------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Action Behind the Scenes Oct. 28-Nov.3
Nuclear Experts' Nightmare: Terrorists Steal a Warhead
Pak does not trust US with its nukes
U.S. Worries About Pakistan Nuclear Arms
U.S. Wants to Eye Pakistan Nukes
India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant
Russian Agrees ABM Pact Is 'Relic of the Cold War'
Reactors and Their Fuel
FAA Prohibits Flights Over Calvert Cliffs Plant
Missouri governor says DOE broke agreements
Old poisons, new worries
Many issues face delayed action
Bush seeks support in week full of meetings

MILITARY
Pentagon Weapons at a Glance
Pentagon Uses Weapons Mix in Assault
A look at recent conflicts as they developed
History Confirms War a Futile Business
Winter's cold may help military track Taliban
Bin Laden Arabs buy husbands for their women
Air Controllers Play Role in Bombing
Rumsfeld Says Taliban Government Greatly Weakened
America's pipe dream
N. Korea Criticizes Japan Terror Law
Milosevic Hears the Charges
U.S. authorities ready to fumigate Senate
CDC preps for possible smallpox scare
U.S. Sets Up Plan to Fight Smallpox in Case of Attack
A Muscular Lobby Tries to Shape Nation's Bioterror Plan
MoD takes military campaign to schools
Teachers told not to preach against the war
Marijuana Crackdown
Marijuana Misjudgment
Palestinian Kills 2 and Injures More Than 40 in Jerusalem Ambush
Israel Destroys Palestinian Factories
A New Alliance Could Nudge Aside the Old
Massacre in Nigeria
US soldiers turn on Pentagon over war tactics
New Army surgical teams are 'right over the hill'
U.S. Special Forces Soldier Is Rescued From Afghanistan
A Vigorous Debate on U.S. War Tactics
Rebels Say They Launched a Major Offensive on Taliban City
The Coalition Is Broad, But Can It Hold?

OTHER
Refugees who make it find Pakistan can be hell
Chinese media see attack on U.S. as price for bullying
Bush relies on advertising experts to win over Muslims

POLICE / PRISONERS
Terrorist hunt gives secret court more power
A Deliberate Strategy of Disruption
"Citizen, Can I See Your ID"
Disputes Erupt on Ridge's Needs for His Job
Sentencing of spy may be postponed
Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
The Spy Puzzle
Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11
Torture, treachery and spies - covert war in Afghanistan
Guns Won't Win the Afghan War
Echoes of Sept. 11 on the Rio Grande
More and More, War Is Viewed as America's
TERROR BY THE BOOK
Anthrax jokes could bring life term in prison

ACTIVISTS
Oden a Victim of Dirty Politics
Alternatives to War
Just War or Criminal Bombing? The Rule of Lawlessness



-------- NUCLEAR

Action Behind the Scenes Oct. 28-Nov.3

November 4, 2001,
David E. Sanger
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

Publicly, the White House says to expect no great breakthroughs when Vladimir V. Putin of Russia arrives in Washington this week. Privately, each country is maneuvering as fast as it can. Mr. Bush thinks the Russians are willing to allow him to go ahead with antimissile tests, even if they violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. In return, the Russians think America will deeply cut its nuclear arsenal (something the Russians want to do also, to save money), usher Russia into the World Trade Organization and begin to integrate the country into Europe.

----

Nuclear Experts' Nightmare: Terrorists Steal a Warhead
But Specialists Disagree on Whether They Could Fashion Atomic Weapon From Uranium or Plutonium

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36150-2001Nov3?language=printer

Nuclear weapons experts say the greatest threat posed by terrorist groups seeking nuclear weapons comes from their stealing a warhead or obtaining highly enriched uranium or plutonium from which they could fashion a nuclear device.

"We have been worrying about this kind of threat emerging for years," Roger L. Hagengruber, senior vice president for national security and arms control at Sandia National Laboratories, said Friday. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, "my worry index has gone up substantially," Hagengruber said, adding that the skills shown by the al Qaeda terrorist network putting together that operation demonstrate "the potential is there."

Hagengruber said the first threat of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, acquiring a nuclear capability comes from their stealing a weapon. That is "the most devastating scenario," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

But Hagengruber noted that U.S. weapons have built-in locks to prevent their being exploded, a secure system that he said would take outside scientists years to break.

Hagengruber added that, having worked with the Russians on security for their weapons, "I just don't think Russians are missing weapons, they care about this . . . they care about safety and security about theirs as we do about ours."

Bin Laden or others obtaining highly enriched uranium is the second greatest threat, according to the IAEA and other experts.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said on Monday that "while we cannot exclude the possibility that terrorists could get hold of some nuclear material, it is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and successfully detonate a nuclear bomb."

Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a research and advocacy center on nuclear proliferation and terrorism, disagreed. He said a team of five former U.S. weapons designers "found that terrorists indeed would be capable of making an effective, first-generation nuclear weapon if they could obtain enough reactor-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium."

But those designers said terrorists working with the material would have to be trained in physical, chemical and metallurgical properties of nuclear materials, the characteristics of their fabrication, high explosives, chemical propellants, hydrodynamics and electrical circuitry.

"It is exceedingly unlikely that any single individual, even after years of assiduous preparation, could equip himself to proceed confidently in each part of the diverse range of necessary knowledge and skills," the panel wrote in a 1997 paper. It concluded that at least three specialists would be required.

Hagengruber said that if an aspiring bomb builder had enough pure, highly enriched uranium, and had some fundamental understanding of nuclear weapons design, he "could create a situation with a 10 percent chance of having a sizable explosive yield."

But obtaining the roughly 30 kilograms -- or 65 pounds -- of highly enriched uranium required for such a result is a difficult task, according to counterterrorism experts.

Much less plutonium is needed for a nuclear explosion, but it is far more dangerous to handle and much more difficult to treat in a manner that would cause a nuclear explosion.

If a terrorist group succeeded in obtaining enough fissile material, it would need a place where it could work "uninterrupted for a significant period of time," according to David Albright and his colleagues at the Institute for Science and Security. "The necessary weaponization facilities can be small," Albright wrote in September, noting that South Africa's "initial nuclear weapons effort in the 1970s used small, rudimentary facilities that were extremely difficult to detect by overseas intelligence agencies."

One other consideration is what is known as a dirty bomb, a device containing radioactive materials and explosive chemicals that is detonated to contaminate a selected area.

The potential impact from such a device can be measured using the experience recorded in 1987 in the Brazilian city of Goiania. There, some scrap scavengers broke into an abandoned radiological clinic and stole a capsule containing a little more than an ounce of highly radioactive cesium 137. The capsule was cut into more than 100 pieces, which were passed along to family members and friends around the city.

"Fourteen people were overexposed to radiation out of 249 contaminated," according to the IAEA. "Four subsequently died and more than 110,000 had to be continuously monitored. To decontaminate the area, 125,000 drums and 1,470 boxes were filled with contaminated clothing, furniture, dirt and other materials; 85 houses had to be destroyed."

-------- india / pakistan

Pak does not trust US with its nukes

TONY ALLEN-MILLS
The Sunday Times
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1648795793

WASHINGTON: Fears of fundamentalist upheaval in Pakistan have aroused concerns in Washington that part or all of Islamabad's arsenal of nuclear weapons may have to be moved to China for safekeeping from foreign attack. The prospect that loose warheads might be loaded onto helicopters or moved around a region foaming with fundamentalist turmoil is adding to fears in Washington that the war in Afghanistan might provoke a nuclear crisis.

The threat to weapons widely regarded as the Pakistan military's "crown jewels" has forced Islamabad to consider what one American expert described as the "ultimate worst-case scenario" of removing warheads to China, Pakistan's closest strategic ally in the region.

China's nuclear relations with Pakistan have long been the focus of controversy. Chinese scientists are believed to have played a key role in developing Pakistan's nuclear programme in the early 1980s. The two countries share a mistrust of India, which has also developed nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s relations between Beijing and Washington were strained when American officials discovered that China had supplied Islamabad with magnetic components for a centrifuge used in enriching uranium, a material used in warheads. US experts believe that Pakistan possesses between 30 and 50 warheads. Islamabad has also developed facilities for making weapons-grade plutonium.

The precise locations of Pakistan's nuclear weapons are highly secret. Several Washington sources said last week that senior Pakistani officers had been forced to consider a range of scenarios, from thefts of weapon materials to US bombing raids on nuclear facilities. The arrest in Pakistan of three nuclear scientists with alleged Taliban sympathies heightened concern that bomb-making secrets may have leaked to Afghanistan.

But even under extreme duress, several US sources said, many elements of the Pakistani military would resist surrendering custody of their warheads to China. The risks of any deal with China are obvious. China is certain to be deeply wary of being linked to fundamentalist conflict. Yet American experts believe that Beijing represents the only haven that Pakistan would dare to trust.

In a bid to defuse concern, US officials are understood to have offered Pakistan high-tech assistance to improve the security of missile vaults and update both command and control communications, and the multiple-code custody arrangements that theoretically prevent rogue missile launches.

The issue was discussed by General Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, during his recent visit to Pakistan. A State Department official said last week Washington was "confident that Pakistan is taking steps to assure the safety of these (nuclear) assets". But other American sources said Pakistan was reluctant to accept US technology for fear that it might be bugged by the CIA in order to establish the whereabouts of warheads. The threat that Osama Bin Laden may acquire nuclear bomb-making materials is weighing heavily on American officials. "Nobody in the Bush administration wants to be held responsible if Al-Qaida gets a nuke," said George Perkovich, an Asian nuclear programme expert, who has urged the State Department to include China in talks on Pakistan's nuclear problems. "They are working their asses off on this," he said.

Pakistan's military establishment was said last week to have been shaken by reports that America, India or Israel might be planning pre-emptive strikes on nuclear sites to prevent weapons falling into fundamentalist hands. "The generals are panic-stricken," said one Pakistani source.

Abdul Sattar, the Pakistani foreign minister, insisted last week the arsenal was secure. But Washington officials have expressed mounting alarm that any coup attempt against General Pervez Musharraf, the military president, might put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk.

Pakistani generals were appalled by one authoritative American report last week that an elite Pentagon undercover unit, trained to disarm nuclear weapons, was exploring plans for a mission inside Pakistan. "Every paranoid fear they have had over the past 20 years about people coming to get our missiles is suddenly coming to the fore," said Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist and authority on the nuclear programme.

----

U.S. Worries About Pakistan Nuclear Arms
Officials Try to Guard Against Arsenal, Radioactive Material Going to Terrorists

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36075-2001Nov3?language=printer

About two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a group of medium-level Bush administration officials met with experts on South Asia for a discussion of whether war in Afghanistan might detonate a series of bigger problems in Pakistan -- including the loss of control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

That arsenal holds about 30 nuclear weapons and perhaps as many as 50, according to experts on Pakistan's nuclear program. There has been mounting concern in the United States that those weapons, their plans or some of the radioactive materials could fall into the hands of terrorists or their allies should the Pakistani government fall as a result of its decision to support the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

"If domestic instability leads to the downfall of the current Pakistani government, nuclear weapons and the means to make them could fall into the hands of a government hostile to the United States and its allies," said David Albright, a South Asia expert at the Institute for Science and International Security.

Those fears were fanned a week ago when Pakistan detained two retired nuclear scientists, including Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former chief designer and director of the country's Khoshab Atomic Reactor who for the past three years has run a relief organization and traveled frequently to Afghanistan.

Mahmood was a pioneer in Pakistan's efforts to enrich uranium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons, and held a patent on a technique for stopping leaks of heavy water from enrichment plants. Later he helped manage the construction of a reactor that produces plutonium, also used in nuclear weapons.

Mahmood has made no secret of his political views. After Pakistan exploded a nuclear device in May 1998, Mahmood said the country should not give in to international pressure to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Instead, he said, Pakistan should enhance its capability to "at least match our enemy," India, "in order to safeguard our independence."

The other detained nuclear scientist, Abdul Jajid, worked in Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.

Pakistan has asserted that its nuclear arsenal is safe. Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar said in a statement Friday that "Pakistan has an impeccable record of custodial safety and security free of any incident of theft or leakage of nuclear material, equipment or technology."

Though the United States usually supports civilian control of nuclear weapons around the world, it has endorsed continued military control of the weapons in Pakistan because the military is seen as more professional and stable than other elements of Pakistani society. Experts say the military chain of command appears intact despite turmoil and reshuffling at the top of the government, and most of the sympathizers of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia in the government are believed to be in the intelligence service.

But Bush officials remain anxious. John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, without singling out Pakistan, said Thursday that since Sept. 11 "my concern about nuclear weapons everywhere has gone up." He said he worried that a hostile state, or nonstate organization, might acquire such a weapon and that the attacks in New York showed they would be willing to use them.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the United States had "certain knowledge" that the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden "had an appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction of various types, including nuclear materials."

A recent article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hirsch alleged that the U.S. military had a secret plan to destroy Pakistan's nuclear weapons, and that a special team had trained with Israeli advice and assistance. The State Department and Pentagon have denied the report.

Experts doubt such plans could succeed in any case. Because of Pakistan's long-standing fear that Israel, India or the United States might seek to destroy its nuclear weapons program, Pakistan's weapons are probably spread among several sites, making it difficult for any foreign special operations force to destroy or defuse. Experts say Pakistan might keep its warheads separate from missiles, for safer storage.

"People talk about getting the nuclear weapons. I don't know how you would do that," Albright said. "I think it would be very dangerous right now. The Pakistanis are very paranoid about what U.S. intentions are right now."

Administration officials are eager to increase the safety of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. But they want to do so in a way that would not give Pakistan greater confidence to deploy the weapons or fan fears in Islamabad that the United States simply wants to collect information about the weapons so they could be destroyed.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week that he had discussed the issue with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf during his visit to Islamabad last month. "He knows that if he needs any technical assistance on how to improve that security level, we'd be more than willing to help in any way that we can," Powell said.

Some administration officials have raised among themselves the possible transfer of "permissive action links," devices that would prevent warheads from being armed unless a number of people punched in codes. But many experts worry that such devices would encourage Pakistan to deploy weapons now kept in pieces for safekeeping.

Robert Einhorn, the Clinton administration's top nonproliferation official, said the United States should limit aid to improvements in the physical security around nuclear weapons sites through better surveillance equipment.

"We should pursue a program of cooperation that does not contribute to the operational capability of Pakistan's nuclear force," said Einhorn, a fellow at the Center of Strategic and International Studies.

That, however, might not help if the government falls. "The real threat is not that some guys with beards are going to run through and capture these things but that, with a change in government, control will change hands. That's not something better fences is going to solve," said George Perkovich, author of a book on Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

Most experts say the greatest terrorist danger comes from the possible theft of nuclear material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. They said the theft of a nuclear weapon would be more difficult and more easily detected by Pakistani authorities.

That fissile material could be given to Iraq, which has sought to make its own nuclear weapons.

Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project said an even greater danger would be that a terrorist could obtain nuclear waste from a Pakistani plant and use it in a conventional explosion to spread hazardous radioactive material. Though the explosion would kill more people, at least initially, than the radioactive waste, it would have a "terror effect," Milhollin said.

---

U.S. Wants to Eye Pakistan Nukes

By Greg Myre,
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline095057_000.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Concerned that Osama bin Laden is seeking to get his hands on nuclear weapons, the United States has dropped its punitive measures against Pakistan's nuclear program and is now offering to advise the country on securing its stockpile.

The Americans spent a decade sanctioning Pakistan for building nuclear weapons, but that policy effectively changed with the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States.

The United States now views Pakistan as an essential ally in the war against terrorism. The Americans want to cooperate with Pakistan on nuclear issues to ensure that no nuclear material leaks to bin Laden's al-Qaida network or comes under the control of Islamic fundamentalists inside Pakistan.

President Bush lifted economic sanctions originally imposed in 1990 by his father. And when Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived last month, he went a step further, proposing that the United States provide training for Pakistan's nuclear facilities.

"During his visit, Colin Powell offered us that kind of support, to train Pakistanis in America on the safeguarding of nuclear installations," said Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar.

Asked if Pakistan had accepted, Sattar responded, "who would refuse?"

Neither Pakistan nor the United States has released details. But the offer is believed to include training on everything from preventing accidents at civilian power plants to guarding against the theft of weapons-grade uranium, said Rifaat Hussain, head of the department of defense and strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

Powell, speaking Wednesday in Washington, said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf "understands the importance of ensuring that all elements of his nuclear program are safe and secure."

Musharraf "knows that if he needs any technical assistance in how to improve that security level, we would be more than willing to help in any way that we can," Powell added.

The shift in U.S. policy does not mean American concerns about Pakistan's nuclear program have eased. If anything, the United States may more worried than ever about an arsenal that includes an estimated 20 to 30 warheads. Pakistan has never said how many weapons it has.

The Americans have three big concerns about Pakistani nuclear weapons: the spread of nuclear material to terrorist groups, the prospect of Islamic fundamentalists taking power in Pakistan, and the fear of a nuclear war between Pakistan and archrival India.

How serious is each threat?

- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday that bin Laden's network has been trying for years to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld named no countries. However, speculation has focused on Pakistan, which until the Sept. 11 attack had backed Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement, which in turn has harbored bin Laden.

There's also a widespread belief that the former Soviet Union, with its widely scattered nuclear program, impoverished scientists and soldiers and often lax security, would be the best place to look for a stolen nuke.

Yossef Bodansky, a former consultant to the U.S. State and Defense Departments and author of "Bin Laden, the Man who Declared War on America," wrote that bin Laden has tried but failed to acquire weapons of mass destruction in several parts of the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Kazakstan, Ukraine and Chechnya.

Politics are turbulent in Pakistan, but the country has kept a tight lid on nuclear materials and technology since it launched the program in the mid-1970s, noted Hussain, the analyst.

He said Pakistan is proud of being the only Islamic country to build nuclear bombs, and has rebuffed efforts by other Islamic countries, including Iran and Libya, to acquire technology and material.

Last week, Pakistan arrested two retired nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mehmood and Abdul Majid. But the government insisted they were being questioned about alleged pro-Taliban sympathies, not about passing on nuclear secrets. Both were released, but a presidential spokesman said they were called in again Saturday for questioning.

- Pakistan's history of military coups has raised fears that Islamic fundamentalists in the officer corps could someday seize power, thereby gaining control over Pakistan's nukes.

Musharraf, who came to power in his own coup two years ago, recently purged the senior military ranks of officers viewed as Islamic fundamentalists. Five of the top 14 officers were moved to lesser positions.

"This threat has receded," said Hussain. "Anyone harboring these kinds of ideas has been sidelined."

Islamic parties have been staging noisy street protests against Musharraf's decision to abandon the Taliban and side with the United States.

However, the parties have never fared well in elections, and throughout Pakistan's 54-year history, its leaders have sought close ties with the United States and the West.

- Nuclear tension between Pakistan and India has created several crises in the past decade and many believe it remains the greatest threat to the region.

