques groups also confront the federal referendum, created by the Navy to confuse and divide. Our people have begun a campaign to promote a critical participation in the referendum, to convert this event in another claim for peace on Vieques. The Navy´s decision to postpone the referendum until January, was announced the day after our organizations held a press conference about the start of our campaign to defeat the Navy at their own game. According to Vieques leaders, the people here are prepared and willing to beat the Navy in the bombing zone, in the ocean, in the jails, the courts and in any referendum on the issue.

Last month, the diverse organizations in the struggle began a process of meetings to improve the coordination of protest actions and civil disobedience. In the coming weeks a meeting will be held between the groups here and the support groups from the main island of Puerto Rico to continue strengthening our efforts toward demilitarization and peace.

THE MORATORIUM ON CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IS OVER. The Vieques organizations declared a moratorium during the past maneuvers in solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attacks in New York and as a security measure for our people in light of the wave of repression and increased tension. The moratorium received the support of the immense majority of the groups in Vieques, in Puerto Rico and in the US. Vieques Mayor, Dámaso Serrano, in messages sent from federal prison, where he serves a four month sentence for his participation in civil disobedience, congratulated our organizations for declaring the moratorium that demonstrated to the world the humanitarian nature and the solidarity that characterizes the people of Vieques.

On Saturday, 27 October, a group of champion athletes from Puerto Rico, in coordination with the CRDV, held a Gathering of Runners, Walkers for Peace on Vieques from the Aire, Water and Sky. Zoraid Díaz, principal coordinator of the activity, described it as "an oasis of peace for the people". The activities began at Sun Bay beach flying kites under the direction of the Vega Alta kite team who brought not only small kites for children but three impressive kites of 20, 30 and 40 feet length. Suddenly, a small plane flew over the area and dropped a 'rain of margaritas' (flowers) as a symbol of peace and love. The 'rain' was received with cheers and applause from the participants.

Around 1PM, the children, adults, champion class horses, bicycles and other vehicles, paraded from the Public Beach to the Peace and Justice Camp. Once at the camp, the Metropolitan Choral Group - 35 beautifull voices - offered a concert for peace. Our 'disobedient' parish priest, Father Nelson López, offered a message to the approximately two hundred people participating. Judith Conde, leader of the Vieques Women´s Alliance; Ismael Guadalupe, CRDV; Emilio García of the Vieques Veterans for Peace and the Millivy Resistance Camp, among other leaders of the struggle, gave messages about the importance of unity and militancy in the face of new threats of renewed bombing.

During the Choral concert, we received a phone call indicating that several vehicles carrying military personal were approaching the camp area to enter the Navy base of Camp García. We immediately called our people to the street for a massive picket that impeded the military vehicles from arriving at the gate. The vehicles, together with their PR police escorts, were forced to turn around and return to where they had come from. In this small, but important 'victory', we reminded all of the necessity to continue the struggle in the bombing zone, at the fence, in jail, in the courts, in any referendum on the issue - and in the streets of Vieques.

On Saturday evening, the Metropolotican Choral Group participated in the vigil at the PJC, sharing the stage with actress and lawyer for the Vieques cause, Roxana Badillo, who read several poems dedicated to the struggle for peace and freedom in Vieques and Puerto Rico.

Last week we began a new project of dissemintation through Channel 28, televisión Viequense. The channel can be seen in all of Vieques and in several towns in the Eastern part of Puerto Rico. With the support of the channel´s owners and donations from solidarity groups, we began transmitting two hours Monday through Friday from 8 to 10 PM. Memebers of the Vieques Women´s Alliance and community leaders who played important roles in the 29 July referendum - José M. Emeric, Eva Torres, Teófilo Bermúdez, entre otros - Viequense artists, merchantes and other representatives of our community participate in this project that allows us to announce the actvities of the struggle and provides and important space for community participation in the public discussion on the problem of militarism in Vieques. Our technician and PJC filmaker, Andrés Nieves, together with Nilda Medina (CRDV) have taken on the great responsibility to produce this important program for peace on Vieques.

Some of the upcoming activities related to the struggle for peace on Vieques are:

3 November -- meeting of Vieques organizations in the struggle

10-11 Nov. -- solidarity activity in Barrio Esperanzz

11 Nov. -- anniversary of the death of Angel Rodríguez Cristóbal, assasinated (1979) in his Tallahassee, Florida jail cell where he was serving a six month sentence for civil disobediencia on Vieques

17 Nov. -- openning of exhibit, Art Imprisioned - drawings from federal prison, by Vieques artist, Ernesto Peña.

18 Nov. -- meeting between Vieques community groups and solidarity organizations from the main island of PR

During the next two months, representatives of the CRDV will bring the

issue of Vieques to conferences and meetings in California, Cuba,

Princeton University, Japan and Guam, as well as activities in Puerto Rico.

The preparations for civil disobedience as well as the continuous program of activity organized by the CRDV and the Peace and Justice Camp, demand an enormous sacrifice by committee members and the great number of people from the community who support this work. We also need funding to continue this long struggle in defense of dignity and for peace. All donations are greatly appreciated and should be sent to the Committee´s address listed above.

In struggle, in solidarity

CRDV

-------- u.n.

War on terrorism to top U.N. agenda

October 31, 2001
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011031-155425.htm

NEW YORK - What looked like a low-wattage U.N. gathering now is taking on new life with a focus on the U.S.-led war on terrorism as dozens of world leaders have agreed to attend a General Assembly debate next week.

President Bush will make his first appearance before the world body on Nov. 10, the first day of the weeklong debate, and several governments have upgraded their participation in the annual event.

While he is here, Mr. Bush will meet with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to discuss a $500 million aid package, regional security and other matters.

He also will attend the annual luncheon for presidents and prime ministers and probably will sit at the head table with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

U.S. officials still are unable to flesh out the rest of the president's schedule. However, U.N. and U.S. officials say the fight against terrorism - specifically the situations in Afghanistan and the Middle East and the importance of international legal conventions - is likely to dominate both the public addresses and the private meetings held on the sidelines of the annual debate.

So far, 49 world leaders had confirmed their participation in the general debate, which was postponed from mid-September after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Several high-level meetings are planned for that week, including a largely summit-level meeting of the 53-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.

There is some talk of reconvening the so-called "six-plus-two" meetings of Afghanistan's six neighbors - Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China - plus the United States and Russia.

The U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, is in the region, but is prepared to return to New York if the parties demand it. Jan Fischer, General Assembly spokesman, said leaders often confirm only a week before the scheduled debate, often out of security concerns or potential scheduling conflicts.

"Once committed, it's more difficult to pull out," he said. "It's much easier to add their names."

Many world leaders enjoy coming to the General Assembly because it is an opportunity for them to articulate their nations' goals and priorities in a public, nonconfrontational way that also is guaranteed to dominate the news at home.

The vast General Assembly chambers is a dramatic backdrop, giving weight to a president's or prime minister's declarations about world peace, social and economic development, debt relief, cooperation, disarmament and myriad other topics.

But the real value, say U.N. officials and most delegations, is the opportunity for leaders to meet privately, without the pomp and expectations generated by a state visit. These bilateral, regional and ad hoc gatherings will take place in conference rooms, hotel suites, diplomatic missions throughout midtown Manhattan, and even in spartan booths in the heavily secured U.N. visitors' lobby.

"This is a great venue to meet foreign ministers and world leaders that otherwise would have to be met in the capitals," said Ariel Milo, spokesman for the Israeli mission. "In one week, you are able to condense a lot of diplomacy that is very effective."

Issues other than terrorism and building a new Afghanistan are on the table.

Mr. Annan plans to focus on the worsening situation in the Middle East, say aides who dismiss recent reports in Israel of a new U.N.-proposed peace initiative.

Mr. Annan also is hoping to nudge the heads of Pakistan and India toward a rapprochement over Kashmir.

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

U.S. troops on the ground

October 31, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011031-48831380.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said for the first time yesterday that a small number of U.S. troops are working on the ground with opposition Afghan forces and he insisted that the campaign is progressing well.

"We do have a very modest number of ground troops in the country, and they are there for liaison purposes and have been doing an excellent job of assisting with the coordination for resupplies of various type, as well as targeting," said Mr. Rumsfeld.

The U.S. soldiers are in northern Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld said, and are "assisting with targeting and providing the kind of very specific information which is helpful to the air effort.

"And because they are there now, the effort has improved in its effectiveness over what had been the case previously," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

The disclosure comes amid some media criticism from pundits who say military operations, now in the fourth week, are bogging down and that more forces should be used in the campaign against more targets.

In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, said the war is going as planned and has not become stuck.

"I don't believe this operation is at a stalemate," Gen. Franks told reporters. "We are committed to this for as long as it takes."

Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed claims by critics who said the United States is not doing enough and said anyone who makes such suggestions lacks "knowledge as to the effort we've been putting into it."

He said that more than half of the targets in bombing raids in recent days have been targeted at helping the opposition Northern Alliance troops with attacks on frontline Taliban forces.

Asked about media criticism, Mr. Rumsfeld said he reads many op-ed articles and that "I would just be dumbfounded if I found that everyone agreed with everything that we did. We expect that there will be differences of views."

The defense secretary spoke to reporters following a meeting with British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon.

Both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Hoon said it is unlikely that bombing raids will be halted during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At a breakfast earlier yesterday, Mr. Hoon said Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect behind the September 11 terrorist attacks, is still hiding in Afghanistan.

"We don't know where he is," said Mr. Hoon. "My judgment remains that he's still in Afghanistan. We know from the past that he has moved around Afghanistan, that he has a number of places that in past, at any rate, he has been able to hide out."

Mr. Hoon said British special-operations forces are poised to conduct raids in Afghanistan, like the Oct. 19 U.S. commando raid on Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's residence. The British defense chief also said it is possible that the Taliban may relent and give up bin Laden.

In Uzbekistan, Gen. Franks denied that U.S. civilian defense leaders are dissatisfied with the pace of the war.

"My boss, the secretary of defense, and the president have not indicated to me any frustration about the pace of this activity," the four-star general said in his first substantive remarks about military operations. "We will undertake our actions on a timeline that is satisfying to us. We will maintain the initiative."

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff, said the U.S. forces moved into Afghanistan within the past several days are also helping military planners.

"It's also important to be able to see a battlefield from on the battlefield," said Adm. Stufflebeem. "An Army expression is you have to walk the terrain to understand it, and that's of value in its own intelligence as well as the ability of our forces to have the confidence to get on the ground to conduct operations and to engage an enemy."

The ground troops will "help direct the strikes with more precision so that there's less chance" of errant bombing, said Adm. Stufflebeem.

The troops are in a combat zone and are at risk, he said, "but it's a risk that is part of the plan."

Mr. Rumsfeld said there are signs the Taliban, a radical Islamic movement, is becoming disunited and some of its leaders are defecting.

Also, Afghans are concerned that bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban are using mosques as ammunition storage sites and command-and-control centers, and that they are moving air-defense batteries close to residential areas. The moves are designed to avoid U.S. bombing and missile attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

"The Afghan people feel that they are being put at unnecessary risk because of the collocation, which clearly is for the very reason that they know we avoid targeting residential and civilian areas," said Mr. Rumsfeld.

Adm. Stufflebeem said military operations Monday included bombing raids on terrorist and Taliban power centers, including bunkers and tunnels, an airfield and Taliban forces near opposition troops.

A total of 13 targets were hit by some 70 strike aircraft, most of which are based on aircraft carriers.

Adm. Stufflebeem said Northern Alliance troops are fighting to take the key strategic town of Mazar-e-Sharif in the north.

"We know there are multiple opposition groups that are aligned against multiple Taliban groups," he said.

"There are many forces involved, there are many different commanders involved, and there may be more than one objective that I'm not sure about in terms of are they all after the same thing," he said. "The one thing that's for sure is that it's heated."

Adm. Stufflebeem said the opposition forces in northern Afghanistan are "openly opposed to the Taliban" and have "asked for assistance."

Helping other opposition forces in the south is "more problematic," he said. Although "we are certain that there are those tribes in the south that are not loyal to the Taliban. We have not been invited, we have not been asked for, we have not been requested, as we have in the north."

Helping the southern Afghan opposition also is more difficult because it is harder to reach their forces, Adm. Stufflebeem said.

"It's quite a different geographic area," he said. "And there's quite a bit of difference in terms of organized opposition."

Adm. Stufflebeem also said the military is "eternally, eternally grateful to the American people for the steadfast support" of the military action in Afghanistan.

"And for those of us in uniform, that steels us in our resolve," he said. "We know we're doing the right thing, we're going it in the best way that we know how, we're adapting as we go along, we're confident that we're making progress, and we are going to win."

--------

Concern grows over pace of U.S. campaign

By Patrick Rucker
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 31, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011031-10518564.htm

Three weeks after U.S.-led forces began an assault against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and the terrorists whom the regime shelters, there are signs of growing diplomatic disquiet and public concern about the direction and pace of the military campaign.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday called for the allies to end the bombing campaign as soon as possible, saying humanitarian aid for millions facing starvation in Afghanistan depended on a cessation of hostilities.

"What is important from our point of view is that we need to see the operation ended as soon as possible so that we can step up our humanitarian effort, get in as much food as we can and prepare for the winter," Mr. Annan told reporters yesterday.

Asked how long a halt the organization would require, Mr. Annan said, "I haven't referred to a halt. What I am saying is that we would want to see this whole military operation ended as soon as possible, particularly the air action, so that we can begin to move in our supplies."

Earlier this week, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon indicated that officials were contemplating a pause to the air campaign during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. U.S. officials insisted their effort could continue during the four weeks beginning in mid-November.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who delivered a major speech in defense of the war effort yesterday, was responding at least in part to signs that the British public was growing ambivalent about the air campaign.

A poll commissioned by Britain's the Guardian newspaper showed 62 percent of Britons surveyed supported military action, down from 74 earlier this month. Some 54 percent said the bombing campaign should be paused to allow aid convoys to go into Afghanistan.

"I very much doubt whether bombing can do anything but make matters worse," columnist Dr. Malise Ruthven wrote in yesterday's paper. Comparing the military campaign in Afghanistan to Britain's effort to quell political unrest in Northern Ireland, the columnist encouraged, "The IRA [has] come to see that politics will serve their constituency better than violence."

"There is nothing tangible left to bomb," Peter Kilfoyle, former defense minister and a member of Mr. Blair's Labor Party, said over the weekend. He said the strikes only "create more terrorists."

Britain has committed 200 Royal Marines for action in Afghanistan and put another 400 on "high readiness."

British missile-launching submarines and specialized refueling and reconnaissance aircraft also have been supporting the Americans.