The countries conducted back-to-back nuclear tests in 1998, and a year later were fighting yet again over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

Both countries have nuclear weapons that could be delivered by warplanes or missiles. However, neither has the "push-button" capability to launch, according to Aslam Beg, a Pakistani retired army chief.

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from the other components of the weapon, Beg said, adding that the bomb would first have to be assembled, and then launched from either from a missile or a plane.

"There would be a gap of hours, or even days before it could be put together," said Beg.

Pakistan and India remain archenemies, exchanging artillery fire almost daily across the disputed frontier in Kashmir. However, they have agreed not to target each other's nuclear facilities, and even hard-liners such as Beg believe the existing tensions aren't an insurmountable obstacle to progress on the nuclear issue.

Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, normally a harsh critic of Pakistan, even had a kind word to say this week about Pakistan's handling of its nuclear program.

"Politics apart, I must give (the Pakistanis) credit. They are responsible people and will not allow people to walk away with nuclear weapons," said Fernandes.

--------

India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant

Reuters
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/041101/dLNAT01.asp

New Delhi - India will build a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant with technical and financial assistance from Russia, a government statement said late on Saturday. The plant was approved by a cabinet panel a day before Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee begins a trip to Russia, the United States and Britain to promote New Delhi's interests in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Vajpayee is due to meet President Vladimir Putin during his November 4 to 7 visit in Russia.

"The project will open a new window for the country in the high technology area of advanced Light Water Reactor technology and wide-ranging scientific and technological cooperation...in the vital field of atomic energy," the statement said.

The Cabinet Committee for Economic Affairs approved spending of 131.7 billion rupees for the power project.

India would spend 67.55 billion rupees and the rest would be funded by soft credit from Russia, India's friend during the Cold War era.

Construction would begin next May on the nuclear power station, to be built at Kudankulam in the Tirunelvelli district of Tamil Nadu.

The first unit of 1,000 MW will start generating power in 2007 and the second unit will begin a year later, it said.

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-------- russia

Russian Agrees ABM Pact Is 'Relic of the Cold War'

Sunday, November 4, 2001
BY DAVE MONTGOMERY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
http://www.sltrib.com/11042001/nation_w/145940.htm

MOSCOW -- Russia displayed flexibility toward the United States' position on missile defense Saturday as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov acknowledged that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a "relic of the Cold War."

Ivanov's statement after a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised U.S. hopes that Russia is receptive to a compromise on missile defense and strategic arms cuts. But the Pentagon chief left hours later with no concrete signs of a breakthrough.

Rumsfeld met with Ivanov and President Vladimir Putin in back-to-back meetings to prepare for a mid-November summit between Putin and President Bush in the United States. The two presidents made progress in missile defense talks last month in Shanghai.

Bush has pressed for a U.S. missile defense system to protect the United States from "rogue nations," contending that the Sept. 11 attacks underscore the nation's vulnerability to all forms of terrorism.

The 1972 ABM treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union bans missile defense systems on the theory that neither side will attack the other if it is unable to defend itself.

Rumsfeld and the Russian officials said they were not ready to announce a pre-summit agreement. But Ivanov said for the first time that Russia finds some common ground with the United States in viewing the treaty as obsolete.

"We often hear that the treaty is hopelessly outdated, a relic of the Cold War. Partially -- I stress partially -- I agree," Ivanov said. "All the fundamental Russian or Soviet-U.S. accords are relics, to some extent."

Ivanov also said NATO is "in many ways, a relic."

"Russia and the United States now have mutual understanding and the desire to look to the future together," he said.

But he added the two countries must "create something different" before scrapping the ABM treaty. Russia has maintained the treaty is the cornerstone of nuclear stability.

"Since we are no longer enemies but partners, we should trust each other," Ivanov said. "There are good prospects -- we can move forward faster in such issues as the struggle against terrorism and the reduction of weapons of mass destruction."

The two sides are believed to be close to a deal allowing the United States to proceed with missile defense testing without pulling out of the treaty. Each country would agree to cut the number of nuclear warheads by two-thirds, down to 1,750 to 2,250 on each side from about 6,000 each.

Putin has insisted on deep cuts in nuclear arsenals as a condition for any agreement on missile defense. The presidents agreed to link discussions on missile defense and arms cuts when they met for the first time in Slovenia in June.

Rumsfeld declined to say when or if the United States would withdraw from the ABM treaty. "I'll leave it to the president of the United States," he told reporters.

Arms talks are expected to dominate the agenda of the Nov. 13-15 summit. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who met with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this week in Washington, told reporters it is unlikely that the summit will produce a formal agreement.

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

Reactors and Their Fuel Are Among the Flanks U.S. Needs to Shore Up

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 - As they survey the industrial landscape for objects that terrorists could turn into weapons, members of Congress, governors and others are showing growing anxiety about the vulnerability of nuclear reactors, and especially their spent fuel.

The Coast Guard and the National Guard are already patrolling many plants, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says improvements have been made since Sept. 11 to make reactors less susceptible to sabotage. The industry emphasizes that many design features intended to protect plants against accident result in "robust" structures that are also resistant to military attack.

But studies that were available until recently on the Internet are being cited by a variety of others as reason to worry. One, done 20 years ago for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, raises the possibility of an airplane crashing into a containment dome or some less-hardened part of a reactor and causing a meltdown. Another, dated September 2000, suggests that breaching a cask used to store spent fuel would create a lethal radiation dose in an area many times larger than that caused by a 10- kiloton nuclear weapon.

Other experts note that the spent fuel pools can contain 20 to 30 times as much radioactive material as the reactor core does. And the pools are in buildings not nearly as strong as those that house the reactors.

"I'm not so worried about the core; I'm worried about the spent fuel pool," said Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont, who has asked for the establishment of a permanent five- mile no-flight zone around the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in the southeastern corner of his state. "There's basically no protection there," he said in a telephone interview.

Experts disagree about the extent of the vulnerability, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry say there is no cause for alarm. But the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted Thursday to require the commission to review the potential for attacks on nuclear plants , specifically to identify a new "design basis threat," or threat around which the plant's defenses are geared. The commission had opposed the amendment.

The provision's author, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, is a longtime opponent of the industry. Still, he won the near-unanimous agreement of his colleagues. "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is refusing to take up the question at all," Mr. Markey said. "We're mandating that they take it up."

His amendment would also guarantee the continued existence of the office within the N.R.C. that evaluates physical protection at reactors. Before Sept. 11, the agency had a plan to turn that function over to an industry group, which it said could run tests more frequently.

The details of the design basis threat against which the plants are tested are classified, but the threat is known to be a commando-type attack. Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, a nonproliferation group, suggested today that the basis should be "19 suicidal terrorists, technically sophisticated, coming at you from different directions." That would describe the groups that hijacked four airliners on Sept. 11.

Some arguments are revised versions of the case that opponents have made against nuclear power for years. "We've never heard of a terrorist taking aim at a wind turbine," said Anna Aurelio, legislative director of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which favors ending the use of nuclear power.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman, Richard Meserve, said that various improvements had been made since Sept. 11, but he added that reactors were smaller than either the World Trade Center towers or the Pentagon and, thus, more difficult to crash into. "It would not be a trivial thing to have a kamikaze attack," Mr. Meserve said. "It's a lot harder to hit than the World Trade Center."

"We have all kinds of infrastructure in this country that is vulnerable to aircraft," he added. "You think about dams, chemical plants, refineries, skyscrapers, pipelines, any number of things.

"I don't particularly lose any sleep over collisions with spent fuel pools, as compared to those other things."

But threats to the nation's nuclear power industry have new resonance with some elected officials since the hijackings. "The risk assessment that existed prior to Sept. 11 is clearly inadequate," Representative Peter Deutsch, a Florida Democrat who is another member of the Energy and Commerce committee, said at the committee's meeting on Thursday. He said that a reassessment was urgently needed because some threats were clearly beyond what a private company could defend against and would require government action. In a telephone interview, he added that it was clear that the reactor containment would not be the only possible target.

While the most obvious area of concern at a nuclear plant is the reactor, which operates under high temperatures and pressures and could vent radioactive steam in an accident, the bulk of the radioactive material at most plants is in the spent fuel pool.

The radioisotopes, like cesium and strontium, are created in the reactor by splitting uranium. Since the fuel is moved from the reactor after about three years, it begins to accumulate in the spent fuel pool. While there, it sits under about 25 feet of water, which shields the radiation and carries off the heat that continues to emanate from the fuel.

The industry estimates that even if all cooling stopped, the water would not begin boiling for 20 to 40 hours, and that even if it boiled, all that would be needed to end the problem is to add more water through something as simple as a fire hose. "These are huge structures, with a lot of inertia," said Lynnette Hendricks, director of licensing at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association.

Critics say that if the fuel were allowed to get too hot, it could ignite the cladding - a metal called zirconium - that holds the uranium fuel in place. The metal was selected primarily because it can be easily penetrated by neutrons, the sub- atomic particles that sustain a chain reaction.

But a petition filed earlier this week with the N.R.C. by a nuclear safety group argued that the zirconium could provide the chemical energy to fuel a fire that would disperse the radioactive materials. The group was seeking to prevent the owners of the Millstone nuclear plant, in Waterford, Conn., from storing more fuel in a pool there.

Until recently, the commission's staff said that zirconium would not burn once the fuel was a few years old, and its heat production was reduced as some of the radiation died off. But earlier this year, the staff retreated from that position.

Still, Ms. Hendricks said that to set up a situation in which such a fire could occur, "you need to hook up a lot of `what-ifs.' "

The other way to store fuel is to put it in dry casks, massive concrete and steel boxes filled with inert gas. Before Sept. 11, safety advocates and nuclear engineers described this as safer, at least for older fuel, because it used no water for fuel to leak into and no pumps to fail.

But the casks sit outside the plant buildings, sometimes in sight from roads or nearby hillsides. They have been tested for transit accidents, but their security against attack with an antitank weapon or other armament is less certain.

A draft study by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements discussed the risk of shipping spent fuel and calculated that breaching a cask could produce a lethal radiation dose in an area of 2,700 square kilometers. In comparison, the study said, a 10-kiloton nuclear blast would produce those doses in 47 square kilometers.

Government officials note, though, that creating a hole in a cask is not the same as dispersing its contents; dispersion would depend on the size of the breach and the energy available to break up the fuel.

The federal government was supposed to take responsibility for disposing of civilian reactor fuel in 1998, but the plan is now more than 10 years behind schedule. The Energy Department is trying to demonstrate that Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, is a suitable spot for deep burial, but has encountered a variety of problems.

So the spent fuel risk, however great it turns out to be, will stay with the plants for years to come. In Wiscasset, Maine, where the Maine Yankee nuclear plant used to operate, the state is demanding the fuel be hauled out. Otherwise, the site could become, in the words of Paula Craighead, the state's nuclear safety adviser, "Yucca Mountain without the mountain."

-------- maryland

FAA Prohibits Flights Over Calvert Cliffs Plant

By Raymond McCaffrey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page SM03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33094-2001Nov2?language=printer

The airspace above Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant and other such facilities throughout the nation has been placed off-limits to general aviation flights for at least a week amid continued concerns about terrorist threats.

The Federal Aviation Administration's order issued Tuesday covers 86 nuclear sites and prohibits flying within a radius of 10 nautical miles and below 18,000 feet. The ban was to remain in effect at least until midnight Eastern time this Tuesday.

The ban doesn't apply to medical, police, firefighting and rescue aircraft authorized by air traffic control, according to the FAA.

The list of affected sites was given to the FAA by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has also advised nuclear power plants to take additional precautions beyond those already in effect, according to Sue Gagner, an NRC spokeswoman.

"We issued an advisory to the nuclear facilities that they should strengthen perimeter security . . . with site security staff and urging them to request augmentation of their security patrols . . . with local law enforcement, state police and/or National Guard, if needed."

Calvert Cliffs officials would not comment specifically about their response to the NRC request, except to say that the National Guard has not been called to the site.

"We did get that message," said Karl Neddenien, a plant spokesman. "We did take appropriate action.

"We figure one of the key elements of a security program is to not discuss how the program operates."

The facility, however, is trying to alert the public to a regularly scheduled annual test of the emergency sirens within 10 miles of the plant, set for noon tomorrow. The routine test is required by the NRC, Neddenien said.

He said that within the 10-mile radius there are 72 sirens, primarily in Calvert County but also in St. Mary's County, as well as Dorchester County across the Chesapeake Bay. Each will sound for three minutes.

"The purpose of the siren system is to alert the public to turn to one of the radio stations that will be broadcasting information," Neddenien said.

Neddenien acknowledged that the drill's timing is very unfortunate, with residents already jittery over warnings about possible terrorists attacks, but the plant has tried "to do all we can to avoid alarming our neighbors."

"For nearly a month now, the local radio station . . . has been running public service announcements," he said, as have local newspapers, all "with a shared goal of avoiding any kind of needless concern by the public when the sirens sound on Monday."

Staff writer Michael Amon contributed to this report.

-------- missouri

Missouri governor says DOE broke agreements on shipment of nuclear waste

The Associated Press
Saturday, Nov. 3, 2001; 10:48 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011103/aponline224821_000.htm

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Gov. Bob Holden accused the U.S. Energy Department of breaking agreements on the shipment of nuclear waste through Missouri earlier this year and raised security concerns in light of Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Holden asked the department to rethink shipping radioactive waste through Missouri, specifically through densely populated areas.

"In light of the recent terrorist attacks on our nation, I think it only appropriate for the Department of Energy to revisit the practice of shipping spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste through densely populated areas," Holden said in the letter.

He accused the department of failing to avoid rush-hour traffic and major public events on June 28 when the shipments passed through Missouri.

When the convoy carrying the waste arrived at the outskirts of St. Louis around 2:30 p.m., Holden sought to delay it. The trucks were allowed to proceed shortly after 7 p.m. and made their way along Interstate 70 across the state.

In its official notice, the Energy Department had written that the waste would go through Iowa, not Missouri.

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said federal officials worked with Missouri for months leading up to the shipment and went beyond what the state was requiring for security. "We only seem to run into problems in Missouri," he said.

-------- washington

Old poisons, new worries:
At Northwest sites storing the weapons of world wars, soldiers on alert

By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter
Sunday, November 04, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=umahanford04m&date=20011104

On the Oregon side of the state line, near where the Columbia River bends west instead of south, military troops watch over deteriorating rockets packed with enough nerve gas to annihilate a small country.

Forty-five miles north, armed security forces outside Richland safeguard a working nuclear-power plant fueled by 154 tons of radioactive uranium. Nearby, four tons of plutonium are under equally heavy guard at the 560-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

While there's been no terrorist threat at any of these locations, the federal government has acknowledged what may be each site's vulnerability - the crash of a jumbo jet.

Experts say isolation makes the Umatilla Chemical Depot, the nuclear reactor and Hanford itself unattractive - and unlikely - targets. Potential invaders would be more likely to try to steal, rather than destroy, the sites' most dangerous stuff. All are housed in structures designed to protect against everything from bombs to lightning.

But the events of Sept. 11 focus new attention on security issues that may have seemed less significant a few months ago:

• Four decades after chemical weapons began arriving in the Oregon desert for storage, the depot and its neighbors are still ironing out glitches in elaborate disaster-response systems.

• The nuclear-power industry is facing new pressure to show it can defend itself against terrorism - an area some even within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) contend has been flawed for decades.

In nearly half its own top-secret mock-terrorist attacks on the nation's 103 nuclear plants, NRC investigators found "significant weaknesses," according to a 1998 internal memo.

• After suicide bombers turned commercial jets into missiles in New York and near Washington, D.C., the NRC admitted it had no information on whether such nuclear-power plants - including the 1,200 megawatt facility near the Tri-Cities - could withstand a crash by a Boeing 757 or 767.

"The (engineering) calculations for Columbia Generating Station being hit by an airliner have not been done," said power-plant spokeswoman Laura Dovey. When the plant was built 20 years ago, the risk was deemed too remote to warrant consideration.

"Terrorists weren't flying planes into buildings at that time."

• At the weapons depot outside Hermiston, Ore., where the U.S. Army is making plans to destroy 3,717 tons of stockpiled sarin, VX and mustard-gas munitions, officials detailed risks years ago.

In a 1996 report, the Army described one of its potential worst-case disasters: a crash by a large plane followed by a fire, which could kill up to 10,300 people. On a breezy day, people could die 77 miles downwind.

"We've kind of got it all here," said Deanna Davis, with Benton County Emergency Services. All the facilities are either neighboring or in Benton County.

In recent weeks, the Army, the two states and county authorities have stepped up security at the sites, creating checkpoints, restricting public access, beefing up armed personnel and conducting more rigorous drills. At least 10 states have National Guard troops defending reactors, but Washington is not among them.

"No National Guard troops have been requested," said Dana Middleton, spokeswoman for Gov. Gary Locke. "I can tell you though: You can't get anywhere near there."

The Federal Aviation Administration has sealed off airspace for three miles above each area and emergency authorities who have trained for years say they are prepared to handle anything - and expect nothing at all.

"You'd win the lottery several times before something would happen," said Brian Calvert, with Benton County Emergency Services.

Risks at nuclear reactor

Ten years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly began mock sabotage attacks on the nation's nuclear plants to test their strength against terrorism.

Led by David Orrik, an NRC staff member and ex-Navy SEAL, a small band of intruders approaches a plant and tries to gain control of the site and its nuclear material. They test equipment, attempt to beat alarms and try to sneak through barriers by jumping, crawling and climbing.

While not made public, the attacks aren't secret among the industry. Sometimes they're scheduled six months in advance.

Still, from 1991 to 1998, the pretend terrorists were successful in 26 of 55 attempts, Orrik wrote in a memo to his superiors in 1998. In all but two of those cases, the power plants' security forces were defeated even as they followed their own security plans.

Security at nuclear-power plants has been a point of controversy within the industry for years.

In 1995, an FBI agent testified that Islamic militants linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had discussed targeting nuclear-power plants. Yet in 1998, the NRC disbanded its anti-terrorism exercises as too expensive, sparking internal disputes until the Clinton administration reinstated them. Before Sept. 11, the NRC was considering giving nuclear plants greater latitude to test themselves.

The risk is not a nuclear explosion; power plants can't physically explode. At issue is the release of radiation. Power plants are designed to withstand earthquakes and fires and are among the strongest structures anywhere, built with multiple layers of steel and concrete. Any accidental release would require simultaneous damage to fuel cells and a rupture of containment facilities.

"The building is pretty robust, heavily fortified, and primary containment is several feet thick with concrete," Dovey, with Washington's nuclear plant, said.

Given the right wind conditions during a release, emergency planners acknowledge potentially harmful radiation could blanket small communities just outside the reservation's boundaries. But county officials are so confident in their response plans - and the miles between the reactor and population centers - they worry less about a radiation release than a panicked exodus by an uniformed public.