• Betsy Pisik in New York contributed to this report.

-------

U.S. Troops Coordinating Airstrikes
Ground Support Aids Northern Alliance

By Thomas E. Ricks and Doug Struck
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14820-2001Oct30.html

The Pentagon moved yesterday to step up its support of the anti-Taliban rebels in northern Afghanistan, acknowledging for the first time that U.S. troops are on the ground to coordinate intensified airstrikes and signaling that additional military assets may be moved to Central Asia in the coming weeks. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said "something like 80 percent" of yesterday's airstrikes were aimed at frontline troops of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia. A senior defense official said the strikes focused on Taliban units barring the opposition Northern Alliance from taking Afghanistan's major northern city, Mazar-e Sharif, and its capital, Kabul.

Rumsfeld said the U.S. combat troops in northern Afghanistan are playing a liaison role with the Northern Alliance, designating targets for airstrikes and helping arrange logistical support. "We do have a very modest number of ground troops in the country," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. "They're in the north. We've had others on the ground who have gone in and come out in the south." A senior U.S. military officer, meanwhile, said it is likely that additional forces -- most likely strike aircraft -- will be moved in the coming weeks to Central Asia, where they could easily attack targets in northern Afghanistan. Another official said that the deployment of a variety of military assets to the region has been proposed but not yet approved by Rumsfeld.

The United States is already using bases in the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Rumsfeld is scheduled to fly to Central Asia early next week, following a trip he made there earlier this month. Next week's visit comes on the heels of one made to Uzbekistan yesterday by Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld also is expected to visit Russia, India and Pakistan.

The shift of the Pentagon's attention to northern Afghanistan after several weeks of concentrating airstrikes on the south of the country could provide several military and political benefits to the United States and its allies. By helping the Northern Alliance advance, it would enable the United States to point to progress in the 24-day-old war as well as open up northern land corridors for humanitarian food relief for starving Afghans as winter approaches.

It also addresses a major concern of Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that weeks of bombing the south are exacerbating tensions inside his country, where the war is widely unpopular. Many Pakistanis are far more sensitive to bombing of their ethnic cousins in the south than they are to military action in the north.

Finally, officials said, an emphasis on the north might buy time for the covert U.S. effort in southern Afghanistan under which the CIA and Pakistani officials are trying to woo leaders of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in the south, away from the Taliban militia.

Until yesterday there were few signs that the U.S. strategy was succeeding. But prominent officials said yesterday that they now think that splits may be emerging.

"We are getting accounts of changing sides, of local leaders abandoning support for the Taliban regime," British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told reporters at a breakfast meeting here. He said he thinks some Pashtun leaders "are having second thoughts" about supporting the Taliban.

Musharraf hinted that he also saw the prospect of prominent Pashtun defections. "It's not wishful thinking," he told Reuters television.

Field reports indicate that some Taliban commanders are "pleading for more supplies, including weapons, and pleading for more reinforcements," said one senior U.S. official briefed on conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. "There are also defections among Taliban commanders, and some are are questioning" Taliban leader Mohammad Omar's "leadership and his stability."

The reports could not be confirmed independently.

Rumsfeld was more cautious on the subject. "I have not seen personally anything that I could validate that would suggest a major shift in one direction or another," he said.

One U.S. military officer said that the Northern Alliance, which has been battling the Taliban for control of Mazar-e Sharif, is "trying to organize themselves for something coordinated before Ramadan," the Muslim holy month that begins in mid-November. The effort, the officer said, is clearly being aided by U.S. airstrikes. "They attrit the Taliban lines every day."

A senior defense official said that the bulk of yesterday's airstrikes by about 70 aircraft were focused on the Mazar-e Sharif area. "The better availability of information helps immensely," the official said, referring to the presence of U.S. troops designating targets.

The official said that this emphasis on Mazar-e Sharif in particular and northern Afghanistan in general is the byproduct of the Pentagon's plan of operations, not a political decision.

"What you're seeing is a conventional side of a campaign -- you obviously take out the air defenses," the official said. "Then you take out the military assets, so that when you get to the point where you can turn to the forces in the field, you've clearly given them nowhere to go. That's what you're seeing when you hear people say we're on plan."

Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem, an opposition spokesman, told Reuters that some American troops already are operating a small base in northern Afghanistan. "They have their own base there and are equipped with guns and other means of defense and wear uniforms," he said.

By helping the opposition move in the north, the United States also might take the spotlight off Kabul, where the opposition is bogged down about 25 miles north of the capital. The United States and Britain would like to preserve that standoff by having the Northern Alliance advance against the Taliban elsewhere, and having the rebels stay out of the capital until arrangements are in place for some sort of Pashtun involvement in the future government of Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance is comprised primarily of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks.

Hoon declined to answer directly when asked whether he would like to see the rebels occupy Kabul. Rather, he said that, "We want to see the Northern Alliance advancing and taking territory from the Taliban regime."

Franks told reporters in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, that he flew to Uzbekistan from Pakistan yesterday by crossing directly through Afghan airspace. "We've said for awhile that we own the skies, and he wanted to make that point," a defense official said.

Franks suggested that the United States has different goals than the Afghan rebel groups. "We have discussed whether it would in fact support our campaign objectives to move toward a variety of places," the general said. "And we have taken a decision that says we will remain focused on our objectives, and we will retain the initiative rather than providing specific focus on a specific area." The United States has been clear that its two top priorities in the war are attacking the al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan and its hard-core supporters in the Taliban.

Franks, the chief of the U.S. Central Command, also said the war is going according to plan. "We want to conduct this operation on our timeline," he said. "I think we are on that timeline."

Pentagon officials were generally more upbeat as well. "I think that it's certain that we will defeat the Taliban," said Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We will do it in consonance with the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces. So it is a matter of when more than it is a matter of if."

Struck reported from Tashkent. Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

New England's EMI plans 420 MW Nantucket wind farm

Reuters,
by Scott DiSavino:
31/10/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13035/story.htm

NEW YORK - New England energy trendsetter Energy Management Inc. (EMI) is developing one of the world's largest offshore wind farms in Massachusetts' Nantucket Sound, rivaling some of the North Sea projects off Denmark and Germany.

"We're developing America's first offshore wind farm five miles off the coast that will generate up to 420 megawatts (MW) of clean renewable energy," Jim Gordon, president of Energy Management and Cape Wind Associates LLC, told Reuters.

Energy Management of Boston, developing energy projects in the region for 26 years, built New England's first natural gas-fired merchant power plant in Dighton, Mass. in 1999.

Last year, Gordon said Energy Management sold its power plants to independent power producer Calpine Corp. of San Jose, Calif. and moved into the renewable energy business.

"Cape Wind represents the next level ... it's the most earth friendly energy project we've ever developed," Gordon said.

He said Cape Wind wants to build the Nantucket Wind project, which will include about 150 wind turbines on a four-by-six mile (six-by-10 km) shoal in Nantucket Sound about five miles (8 km) off the coast of Hyannis, Mass.

The turbines, which are about 15 feet (3 meters) in diameter, will be spaced a third to half a mile apart so recreational and fishing boats can traverse the area.

Cape Wind is compiling an environmental study for the project that it expects to file this autumn, working toward a goal of generating power by 2004.

THE COST OF WIND POWER

Gordon forecast the project would save New England electricity customers tens of millions of dollars a year.

"This project has a 30-year life. Over that time, it will be competitively priced against any other energy generation technology," Gordon said.