And, as Dovey pointed out, the Columbia Generating Station's last mock attack was in 1998. Unlike some of its counterparts, its performance was "excellent." According to an internal memo filed to an NRC safety chief: "It demonstrated that the security-response force could provide a protected, safe environment for the operators to operate and control the reactor within their normal training and qualification."

While the most obvious area of concern at a nuclear plant is the reactor, radioactive material at most nuclear-power plants includes spent fuel.

The federal government was supposed to take responsibility for disposing of civilian reactor fuel in 1998, but the plan is now behind schedule.

NRC Chairman Richard Meserve said various improvements had been made since Sept. 11, but he added that reactors were smaller than the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and, thus, more difficult to crash into. "It would not be a trivial thing to have a kamikaze attack," Meserve said. A reactor is "a lot harder to hit than the World Trade Center."

"We have all kinds of infrastructure in this country that is vulnerable to aircraft," he added. "You think about dams, chemical plants, refineries, skyscrapers, pipelines, any number of things. I don't particularly lose any sleep over collisions with spent-fuel pools, as compared to those other things."

Umatilla up close

On Dec. 30, 1999, sirens mounted on 50-foot poles began to howl over Eastern Oregon, across the Columbia River from the tiny Washington towns of Plymouth and Paterson.

Loudspeakers issued verbal commands - some places only in Spanish - telling residents of a toxic release at the 19,000-acre Umatilla chemical-weapons depot. Roadside reader boards broadcast the same caution.

"Some people sheltered in place," recalled Army spokesman Jim Hackett, meaning residents quickly sealed their homes using government-supplied emergency kits that include plastic and duct tape. The urgency was clear. One-tenth of a drop of sarin gas inhaled is enough to block all the nerve receptors that allow muscles to relax. VX is even more potent.

"Your muscles contract and keep getting tighter and tighter and tighter until you can't breath and you die," said Donald Smythe, chemical-operations director at the weapons depot.

The depot houses nearly 106,000 rockets each packed with roughly nine pounds of such gas. There's also nerve gas stuffed into land mines, projectiles and bombs - outdated munitions from the Cold and World wars.

There are old spray tanks, designed to sprinkle VX over enemy battlefields. There are more than 2,600 partially filled one-ton containers of mustard gas, a corrosive blistering agent that scorches the flesh.

The armaments were brought in undercover from 1962 to 1969, packed in rail cars with rabbits that monitored for leaks like canaries in a coal mine. The weapons are stored in 89 of 1,001 concrete mole-hill igloos at the 60-year-old depot.

Davis, stockpile-preparedness coordinator for the Benton County emergency program, said between 1,000 and 3,000 people live and work in Washington's "immediate response zone."

Under normal winds, Washington residents would have an hour or more before a dangerous chemical plume arrived. Stronger winds could disperse it in a less-hazardous fashion.

"Given the nature of our distance, we have time on our side, so we would evacuate," Davis said.

Since 1984, 126 of the stored weapons have leaked inside their storage bunkers - eight of them twice. But the Army declares no chemical release has ever escaped the compound.

That day late in 1999 was no different. There was no chemical mishap. Emergency dispatchers were trying to turn on a highway sign to warn of snow and ice but had computer trouble.

Disaster officials have since worked through that kink, but Army officials are still smoothing out others. Chief among pressures is public safety when the military begins incinerating the aging weapons on site.

The Army has trained and retrained for any type of disaster.

"They look at everything from a forklift accident when trying to remove a pallet, and it blocks the door it can't be closed, and one or two rockets automatically take off and explode - that sort of thing," said Wayne Thomas, with Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality.

In the wake of the 1999 incident, the governor created a special safety board. The Army must prove proficiency in 16 safety measures before the panel recommends approval for the incineration program.

During its last exercise this spring, "they successfully passed half of those measures," Thomas said. "They didn't pass the other half."

The Army will try again in 2002.

Seattle Times researcher Vince Kueter contributed to this story. Information from The New York Times is included in this report. Craig Welch can be reached at 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com.

-------- us nuc politics

Many issues face delayed action

USA Today
11/04/2001 - Updated 09:26 PM ET
By Richard Benedetto
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/04/agenda.htm

WASHINGTON - Nearly 2 months after its agenda was completely changed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Congress is heading toward adjournment with fading hopes of acting on issues that once seemed likely to become law.

High-priority issues such as improving public schools, increasing energy production and giving President Bush broader trade powers have been replaced by emergency needs: financing the war on terrorism, strengthening counter-terrorism laws, making airlines and airports more secure, and shoring up a weakened economy.

As a result, issues with no connection to Sept. 11 are likely to wait until next year:

Education overhaul. Both houses passed bills last spring that would require states to test students in reading and math from grades 3 through 8.

But House-Senate negotiations since July have failed to resolve key disputes, such as how much money should be spent to aid needy schools and enforce higher standards. Both sides say they can reach agreement, but prospects are dimming.

Energy supplies. Bush and Republican leaders want to boost energy production to reduce reliance on Mideast oil.

But most Democrats in the Senate oppose an administration provision that would allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Trade powers. Bush wants authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress could not amend.

But House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., says Democrats are unlikely to give the president broad negotiating power unless trade partners are required to meet labor, environmental and human rights standards.

Farm aid. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has asked to postpone action on a 10-year program capping or phasing out government payments to large farms. Even if lawmakers attempt to move the bill, the subsidy caps likely are too controversial to resolve.

Patients' rights. Both houses have passed separate versions of legislation giving patients in managed-care plans new protections. But negotiations about when and where those patients could sue their health plans over denial of care never got started.

Campaign finance reform. House proponents of a Senate-passed bill to overhaul the way elections are financed are within a few signatures of forcing GOP leaders to schedule action. But they admit the issue is dead for this year.

Stem cell research. Lawmakers last week dropped an effort to ease the restrictions President Bush has clamped on stem cell research. In return, lawmakers who oppose the research put off Senate action on legislation that would ban human cloning and further restrict research.

Contributing: Jessica Lee

---

Bush seeks support in week full of meetings

USA Today
11/04/2001
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/bush.htm

In individual meetings with eight world leaders at the White House, Bush will try to shore up the international coalition he quickly assembled after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The sessions mark a new diplomatic phase as the administration tries to quell doubts about the pace and progress of the military campaign in Afghanistan.

And in a speech Thursday, the president will try to fortify Americans' patience with the investigation into anthrax attacks in the United States. The speech will likely be delivered in the evening to give him the widest possible TV audience.

On Saturday, Bush will travel to the United Nations in New York to confer with more heads of state and give another speech outlining progress in the war. Aides say Bush intends to scold allies who haven't fulfilled pledges to find and remove terrorists in their countries.

"The president will remind the international coalition of our common responsibilities in disrupting and defeating terror wherever it exists," Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Sunday.

Tuesday marks 8 weeks since the attacks Sept. 11, and administration officials want to maintain momentum in the war on terrorism. This week's events are designed to allay public concerns about the administration's handling of bioterrorism, as well as possible erosion of support at home and abroad for military strikes in Afghanistan.

Bush will also welcome the leaders of Algeria, France, Kuwait, Morocco, Great Britain, Brazil, Ireland and India to the White House. The Friday meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee is particularly important, because Bush wants to limit tensions between India and Pakistan. Bush will meet at the United Nations with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

Bush speaks Tuesday via satellite to a conference on combating terrorism that's meeting in Warsaw. In those remarks, he's expected to note the ways women are oppressed by the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling regime. Women in Afghanistan have little access to education or health care.

White House officials say Muslim women, including leaders from around the world, will be asked to emphasize the Taliban's repression in the coming weeks.

Bush expects to deliver some good news on Wednesday, when he'll announce new amounts of terrorists' assets that have been seized or frozen since Sept. 11.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's visit to the White House, also Wednesday, will let Bush showcase the kind of support he expects from other allies. Blair, a steadfast partner in the war, has traveled around the world recruiting partners for the coalition.


-------- MILITARY

Pentagon Weapons at a Glance

The Associated Press
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 1:55 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline135522_000.htm

Facts and figures about some of the weapons being used in the war on terrorism:

USS KITTY HAWK, aircraft carrier:
Length: 1,0621/2 feet
Flight deck width: 252 feet
Beam: 130 feet
Displacement: About 80,800 tons with a full load
Speed: More than 30 knots
Aircraft: 85
Crew: Ship's company: 3,150, Air wing: 2,480
Weapons: Sea Sparrow launchers, three 20mm Phalanx CIWS mounts
Date Deployed: April 29, 1961

TOMAHAWK CRUISE MISSILE:

A long-range, jet-powered cruise missile launched from Navy ships and submarines. First used in the 1991-1992 Persian Gulf War, the missile has since been used in several other conflicts, including 1998 attacks on Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

Length: 20 feet, 6 inches with booster, or 18 feet, 3 inches without
Diameter: 20.4 inches
Wingspan: 8 feet, 9 inches
Weight: 2,900 pounds, 3,000 pounds with booster
Cost: $600,000
Range: 1,000 miles
Speed: About 550 mph
Deployed: 1986

B-52:

The Air Force's workhorse bomber, able to drop or fire a wide variety of bombs and missiles. B-52s dropped 40 percent of the ordnance on Iraq during the Gulf War. With airborne refueling, the planes can fly around the world. During the Gulf War, for instance, B-52s took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., fired missiles at Iraq, and returned home in a marathon 35-hour mission.

Length: 159 feet, 4 inches
Wingspan: 185 feet
Speed: 650 mph
Range: 8,800 miles without refueling
Weapons: 70,000 pounds of ordnance, which can include bombs, mines and missiles
Crew: Five (aircraft commander, pilot, radar navigator, navigator and electronic warfare officer)
First deployed: 1955
Cost: $74 million

AC-130H/U GUNSHIPS:

A low-flying, loud aircraft - used as much for its deadly accuracy as its psychological impact - the AC-130 is capable of unloading withering fire from side-mounted guns.

Sensors on board the aircraft give it night-operation capability. It has infrared target-seeking equipment, a low-light-level television camera and laser target designators.

The latest versions are outfitted with radar to detect targets at long range, as well as satellite-guided navigation systems.

Primary Function: Close air support, air interdiction and force protection
Thrust: 4,910 shaft horsepower per engine
Length: 97 feet, 9 inches
Height: 38 feet, 6 inches
Wingspan: 132 feet, 7 inches
Speed: 300 mph
Range: Approximately 1,300 nautical miles; unlimited with air refueling.
Ceiling: 25,000 feet
Maximum Takeoff Weight: 155,000 pounds
Armament: AC-130H/U: 40mm cannon and 105mm cannon; AC-130U: 25mm gun
Crew: AC-130U - Five officers (pilot, co-pilot, navigator, fire control officer, electronic warfare officer) and eight enlisted (flight engineer, TV operator, infrared detection set operator, loadmaster, four aerial gunners)
First Deployed: AC-130H, 1972; AC-130U, 1995
Unit Cost: AC-130H, $132.4 million; AC-130U, $190 million

B-2 SPIRIT:

A multi-role bomber capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear bombs.

Many aspects of the stealth process remain classified; however, the B-2's composite materials, special coatings and flying-wing design all contribute.

Length: 69 feet
Wingspan: 172 feet
Speed: high subsonic
Range: Intercontinental, unrefueled
Weapons: Conventional or nuclear weapons
First deployed: 1993
Crew: two
Cost: $1.3 billion

GLOBAL HAWK:

An unmanned spy plane capable of high altitudes and long endurance, while providing near-real-time imagery of a target area. While not fully tested, the aircraft will be capable of surveying an area equivalent to the state of Illinois - or 40,000 nautical miles - during missions that can last more than 35 hours in the air.

Wingspan: 116 feet
Length: 44 feet
Ceiling: 65,000 feet

PREDATOR:

An unmanned spy aircraft, flown remotely by pilots in a van at their base. The video images relayed by the aircraft can potentially be viewed by not only the pilots but others around the world. The Predator can stay in the air for about 40 hours.

Ceiling: 25,000 feet
Wingspan: 48 feet
Length: 26 feet
Weight: 1,500 pounds
Speed: about 90 mph

HELLFIRE MISSILE:

An anti-armor, laser guided, air-to-ground weapon, capable of knocking out tanks. It weighs about 100 pounds, and comes in various models for more specific needs.

E-8C JOINT STARS:

A modified Boeing 707, the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System is an airborne battle management and command center. With a jam-resistant system, it surveys the movement of both friendly and enemy forces on the ground and relays the data in near-real-time to ground stations. It is capable of detecting targets up to 820,248 feet from the aircraft.

Primary Function: Airborne battle management
Thrust: 19,200 pounds per engine
Length: 152 feet, 11 inches
Height: 42 feet, 6 inches
Wingspan: 145 feet, 9 inches
Speed: 390 - 510 knots
Ceiling: 42,000 feet
Maximum Takeoff Weight: 331,000 pounds
Range: 8 hours (unrefueled)
Cost: about $270 million
Crew: Flight crew of four plus mission crew of 15 from the Air Force and three Army specialists
First Deployed: 1996

GBU-28

"Bunker buster" bombs are 5,000-pound, laser-guided bombs used to uproot underground targets, like caves or buried command centers. Developed during the Gulf War in 1991, they are being used against al-Qaida hide-outs and the Taliban, often dropped by the B-2.

----

Pentagon Uses Weapons Mix in Assault

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 1:53 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline135320_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. fight in Afghanistan is relying on an odd mix of weapons - from the past, present and future - for a military that before Sept. 11 already was making the transition from arming for the Cold War to tooling for new threats.

B-52s of Vietnam War vintage - some older than the Air Force pilots flying them - lumber hundreds of miles from an island in the Indian Ocean to drop tons of "dumb" bombs on Taliban trenches.

Million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from Navy ships and submarines are aimed at turning terrorist camps into dust clouds.

Army helicopters and Air Force AC-130 gunships watch warily for Stingers, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that the CIA provided to Afghan rebels in their 1980s war against the Soviet Union.

Billion-dollar B-2 bombers, built to evade the Soviets' sophisticated radar networks, fly 44-hour missions from Missouri to drop the latest version of a "bunker buster" bomb first used in the Gulf War.

Aircraft carriers, derided by some as irrelevant relics ready for retirement, launch dozens of fighter-bombers daily from the Arabian Sea, their sights set on decrepit but still dangerous Taliban air defenses and other targets.

One carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, left most of its usual complement of Navy strike aircraft at their home base in Japan. The Kitty Hawk is loaded with Army special operations helicopters, some of which launched commando raids on Afghanistan on Oct. 20.

The Afghan war also is providing a glimpse of the future for U.S. weaponry.

The Global Hawk, a high-altitude spy plane that flies without a pilot, has been ordered into action over Afghanistan even though it is still in development, yet to be fully tested. Unmanned aerial vehicles, as the Pentagon calls this type of high-tech aircraft, do the job without risking pilots' lives.

Also at work are unmanned Predator aircraft, which fly much lower than the Global Hawk and provide real-time video images of ground targets. An armed version of the Predator, capable of firing Hellfire anti-armor missiles, reportedly has been flown over Afghanistan.

With the Taliban's air defenses largely disabled and winter weather approaching, the Pentagon also is sending into action the E-8 Joint STARS, a modified Boeing 707 jet with radar that can find and track vehicles on the ground at a distance of more than 124 miles, in any weather.

The original idea, of course, was to track tanks and other armor on a traditional battlefield. In Afghanistan, a war that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says is being fought unlike any other, the vehicles to be tracked by Joint STARS include sport utility vehicles and pickups used by the Taliban.

A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, emphasized that Joint STARS can track vehicles in all weather.

"That will be helpful when you're looking for trucks or SUVs or others that are moving around," he said.

The war on the homefront - "homeland security," as the Pentagon calls it - also features a mix of past and future.

Air Force fighters are flying armed missions 24 hours a day over New York and Washington and over other parts of the country from time to time, a domestic air defense effort not seen even during the Cold War.

At the Pentagon and other federal installations in Washington the Army has stationed machines that monitor the air for signs of biological or chemical agents - a new capability that heretofore had been intended for use on a foreign battlefield.

---

A look at recent conflicts as they developed

November 4, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011104-2400360.htm

A month into the Afghanistan campaign, Americans are fighting their way into winter. A month into the Kosovo campaign, they were fighting into spring.

In the Persian Gulf war, it was just plain hot.

The United States attacked Afghanistan in response to terrorists who killed Americans at home. It went to war against Iraq to free Kuwait and protect the region and its supply of oil.

Kosovo was about ethnic killing and regional instability.

These major military campaigns over a decade that also took Americans into harm's way in places such as Bosnia and Somalia, are different in their motivations, goals, size, terrain and much more.

But there are some similarities, too - the stateside goodbyes to sailors and soldiers, the knowledge each day's choreography of military machinery will bring danger, the certainty that innocents abroad will die.

Also common at least to the Afghanistan and Kosovo conflicts is that, about a month into each one, nagging questions arose about whether all that bombing was doing much good.

NATO planes bombed through several weeks of severe weather before they could target Serbian troops and their artillery. Even during the air war that proceeded swiftly against Iraq after months of buildup, fears existed that allies would die in great numbers in the coming ground war.

A look at elements of three wars, in their first month, by the numbers:

• The bombing: The number of combat and bombing flights over Afghanistan, increasing lately, has averaged just over 60 a day. Allies flew 500 missions a day over Yugoslavia and 1,500 a day during the Gulf war.

• The other side: U.S. forces are up against 45,000 to 50,000 Taliban fighters. The United States and its allies faced about 40,000 armed Serbs in Kosovo and roughly 500,000 Iraqi soldiers.

• U.S. casualties: About a month into the Gulf war, U.S. officials said 16 Americans had been killed in combat and 33 in noncombat operations. Thirty were missing in action and eight were prisoners of war. No Americans died in that period over Kosovo; three were taken prisoner. No U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan but two Army Rangers supporting a commando raid died in a helicopter crash in Pakistan and a third soldier was killed in a forklift accident in the Persian Gulf.

• Civilian casualties: Reliable numbers are impossible in the midst of fighting. More than 400 civilian deaths from NATO air strikes were confirmed independently a month into the Kosovo campaign, which was fought to stop the killing and dislocation of civilians by Serbian forces. Iraq claimed 1,600 civilians dead at this point of the Gulf war. The United States, which lost more than 4,600 people in the terrorist attacks, has acknowledged mistaken bombings of some civilian areas while disputing Taliban claims of 1,500 civilian dead.

•U.S. losses: About a month into the Gulf war, 17 aircraft. In the Yugoslavia campaign, Americans lost one stealth bomber, one Apache helicopter and one unmanned reconnaissance plane in that time. In the Afghan war, America lost a helicopter and an unmanned Predator spy plane Friday - bad weather was blamed - as well as the helicopter that crashed in Pakistan, and an additional unmanned aircraft that went down before airstrikes started.

• Opposing losses: A month into the Gulf war, allies had destroyed 72 Iraqi planes and damaged or sunk as many ships, taken more than 1,200 prisoners and prompted 142 Iraqi planes to flee to Iran. Serbian officials said they had lost 2,000 troops, and suffered damage to their military equipment and petroleum supplies. In this conflict, the Pentagon claimed control of the Afghan sky within days but has refused to estimate Taliban troops killed or the range of targets damaged or destroyed.

--------

History Confirms War a Futile Business

Common Dreams
Wednesday, October 24, 2001
Toronto Star
by Dalton Camp
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1024-06.htm

While our allied air forces continue the redistribution of the rubble in Kabul, the objectives and purposes of this "new war" become, like the dust rising from that battered city, more difficult to comprehend.

Historically, there have been necessary wars and wars fought whether necessary or not. But it is a futile business, as history will confirm.

According to one political scientist, who counted the wars of the great powers, from 1495 to 1975, one or another of them has been at war 75 per cent of the time. Astonishingly, one of the more peaceful centuries was the 20th, although it has been, thus far, the bloodiest, as a result of its two world wars.

We have been, if you're counting, marching off to battle much of our time, and here we are, marching off again. There must be something to the view of man as a natural hunter and natural killer.

Still, one would think that man would run out of wars to make or nations to invade or, that at some epiphanous time, nations would conspire to stop the killing, that war would become not the last resort but simply an unthinkable one.

But here we find ourselves at war again, against half the world in general and no one in particular, pulverizing ruins and inflicting "collateral damage" - a euphemism for killing - on people we know nothing of, in a land we have nothing against, hope never to see, in a cause so rhetorical and clothed so much in hyperbole as to be unattainable.

I have been reading of late about the Allied bombing of the German city of Hamburg, in World War II, during July, 1944. At that time we (the Allies) had achieved air superiority. We had also developed superior aircraft and bigger bombs, as well as a means of deceiving the enemy's radar defenses.

On July 25, nearly 800 bombers attacked Hamburg, a nearly helpless city, dropping their loads of 400- and 800- and 1,000-pound bombs and incendiaries. The city was soon ablaze, and without water to fight the fires; in this cauldron, the temperatures would exceed 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. In one week, the number of killed was put at 50,000 - just 1,000 short of those British civilians killed by German attacks in the first four years of the war.

Of course, we "won" the war against infinitely greater and more menacing evil than that of terrorism. But more to the point, subsequent study by professional appraisers has concluded not even all the slaughter of civilians, not the collateral damage wrecked upon Hamburg, Dresden, Essen and the rest made any significant difference either to the result or the war's duration. It did, however, make a difference to those killed in the exercise, including those of our own.

War is an exercise in excess. We emerge from battle choking on the blood of innocents. Self-deception is always helpful to those of delicate sensibility. Hence, we do try to limit collateral damage and imagine ourselves fighting for democracy, justice and - heaven help us - peace. Should one be a refugee, a bombed-out peasant or a child crippled by a mine, a just war is a true oxymoron, at least for those accompanied by a translator.

I have come to be wary of Pentagon briefers. These films of direct hits on arbitrarily defined "objectives" remind one of the underlying irony of this "new war." Bombing has become a kind of elliptical expression of military frustration. When in doubt, bomb. It is to politics what paving used to be to policy.

What is new about this "new war," at ground level where all wars are finally settled, is that the terrorists in our midst - or in their caves - have found the equalizer to war as an exercise in technology. Terror is an extension of war by other means, including stealth, deception and disguise. It is not new that it is a war waged upon innocents; the graveyards of Europe are crowded with those who perished in their kitchens, in their sleep, in their unknowing. What is new is that the oceans no longer protect us from the risks and perils of war because the new enemy has new weapons of an original design and unfamiliar ruthlessness.

Still, when it is finally over, when the struggle is exhausted, when we achieve another peace between another war, we can band together in reunion and, in common folly and arrogance, be reborn in our usual ways, boasting of our superior means and inexhaustible bounty and, while the world will not be the same, can never be so, we will hardly know the difference.

We should not, then, excessively fret over our present condition but view it, as much as we can, as a passing inconvenience. After all, were it a truly serious crisis, we would not, in our considerable genius, be acting like fools and behaving with such compulsive, ruinous mindlessness.

The most dangerous man alive these days is the one who justifies our present folly by asking, "Well, what would you do?" Those who ask the question have no memory and even less imagination. Perhaps, someone will awaken to other Canadian options and possibilities before John Manley does.

Dalton Camp is a political commentator. His column appears in the Toronto Star on Wednesday and Sunday.

-------- afghanistan

Winter's cold may help military track Taliban

11/04/2001
By Dave Moniz,
USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/winter-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Conventional wisdom says Afghanistan's harsh winter weather will hamper U.S. military operations. But the Pentagon sees it as an opportunity. U.S. forces plan to use an array of high-tech heat sensors to locate and rout Taliban troops from their hideouts during the cold weather. "It's my judgment that there will be ample opportunity to use a variety of the advantages we have," says Bill Nash, a retired Army general who commanded troops in Bosnia. Nash says one advantage is the ability to locate heat sources on the ground.

The military plans to use thermal sensing devices on fighter jets and helicopters to track the heat coming from cave openings, military vehicles and even groups of soldiers. Officials say that under the right conditions, heat-sensing technologies are more effective in cold climates.

Two years ago, the Air Force began employing a sophisticated computer program known as Target Acquisition Weather Software, which uses climate models and other variables to track differences in heat. One Air Force general says the software can be used effectively in cold weather because of the contrast between heat-emitting objects and the air around them.

The Army uses thermal sensors in tanks to pinpoint targets. Nash says that's why Army tank crews often score higher on nighttime gunnery drills. In the cooler nighttime air, a hot tank engine will appear more clearly on a thermal sensor that it might during the daytime.

A senior military official knowledgeable about thermal sensors says U.S. forces will need to combine on-the-ground intelligence, satellite photographs and airborne thermal technologies to locate Taliban caves and bunkers. He saysthe process is difficult but doable.

The Pentagon has prepared a detailed analysis of winter temperatures in Afghanistan, which vary widely from the lower altitudes of the desert-like southwest to mountains as high as 24,000 feet in the northeast.

According to a senior military official familiar with plans to use thermal sensors, the Pentagon is counting on the fact that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders are "going to have to have some heat source" wherever they hide.

Dave Rockwell, a military analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., says it's unclear whether the Taliban has attempted to modify caves, tunnels or other underground buildings to mask heat. "We don't know what level their sophistication is in camouflaging the thermal signatures," he says.

Rockwell says that depending on the depth of the hideouts, sensors may only be able to pick up heat escaping from the mouths of caves. Even so, senior military officials say, that might be enough to locate and destroy some of the hideouts.

Rockwell says the Pentagon will need accurate intelligence on the ground, so that when they detect heat sources in caves, "you know it's not just a shepherd and a bunch of sheep in there."

The U.S. military used thermal detection to its advantage during the 1991 Gulf War. Using night sensors, Air Force fighter jets were able to pick out and destroy thousands of Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles from their engine heat.

---

Bin Laden Arabs buy husbands for their women

BY Christina Lamb, Diplomatic Correspondent
04/11/2001
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$BJFNFAIAAFXITQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F11%2F04%2Fwwed04.xml

OSAMA BIN LADEN's Arab bodyguards have begun marrying off their daughters and sisters to Afghan men around Kandahar in the first sign that they do not expect to survive the war.

The secret weddings took place last week in various suburbs and villages around Kandahar and involved hundreds of Arab women being married to locals who agreed to look after them in return for large sums of money.

"The Arabs came at night bringing large numbers of women and suitcases of money," said Abdul Razza, a teacher from Kandahar who witnessed some of the negotiations. "They asked that the people look after their womenfolk and protect them in the war."

The women were completely covered but Mr Razza believes some were as young as 12 and that they brought their mothers with them. Local mullahs carried out the quick marriage ceremonies.

An estimated 2,000 Arabs from Sudan, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates among other countries, lived in the Taliban spiritual capital of Kandahar before the war but fled last month before the start of the American bombing campaign. Some managed to escape the country but many are thought to be in Uruzgan, a mountainous province with a network of caves that is the home province of Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader.

According to Mr Razza, however, there was no shortage of men agreeing to take the Arab women as wives. "Normally we have to pay for women so they were happy to get brides who came with their own money particularly at the moment with so many shortages and high prices for food and fuel. They also believe it is their Islamic duty to protect these guests." Many of the Kandahari bridegrooms were already married but Islamic law allows a man to have four wives, a custom that dates specifically from times of war when men had gone off to fight leaving many women with no one to look after them.

Many of the Arabs marrying off their women to Kandaharis are believed to be from bin Laden's elite 055 Brigade, a crack squad of 500 Arabs set up five years ago, who have vowed to fight to the death, in addition to his own personal bodyguards. Over the past two weeks the Americans have stepped up the bombing of caves and tunnels where bin Laden and his guards are thought to be hiding.

"The fact that the Arabs feel they can no longer protect the women is the first sign that they believe the war is not going their way," said a Western diplomat.

----

Air Controllers Play Role in Bombing

By Chris Tomlinson
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 11:56 a.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline115629_000.htm

ABOARD THE USS PELELIU -- Hidden in the mountains of Afghanistan, armed with rifles and laser beams to mark targets, U.S. special forces have taken on a key role in the war against the Taliban in recent weeks.

As U.S. fighter jets run out of fixed targets, pilots have become more dependent on U.S. ground troops to locate and identify troops and tanks, said Rear Adm. Mark Fitzgerald, commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt battle group.

Working undetected in Afghanistan's rugged terrain, sometimes miles from friendly forces, the specially trained troops - known as forward air controllers - have an especially difficult job.

U.S. special forces teams already are helping anti-Taliban rebels with training and are directing American warplanes to Taliban targets. So far, special forces with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Peleliu remain on standby.

If Marines from the USS Peleliu are ordered to land in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Capt. Howard Gordon will be involved in planning every aspect of the air operation, and then head for the front lines.

Though he has not yet seen combat, Gordon has specialized training in directing precision airstrikes in urban areas, a skill that may be needed as the Taliban are reported to be hiding in residential areas to avoid airstrikes.

He said controllers can call in airstrikes precise enough to send missiles fired from Harrier jump jets through specific windows, without destroying the entire building.

In training "we called in the Harriers to drop bombs in that mock city; it was just a blast to see what they can do," Gordon said.

Forward air controllers have to combine the skills of battlefield tactician, pilot and infantryman, Gordon said.

"I help coordinate how the planes are going to come in and drop their bombs, where they are going to drop their bombs and also coordinate the troops coming in and out of the field by helicopter or C-130 aircraft," Gordon said.

On the battlefield, controllers also help determine what type of aircraft and bombs are needed to destroy a target.

Gordon, a 32-year-old from Milwaukee, said he takes between six and 120 infantrymen with him when he goes into the field, depending on how far they have to go and how long they have to stay. His men are trained to get within eyesight of the enemy without being detected, he said.

"We all strive to sneak in without anyone seeing us," Gordon, who has not yet seen combat, said. "It is hard to do, but it's your goal."

Once he has identified a target to be bombed, Gordon has a variety of ways he can point it out to pilots. During daylight, he can use a radio to talk to the pilot and describe landmarks to pinpoint the target, lob a smoke or luminescent grenade next to it or even use a mirror to reflect sunlight on to it.

Controllers also have high-tech ways of indicating a target. Controllers carry a laser that allows them to point an invisible beam on the target. Laser-guided bombs dropped from attack jets will home in on whatever the laser is shining on with pinpoint accuracy, Gordon said.

Controllers also carry infrared pointers that can be seen with night vision goggles worn by pilots.

The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit is the primary amphibious combat unit in the Arabian Sea, based on the USS Peleliu. Two or three expeditionary units are at sea at any one time, usually accompanying aircraft carrier battle groups.

The Peleliu Amphibious Ready Group - which consists of three ships based in San Diego, Calif. - carries a total of 2,200 Marines and 1,900 sailors.

--------

IN PAKISTAN
Rumsfeld Says Taliban Government Greatly Weakened

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Rumsfeld.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Four weeks of U.S. bombing has greatly weakened the Taliban's ability to operate as a government in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.

``The Taliban (are) not really functioning as a government,'' Rumsfeld said after arriving in Pakistan, the latest stop on a trip which has taken him to Russia and a pair of Central Asian states bordering Afghanistan.

Militarily, the Taliban are ``using their power in enclaves throughout the country to impose their will on the Afghan people,'' Rumsfeld said. But he added, ``they are not making major military moves. They are pretty much in static positions.''

Rumsfeld said the Taliban were trying to prevent U.S. strikes on their military targets by using mosques as military command centers and for storing ammunition and placing tanks near hospitals and schools. The Taliban are ``actively lying about civilian casualties,'' he added.

Rumsfeld, who arrived from Uzbekistan, spoke after talks with Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has called for a break in the bombing during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan which begins around Nov. 17.

President Bush already has said the bombing was likely to continue through Ramadan. Rumsfeld gave no indication that stand had changed.

``The reality is that the threat of additional terrorist acts is there,'' he said. The United States will be sensitive to the views in the region, he added, but he declined to outline military plans.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, who appeared with Rumsfeld at a news conference, said his country wanted the military campaign to be as brief as possible -- but it also needed to achieve its objectives.

At his earlier stop in Uzbekistan, Rumsfeld told reporters that the anti-terrorist campaign was ``proceeding at a pace that is showing measurable progress.''

Rumsfeld's stopovers in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- two nations on Afghanistan's northern border -- came at a time when Washington is looking to send more troops into Afghanistan to scout out targets and train opposition fighters. Uzbekistan in particular has been pointed to by many experts as a possible staging ground for Afghan operations.

But Rumsfeld's visit did not bring any announcements of any change in either country's level of cooperation with the campaign against Afghanistan.

But while Rumsfeld said he ``appreciated'' Uzbekistan's help, he and the Uzbek defense minister said they had not discussed expanding the U.S. presence in this former Soviet republic. Rumsfeld said the United States needed all kinds of assistance in the war against terror, but firmly insisted that he would not detail the contributions of any country.

The United States already has some 1,000 troops in Uzbekistan. Although Uzbekistan has balked at allowing the United States to carry out strikes from its bases, it has agreed that soldiers for search-and-rescue and humanitarian missions can be based on its territory.

Rumsfeld met with Uzbek President Islam Karimov and Defense Minister Qobir Ghulomov on Sunday on his second visit to this Central Asian nation in a month.

During his brief visit to Tajikistan -- which shares a long and volatile border with Afghanistan -- Rumsfeld said he reached no deals on military cooperation, though he said Tajikistan and the United States would form an ``assessment team'' to look into ways in which the country could assist in the military.

Tajikistan currently allows flights carrying U.S. aid to cross its airspace. Foreign Minister Talbak Nazarov said assistance could be expanded to allow overflights of military planes or the use of Tajikistan's air fields.

---

America's pipe dream
A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil

The Guardian
George Monbiot
Tuesday October 23, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,579174,00.html

"Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here," Woodrow Wilson asked a year after the first world war ended, "that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?" In 1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938. Afghanistan is as indispensable to the regional control and transport of oil in central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the central Asian republics, which is precisely what the west has spent 10 years trying to prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense. In south Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce. Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, in 1995 the US oil company Unocal started negotiating to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian sea. The company's scheme required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan". Unocal invited some of the leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco [the former US oil consortium in Saudi Arabia] pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.

Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and banks, still hoped to build a 1,000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in east Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few days before the attack on New York, the US energy information administration reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through Afghanistan". Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry executives, we would be foolish to suppose that such plans no longer figure in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

American foreign policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means that the US should control military, economic and political development worldwide. China has responded by seeking to expand its interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled four central Asian republics into a "Shanghai cooperation organisation". Its purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

If the US succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing them with a stable and grateful pro-western government and if the US then binds the economies of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China. Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944: "The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." I believe that the US government is genuine in its attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is doing.

www.monbiot.com

-------- asia

N. Korea Criticizes Japan Terror Law

NOVEMBER 04, 05:13 EST
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=NKOREA%2dJAPAN

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea on Sunday criticized Japan's legislation of a new law that allows its troops to be sent overseas, calling it a dangerous step forward for overseas aggression.

Last week, Japanese lawmakers passed a law allowing its military to join the U.S.-led campaign against Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The law limits Japan to a non-combat role such as transporting supplies, conducting search-and-rescue missions and dispatching medical teams.

But the North interpreted the law as a sign of resurgent militarism.

``Japan is taking the road of overseas aggression again instead of drawing lessons from its defeat in the second world war,'' said Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling communist party.

The Rodong article was carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA, which was monitored in Seoul.

After its World War II defeat, Japan adopted a pacifist constitution that bans the use of force as a means of settling international conflicts, and prohibits the country from sending troops overseas.

North Korea has said that it ``may be a right option'' for countries to participate in the international campaign against terrorism, but has expressed its opposition to Japan's participation.

Japan ruled the Korean peninsula as a colony for 35 years until its World War II defeat.

-------- balkans

Milosevic Hears the Charges

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

The international war crimes tribunal in The Hague usually waives the recitation of indictments. But for one defiant defendant, who has refused to accept legal representation that would ordinarily review the charges, the tribunal made an exception. Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, was forced to listen to the full text, delivered in his own language, of two indictments. The reading of the charges - including murder, torture, plunder and rape in Croatia in 1991 and in Kosovo in 1999 lasted almost four hours.

-------- biological weapons

U.S. authorities ready to fumigate Senate building to kill anthrax spores

Canadian Press
Sunday, November 04, 2001
Montral Gazette
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={F8F205E0-27FC-4B7C-8C92-DAF976221DBF}

WASHINGTON (AP) - Authorities were set to order the release of powerful chemicals in a U.S. Senate office building in hopes of killing any lingering anthrax spores. A suspicious letter sent to the Treasury Department was getting a careful look.

One month after the first anthrax case was confirmed, President George W. Bush on Saturday called the anthrax threat "a second wave of terrorist attacks upon our country." He said in his weekly radio address that the government is working to swiftly test post offices and other sites for spores.

On Capitol Hill, environmental experts planned to announce Sunday their plans for decontaminating the Hart Senate Office Building, where an anthrax-filled letter to Majority Leader Tom Daschle was opened.

They planned to fill the nine-story building with bacteria-killing chlorine dioxide gas, but the final approval was being left to a panel of experts.

Officials at the Treasury Department isolated a suspicious letter and sent it for testing. The letter bore the same Trenton, N.J., postmark as anthrax-laced mail delivered in New York and Washington. Officials said the address was also handwritten.

Anthrax testing was under way at 259 postal facilities, mostly on the East Coast. Officials awaited results from 21 post offices where testing was complete.

To date, the biological attack has killed four people and infected 13 others. Concentrated along the East Coast, anthrax also has been found in Kansas City, Mo., and Indianapolis.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention sent a team of epidemiologists to Arizona, where the World Series was concluding, a precaution often taken when large crowds are expected. CDC officials considered a public service campaign to educate Americans about anthrax.