"Once the turbines are built, the wind is free."

In a study done for Cape Wind, utility consulting firm LaCapra Associates of Boston determined the Nantucket Wind project would cut New England power customers' energy costs by $18 million to $22 million a year.

Because of the fickle nature of the weather, EMI estimates the project would operate at an average 34 percent of capacity over any given year.

"I don't think wind power is cheap by any stretch," said energy analyst Mike Worms of investment banking firm Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co. of New York.

"If it weren't for federal subsidies, it probably wouldn't even be a viable option," Worms added, referring to the federal production tax credit for wind power.

The production tax credit pays wind farm operators 1.7 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity generated.

The credit, which pays a developer for 10 years after a turbine starts generating electricity, will expire at the end of December.

A spokeswoman at FPL Energy, the largest wind power producer in the United States, said the company was working diligently to get the tax credit extended.

FPL spokeswoman Carol Clauson warned that, if the credit is not extended, "the whole infrastructure that supports the wind industry will begin diminishing because there will be fewer and fewer developers like ourselves."

FPL Energy operates more than 1,000 MW of wind power in eight states in the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, the Northern Plains and the Great Lakes.

WIND IS COMPETITIVE

Until recently, wind was not a cost-effective source of power.

But in the past 20 years the cost of wind energy has dropped by about 80 percent, according to FPL Energy, making it competitive with other energy sources.

FPL's Clauson said it costs about $1 million to develop a megawatt of wind power, compared with $550,000-$700,000 a megawatt for natural gas.

"When natural gas prices are high, wind is more competitive. When natural gas prices are low, wind power is less competitive," Clauson said.

The production tax credit helps narrow the remaining cost gap between wind power and natural gas.

Wind power costs about 4 cents to 4.5 cents per kWh, compared, with about 3 cents to 4 cents per kWh for natural gas and just 2 cents per kWh for nuclear fuel, according to Gerard Klauer's Worms.

When the wind blows, it can displace more costly fossil fueled generation such as oil and natural gas.

--------

LONG ISLAND UTILITY INSTALLS FUEL CELLS

October 31, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-31-09.html

WEST BABYLON, New York, Under a $7 million program to demonstrate how fuel cell technology can generate electricity for Long Island consumers, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) announced today that it has installed 55 fuel cells - manufactured by Plug Power - at its West Babylon substation.

The fuel cell project is part of LIPA's Clean Energy Initiative (CEI), first proposed by New York Governor George Pataki as a way to promote new energy technologies and energy conservation projects. A total of 75 fuel cells will be installed at the substation. Eighteen of the 55 fuel cells are now installed and generating electricity for LIPA's grid.

The program is intended to begin identifying and developing the measures and systems needed to facilitate the use of fuel cells operating in parallel with LIPA's electrical grid system.

A fuel cell is a device that converts the energy of a fuel (hydrogen, natural gas, methanol, gasoline, etc.) and an oxidant (air or oxygen) into useable electricity. Unlike traditional fossil power plants that burn fuels, fuel cells generate electricity through an electrochemical process from which no particulate air pollution is produced. As a result, they do not contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain.

LIPA's application of fuel cell technology will be the first large scale use of fuel cells for this purpose in New York State.

"LIPA's mission is to provide safe, reliable, environmentally sound electricity for our customers' needs," said LIPA chair Richard Kessel. "Fuel cells are an environmentally friendly electric generating technology, and this project will help us develop a better understanding of how fuel cells can be integrated into our electric grid. In turn, the information and experience gained through this program will continue to help fuel cells evolve as a technology that can be utilized by electric utilities as a source of power, and eventually by residential and commercial customers for their own on site power needs."

---

UNION BUILDS GREEN HEADQUARTERS

October 31, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-31-09.html

SAN JOSE, California, Officials of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union Local 332, the largest IBEW local in northern California, announced today the completion of new headquarters that feature the largest commercial solar power installation west of the Mississippi.

Designated an official Green Building model by the city of San Jose, the union hall's photovoltaic (PV) solar power system generates 55 kilowatts of power, enough to provide for 70 to 80 percent of the building's total electrical needs. The use of solar photovoltaics cuts the facility's utility bill in half - and allows IBEW Local No. 332 to send power back to the utility grid.

The independent power system also insulates the building against loss of power from the utility grid in the event of a blackout, as well as from fluctuations in the price of electricity. IBEW said having a source of reliable power is important in California, with its unpredictable supply of electricity.

"The future for solar power is very strong, and the electrical workers have a philosophical and environmental commitment to using solar energy," said Terry Tanner, business manager of IBEW Local 332. "We installed this system ourselves because it points the way to the future of electrical generation for the businesses and communities in Silicon Valley. Plus, it lessens the impact to the environment and lowers our energy costs."

IBEW Local 332's commitment to the use of solar energy is a reflection of the national policy of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA).

"There is a growing consensus that distributed PV systems that provide electricity at the point of use will be the first to reach widespread commercialization," said Mark Ayers, national IBEW director of construction and maintenance.

The building's solar powered PV system, built into the structure's rooftop and south side awning, help supply heating, cooling and lighting to the IBEW's 400 seat meeting hall, conference rooms, dispatch and administrative offices. The PV solar system also operates the building's computers, telephones, fire alarm and security systems.

On weekends, electricity produced by the solar array is sent out to the utility grid, and earns credit for the building during the midday hours when the grid needs power the most. IBEW Local 332 spent $400,000 on the installation of the system. Forty percent of the installation cost will be rebated by the state of California, which rebates $4.50 per watt up to 50 percent of the total cost of an installation.

-------- energy

ENERGY DEPARTMENT CELEBRATES WEATHERIZATION DAY

October 31, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-31-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham lauded "Weatherization Day" Tuesday by honoring the Department of Energy's (DOE) Weatherization Assistance Program for cutting the annual energy bills of almost five million low income families across the country.

"Since 1976, the Weatherization Assistance Program has helped families reduce their costs for heating and cooling their homes," Abraham said. "More money saved in energy costs is more money in the pockets of American families."

"This year alone, weatherized households are saving an average of $300 which amounts to a projected cost savings of more than $1 billion for all homes served," Abraham added. "This program is a key feature of President Bush's National Energy Policy which recommends increased funding for weatherization assistance over the next 10 years."

Earlier this month, Abraham toured a family's home in Arlington, Virginia that received weatherization improvements. By adding insulation the family may reduce its gas bill by up to 50 percent.

The Weatherization Assistance Program is provided to families according to income and family size guidelines. The program places high priority on services to the elderly, persons with disabilities and families with children. Weatherization also reduces the nation's energy consumption by the equivalent of 15 million barrels of oil each year, an important contribution to our energy security.

Program funding comes from several sources. The DOE provides funds to state weatherization offices which provide grants to local agencies in every county in the nation to perform the work. Every dollar invested in core program funds leverages about $3 from other sources including federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, utility funds and state support.

More information on weatherization is available at: http://www.eren.doe.gov/buildings/weatherization_assistance

-------- environment

ALASKA TIGHTENS SECURITY ON HAZMAT SHIPMENTS

October 31, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2001/2001L-10-31-09.html

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), are working with major carriers to increase the security of hazardous materials being transported on state roadways.