The New York Times reported in Sunday editions that the CDC also has vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiologic teams that can be dispatched on short notice to examine a suspected case of smallpox anywhere in the country.

Unlike anthrax, smallpox is easily spread from person to person and federal officials are rushing to stockpile enough vaccine to inoculate millions of Americans if necessary.

Health authorities, who now believe that a New Jersey accountant was infected through the mail, said postal customers should keep an eye out for symptoms of anthrax. The skin form resembles a spider bite at first; the more serious inhalation anthrax, thought unable to be transmitted through regular mail, looks like flu.

In his radio address, Bush said the odds of receiving a piece of tainted mail are "very low."

In New York, investigators have not determined how Kathy T. Nguyen contracted inhalation anthrax. Nguyen, who died last week, was never able to tell them where she had been or who she had seen.

Initial testing for anthrax at her Bronx apartment and at the Manhattan hospital where she worked have come back negative.

But CDC officials said they were beginning another round in the most promising sites and expanding to other places where she might have been.

---

CDC preps for possible smallpox scare

USA Today
11/04/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/04/smallpox-vaccinations.htm

ATLANTA (AP) - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has vaccinated some of its health workers against smallpox as a precaution in case they need to investigate a terrorist attack involving the deadly virus, a spokesman said Sunday.

While the CDC has no evidence that anyone is readying a terrorist attack using smallpox, which was eradicated outside laboratories 21 years ago, officials of the federal agency say the virus is so dangerous that it is important they be prepared.

"We are putting together several teams that could be quickly dispatched to the field if we did see a suspected case of smallpox," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Sunday.

The agency expects a number of false alarms as doctors heighten their suspicion of anthrax, smallpox and other diseases, said Jeffrey Koplan, the CDC director.

Last week, the CDC vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiological teams that can be sent at a moment's notice to examine suspected cases of smallpox.

This week, the CDC will begin a series of training courses on smallpox for some employees and state and local health workers.

The contagious virus is known to survive only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. However, germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks.

Health experts worry about smallpox because it can spread quickly from person to person and has a high death rate. The infection is characterized by a rash and a fever of at least 102 degrees.

Many Americans are susceptible to smallpox because they were never vaccinated, or were vaccinated but have decreased protection because the vaccine has worn off. The United States stopped smallpox immunizations in 1972.

Skinner said the CDC is not calling for public vaccinations now.

Since smallpox was eradicated, the CDC has sent epidemiologists to investigate suspect illnesses a few times a year.

Smallpox experts were sent to evaluate specific cases three times last month, said James Hughes, who directs the agency's center for infectious diseases. None of the patients had smallpox.

---

U.S. Sets Up Plan to Fight Smallpox in Case of Attack

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04CDC.html

ATLANTA, Nov. 3 - The government has begun taking steps to cope with the possibility of a terrorist attack involving smallpox by training doctors to recognize the disease and by vaccinating small teams of experts who would rush to any part of the country to contain and treat a suspected outbreak.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is taking the steps, say they have no evidence that anyone is readying a terrorist attack using smallpox, a disease that was eradicated worldwide 21 years ago. But they say smallpox is so deadly that it is important to prepare for any attack.

The smallpox virus is known to exist only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. But germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks. It is greatly feared as a weapon because it is contagious and has a high death rate. And much of the world's population is susceptible.

Last week, the disease centers vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiologic teams that can be summoned at a moment's notice to examine a suspected case anywhere in the country.

This week, the centers will begin a series of training courses in smallpox for certain of its own employees and state and local health workers. Additional courses will be held over the next several weeks at the federal agency's headquarters here.

The vaccinations and course are part of a broader effort by health officials to respond quickly to any new bioterrorism threats that might follow the recent deliberate spread of anthrax through the mail.

"Our concerns are not limited to anthrax," said Dr. James M. Hughes, who directs the agency's center for infectious diseases. Those concerns include diseases like botulism, plague, tularemia and smallpox.

Smallpox is of particular concern because it can spread quickly. In a military exercise last summer called Dark Winter, researchers simulated a smallpox attack on Oklahoma City. The epidemic quickly soared out of control, spreading to 25 states and millions of people.

Tens of millions of Americans younger than 30 are susceptible to smallpox because they were never vaccinated; the United States stopped smallpox immunizations in 1972. Tens of millions of people vaccinated decades ago are thought to have decreased protection because the vaccine may have worn off.

Another concern is that generations of American doctors have never seen a case of smallpox. The only doctors who have are a few hundred who participated in the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program decades ago.

Smallpox patients are usually quite sick. The infection is characterized by a rash and a fever of at least 102 degrees.

The rash and symptoms begin to develop 11 or 12 days after a person is exposed to the virus. The characteristic lesions can occur anywhere on the body, but they usually appear on the face first, and they tend to appear more on the arms and legs and less on the chest, abdomen and back. Palms and soles are favorite areas. The earliest lesions tend to appear as raised bumps that often contain fluid.

Over a period that can last as long as 19 days, the lesions become firm, filled with pus, and form scabs. The illness can scar and blind its victims.

Smallpox can be confused with chickenpox. In making the diagnosis, a doctor touches the skin. Smallpox lesions tend to feel as if they are deep in the skin, in contrast to the lesions of chickenpox, which feel superficial. Chickenpox itches; smallpox lesions can be very painful.

But because the earliest stage of smallpox can resemble rashes caused by many other diseases besides chickenpox, identification can be difficult without laboratory tests.

Since smallpox was eradicated, the centers have sent epidemiologists to investigate suspect illnesses a few times a year. Dr. Hughes said that the centers had already dispatched smallpox experts on short notice three times in the last month to evaluate specific cases.

None of the patients had smallpox. Instead, they had problems like allergic rashes or shingles, an illness in adults that is caused by the same virus that caused chickenpox early in life.

Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the director of the disease centers, said that his agency expected a number of false alarms as a necessary part of the efforts to encourage doctors to heighten their suspicion of anthrax, smallpox and other so-called exotic diseases.

Dr. Koplan likened the extra caution to programs that encourage patients with chest pain to seek medical attention to determine if they are having heart attacks. Many patients admitted to coronary care units turn out not to have had heart attacks.

Even doctors who have seen smallpox cases have been wrong. Doctors at the disease centers misdiagnosed a case of chickenpox as smallpox in Washington in the mid-1960's. And earlier this year, epidemiologists at the centers responded to a call from health officials in a Central American country where a missionary doctor who had seen smallpox became suspicious about several cases of rash and fever in a remote village. But the rash turned out to be from something else.

Dr. Stanley O. Foster and Dr. J. Michael Lane, two former disease centers employees who are smallpox experts, are helping with the centers's course on the disease. They said in interviews that they would show course participants pictures of smallpox lesions at various stages of development.

The course leaders are also trying to find ways to put photographs of smallpox lesions on the Internet so that doctors anywhere will recognize it if they see a real or suspected case.

Participants will also learn how to use the special two-pronged needle required to administer smallpox vaccine.

But disease centers officials are not planning mass smallpox vaccinations at this time. One reason is that not enough vaccine exists. Another is that the risks of mass vaccination could outweigh any benefits, particularly if no smallpox case ever appears.

Smallpox vaccine, made from a different virus, has risks that are difficult to quantify for today's population. Among the 5.5 million Americans who received their first smallpox vaccination in 1968, Dr. Lane said, eight died as a result. About two people per million who were vaccinated had an often fatal reaction known as vaccinia necrosum, which destroyed flesh and muscle. About four per million developed encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain.

Today, a particular concern is the hundreds of thousands of Americans with weakened immune systems from H.I.V. and other viruses, as well as drugs used to treat cancer and prevent rejection of organ transplants. The danger is that such people can become ill from the vaccine itself, and transmit the vaccine virus to other people, including those with impaired immune systems.

The standard epidemiologic response to smallpox is to identify the disease, isolate cases, vaccinate everyone known to have had direct contact with infected people since the first week of symptoms and then monitor their state of health.

Mass vaccination is not considered the appropriate medical response to an outbreak of smallpox. But if epidemiologic information determines that the virus was introduced widely through the air - at a public gathering, for instance - then mass vaccination might be required.

---

DRUG INDUSTRY
A Muscular Lobby Tries to Shape Nation's Bioterror Plan

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By LESLIE WAYNE and MELODY PETERSEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/business/04PHAR.html

With anthrax spores turning up all over Washington, plenty of people are heading out of town.

Not those in the drug industry.

Executives of the major pharmaceutical companies have been hopping trains and planes to the nation's capital, where they are staging an enormous lobbying campaign, at the highest levels of government, to help shape the nation's bioterrorist plan - and beyond.

So far, they have had some remarkable victories. While the government has struggled to make sure the nation will have enough drugs to treat biological weapons that were largely hypothetical a few months ago, drug companies have managed to stave off many actions that would harm them, like violating patents or forcing them to supply free drugs.

As that success shows, the pharmaceutical lobby, which represents the nation's biggest drug makers, from Eli Lilly to Pfizer to Merck, is both large and politically adroit and, if anything, more sophisticated than when it gained fame in the early 1990's for helping to defeat the Clinton administration health plan.

It has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress - 625 who are registered. It had a combined lobbying and campaign contribution budget in 1999 and 2000 of $197 million, larger than any other industry. Now it is harnessing those resources to influence major policy decisions being made by the Bush administration that may well influence public health issues and industry profitability for years to come - much to the dismay of many consumer groups and others.

"When you've got this access to high places, it will encourage these guys to coordinate instead of compete," said Jack Calfee, a health care expert at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research group. "It's more likely to forestall getting good products than to encourage it."

Because of the anthrax scare, and all the attention given to Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug of choice, that access has been enormous. In recent weeks, the chief executives and other top executives of Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb (news/quote), Bayer, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson (news/quote ), along with trade association officials, have been meeting regularly with Bush cabinet members. On one occasion, with executives from other industries, pharmaceutical executives met with President Bush in New York to discuss the administration's response to terrorism. Drug company executives have offered to send scores of industry scientists, now on their payrolls, to work in government agencies in what the industry calls a gift to the nation, but critics say it is both a conflict of interest and a way for the industry to get a toehold in government.

In return, at these top-level meetings, industry executives and lobbyists are seeking exemption from antitrust regulations, reduction of the timetable for getting new drugs to market for treating the ills of biological warfare, and immunity from lawsuits for any vaccines they develop to combat bioterrorism. The administration, those in the meeting say, has offered other help, asking the pharmaceutical executives to identify the regulatory barriers they would like to see eliminated for this fight.

Last Wednesday, for instance, a dozen industry lobbyists and executives, among them Peter R. Dolan, chief executive of Bristol-Myers, and Raymond V. Gilmartin, chief executive of Merck, met for an hour and a half in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security. According to one person at the meeting, Mr. Ridge was so impressed with what the industry executives said that he responded: "I'm grateful for your offers of assistance. I accept."

That, according to the meeting's participant, reflected "a true partnership between the federal government and America's pharmaceutical companies."

Industry executives say they are just trying to help. "We are part of the nation's defense system," said Mr. Dolan, who has met with President Bush in New York and with Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, and Mr. Ridge in Washington. "As an industry, there is a real opportunity for us to give our resources in a time of great need."

But that partnership is troubling to some industry watchdog groups. They say the cozy relationship threatens to compromise regulatory standards on new applications of medicines at a time when millions of Americans may be seeking new drugs and vaccines. They worry that the industry's efforts to present its proposals as patriotic gestures mask an effort to increase its power in Washington and to improve its image while still protecting its financial interests. Critics also say consumer groups and executives from generic drug companies, which make cheaper copies of well-known drugs, have been conspicuously absent from any administration meetings.

"I am concerned that the industry is trying to subvert the normal regulatory process," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the health research group of Public Citizen, a Washington research organization. "These meetings have no transparency, no openness nor any involvement of the public. It's a dangerous precedent."

The pharmaceutical industry, of course, has not always had its way. Some of its efforts to speed federal drug approval have failed. Federal regulators are actively investigating several companies' attempts to keep generic drugs off the market and are taking a harsh look at some marketing practices.

There is no lobby in Washington as large, as powerful or as well-financed as the pharmaceutical lobby. Battle-honed over a number of health care initiatives that began with the creation of the Medicare program in the 1960's, the industry spent $177 million on lobbying in 1999 and 2000 - a good $50 million more than its nearest rivals, the insurance and telecommunications industries.

Thanks to Washington's well-oiled revolving door between government and business, the industry is able to claim friends in especially high places. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the former chief executive of the drug maker G. D. Searle, for example, and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the White House budget director, is a former Eli Lilly executive.

Even more important, more than half the drug industry's 625 registered lobbyists are either former members of Congress or former Congressional staff members and government employees, according to a report from Public Citizen. Former members of Congress who now work for the industry include Beryl F. Anthony Jr., Birch Bayh, Dennis DeConcini, Vic Fazio, Norman F. Lent, Robert L. Livingston, Bill Paxon, Robert S. Walker and Vin Weber. While in Congress, many of them led key legislative committees, and they still have close ties to those now in power.

Along the city's fabled K Street corridor, 134 lobbying firms are on the industry's payroll. One company, Bristol-Myers Squibb, has hired 15 lobbying firms with 57 lobbyists, including such superstars as Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Thomas H. Boggs Jr., the city's legendary Democratic lobbyist and son of the former Louisiana representative Lindy Boggs (and the late Hale Boggs, a former Democratic House majority leader).

The industry has also hired such up-and-coming lobbying rainmakers as Deborah Steelman, a powerful Republican insider, and Anthony Podesta, brother of President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff.

On top of that, the industry makes generous campaign contributions - giving much more to Republican politicians than to Democrats. Of the $26 million that the industry donated in the presidential election cycle, nearly 70 percent went to Republican candidates. Last January, the industry wrote a $625,000 check - one of the biggest - to the Bush-Cheney inaugural committee.

One of the industry's staunchest critics, James Love, the director of the Consumer Project on Technology, who works to get low-priced AIDS drugs to poor countries, called the industry's drive for government contracts for medicines against bioterrorism "a feeding frenzy."

"They are putting together another gravy train to cash in on some big government contracts," Mr. Love said.

With Americans spending more than $100 billion on drugs last year - double the amount of 1990 - and with public pressure increasing for pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices, the companies concluded quickly that they had to become an active participant in the resolution of the nation's crisis. Executives have gone to great lengths to say that they are not going to profit from it. They point to the fact that Bayer, under pressure from the government, reduced the price for government purchases of its anti-anthrax antibiotic, Cipro.

At every opportunity, they have also noted that they plan to give away additional drugs and vaccines to the government fight bioterrorism - albeit with some important strings attached. The medications would be made available only if the government agreed to speed the process that would allow existing drugs to treat anthrax and only if there was a national emergency.

"It's very unusual for our industry to get a large number of chief executives to come to Washington on short notice," said Alan F. Holmer, chief executive of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of American, the industry's trade group. "But it reflects our overwhelming desire to do whatever we can to address these issues. This is not about profits. It is not about patents. It is about making sure we have an adequate supply of medicines available to the American people."

Not so fast, critics say. They say the drug industry is trying to stockpile good will at a time when it badly needs to improve its image in Washington. For years, the industry has been roundly criticized for putting profits ahead of people when, for example, it has blocked or stalled the production of cheaper, generic drugs. Criticism comes most loudly from senior citizens and health care providers.

The drug industry needs this political capital both now and the future - especially when it comes to patents. For the industry, the protection of patents - which give companies monopoly control over the drugs they bring to market for a number of years - is basic to their existence. For them, any threats to that protection, even at a time of national crisis, is a clarion call to action.

"This is a huge issue to them," said William Nixon, chief executive of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association, which battles the large drug companies with a budget of about $2 million a year. "They will do everything in their power to maintain their monopoly. There is no question of that. And that's what made Bayer and Cipro so important to them. It could be perceived by them as the crack in the dike that they have been trying to put a finger in. They didn't want this to escalate."

Companies are fighting so hard to protect their patent rights in part because they have so few drugs with large potential that will move from development to the market over the next several years.

By 2011, brand-name drugs with more than $40 billion in annual sales are expected to go off patent; they can then be sold by generic drug makers at prices of, say, 70 percent less. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved just 27 new drugs, down from 35 the year before and about half the number approved in 1996. To prevent huge drops in revenue, drug makers need to hold on to their patent protections for as long as possible - or even extend them further.

The industry is also hoping that its effort will build political capital for legislation pending before Congress and later as well. At the moment, industry lobbyists, among them Mr. Boggs, the Democrat, and Mr. Barbour, the Republican, are swarming through the halls of Congress because the House is about to consider a Senate-passed bill to extend the industry's monopoly patents by six months on many existing drugs - a measure that could reap billions for the industry but cost consumers. Also on the horizon are trade talks in Qatar that will deal with patent rights and a battle over prescription drug benefits in Medicare.

"The industry has been under the gun and losing the public relations war," said Ira S. Loss, a drug industry analyst for Washington Analysis, which provides research for institutional investors. "The drug industry has been pointed to as a major reason for the rise in health care costs. They are trying to position themselves for the future and to be able to say: `We are not the bad guys. When the country was in a crisis, we stepped in and were willing to donate our products.'"

But Mr. Loss says, there is less than meets the eye to the industry's offer of free medications. Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline (news/quote), Bristol- Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories (news/quote ) have all made offers of free medications to fight bioterrorism - should the government speed these drugs through the approval process.

"It's a very contingent offer," Mr. Loss said. "If they get the approval and if there is a national crisis, they will provide it for nothing. You have to have two ifs for it to work."

And there may have been another motive for the corporate offers. Drug makers depend on patents to help them recoup their research and testing costs, but once those costs are recovered, the high prices they charge for patented drugs give them operating margins that are among the highest in corporate America.

Several of the offers of assistance came a day or two after Mr. Thompson, the health secretary, threatened to seek Congressional approval to break Bayer's patent for the anthrax drug Cipro if Bayer did not lower its price for the drug. A few days earlier in Canada, the government had momentarily overridden Bayer's patent by ordering a generic version of Cipro from another company.

The drug companies say their offers of free drugs had no connection to Mr. Thompson's comments on Cipro's patent. "We only wanted to be as helpful as we can," said Jeffrey J. Leebaw, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson.

In the end, Bayer backed down and agreed to reduce the price of Cipro tablets to the government to 95 cents a pill from $1.77 for the first 100 million, to 85 cents for the second 100 million and to 75 cents after that. It also agreed to increase production.

Still, while these price reductions will dent Bayer's profits, they pale next to the $800 million the company could have lost, according to analyst estimates, if the Cipro patent had been overridden. Sales of Cipro, Bayer's best-selling prescription drug, were $1.6 billion last year out of total pharmaceutical sales of $5.8 billion for the company, which is based in Germany. Stewart Adkins, a Lehman Brothers (news/quote ) analyst in London, said the cut in price for Cipro would reduce Bayer's profit margin on the drug to 65 percent from 95 percent.