"Alaska carriers transport various types of hazardous material every day including explosives and products like fuel, paint, and even hair spray," said Alaska Governor Tony Knowles. "In response to recent events, state and federal transportation officials are now contacting Alaska motor carriers to educate them about security issues, and ask them to be on alert for suspicious behaviors from drivers, shippers, consignees, or the public, and to report any suspect activity to the proper authorities."

Members of the state's Measurement Standards and Commercial Vehicle Enforcement (MSCVE) division and the U.S. DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration are conducting on site security visits to hazardous materials carriers in Alaska. MSCVE's commercial vehicle enforcement officers working at weigh stations and at roadside have been alerted to be on the lookout for suspicious activity, particularly activity involving commercial vehicles hauling hazardous materials. Enhanced inspections of vehicles and drivers transporting hazardous materials are also being conducted.

Companies are being asked to examine personnel security by reviewing all drivers' files and ensuring that detailed background checks have been performed as required by regulations. Companies are also being asked to review the security of their on site storage of hazardous materials as well as security measures being taken during the transportation of such materials.

Priority will be given to carriers that transport bulk explosives, petroleum products, poisonous gases and similar products.

"Unfortunately, we have been made painfully aware of the fact that commercial transportation equipment can be used as weapons by terrorists," says Alaska Department of Transportation Commissioner Joe Perkins. "Taking these additional steps will heighten the level of vigilance and enhance the security of hazardous materials moving throughout Alaska."

-------- police / prisoners

FBI Subpoenas Labs, Schools in Anthrax Probe

By Earl Lane
Newsday WASHINGTON BUREAU
October 31, 2001
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-usprob312439948oct31.story?coll=ny%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines

Washington - The FBI has been using subpoenas from a Florida grand jury to obtain information from universities and research institutions, including Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory, as part of its search for possible sources of contraband anthrax or people with the expertise to make it.

While investigators still do not know the origin of the pure, fine-grained anthrax mailed to the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), some experts have said it could be the work of a competent, doctorate-level microbiologist.

At least two laboratories that continue to do active research on anthrax said they have received subpoenas and others likely have been issued. The FBI also has been contacting many of the nation's more than 100 laboratories that handle hazardous biological agents.

At Brookhaven, the subpoena from the U.S. District Court in Miami was delivered to Nora Volkow, the laboratory's associate director for life sciences, according to Mona Rowe, a Brookhaven spokeswoman. Rowe said Brookhaven has done structural studies in the past on the DNA of the anthrax bacterium but does not possess the organism or its dormant spore form.

According to Rowe, the subpoena directed Volkow to appear before a federal grand jury in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Oct. 23 and provide information regarding the lab's handling, use and transfer of anthrax as well as the personnel involved. After the laboratory responded in writing, Volkow was not required to appear before the grand jury.

"We sent a letter explaining what we have on site," Rowe said. The lab continues to store some anthrax DNA for possible use in future studies. The FBI has not made any further inquiries, Rowe said.

The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation into the spread of anthrax in Florida and New York a week after photo editor Robert Stevens died of anthrax inhalation on Oct. 5.

The FBI anthrax investigation, which is separate from but in communication with the FBI's probe into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is being overseen by the FBI's Washington Field Office, Justice officials said.

But Justice Department and FBI officials in Washington declined to comment on the reports about FBI requests for information from universities and research facilities, saying they could not discuss subpoenas or matters before a grand jury.

A subpoena was delivered Oct. 16 to the lab of Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax specialist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. According to Richard Hidalgo, assistant to the dean of the school of veterinary medicine at LSU, it asked the school to provide by Oct. 23 a log of all visitors and employees at the Hugh-Jones lab since Jan. 1, 2000, including their Social Security numbers and dates of birth. The subpoena also asked for information on shipments of pathogens to and from the lab.

"Besides Dr. Hugh-Jones and his lab director, only three others have been in the lab" during the time in question, Hidalgo said. "I've never been there myself." Hugh-Jones, who questioned the necessity of using subpoenas to obtain information from research labs, said LSU's reply was sent to the FBI last week.

A subpoena also was delivered to the University of Michigan, according to a source who asked not to be identified. "All research institutions are being contacted by the FBI and asked for information," the source said. "They were seeking personnel records for those who may be working with select agents." That refers to the class of hazardous biological agents whose possession and transfer is regulated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. In addition to anthrax, the list includes more than 30 other agents, including toxins, bacteria and viruses such as yellow fever and eastern equine encephalitis.

Barbara Govert, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said recently that more than 100 laboratories throughout the United States are registered with the agency's Select Agents Standards system. Every state has at least one registered laboratory and several states have multiple registrants, such as California and Texas. But Govert said the identities of the registrants and the types of hazardous materials they possess need to remain anonymous to avoid making them targets of future theft or attacks. "What we've been telling people is that it's classified, it's sensitive, it's very secure," she said of the list.

LSU's Hidalgo said the FBI appears to be looking for any breach in the strict handling procedures for anthrax and other select agents. It could not be determined yesterday how many institutions have received subpoenas. In some cases, the FBI has made investigative inquiries without court orders.

"The FBI showed routine interest in Princeton as a place with a graduate program in molecular biology," said Steven Schultz, a spokesman for Princeton University, in New Jersey. "We told them there is no anthrax research on campus."

Tim Parsons, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins University's school of public health in Baltimore, said the FBI had contacted the school regarding a student who graduated in May. "We provided information to the FBI," Parsons said, but he could provide no further details.

At several institutions where select agents have been studied in the past or are currently under study, officials said they have received no subpoenas or FBI requests for information. At Iowa State University, which recently destroyed its old stocks of anthrax, director of legal services Paul Tanaka said "as far as I know we have had no subpoenas delivered." He also said he had not heard of any investigative contacts by the FBI.

Officials at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston said their institution had received no subpoenas even though it continues to do research on agents on the CDC's list. "We work on a lot of restricted agents," said Dr. David Walker, chairman of the pathology department. He said procedures for handling and distribution of the agents are strictly enforced under federal regulations that went into effect in 1997. Walker noted that many post-doctoral students at his institution and others are foreign-born. He expressed some concern that the scrutiny of university-trained microbiologists not hinder the flow of scientific talent to this country. "The great strength of America has been taking the brains of the rest of world and fostering their development," Walker said.

Staff writers Tom Brune and Bryn Nelson contributed to this story.

-------- spying

Unleashing the CIA:
When Did They Ever Stop?

By William Blum
October 31, 2001
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum1.html

The old joke goes that in the waning days of the Second World War, when Hitler was told of yet another defeat on the battlefield, he slammed his fist into his desk and declared: "That does it! No more Mr. Nice Guy!"

We've been treated in the past couple of weeks to one press story after another about how the Bush administration seeks to "unleash" the CIA from its restrictions concerning things like political assassination and dealing with "unsavory" characters. The nature of the September 11 attack was such, we are told, that we have to remove our kid gloves and put on depleted-uranium-tipped brass knuckles.

The policies whose "revisions" are being discussed and leaked are principally a 25-year ban on the CIA and other agencies of the government from engaging in assassination, and a policy of the past five years or so of barring the CIA from employing real nasty killers and torturers abroad, or at least not without express approval from high up.

Why are they telling us these tales at this time? Is it to comfort the American public into believing that the government is holding nothing back in its campaign of making us more secure? Or can they actually believe that such announcements will put the fear of Allah in the Taliban leadership?

The fact is that since Gerald Ford signed a presidential order in 1976, which stated that "No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination", the United States has plotted, on more than a dozen occasions, to administer what the CIA at one time called "suicide involuntarily administered". The last known attempt was the firing of missiles into the home of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999; amongst other attempts during this period was the arranging by the CIA, in 1985, for a car bomb to kill one sheikh Fadlallah in Beirut; 80 people were killed in the explosion, the sheikh not being among their number.

Moreover, in 1984, President Reagan cancelled his own executive order, which had reiterated Ford's, with a new order which was actually called by the press a "license to kill" -- a license to kill anyone deemed a "terrorist". After the Fadlallah travesty, the license to kill was cancelled, only to be reinstated a few months later following a hijacking of a TWA plane.

President Bush, the elder, added a new twist in 1989. He issued a "memorandum of law" that would allow "accidental" killing if it was a byproduct of legal action: "A decision by the President to employ overt military force ... would not constitute assassination if U.S. forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States." In other words, assassination was okay as long as we said "oops!"

It can thus be seen that all this talk we are being fed of late about giving the CIA "new" powers to engage in "targeted killings" is little more than spin, the native language of politicians.

The same can be said for the public now being told that because of the terrorist crisis, the CIA is going to be allowed to revert to the good ol' days when they could cozy up to the most despicable human rights violators without getting permission from headquarters. It's hard to imagine that in recent years that even if an Agency officer felt moved to ask for such permission that it would have been refused. A CIA officer could not have set foot in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Kosovo or Croatia without tripping over an unindicted war criminal-cum-US ally. As I write this, the Agency is sleeping with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, a band of torturers, kidnappers and rapists so depraved that the people of Afghanistan at first welcomed the Taliban as heroes for conquering these worthies.

To top it all off, we are told that the finest legal minds of the Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon, etc. have put their fine minds together and have decided that the new marching orders are -- will wonders never cease? -- LEGAL!

All these announcements are designed not only to make Americans feel safer, but to give us a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling that our leaders are so honorable that they engage in protracted debates and soul searching before endorsing any policies not fit for our children's schoolbooks.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower.

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Pentagon Seeks Tinkerers Against Terrorism

By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14444-2001Oct30?language=printer

In peacetime, the press release might have passed without much notice. "Pentagon Seeks Ideas on Combating Terrorism," it said. Please submit a one-page description of your idea to the Department of Defense by Dec. 23.

But as a jittery populace watches a weird new war unfold, perhaps it isn't the most reassuring announcement to emanate from the Pentagon: Help. Specifically, the military wants to know about technologies that might assist U.S. troops hunting for terrorists hiding in caves -- or, as the press release put it, "conducting protracted operations in remote areas."

It turns out you can do more to help Uncle Sam than remaining calm and going shopping.

"We've got a new kind of problem here, so if anyone's got good ideas, that can be helpful," notes James Kurtz, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses who spent 32 years in the Army. "They're looking for the guy in the basement of the high school science building who's got a new idea. Nobody has a lock on all good ideas."

The Pentagon, as reported last week, is seeking anti-terrorist "concepts" in 38 categories, including "countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction." These might include, say, air samplers to sniff out germ agents, sensors to detect small nuclear devices and gizmos to identify truck bombs.

The announcement left some defense observers puzzled. "You read that list and wonder: What have they been doing?" asks Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and author of "Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?"

Perhaps, in the midst of increasingly dire pronouncements about "credible" terrorist threats, you have personally felt confused, helpless and driven to drink. Well, buck up: Haven't you heard there's a war on? It's time to put on your thinking cap and repair to the workbench in your garage.

Visit the Web site www.bids.tswg.gov and pick a category. Got an idea for "lightweight personal armor that stops both weapons and knife penetration with full body protection"? Fire away. Are you handy with cameras? "Develop high-fidelity through-wall imaging capability." Let's see those terrorists hide from American X-ray vision.

"Unconventional surveillance and reconnaissance systems are desired," the Pentagon says. Especially one to "detect, locate and map underground/concealed cavities that may serve as secure havens for terrorists."

Your ideas can help protect the homeland, too. "Develop a deception detection device for use with counterterrorism-based structured interviews for passengers in various modes of transportation," the Pentagon requests. In other words, a portable lie detector. Finally, ticket agents will have a way to verify the answers to those important questions: "Have you had your luggage in your possession at all times? Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry anything on board?"

If Messrs. Hewlett and Packard could launch a high-tech behemoth from a garage, then why can't you invent an algorithm-based software that can identify and analyze voices -- specifically to "incorporate Pashtu, Urdu, Farsi, Arabic dialects, and other minor Middle Eastern and central/south Asian languages into an existing Automated Speaker Recognition System" that can be used by "selected intelligence and counterintelligence agencies"?

The Department of Defense says it wants concepts that can be "developed and fielded" in 12 to 18 months. Pentagon officials express confidence that the call for ideas will produce rapid results, given the ingenuity of Americans.

"We're trying to find every possibility, to find everything to make us the best equipped and give our people the best protection, which they deserve," says Air Force Maj. Michael T. Halbig, a Pentagon spokesman. These new products, he says, will keep America "ahead of the bad guys."

Paul Taibl, assistant vice president for policy at the nonprofit Business Executives for National Security, applauds the Pentagon for casting a wide net for anti-terrorism tools. "I'd like to think that if anyone's got access to this technology, it ought to be the government, but that's no longer the case," he says. "The Department of Defense is not the technology leader that it was during the height of the Cold War."

In recent years, untold sums have been poured into studies by the Pentagon and various congressional commissions to identify terrorist threats, including a $45 million brainstorming effort by Hollywood writers and directors under the Army's Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command. But concrete solutions aren't so readily offered.

"Maybe somebody's got a better idea out there," Halbig says.

Remember to send in your idea by 4 p.m. Dec. 23. Better yet, beat the Christmas rush and get to the post office early. That is, if you can find a functioning post office . . .

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Bin Laden Met With CIA Agent in July

Radio France International
Le Figaro
truth out
10.31.01

According to information's collected by Radio France International, and Le Figaro, Oussama Ben Laden met with an American CIA agent last July while he was being treated for a kidney ailment at the American Hospital of Dubai.

The billionaire Saudi Ben Laden visited the American Hospital of Dubaï from July 4 to July 14th, two months before the attacks of September 11, confirmed by sources close to European services of information.

He was accompanied by his personal doctor and faithful lieutenant, Egyptian Ayman Al-Zawahari, a male nurse and four bodyguards. Ben Laden suffers from a renal infection which is propagated with the liver and requires specialized care. Doctor Terry Callaway at The American Hospital of Dubai is known for the specialized treatment of such ailments.

During his hospitalization, Oussama Ben Laden was visited by several members of his family, and on July 12th the local representative of the CIA, that many people know in Dubaï, was seen going into his room.

A few days later, shortly after Ben Laden left for Quetta with a new kidney dialysis machine, the CIA agent bragged to friends about visiting the billionaire saudi and was subsequently recalled to the USA on July 15th.

According to various Arab diplomatic sources and the services of French information themselves, very precise information was communicated to the CIA relating to terrorist attacks aiming at American interests in the world, including on the territory of the United States. A report of the DST on September 7 gathers the totality of this data, specifying that the order to act was to come from Afghanistan.

The American press is appears unwilling to report this information to the 270 million people of the American public.

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Anti-Terror Efforts Revive Interest in an Old Enemy
FBI List Includes Lebanese Suspect in Past Attacks on U.S.