"Bayer will still be doing O.K. on it," Mr. Adkins said. "If Bayer lost the patent protection and the drug could be sold in the U.S. at generic prices, it would have been devastating for the company."

In the last few days, as Congress has debated a patents measure, the industry has been pulling out the stops to renew a law that provides the pharmaceutical industry with a six-month extension on patents in return for the drug makers' agreement to do more testing of drugs for pediatric use.

Consumer groups say the bill would require the drug companies to do little new research but would cost consumers $14 billion over what generic equivalents would cost. On Cipro alone, for instance, Public Citizen, the consumer group, estimates that Bayer would get an additional $357 million in business that it could have otherwise lost to cheaper generic drugs.

Fighting the hardest is Bristol-Myers, which is also seeking a three- year extension on the use of Glucophage, a diabetes medicine, based on studies of the drugs on children. Analysts estimate that the company could reap an additional $1 billion in sales for every six months the patent is extended.

Eli Lilly, meanwhile, is lobbying Congress to overturn guidelines that limit the use of its antipsychotic drug in Veterans Administration hospitals - over the strong objections of some government doctors in those hospitals. They contend that it would be a "dangerous precedent" for Congress to start telling them which drugs to prescribe.

"This is a great time to buy some good will," said Jake Hansen, a lobbyist for Barr Laboratories (news/quote ), which wants to make a generic version of Glucophage, the Bristol-Myers diabetic drug. Under "normal times," Mr. Hansen said, "the press would be having a field day" over the patent- extension issue now in play.

But, with the attention on anthrax, big pharmaceutical companies "know they are not under as much scrutiny," he said, adding "and they are taking advantage of that."

-------- britain

MoD takes military campaign to schools

By Chris Hastings
04/11/2001
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$BJFNFAIAAFXITQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=%2Fnews%2F2001%2F11%2F04%2Fnteac104.xml

DEFENCE chiefs are to combat anti-war feeling in schools by launching a new initiative aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Britain's schoolchildren.

The Ministry of Defence is to appoint a schools adviser to increase awareness of the Armed Forces among staff and pupils. The adviser will head a series of "defence presentation teams" which will go into schools and lobby for the military.

A vital component of the new initiative will be the publication of defence-related material that can be used as part of the national curriculum. There will also be a new MoD website which will be aimed specifically at secondary schools.

An advertisement for the new job, which details how "the MOD is looking to increase its activity with schools and colleges", has appeared in a number of specialist publications.

The timing of the appointment has been seized upon by critics who claim that it is an attempt to bolster what they say is flagging public support for military action in Afghanistan.

Paul Marsden, the Labour MP who has infuriated his own party whips by voicing opposition to the military action, last night condemned the new appointment as an "outrageous" waste of money.

He said: "I am not against Army recruiting officers going into schools and trying to sell the Army as a career. But we are talking about something very different here. You have to question the timing of something like this.

"Should we really be wasting taxpayers' money on what is essentially a spin doctor for schools? I think teachers and parents would much prefer it if this money was spent on books.

Alastair Campbell has already established a network of international spin centres and now we have this attempt to indoctrinate children."

Supporters of the appointment, however, said it was a long overdue move. They feel the MoD has lost out to groups such as CND which have regular contact with schools through their own information officers.

The initiative was welcomed by David Clark, a former Labour Party defence spokesman, who is now chairman of the Atlantic Council of Great Britain which was set up to promote Nato among children.

He said: "It will not be brainwashing. Children today are far too intelligent for that. They can get information from a number of sources and compare the information they get from the Army with other information points."

----

Teachers told not to preach against the war

By David Bamber, Home Affairs Correspondent
04/11/2001
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$BJFNFAIAAFXITQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2001/11/04/nteac04.xml

TEACHERS are to be told by the Government to remain impartial and not to preach against the military action in Afghanistan after growing signs that school staff are condemning the war.

The Department for Education and Skills has issued guidance for schools and head teachers in the light of the terrorist attack warning them that they must only give "accurate information" and provide an "appropriate" way to discuss the issues.

Ministers have become alarmed that some teachers are openly speaking out against the war on terrorism and encouraging children in their care as young as five to dissent.

One head teacher has already told his school assembly that he is against the war and is prepared to defy his governing body.

Peter Stevenson, the headmaster of Exeter Road Community School, in Exmouth, Devon, said: "I understand that not everybody will share my view, but I think it is important to be honest and express my opinions."

He added: "I am a member of CND and I oppose the bombing in Afghanistan because 'an eye for an eye will make everyone blind' as Martin Luther King said.

"I am worried that the action will make the situation worse and create widespread suffering in Afghanistan because of the bombing of civilians."

He said: "After years hiding in the closet, I'm going to say what I think. I'm going to wear my CND badge every day and I'm not going to take it off for governors' meetings."

Mr Stevenson, 45, who is married with two young children who attend his school, said that there was a growing peace group at his school, including many parents, but admitted that others had objected to his stand against the war.

He added that he was encouraging his school's 327 pupils, aged five to 11, to discuss all aspects of recent events and was not seeking to indoctrinate them.

Councillor May Hardy, a member of the governors at Mr Stevenson's school, condemned his actions. She said: "I do not believe you should ever take politics into the classroom.

"I do not agree with what he is saying either. These people who caused the outrages in America are terrorists and I don't think he should be expressing an opinion about it at school."

John Hart, the Conservative executive member of Devon County Council in charge of education, last night said: "I do not think any teacher should air his personal views in front of children at their school."

Damian Green, the shadow education secretary, said all teachers must remain impartial.

He said: "It is wrong-headed and dangerous for teachers, especially head teachers, to allow their personal opinions to intrude in the classroom or assembly hall.

"Children look up to their head teachers and to preach against the war on terrorism at this time seems particularly ill thought out."

Jeff Ennis, a Labour member of the House of Commons Education Select Committee, said: "As a former primary teacher myself, I would never have dreamt of letting my personal opinions intrude in the classroom.

"This is a complex moral issue and teachers have every right to hold their own opinions but they must be sensitive to the fact they are dealing with young children," said the MP for Barnsley East and Mexborough.

"In some senses the current war is a matter of conscience not party politics, but you have to be very careful."

He said it was up to the governing body of each school to keep a close watch on what was being taught.

The Department for Education and Skills has now issued guidance to schools and teachers that says: "Schools can help to provide accurate information, challenge crude stereotyping and provide a safe environment in which children and young people can explore their understanding and come to terms with their fears.

It adds: "Schools should maintain an atmosphere as normal as possible neither denying recent events nor letting them take over."

It says teachers should use their "professional judgment" to ensure schools "respond appropriately".

-------- drug war

Marijuana Crackdown

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

Through raids on a cannabis club, a doctor's office and a patient-run marijuana garden, the Bush administration has begun its first major crackdown on the distribution of marijuana for medical purposes. The rush of enforcement, three years after the last federal raid of a California medical marijuana cooperative, marks the Justice Department's renewed attempt to impose federal drug laws in states that have legalized the drug's use for the sick and dying. The administration says it is enforcing a May Supreme Court ruling that there is no "medical necessity" exception to the federal marijuana laws. Greg Winter

---

Marijuana Misjudgment

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/opinion/L04MARI.html

To the Editor:

In an Oct. 31 news article about the Justice Department's escalating war on medical marijuana in California, a department spokeswoman is quoted as saying, "The recent enforcement is indicative that we have not lost our priorities in other areas since Sept. 11."

I find it rather disturbing that in the face of terrorist attacks and threats to the general population, the Justice Department has any priority toward denying the sick and dying access to a nontoxic medicine that greatly improves their quality of life. Even without the outside aggression being directed toward our country, the policy of denying beneficial medicine to those who need it is unfathomable.

RICHARD L. ROOT Communications Director American Medical Marijuana Assn. Westminster, Calif., Oct. 31, 2001

-------- israel

THE MIDEAST
Palestinian Kills 2 and Injures More Than 40 in Jerusalem Ambush

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Shooting.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Mazal Amsalem saw the gunman through the window and cried out to the schoolgirls sitting near her on the No. 25 bus to get down.

The girls did as they were told, and began reciting psalms as automatic gunfire shattered the bus windows around them.

Sitting crouched on the sidewalk, Amsalem recounted the moments of terror as a Palestinian gunman sprayed the bus with gunfire, killing two people, injuring more than 40 others and turning a Sunday afternoon commute home from school into a horror.

One of the dead was identified by police as Shoshana Ben Yishai, a 16-year-old from the West Bank settlement of Betar Illit who immigrated with her parents from Long Island when she was five years old. She was shot in the head as she traveled home from school.

``It's terrible that high-school girls get wounded, some in the head, some in the back. It's indescribable,'' said Amsalem, an adult bus passenger who said she worked in a local school. She appeared in shock, her right hand clutching a scrunched-up tissue.

``I could see him very clearly outside the door,'' she said. ``I was scared. The first thing I did throw myself to the floor and I yelled at some girls to get heir heads down,'' she said.

``They all did, and they began reciting psalms and praying,'' she said.

The area of the shooting was in a disputed part of Jerusalem, the French Hill district, which is near several Palestinian villages and neighborhoods.

The intersection, which had a trail of blood running through it, was cordoned off at the start of the busy afternoon rush-hour and police swarmed the area. Backpacks were strewn on the ground near the shattered glass from the bus windows.

The bus door and most of the windows were either blown out or punctured by bullets, and bloodied victims were visible through the windows for several minutes as paramedics rushed to the scene. One man, his head bloodied, sat motionless in the back seat.

The gunman, identified by police as a 24-year-old member of the militant group Islamic Jihad, managed to empty his M-16 of bullets before being killed by a civilian, a border guard and a soldier who opened fire, police said.

A witness who identified himself only as Marcus told Israel radio he fired first.

``I got out of the car. I fired. I emptied an entire clip. He fell. Then two soldiers came and I showed them where he was and they shot him with their M-16s,'' he said.

Border policeman Eliad Ela, 19, was patrolling the area with another officer when they heard the gunfire and ran toward it, cocking their guns.

``When I got there I looked around the corner of the bus and saw a man shooting all over the place,'' Ela told reporters. ``I shot at him. I saw that he was neutralized. I kicked his gun away and went to help the wounded.''

---

Israel Destroys Palestinian Factories

By Nicole Winfield
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001; 2:06 a.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline020601_000.htm

JERUSALEM -- The Israeli army demolished three Palestinian factories suspected of producing mortar shells in the Gaza Strip early Sunday in response to what military officials said was the firing of 30 shells at Israeli settlements in the area.

The strike came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon canceled a visit to the United States in which he had been slated to meet with President Bush to discuss efforts to renew peace talks.

On Saturday, a Palestinian security officer was killed when Israeli tanks fired at security posts in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian security officials said.

The factories in the northern Gaza Strip were ablaze Sunday after Israeli forces pummeled them with surface-to-surface missiles, Palestinian security officials and witnesses said. Helicopters flying over the area shot heavy-caliber bullets, they said.

The Israeli army said the plants produced mortar shells, but Palestinian witnesses said the factories made machines to cut wood and marble.

In Saturday's shooting of the Palestinian security official, the Israeli army said it opened fire after shots were fired from Deir el-Ballah, south of Gaza City, toward the isolated Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom.

Sharon and Bush had scheduled a tentative meeting for Nov. 11 during the U.N. General Assembly's annual debate in New York. But the Israeli leader decided to postpone his trip to the United States, as well as one to Britain, because of the security situation in the region, Sharon spokesman David Baker said Saturday. No new date was set.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will attend the U.N. General Assembly meeting from Nov. 10-12, Palestinian officials said.

Some analysts in Israel had expected that Sharon's U.S. visit would be a platform for an attempt to re-establish some sort of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, or that Sharon would be compelled to present a concrete proposal for breaking the political deadlock.

Israel has been under intense U.S. pressure to withdraw from parts of several West Bank towns it entered after a Cabinet minister was gunned down outside his Jerusalem hotel room Oct. 17. Israeli forces left Bethlehem and the nearby town of Beit Jalla last week.

The United States has also urged both sides to return to the negotiating table - a call that in recent weeks has been repeated by Arafat. Sharon has said he won't negotiate while violence continues, although last week he didn't mention that condition in a speech mentioning negotiations.

There has been a debate within Israel about whether, given the diverse array of Palestinian security services and militant groups, Arafat is able to ensure an absolute end to all violence - and whether demanding it might be a pretext by Sharon to avoid negotiations.

Sharon says he is ready for "painful compromises" - but he has also indicated he would not make offers as sweeping as those made by his predecessor Ehud Barak and rejected last year by Arafat.

"There are those who believe that Sharon's problem is that the Americans expect him to present a plan to them, and he doesn't have one in stock," commentator Hemi Shalev wrote in the weekend edition of the Maariv newspaper.

Even as Sharon backed away from the meeting with Bush, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met Saturday with Arafat on the sidelines of an economic conference on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca.

Peres said pullbacks could begin from other West Bank towns as soon as early next week, provided a cease-fire holds. Israeli troops remain in areas of Ramallah, Tulkarem, Jenin and Qalqilya. Israel says the incursions in the towns were necessary to keep security after the slaying of ultranationalist tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi.

In over a year of fighting, 739 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 192 on the Israeli side.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Israelis massed in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square on Saturday evening for a concert marking the sixth anniversary of the assassination of former Premier Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, gunned down by an Israeli extremist opposed to his peace efforts.

"Peace Now" and "Enough of the occupation," read some of the posters in the crowd, which included Rabin's daughter, Dalia Rabin-Pelosoff, currently deputy minister of defense, and Peres.

Rabin was an architect of the original interim peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians.

-------- nato

A New Alliance Could Nudge Aside the Old

By John Newhouse
Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page B05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33756-2001Nov3?language=printer

The terrorist threatlaid bare on Sept. 11 is transforming global security arrangements. Already, it is pushing Washington and other major capitals toward a historic makeover of the security system the United States and its European allies have relied upon for half a century. And much of the energy for that push is coming from an improbable source: Russia -- or, more precisely, its president, Vladimir Putin.

Putin's broad purpose -- to link his ailing, self-absorbed country to the United States while moving it into the European mainstream -- has been gathering force for some time. Even before Sept. 11, he was taking a more accommodating line on PresidentBush's foremost priorities -- missile defense, modification of the ABM Treaty, and further enlargement of NATO, the Western security alliance. Since the attacks, the Russian's tone has become even more acquiescent, enough to raise concerns in Western capitals that he has maneuvered himself far in front of his national security apparatus and political base. When he meets withBush in Washington and Crawford, Tex., later this month, the two men can be expected to start a process aimed at moving their countries into a shifting strategic environment. And that move could edge NATO, the centerpiece of America's security relationship with Europe, to the sidelines.

Well before Sept. 11, NATO was the object of some tough questions: Did it still have a purpose? Was there a role in it for Russia, and if so, how central a role? A few Western leaders, starting with Britain's Tony Blair, had in one degree or another concluded that Western and Russian strategic interests had converged, and that collective security arrangements that lacked Russian participation no longer made sense. But if anyone was shuffling the new deck after Sept. 11, it was Putin. Hewas the first to call Bush after the attacks. He agreed not to oppose the use of bases in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia for strikes against the Taliban. He visited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and wowed the Bundestag with a speech delivered in fluent German, studded with quotations from Goethe and Schiller, that portrayed Russia as rooted in European values.

On Oct. 3, Putin had a long private meeting in Brussels with NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson, with whom he enjoys discussing security issues. Soon thereafter, I was shown an official account of what the two men said. The conversation pointed up Putin's resolve to anchor Russia to the West, and the intensity of his hatred of the Taliban and radical Islam.

In the meeting, Putin cited nuclear proliferation as the main threat confronting the world. He said there was a plot afoot to kill Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. If that happened, he wondered, who would control Pakistan's nuclear weapons? And he answered his own question in stark, if peculiar, terms: Osama bin Laden, he said, calling the terrorist leader "the defense minister." As for the Taliban, he said it would be a great mistake to remove the leaders but leave the Taliban in power. The Taliban is Afghanistan, he declared, and proposed a conference to bring together all the anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

But Topic A was the Russian link to NATO. Neither man saw any reason Russia shouldn't be a member. Noting that Robertson was the first to understand that Russia poses no threat to the alliance, Putin said his country should be a primary NATO ally. But he said that Russia would have to be consulted on common security issues, or it would be isolated on the periphery of security, which would be in no one's interest. He wasn't asking for membership as such, but rather a central political involvement.

Putin declared that Russia would not stand in the queue to be admitted into the alliance, like countries on whose membership nothing depends. Robertson replied that he understood this, but he saw no reason Moscow shouldn't apply. Both sides, he said, needed to stop the diplomatic sword dance over Russian membership. Putin restated his reluctance to wait in line, but said he did want a full-fledged, mature relationship with NATO. He wondered if Robertson and Russian experts could work jointly on the question.

The Russian president tried to highlight the opportunity he was offering the West by telling Robertson that he expected to be in office only four years at most. All his values, he said, were Western. But he warned that his successors may have a different view of European security -- thereby underlining up the developing gap between him and other key players in Moscow.

Robertson noted that the two sides could focus on a few specific areas of cooperation -- terrorism, air-sea rescue, Kosovo and Bosnia. He also raised the idea of a conference on military responses to terrorism jointly sponsored by NATO and Russia, an idea Putin liked. The conversation ended with Putin, perhaps revealingly, asking Robertson to pass on his regards to Bush, whose name had not arisen.

We should hear loud echoes of this meeting in Texas. There, Putin can safely agree to enlarging NATO yet again. Before Sept. 11, he deplored this idea, especially the prospect of admitting the Baltic nations, because he and his advisers saw it as bringing NATO into space that Russians are accustomed to influencing, if not controlling. But this concern becomes moot as he moves to acquire a serious role in revised Western security arrangements and to segue into Europe on his own.

Moreover, a bloated alliance operating by consensus will not be close to the center of political action. More and more, the center will lie wherever the key players, notably the United States and Russia, locate it. Today's security threats are not military, and NATO is not equipped to help much in the struggle against terrorism and weapons proliferation. Counterterrorism, for example, is much more of an intelligence and police function than a military one, and Washington will be increasingly reluctant to rely on NATO for other than peacekeeping tasks. NATO itself could become absorbed in solving problems between its members.

Although Putin won't be deflected, he will have to show critics at home some return on his bold move toward the West. Embedding Russia in the world economy isprobably his first priority. But accomplishing this will require Russian membership in theWorld Trade Organization, even though well-positioned Russians seethe organization as a conspiracy of multinational companies to exploit Russian assets. Putin also wants and probably needs a trade agreement with the European Union. Members are sympathetic, but unlikely to grant one unless and until Putin has maneuvered WTO membership. They need to see Russia establishing itself as a serious player and fully capable of living up to commitments.

The meeting with Bush could help anchor Russia to the West, politically and probably economically. Putinmay expect Washington to advance his WTO prospects by asking EU governments to join in pushing to relax the standards for Russian membership.