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 31, 2001; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14443-2001Oct30?language=printer

BEIRUT, Oct. 30 -- Long before Osama bin Laden burst onto the scene and President Bush declared war on terrorism, there was the elusive Imad Mughniyah. One of the world's most wanted -- and accomplished -- alleged terrorists, he has been accused of playing a leading role in killing more than 250 Americans, taking a half-dozen others hostage and driving the United States out of Lebanon.

The hunt for Mughniyah has waned in the past decade as the memory of his bloody record in the Beirut of the mid-1980s faded and diplomatic imperatives shifted elsewhere. But now the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign has revived interest in the Shiite shadow warrior whom Lebanese and U.S. officials blame for pioneering suicide bombing, destroying a large Marine encampment and taking out the entire CIA station in Beirut.

Although Mughniyah has not been implicated in the recent attacks in the United States, his whereabouts since Sept. 11 have provoked intense speculation centering on reports that he has returned from Iran to his native Lebanon in an effort to escape a U.S. manhunt. How seriously the United States pursues its old nemesis may be one measure of the breadth of U.S. intentions to wage a global war beyond the search for bin Laden and the bombing of Afghanistan.

The FBI included Mughniyah and two fellow Lebanese, Hasan Izz-Al-Din and Ali Atwa, on a list issued Oct. 10 of 22 people wanted for terrorist acts. It cited an indictment handed up in Washington for the June 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in which a 23-year-old U.S. Navy diver, Robert Dean Stethem, of Waldorf, Md., was shot and dumped on the tarmac of Beirut International Airport.

The U.S. government also has asked the Lebanese and other governments to freeze any assets belonging to Mughniyah, Izz-Al-Din and Atwa, citing their alleged links to terrorist attacks. Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri said in an interview that the Bank of Lebanon has conducted a search and found no accounts or other assets in the three men's names.

In addition to the TWA hijacking, Mughniyah has been indicted in Argentina in connection with the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people, and the July 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires community center called the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association, which killed 85.

But more prominently in the eyes of U.S. officials with long memories, Mughniyah was the leader of a small cell of Shiite Muslim Lebanese who fought an underground war against Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982 and the highly visible U.S. military presence that followed.

As part of that struggle, knowledgeable Lebanese sources said, Mughniyah played a key role in the truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy here in which 63 people were killed in April 1983. Among the victims were CIA officers, who were gathered at a meeting inside the embassy, and Robert C. Ames, the agency's Washington-based Middle East director, who was visiting. Six months later, these sources said, Mughniyah also helped organize the suicide bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in southern Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and leading to President Ronald Reagan's decision to withdraw U.S. forces.

Mughniyah also played a leadership role in the March 1984 abduction of the subsequent Beirut CIA station chief, William Buckley, an informed Lebanese source said. Buckley, who was held for several months in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon and then transferred to Iran, died in captivity of illness at least partly resulting from abusive treatment by his captors, according to U.S. accounts.

Mughniyah's no-holds-barred drive to push Americans out of Beirut also included participating in a notorious string of hostage-takings that led most American and European residents to leave and ushered the Reagan administration into the Iran-contra scandal. According to U.S. anti-terrorism specialists, he has been tied to the abductions of at least six Americans and five Frenchmen.

"Our enemy every time was Imad Mughniyah," said a Lebanese specialist closely involved in efforts to free hostages in the 1980s. "He was always the guy we had in front of us."

Mughniyah was born in 1962 in Tir Dibba, a village in the craggy hills of southern Lebanon overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Like many Shiite Muslim families, however, Mughniyah's was forced by Israeli attacks against Palestinian guerrillas in the late 1970s to flee to the slums of southern Beirut.

As a teenager, he gravitated to Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which then seemed the best vehicle for combating Israel. Mughniyah excelled at military training and was ushered into Force 17, Arafat's personal security corps.

After Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and occupied the country in 1982, driving out Arafat and his PLO, Mughniyah migrated to the small Shiite-based militias that began to grow with funding and encouragement from Iran. These groups, including Islamic Jihad, Islamic Call and Islamic Amal, later would fuse into the powerful Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement and expand their activities into politics and social services.

"I would say the Israeli invasion gave birth to the cells that later made up Hezbollah," said Amal Saad Ghorayab, a political science professor at the Lebanese American University.

According to Lebanese scholars and security sources, Mughniyah and several brothers from the Ali Hamadi family became leaders of an underground action group that went by various names, including Islamic Jihad, but that Lebanese sources said functioned as Hezbollah's Special Security Apparatus.

Although Mughniyah has made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Lebanese sources described him as more action-oriented than devout. His attacks, they said, have been specifically directed at ending Israeli occupation in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, and ending the influence in the Middle East of the United States, seen as a pillar of support for Israel.

For the past several years, Mughniyah has remained underground and, according to most U.S. and Lebanese reports, inactive. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, he has reportedly been on the move.

Before Sept. 11, most reports indicated Mughniyah was living comfortably in Tehran. Some even suggested he was confined there by Iranian authorities, regarded as a man who was once useful but could now cause trouble as the Iranian government seeks to improve ties with the West.

But the FBI, in its list of most-wanted terrorists, said he was "thought to be in Lebanon." Reports from Washington said Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, during his conversations with Bush last week, conveyed intelligence reports that Mughniyah had recently moved from Iran back to Lebanon, connecting him to several recent attacks against Israeli soldiers in a disputed patch of border land.

The Lebanese source knowledgeable about Buckley's abduction has a long history of following Mughniyah's actions. He expressed belief that Mughniyah was in Lebanon, seeking refuge among people and places he knows and fearing that Iran could sacrifice him in the name of cooperation with the U.S. anti-terrorism campaign. "Being on that list, I think his life is in danger," the source said. "And I think he feels that, too, because he is not stupid. The best place for him is with the people he knows."

However, Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, has repeatedly told U.S. Ambassador Vincent M. Battle that Mughniyah is not here. "Since the name has appeared, to the best of my knowledge, he is not in Lebanon," Hariri said in the interview. "This is the information of our services."

A Lebanese journalist with connections to Hezbollah, Ibrahim Amin, summed up: "Nobody really knows anything about him here."

This is not the first time U.S. and other intelligence agencies have been frustrated in attempts to pin down Mughniyah. Lebanese security officials, exploiting a monitored telephone call, traced Mughniyah to Paris in November 1985, only five months after the TWA hijacking. He was staying at the Hotel de Crillon, a tony hotel just across the street from the U.S. Embassy on the Place de la Concorde.

Tipped by the Lebanese, U.S. officials asked French police to arrest him and turn him over. Instead, according to a source who was closely involved, French intelligence agents met with him several times over a six-day period and worked out an agreement to release him in return for the freedom of a French hostage.

At another point, U.S. intelligence got word that Mughniyah was stopping over in Saudi Arabia on a flight from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to Tehran. Despite entreaties to Saudi authorities that he be taken into custody, he was allowed to proceed.

The failures to get help from Paris and Riyadh underscored the sensitive political role played by Mughniyah in addition to his role as an underground activist and alleged terrorist. Nowhere is this sensitivity more apparent than here in Lebanon, where Mughniyah is associated with the Hezbollah movement.

Hezbollah, or Party of God, fields a militia that helped drive Israeli occupation forces from southern Lebanon and also has become a major political force, representing the country's largest religious denomination in parliament and through a panoply of social services. Its leaders proclaim determination to continue "resistance" against Israel but reject associations with terrorism in general or Mughniyah in particular.

Although the State Department's annual terrorism report has regularly included Hezbollah, the movement has been omitted from organizations cited for terrorist connections in various lists issued by the Bush administration since Sept. 11. This was seen as a reflection of U.S. desires to avoid blurring the distinction between resistance and terrorism that is key for Arab governments, especially Hariri's, whose cooperation Washington has sought in the anti-terrorism effort.

"Hezbollah has no connection to any events that happened in the past and have to do with the Americans; Hezbollah's actions have always been resistance against Israeli occupation [of Lebanese territory]," Sheik Naim Qassem, Hezbollah's deputy secretary general, said in an interview.

As for Mughniyah's alleged activities and Lebanon's role, he added: "It's past history. . . . We suffered a lot more than they [the Americans] did from those things. The United States caused a lot of those problems, and some Americans paid the price for them."

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Canada puts counterterror effort on fast track
Canada's foreign minister is on a five-nation tour of the Mideast to reinforce US antiterror coalition efforts.

Christian Science Monitor
October 31, 2001
By Barry Brown
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1031/p7s2-woam.html

TORONTO - While Canada has never been a target of international terrorism, its friendly immigration laws have given haven to cells for raising money, forging documents, and conducting assaults against foreign targets - most notoriously the bombing of an Air India flight from Vancouver in 1985.

Ahmed Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber, launched his mission to bomb Los Angeles International Airport from Canada in late 1999, but was arrested by US border guards trying to enter Washington State. In the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, two of the attackers were presumed - wrongly - to have crossed the border from Canada in their journey to Logan International Airport.

Sensitive to criticism of lax border security, Canada is marshaling its laws in support of the international crackdown on terrorism. It has earmarked more than US$190 million to upgrade its security, financial, immigration, and border operations, and is set to pass the most sweeping counterterrorism legislation in its history.

The counterterrorism bill, which is being fast-tracked through Parliament, would establish a new form of inquiry allowing them to bring suspected terrorists - or anyone who has allegedly had contact with suspects - into court without charges for questioning. The judge would be able to jail the person for a year or longer for refusing to comply. The inquiry would have to be connected to a terrorist plot that is being planned or has been executed.

The bill also would give police the power of "preventative arrest" - to jail suspected terrorists before an attack.

Under the bill, Canada's version of the CIA, the Communications Security Establishment, would expand its domestic communications monitoring to include international links, and the government would have the power to keep secret its sources of information on terrorists who are prosecuted in Canada.

For the most part, Canadians support the sweeping changes. But critics say Canada needs to start with better enforcement of existing laws.

"We mustn't turn Canada into a police state" in the name of defending the country's security, says Clayton Ruby, a Canadian civil rights lawyer. None of these changes "would have made us any safer on Sept. 11."

Yet the issue of human rights and security should not be adversarial, says civil rights lawyer Irwin Cotler. The bill "should be seen as people-centered, rather than as state-centered." Terrorism, he wrote in an article, is "the ultimate existential assault on human rights and human dignity, and the struggle against terrorism must be seen as part of the larger struggle for human rights and human dignity."

Even though the bill is moving rapidly through Parliament, Canadian Justice Minister Anne McLellan says it has been rigorously examined to ensure it meets the standards of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's equivalent of the US Bill of Rights. In fact, she says, no other piece of legislation "has gone through as rigorous Charter analysis as this."

Canadians are also taking pains to assure the US that their northern neighbor stands on guard. Foreign Minister John Manley, recently appointed head of Canada's counterterrorism effort, admitted that successive Canadian governments have let foreign aid, intelligence, and military preparedness slide.

Now, in an effort to develop postwar plans and regional cooperation, Mr. Manley is on a five-nation tour of the Middle East to discuss support for the counterterrorism coalition and ways to reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Canada's former ambassador to the US, Allan Gotlieb, saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon on Sept. 11 when his just-airborne flight from Washington to Toronto was suddenly called back to Reagan International airport. Bush has "brilliantly" organized his international coalition in the fight against terrorism and improved US relations with a number of countries, he says.

Now, Canada, with "it's deep belief in multilateralism and cooperation," intends to help "on the diplomatic front to lessen obstacles, set an example, and be creative."


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Hartford Police Crush The Right To Dissent

October 31, 2001
Hartford Courant (ctnow.com)
Vijay Prashad
http://www.ctnow.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-prashadopedwedoct31.artoct31.story?coll=hc%2Dheadlines%2Doped

No democracy can survive without dissent. Those who do not agree with the government must be able to exercise their right to be heard. We are now inured to the fact that those who are elected give us access only if we have money. The upsurge of street democracy in the past few years, made clear in Seattle in late 1999, shows us that many people in our nation feel the need to take their message to the street because their voices are shut out in the halls of elected and corporate power.

To be out on the street with a message - this is not sedition or an incitement to riot, but the hallmark of democratic dissent.

On Oct. 25, more than 200 marchers protesting U.S. military action in Afghanistan decided to take their message to the streets of Hartford. The media do not take the anti-war movement seriously, even though hundreds of thousands of people around the world and thousands in the United States have marched to the beat of peace each day since the war began on Oct. 6. Some 20,000 protesters took over the streets of London on Oct. 13; 25,000 in Germany; 100,000 in Italy on Oct. 14 (the land that produced the first aerial bomber) and 70,000 in the city of my birth, Calcutta, India. From San Francisco to New York City, the voices of peace gather but do not get any airtime.

What did the police in Hartford do in response to dissent?

As the young people marched and stopped traffic for a brief time, police cars blocked the streets decisively and went after the marchers with clubs and pepper spray for "conspiracy to incite a riot." They arrested 18 people and set bail for an extraordinary amount: between $15,000 and $50,000, with a court date for late November.

Such penalties for speaking your mind are beyond belief.

The protesters shouted: "This is not a police state; we have the right to demonstrate." But, as a student wrote me in an e-mail, "I am rethinking that."

Perhaps the right to demonstrate is not one that people should expect.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat from Berkeley, Calif., was the only member of Congress to vote against the war against Afghanistan. She joins the proud American tradition of Jeannette Rankin, two-time congresswoman from Montana and a Republican who voted against both world wars and said, in 1929, that "there can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined with decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible."

Lee justified her own vote against the current conflict by saying: "I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint."

The young people in Hartford urged restraint, speaking out in that American tradition of Rankin and Lee against the slaughter of human beings and the destruction of people far away who had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

Many U.S. citizens are not beyond reasonable doubt that the Afghan people are in any way guilty of the heinous acts in New York, and our government disdains to release a white paper with whatever evidence there is against the Taliban in the conspiracy.

When our fellow citizens go forth to ask for the truth, they are met with police violence. Let us celebrate the fact that they put their bodies on the line to ask the difficult questions that elude us in emotionally charged times.

Vijay Prashad is an associate professor and director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford.

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PILGER: THIS WAR IS A FARCE

By John Pilger,
Former Mirror chief foreign correspondent
http://mirror.icnetwork.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=11392430&method=full

GRIEF: A father weeps over his dead son after the bombs blunder in Kabul http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/0006405E-3E0B-1BDD-84E080C328EC035A.291001

The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.

Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.

And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.

If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.

None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.

The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.

So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.

The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years".

The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose.

In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.

By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.

If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government.

Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.

If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.

He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.

He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.

That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center.

There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? £800 million so far.

According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby.

"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.

The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries.

There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.

There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.

The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us.

"It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."

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