Putin may not object -- at least not strongly -- to the Bush plan for a national missile defense if he convinces himself that the project may eventually fall of its own weight. Agreeing to kill the ABM Treaty, as distinct from amending it, would be very tough for him. While the treaty is about arms control, it is also seen in Moscow as an agreement between great powers and, as such, of great political value. If he and Bush were to produce a new and verifiable bilateral agreement dealing with steep reductions of strategic weapons, it would play very well in Moscow. Prospects for an agreement of that kind are good, although just how binding it might be is unclear, and the importance Russians attach to locking the United States into a formal agreement cannot be overstated.

The shell of the egg won't be filled overnight. Putin's romancing of major Western capitals will have to be accompanied by internal reforms, including democratic ones. And he will have to hold up the Russian end of any bargain, especially by helping to discourage the proliferation of truly frightful weapons and playing a full part in interconnected programs aimed at curbing organized crime, drug trafficking and money laundering, etc. Also, in most Western capitals, including London, there are senior bureaucrats who resist major change, especially change that benefits Russia and appears to weaken NATO. France, for one, may have mixed feelings about NATO, but it will see stronger Russian involvement as accelerating movement of the center of political gravity eastward, a shift that has been underway since German unification.

Change is nonetheless underway, as Secretary of State Colin Powell made clear in Shanghai last month, when he ventured the lapidary phrase: "Not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War period is also over."

John Newhouse is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information.

-------- nigeria

Massacre in Nigeria

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=print

Soldiers went on a three-day rampage in central Nigeria; it was the worst abuse by the military since the country, Africa's most populous, ended nearly 16 years of military rule in 1999. Apparently retaliating for the killing of 19 soldiers, hundreds of soldiers killed at least 500 civilians and destroyed countless buildings and houses in 16 towns and villages in the rural state of Benue. President Olusegun Obasanjo said the soldiers had acted in self-defense, leading many to question his control over the army. Norimitsu Onishi

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

US soldiers turn on Pentagon over war tactics

Sunday Herald
04 November 2001
By Torcuil Crichton
http://www.sundayherald.com/19875

THE Pentagon has been rethinking its use of ground forces inside Afghanistan in the wake of near-disaster during the October 20 Special Forces assault on Taliban leader Mullah Omar's complex.

The intensity and ferocity of the Taliban response 'scared the crap out of everyone' according to a senior military officer. The Delta team stormed Mullah Omar's complex near Kandahar, but found little of value, and then, 'as they came out of the house, the shit hit the fan. It was like an ambush. The Taliban were fighting with light arms and either [rocket-propelled grenades] or mortars.' The team immediately began taking casualties and evacuated.

'The Delta team was forced to abandon one of its objectives: the insertion of an undercover team into the area.'

One Delta Force soldier said that military planners 'think we can perform f

*ing magic. We can't. Don't put us in an environment we aren't prepared for. Next time, we're going to lose a company.' Twelve Delta members were wounded, three of them seriously.

One military man reports that Delta Force officers were 'still outraged' last week as after-action arguments over how best to wage a ground war continued.

It is said the Pentagon could not give details 'because it doesn't want to appear that it doesn't know what it's doing'. Another senior officer said: 'I don't know where the adult supervision for these operations is. General Franks (Central Commander of the Army) is clueless.'

This extract is from a report by Seymour Hersh to be published tomorrow in New Yorker magazine

----

New Army surgical teams are 'right over the hill'

November 4, 2001
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

U.S. soldiers severely wounded in ground combat in Afghanistan should have improved chances for survival, thanks to doctors who can attend to their injuries minutes after they occur.

The Army's forward surgical teams, which follow every brigade, offer the closest thing yet to battlefield surgery.

"These teams must stay 'one major terrain feature,' such as a hill, behind the forward line of troops," said Lt. Col. Thomas E. Knuth, a surgeon who heads the Army Trauma Training Center in Miami.

Soldiers at risk of death from serious head injuries or from extensive blood loss from other wounds, who normally "would have to be evacuated 150 to 200 miles to a hospital, can be on an operating table in a matter of minutes," Dr. Knuth said in a telephone interview.

Significant medical treatment literally is "right over the hill," he said, adding that patients can be taken to it by jeep or helicopter, depending on their condition and the landscape.

Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel who make up the sophisticated 20-member forward surgical teams are being trained at the Army Trauma Training Center. Dr. Knuth says he fully expects some trainees are headed for Afghanistan.

The concept of these skilled medical teams was developed after the Persian Gulf war, and the first one was established in 1995. "I was a member of that team," which did not operate in a combat situation, said Dr. Knuth.

A key objective of this new approach was to save more lives on the battlefield itself. According to doctors at the Army Medical Command in San Antonio, about 20 percent of those wounded in combat during Vietnam and the Gulf wars died before reaching a physician.

That death rate, they said, is comparable with the rate experienced during the Civil War.

Dr. Knuth said it is essential to provide medical intervention to a trauma patient within the first hour of injury before he goes into shock.

Dr. Robert Mosebar, a retired Army colonel who helped plan combat medical operations at the Army Medical Command, told the Boston Globe a major cause of death on the battlefield is blood loss resulting from severed arteries or internal hemorrhaging that failed to clot within 30 minutes.

Since the Vietnam War, the military has put much emphasis on developing faster medically-equipped helicopters, such as the Black Hawk, to evacuate the wounded, says Virginia Stephanakis, spokeswoman for the Army Medical Department.

But helicopters cannot always reach those who urgently need care, and the typical military medic is not qualified to perform surgery. So emphasis is being placed on bringing better treatment to the battlefield.

With surgical forward teams, wounded soldiers can receive life-saving care and be "stabilized" before they start on what can be a long flight to the nearest military hospital, Dr. Knuth said.

The ground troops now in Afghanistan, as well as those to be added in the near future, are special operation commandos.

"The special forces have forward surgical teams," said Dr. Knuth, who noted that such units also benefit from having highly trained medics.

Maj. Gary Kolb, spokesman for Army special operations at Fort Bragg, N.C., said medics in special forces units "go through extensive medical training," lasting about a year.

Since 1996, they have trained with paramedics at hospitals in New York and Tampa, officials said.

"They are certified as real paramedics, and they can almost do minor surgery," Maj. Kolb said in a telephone interview.

Dr. Knuth went further. "They almost have to operate at the level of being a surgeon," he said. "They may have to complete an amputation. They may have to put a chest tube into a chest wound."

Because curbing blood loss is crucial to saving lives on the battlefield, there is much interest in new blood-clotting technologies.

Examples include a special bandage that features a protein that acts as a coagulant and a hand-held ultrasound device that allows medics to locate internal injuries and bleeding.

--------

MILITARY CAMPAIGN
U.S. Special Forces Soldier Is Rescued From Afghanistan

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/international/04MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Sunday, Nov. 4 - A member of an American Special Operations team suffering high-altitude sickness was evacuated from Afghanistan in an emergency rescue operation, military officials said early today.

A spokesman for the United States Central Command in Florida, which is managing the war in Afghanistan, said, "That person is out of Afghanistan."

An initial mission to rescue the soldier was aborted on Friday after one of two helicopters sent in to extract him crashed because of foul weather.

The Pentagon continued to strike military forces of the Kabul regime on Saturday and todaywith an array of warplanes, including heavy bombers and strike fighters based on land and at sea. Military officials said the bombing had been continuous and focused on units defending key cities from opposition forces.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld left Moscow and flew to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, two states of the former Soviet Union that border Afghanistan on the north. His discussions with leaders there were to focus on cooperation in the war, including the possible expansion of basing rights, access to airspace or troop deployments. He also plans to go on to Pakistan and India.

In renewed ground fighting in the north, rebel commanders claimed to have gained new ground outside the strategic crossroads city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which Taliban forces hold.

Pentagon officials continue to characterize the tactical situation there as "fluid," with an "ebb and flow" as the Taliban are entrenched but having difficulty resupplying, while the rebel Northern Alliance forces have not been able to move forcefully.

The Pentagon said today that about 65 American warplanes struck targets near Kabul, Kunduz and Kandahar on Friday.

---

MILITARY ANALYSIS
A Vigorous Debate on U.S. War Tactics

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/international/04STRA.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - Four weeks after the United States began its military campaign to unseat the Taliban in Afghanistan and to destroy Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, there is an increasingly vigorous debate about whether substantial numbers of American combat troops will be needed to seal the victory in Afghanistan.

In Congress, some lawmakers say the Pentagon's strategy of relying on the opposition Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, bombing around the clock, and mounting sporadic raids by American, and eventually British, commandos is all well and good but unlikely to guarantee a decisive win.

"I am glad that the Pentagon has not thrown U.S. troops in willy-nilly," said Senator Max Cleland, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We have been extremely cautious in hoarding our precious personnel resources and that is wise and good. But ultimately to obtain our objectives we will have to use ground forces."

This view has not been embraced by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or the military officers who brief reporters. They have been careful not to exclude a substantial ground force but are clearly holding out the hope that it will not be needed. But it is a refrain that can be heard from some senior Army officials as strategy and tactics are debated at the Pentagon.

These are still early days for the complex American campaign, and there is no need to rush to a decision on ground troops. The steady and patient application of force that Mr. Rumsfeld has touted may yet pay off, particularly if Mr. bin Laden or Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, slip up and are caught by allied special forces or in the cross hairs of an American gunship. "Friction," the inevitable mistakes or complications of war identified by Karl von Clausewitz, the celebrated Prussian military strategist, affects both sides.

But just as the NATO nations during their 1999 war with Yugoslavia began arguing about the need for ground troops even as they sought to deliver a knockout blow from the air, the ground troops debate about Afghanistan is intensifying.

The debate turns on the Pentagon's three-part strategy.

The American military is beginning to work with the Northern Alliance to put pressure on the Taliban from the north. It is also using small groups of commandos to take the fight to the Taliban and terrorist leaders, and it is carrying out day and night bombing raids.

None of these elements are decisive alone. The Northern Alliance is a loose coalition that has yet to demonstrate it is capable of fighting as a disciplined and well-coordinated force. Its operations may be hampered by the winter, which is harsher in the northern part of Afghanistan. Because the alliance is dominated by ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks it will not be embraced by the Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group.

American and British special forces can be pivotal, providing the United States obtains good intelligence on the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, which is a big if. As for bombing, it was Mr. Rumsfeld himself who proclaimed that Afghanistan lacks a large number of "high-value" targets.

In essence, the Pentagon's calculation is that the combination of these elements will fracture the Taliban, assuming the United States is prepared to keep up the campaign for many months and even years. This week, Mr. Rumsfeld gave a hint of just how much time might be required, invoking comparisons from World War II.

"Consider some historical perspectives," he said. "After the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, it took four months before the United States responded to that attack with the Doolittle Raid in April of '42. It took eight months after Pearl Harbor before the U.S. began a land campaign against the Japanese, with the invasion of Guadalcanal in August of 1942. The U.S. bombed Japan for three and a half years, until August 1945, before they accomplished their objectives."

But the critics say the United States cannot drag out the campaign, especially since there are already protests by Muslim leaders in Pakistan and other cooperative Islamic states. "I do not think we have years," Senator Cleland, who has close ties to senior Army officers, said in an interview. "We can't put those countries on the ropes for that long."

Instead, he says the United States should be thinking about using helicopter-borne air assault units or paratroopers in Afghanistan. This would entail using thousands of Army troops, which would have the firepower that small units of Special Operations forces lack. It could also involve Marines, 2,200 of whom are currently off the Pakistan coast.

The purpose would not be to occupy the country, but to seize bases temporarily and then carry out attacks to root out the Taliban and the terrorist network, Al Qaeda.

"This does not necessarily mean having four divisions up on the line, sweeping across the line of departure and triggering every mine in Afghanistan," said Senator Cleland. "It means airborne or air mobile forces along with Special Operations. It may mean airdrops or vertical envelopment to hold key points of terrain."

Some United States Army officers agree. "The sooner conventional forces are introduced, the sooner we will have a favorable outcome," said one Army official. "Conventional forces are needed to root out the Taliban and exploit the full power of precision weapons."

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, has made similar arguments, saying the Pentagon seems to be waging a war with one hand tied behind its back. But this would mean additional American casualties. Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, it is far from clear that the majority of lawmakers agree.

The White House has been wary. It has not ruled out the use of major ground units, the mistake President Clinton made early in the Kosovo conflict and which he later moved to reverse. But the Bush White House has been hesitant to commit itself to using them.

Last week, Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff, was asked by NBC News if the United States was prepared to dispatch a significant number of ground troops. His answer was brief but spoke volumes.

"Well, let's not go there yet," Mr. Card said.

--------

Rebels Say They Launched a Major Offensive on Taliban City

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Afghanistan.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- After four weeks of U.S. attacks, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban are no longer ``functioning as a government,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday. But an opposition attack on a key northern city was reported faltering only hours after it was launched.

That raised doubts whether the factious, poorly armed northern alliance opposition could exploit U.S. airstrikes and topple the Taliban without the assistance of American ground troops.

Meanwhile, U.S. jets struck the front line about 30 miles north of Kabul, according to Atiqullah Baryalai, deputy defense minister of the northern alliance. In the Afghan capital itself, American bombs hit near the Intercontinental Hotel, set on a hill in the southwest part of the city.

They also struck the northeast town of Taloqan, which the opposition lost to the Taliban last year.

Rumsfeld, on a tour of front line states in the war against terrorism, sought to dispel fears that the air campaign, now in its fifth week, was failing to crack the Taliban's grip on Afghanistan.

``The Taliban (are) not really functioning as a government,'' Rumsfeld declared after meeting Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key Muslim ally in the anti-terrorism campaign.

Rumsfeld, who later Sunday went on to India, said the Taliban were ``using their power in enclaves throughout the country'' and were ``not making major military moves.''

``They are pretty much in static positions,'' he said. Rumsfeld said the Islamic militia was using mosques as command centers and as ammunition storage sites to spare them from American attack and ``actively lying about civilian casualties.''

Earlier Sunday, in Uzbekistan, Rumsfeld gave an assessment of the military campaign's success to date. ``The effort to deal with the problem of terrorist networks is proceeding,'' Rumsfeld said. ``It is, we believe, proceeding at a pace that is showing measurable progress.''

A key element of the U.S. strategy has been to attack Taliban positions facing the northern alliance -- especially on the front north of Kabul and on positions defending the Taliban-held city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

On Sunday, opposition spokesman Nadeem Ashraf said alliance forces launched a three-pronged offensive south of Mazar-e-Sharif in strategic Kishanday district in Balkh province, which borders Uzbekistan. The spokesman said the attack began after U.S. jets softened up Taliban positions by heavy bombing.

Hours later, however, Ashraf said one of the three opposition columns, led by Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, was making no progress and the offensive was faltering. He said Dostum's forces numbered only about 700 to 1,000 fighters and had ``no high morale.''

His assessment could not be independently confirmed. However, it points to ethnic rivalries within the northern alliance that have long hampered the opposition's ability to mount an effective challenge to the Taliban.

The other troops in the Mazar-e-Sharif front are commanded by a close ally of the northern alliance's titular leader, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, and by Shiite Muslim warlord Mohammed Mohaqik.

Opposition commanders around the other major front, north of Kabul, have said they are preparing for a major offensive toward the capital after days of heavy U.S. airstrikes. However, there have been few signs that a major push toward Kabul is in the offing.

President Bush ordered the airstrikes Oct. 7 after the Taliban repeatedly refused to surrender Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the September terrorist attacks that killed about 4,500 people in the United States.

Over the past week, U.S. attacks have shifted from cities to Taliban positions facing the northern alliance. However, opposition forces are poorly armed and outgunned, and the approach of winter is making resupply of its front-line positions more difficult.

In Washington, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the U.S. military is ``settling in for the long haul.''

The Taliban ``have a substantial force left, but at this point that's exactly what we expected,'' Myers said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''

He said a couple more teams of special forces were placed in Afghanistan in the last day or so to work with opposition leaders and better coordinate airstrikes.

Myers and Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the war, declined to say whether it would take a major deployment of U.S. ground troops to topple the Taliban.

Appearing on ABC's ``This Week,'' Franks was asked whether he would rule out the use of a large number of ground forces. ``Absolutely not,'' he replied.

In Pakistan, Rumsfeld addressed the issue of a pause in the bombing campaign during the Islamic holy month Ramadan, which begins around Nov. 17. Bush has ruled out any pause, despite appeals from Musharraf and other Muslim allies.

``The reality is that the threat of additional terrorist acts is there,'' Rumsfeld told reporters. The United States will be sensitive to the views in the region, he added, but he declined to outline the U.S. military plans.

In other developments:

-- The U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan brought his search for a broad-based government for Afghanistan to Iran on Sunday, where he met with Afghan exiles.

-- In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair scheduled a meeting with key European leaders Sunday to discuss the war on terrorism, his office said. Blair was also expected to brief allies on his efforts to shore up Muslim support for the campaign.

-------

The Coalition Is Broad, But Can It Hold?

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By R. W. APPLE Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/weekinreview/04APPL.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON- YOU could almost see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld squirm. Someone had asked him whether the United States would consider halting the bombing of Afghanistan during the Ramadan holiday out of concern for Islamic religious sensitivities.

The question went squarely to the problem of sustaining the shaky coalition assembled for the campaign against terrorism, and most specifically to the situation in Pakistan. Its president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a supporter of the United States-led effort, is under mounting pressure from important elements, both civilian and military, who disapprove of the bombing.

Yes, Mr. Rumsfeld replied, jutting his Dick Tracy jaw out an inch or two farther, he was aware of religious sensitivities in the area, but he continued: "We have an obligation to defend the American people, and we intend to work diligently to do that."

In other words, we will do what we think best. So far the United States has made its views stick (although surely a major reason that the administration has refrained from action in Iraq has been the opposition of coalition partners in the Middle East). Whether he, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell can make them stick over the months ahead is another question. No one knows exactly when the crunch will come or over what issue, but no one in the upper echelons of government doubts that it will come. Eager to defer it, Mr. Rumsfeld flew to the region this weekend to try to do so.

The big issue is whether nursing the coalition along constrains American strategy, despite the disproportionately large contribution of men and machines of war by the United States. And if the strategy is constrained, how to decide when a coalition partner is costing the enterprise more than it is delivering? That depends in part on the availability of viable alternatives.

Offending Pakistan might be a gamble more worth taking, for example, if Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were willing to take on some of the functions that Pakistan currently fulfills. Or if the United States could be more certain that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal would not fall into the wrong hands.

Coalition warfare has always been one of the most difficult exercises of statecraft. As a result, great commanders like Wellington and Marlborough and Eisenhower have been chosen as much because of their diplomatic skills as their military prowess.

National self-interest differs from partner to partner, and as wars drag on, that often works to soften the glue holding coalitions together. So do difficulties in human relations, like those that plagued the Anglophone generals and politicians who had to work with Charles de Gaulle.

But there are coalitions and coalitions.

In World War II, the grand allied coalition consisted in part of Anglo-Saxon countries (notably Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), working with forces from occupied or partly occupied European nations (among many others, France, Poland, the Netherlands and Norway). All were democracies. All were fighting the same war for the same reasons.

But the Soviet Union, the other major element of that coalition, was a totalitarian state with territorial objectives. Relations between London and Washington, on the one hand, and Moscow, on the other, were often as cold as a Russian bear's nose. Only Roosevelt's and Churchill's willingness in the end to let Stalin have his way on key issues kept the coalition intact.

In the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the fighting was done largely by American, British and French forces, with token contributions from the air forces of several Islamic countries. Terrified that if Iraq were permitted to retain Kuwait, which it had overrun, it would come after them too, the Arab states supplied bases and financial support. There was little complaint about infidels (Americans) attacking Islamic brothers (Iraqis).

But as the war reached its climax, some policy makers at the time have hinted since, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt warned that if the United States pressed on to Baghdad to finish off Saddam Hussein, the result would be a fragmented and therefore unstable Iraq. Washington stopped short. In the campaign against terrorism, led by the son of the president who decided not to pursue Mr. Hussein, the coalition is larger and looser. Mr. Bush himself has said it includes just about everyone who doesn't like terrorism, no matter how much or little they contribute, or how directly or indirectly they feel threatened by terror.

This is the biggest of tents. But the people inside it don't agree with each other. Some are enemies - India and Pakistan, Israel and the Palestinians. They don't agree on the purpose of the enterprise, and even when they do they often don't agree on operational tactics.

Pakistan, to take the most obvious case, provides not only access to Afghanistan but also theological and ideological cover for Western nations fighting Muslims; as long as they stay with the alliance, it is hard for the Taliban government and the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, whom it shields, to argue that this is a war between civilizations or religions.

Not that Mr. bin Laden doesn't try. A letter bearing his signature, sent to news organizations last week, urged Pakistan's Muslims to defend Islam against what it called a new Crusade. The letter accused Pakistan's government of "standing under the banner of the cross while Muslims are being slaughtered in Afghanistan."

For the moment, General Musharraf appears to be moving toward the American position, not away from it, despite the pressure from Mr. bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalists in his own country. He has dropped his appeals for a shorter war and abandoned short-term hopes of persuading so-called moderate elements of the Taliban to join with rivals like the Northern Alliance. That will only be practical, he seems to believe, when the Taliban have been ousted, and the best way to do that is to continue the bombing.

BUT Pakistan still makes American officials nervous. What would happen, they ask, if relatively modest street demonstrations there got out of hand? More ominous, what would happen if Pakistani nuclear secrets reached Mr. bin Laden by way of fundamentalist Muslims like Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a nuclear engineer arrested because of possible Taliban ties?

There are further problems in the region. What held together the coalitions against Hitler and Saddam Hussein is missing from the present equation. Some of the most strategically situated players, countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, don't know whether to be more afraid of Mr. bin Laden or of the prospect that an all-out American pursuit of victory might inflame their own dissatisfied and largely disenfranchised populations.

Keeping the Saudis under the tent means not making too big a fuss about Saudi funds that still flow to Mr. bin Laden, a Saudi black sheep. Keeping India requires some diplomatic sleight of hand, so that cozying up to General Musharraf does not seem to pose a threat to it.

In the end the big question is how much of a voice the "moderate" Islamic countries get in both short-term decisions like a possible bombing pause for Ramadan and longer-term issues like whether disaffected elements of the Taliban leadership should be included in a future Afghan regime and whether, assuming the demise of Mr. bin Laden and the fall of the Taliban, the fight against terrorism is then to be pursued into Iraq.

Meantime, support for the American-led bombing campaign seems to be slipping in Europe. In Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair has provided unstinting oratorical, diplomatic and combat backing for the American position, public support has begun to soften. Perhaps sensing an opening, Iain Duncan Smith, the new leader of the Conservative opposition, commented last week, "Even those who have supported military action from the outset are beginning to ask what our real objectives are and whether we are going about securing them in the right way."

Likewise, in Germany, Michael Naumann, the publisher of Die Zeit and a close friend of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, said this: "Despite solidarity with a trusted friend, doubt is growing about its war methods." All over Europe, reports of civilian casualties have found a ready audience. If such anxieties harden into widespread opposition, the United States could begin to feel pressure from some of its oldest and closest friends to alter its strategy. In democracies, maintaining public morale in wartime depends in part on the public's continuing to believe that the cause is just and the methods moral. No leader can indefinitely sustain policies that his electorate comes to consider immoral, as American presidents themselves found in Vietnam.


-------- OTHER

-------- human rights

Refugees who make it find Pakistan can be hell

Irish Times
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
From Miriam Donohoe, in Quetta, south Pakistan
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/1023/wor2.htm

PAKISTAN: This is supposed to be heaven compared to Afghanistan. But thousands of refugees fleeing hunger and bombs are finding that Pakistan can also be hell.

"I thought it was bad in my country, but I think it is even worse here. We have no food, we have nowhere to live, and people don't want us," father of five, Mr Ahmid Bashir, said after crossing the border at Chaman.

After two weeks of United States bombardment, the beleaguered people of Afghanistan cannot take any more. They are moving in droves towards the southern border with Pakistan. But they are receiving a cold welcome.

The Pakistan authorities insisted yesterday that it would not open its arms to Afghan refugees. At Chaman, where there is a build-up of 15,000 refugees, Pakistani guards fired over the heads of already frightened and shattered people who tried to force their way into Pakistan.

Five people including a teenage boy were injured, most by stones thrown by the refugees who turned violent after nervous officials stopped everybody from crossing.

A UNHCR spokeswoman said they had received reports of injuries following violent scuffles. "These people are so desperate they are willing to risk injury to get across," she said.

The UNHCR estimates that 4,000 Afghans managed to slip through the Chaman crossing yesterday, on top of 6,000 who crossed on Sunday, and 10,000 last week.

Some families can be seen with their possessions in carts walking around Quetta, after getting a bus from Chaman - such as Mr Bashir's family.

The UNHCR said most refugees stay with families, and end up living in miserable and cramped conditions, or to already overcrowded camps.

Mr Bashir was not sure where his family would stay. "We are tired and hungry. I don't know what is going to happen our family," said the labourer who fled Kandahar five days ago to get away from bombs.

There are still no new refugee camps to cater for the influx on this side of the border, and no food or medical aid yet being distributed. Yesterday the UN called on Pakistan and other countries bordering Pakistan to open their borders to the refugees.

A Pakistan Foreign Ministry official said it was not in a position to really take care of massive flows of Afghan refugees into Pakistan.

He said while Pakistan's 1,560-mile border with Afghanistan cannot be completely sealed, the government position not to allow people to cross into Pakistan without valid documents continues to remain in force.

The spokesman said Pakistan was "trying whatever is possible" to allow international humanitarian agencies to send food and other relief goods into Afghanistan to contain pressure for Afghans to leave their country.

Many of the arrivals have injuries. They have grim tales of hundreds of homes destroyed and water and electricity supplies being cut off. Looting of houses is common, and Pakistani officials demanding money to let them through.

According to the UNHCR the new refugees are coming from further afield and their physical condition is visibly deteriorating.

The population of Kandahar, which has suffered the heaviest bombing in recent days, is thought to be down to 40 per cent.

Only one third of the population of the capital, Kabul, is left.

There are only four border gates on the 1,500-mile frontier, and almost 300 crossings. Refugees are telling of paying bribes to officials, of anything between £30 and £100 for a family, to get across.

Almost 1.1 million of Afghanistan's 26 million population are on the move inside the country, trying to escape areas that might be targets of the US attack. Such journeys are hazardous with around 10 million landmines scattered across Afghanistan. One hundred people die in accidents every week.

It is not just bombing they are fleeing. The country is on the verge of famine after another year of drought. Before the bombing started, 3.8 million Afghans were dependent on food aid.

Oxfam spokesman Mr Sam Barrett, who arrived in Quetta yesterday, said they have reports of 400,000 Afghans in the central highlands of Hazarajat facing starvation. They had been living on grass but even that was running out. Oxfam is planning to provide water at two planned new refugee camps near Quetta.

The biggest camp will cater for 40,000 people. Concern is also involved in providing services at the new camp.

The UN estimates that to avoid such mass starvation a minimum of 50,000 tonnes of food must get into Afghanistan in the next month. That is five times the amount that went in last month.

However, the bombing means that many truck drivers are afraid to journey deep into Afghanistan or load or unload food. What is going in is often then left at warehouses and not reaching the people who need it. And in the past week there have been reports of looting of aid supplies by the Taliban.

-------- media

Chinese media see attack on U.S. as price for bullying

Washington Times
By Damien McElroy
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
November 4, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011104-51570714.htm

BEIJING - The Chinese state-run propaganda machine is cashing in on the terror attacks in New York and Washington, producing books, films and video games glorifying the strikes as a humbling blow against an arrogant nation.

Video discs filled with lurid images have flooded markets across the nation in the wake of the attacks. Disc after disc bear the imprimatur of the Communist Party-controlled media.

The most notable and popular DVDs have been produced by the Xinhua information agency, Beijing Television and China Central Television.

Communist Party officials say President Jiang Zemin has obsessively watched and re-watched pictures of the aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, workers at Beijing Television worked round-the-clock to produce a documentary they called "Attack America." Scenes from Hollywood films have been spliced between shots of the events of September 11, including footage from the 1998 remake of Godzilla, in which a monster destroys buildings in New York.

As rescue workers pick through the rubble of the twin towers, the commentator proclaims that the city had reaped the consequences of decades of American bullying of weaker nations.

"This is the America the whole world has wanted to see," he said. "Blood debts have been repaid in blood.

America has bombed other countries and used its hegemony to deny the natural rights of others without paying the price. Who until now has dared to avenge the hurts inflicted by unaccountable Americans."

Officials at Beijing Television defended the video as an educational film that will meet market demand. A producer said: "There's this need for more information on world terrorism in the market, so we've got to meet it."

At the country's most respected bookstore, Xinhua Book Shop on Beijing's busiest shopping street, Wanfujing, crowds jockeyed around a table to buy discs.

According to the staff at the store, thousands of copies of the video have been sold in the past month.

"Before people were interested in the movies, but this is more compelling," the shop assistant said. "What happened in New York could have happened in a movie, but this is real life. It's better."

The many shops that stock pirated DVDs compiled in China and Hong Kong report that their most popular products are similar productions that use video graphics to show the United States suffering other damaging attacks on its tallest buildings and military installations.

On the unofficial films, the commentary is even more callous than on the official discs: "Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings - now just a heap of rubble. We will never fear these people again, they have been shown to be soft-bellied paper tigers."

Elsewhere, music shops are selling out of a bootleg version of the summer's top pop hit. The amended song implies that America deserves to suffer for its disregard for the point of view of countries weaker than itself.

The refrain says: "We guys are all Americans, our government is used to bullying people. We guys always have our hands on too much, this time our own people got hurt."

--------

WORLD
Bush relies on advertising experts to win over Muslims

Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday, October 25, 2001
By William Douglas in Washington
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0110/25/world/world10.html

The Bush Administration, fearing that it might lose the public relations war in Muslim and Arab nations to Osama bin Laden, is turning to Madison Avenue for help.

The State Department is talking to the Advertising Council, a New York-based non-profit group that develops advertising strategies for national causes, about crafting a "public diplomacy" campaign on the military action in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism.

Overseeing those talks is Charlotte Beers, the new Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and former advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson who started in the industry marketing Uncle Ben's Rice.

Ms Beers was named to the post by President George Bush early in his administration and was sworn in October 2.

Her job is to sell America, a difficult task in some Arab and Muslim countries where citizens are protesting against the US military response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

"I think the fact is, there is a battle for hearts and minds," said Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman.

"There's a lot of disinformation ... The difficulties we face in getting our message out are quite clear."

Several advertising executives and media analysts say the Administration's increased efforts will do little to sway Muslims and Arabs overseas, many of whom say their distrust of the United States goes beyond the situation in Afghanistan.

The US handling of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, for example, fuelled Arab and Muslim anger and prompted many to dismiss the rationale for going after bin Laden in Afghanistan, said the newspaper owner Osama Siblani.

"The United States lost the public relations war in the Muslim world a long time ago," said Mr Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, a weekly newspaper in Dearborn, Michigan. "They could have the prophet Muhammad doing public relations and it wouldn't help."

That apprehension increased after September 11 because of what Mr Siblani and some advertising executives called the Administration's muddled public relations strategy. Ms Beers told the Advertising Age last week that she would consider buying air time on the Arabic-language al-Jazeera network, which is becoming the CNN of the Arab and Muslim world, to get America's message across to a foreign audience.

-------- police / prisoners

Terrorist hunt gives secret court more power

USA Today
11/04/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/04/secret-court.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - A highly secretive court that can shape how the government spies on some U.S. residents, meets for a few days each month in a windowless room in the Justice Department basement.

Already viewed warily by civil libertarians, the court will grow more powerful as a result of the tougher anti-terrorism laws President Bush signed into law last month.

The court considers requests, almost always from the FBI, for warrants and searches related to foreign intelligence operations inside the United States. From what little is known of the operation, the warrants typically allow the government to listen in on suspected spies or terrorists.

Civil liberties and privacy watchdogs say the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act now will be free to approve more and broader wiretapping against a wider range of people. The government may never have to disclose who was targeted, or why.

"FISA already had just the minimal trappings of a judicial process," said David Sobel, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The anti-terrorism measures "chip away at the very minimal procedures that currently exist."

The court has approved thousands of warrants since it was established by Congress in 1978, and only once has turned down the government.

The single, Reagan-era rejection was not a loss for the government, said Sobel, whose information about the court comes largely from Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Justice Department actually hoped the court would reject its request for permission for a break-in, presumably of an embassy, because that would bolster the government's view that the court did not have authority to rule in that area, Sobel said.

There is a good reason for the strong government track record, said former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh.

"The reason they're never turned down is because they're so meticulously prepared," he said. The court was intended to police the kind of surveillance abuse seen in the Nixon era, by requiring the FBI to go before a judge to get a national security-related warrant. Previously, the Justice Department or the White House could order such surveillance directly.

"It acts as a brake on people acting imprudently," Thornburgh said. "I am quite sanguine that it will continue to play that role."

Yale international law professor Ruth Wedgwood agreed that the court imposes discipline on the Justice Department.

"There is a careful process of scrutiny before the warrants are approved, and I have met intelligence agents who have had their warrants rejected," as too thin to pass the court's scrutiny.

Civil libertarians have always been uneasy with the law and the court, because FISA allows the government to do things in the name of national security that would be illegal or unconstitutional if done as part of a regular criminal investigation.

Under FISA, domestic surveillance can begin once the government shows a suspect is probably a "foreign power or agent of a foreign power."

Law enforcement must meet a higher standard - probable cause that a crime was committed - to get an ordinary criminal warrant for wiretapping or other electronic intrusion.

The different standards were permitted because secret FISA surveillance is supposed to help protect the country, rather than gather information about a particular person that could be used against them in court.

The new anti-terror laws effectively eliminate that distinction, said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

"They totally erased it. Now the primary purpose can be law enforcement," she said.

FISA used to allow secret domestic surveillance if "the purpose" was foreign intelligence. The Bush administration wanted the wording changed to "a purpose," and Congress settled on "a significant purpose."

"They are going to say every (warrant application) has that as a significant purpose," Martin said. That would mean the government could ask for a FISA warrant when it would not have been able to get a criminal warrant, she said.

"We think it renders the statute unconstitutional."

The new laws also allow "roving wiretaps" of suspected spies or terrorists, meaning the government can monitor any telephone used by a terrorism suspect, rather than getting separate authorizations for each phone that person uses.

The laws make it much easier for the government to secretly collect someone's business, medical, credit card or other records. The bank, doctor, even a library turning over the records is bound to secrecy.

The court will expand from seven federal judges to 11 under the new laws. The judges sit in panels of three, and the larger pool will make it easier for the court to meet more often. All the judges are chosen by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

---

A Deliberate Strategy of Disruption
Massive, Secretive Detention Effort Aimed Mainly at Preventing More Terror

Sunday, November 4, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36356-2001Nov3?language=printer

This article was reported by Washington Post staff writers Amy Goldstein, Marcia Slacum Greene, George Lardner Jr., Hanna Rosin, Lena H. Sun and Cheryl W. Thompson, and was written by Goldstein.

Exactly 23 minutes before suspected terrorist plot leader Mohamed Atta acquired a Florida driver's license, a 28-year-old Pakistani gas station attendant got his license renewed at the same motor vehicles' branch. For that reason, Mohammad Mubeen was standing in a tiny courtroom wearing an orange jumpsuit last Monday afternoon, one of more than 1,100 people ensnared in a nationwide hunt for terrorists.

In urgent, rapid-fire Urdu, Mubeen pleaded to be released. True, he had entered the United States illegally, he told the judge through a translator. But he said he simply did not know any of the hijackers.

Still, the government attorney in the Miami courtroom easily persuaded the judge to hold Mubeen without bond. The lawyer presented a striking legal document that offers insight into both the strategy behind the detentions and a novel legal argument to keep people in custody on the most slender suspicion.

Signed by a top international terrorism official at FBI headquarters in Washington, the seven-page document, which has not been previously disclosed, is being used repeatedly by prosecutors in detention hearings across the country. The FBI affidavit explains that "the business of counterterrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic.

"At this stage of the investigation, the FBI is gathering and processing thousands of bits and pieces of information that may seem innocuous at first glance. We must analyze all that information, however, to see if it can be fit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates. . . . What may seem trivial to some may appear of great moment to those within the FBI or the intelligence community who have a broader context."

The document's language offers the clearest window so far into a campaign of detentions on a scale not seen since World War II. As investigators race to comprehend the ongoing terrorist threat, the government has adopted a deliberate strategy of disruption -- locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can.

The operation is being conducted under great secrecy, with defense attorneys at times forbidden to remove documents from court and a federal gag order preventing officials from discussing the detainees. Law enforcement officials have refused to identify lawyers representing people who have been detained or to describe the most basic features of the operation. The officials say they are prohibited from disclosing more information because of privacy laws, judges' orders and the secrecy rules surrounding the grand jury investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The result has been confusion over exactly who is being counted in the government's official tally of 1,147 detainees and who is still being held. When asked directly how many people have been released, Justice Department officials say they are not keeping track.

Of the 1,147, Justice officials have specifically singled out only 185 detainees who are being held on immigration charges. An INS official described them as "active cases" believed to have "relevance to the investigation."

To try to illuminate this hidden campaign, The Washington Post identified 235 detainees and examined the circumstances of their cases.

The analysis of these cases -- located through court records, news accounts, lawyers, relatives and friends -- shows that three-fifths of the detainees found by The Post are, like Mubeen, being held on immigration charges. Seventy-five have been released.

A small, as-yet-unknown number are being held on "material witness" warrants, an indication that investigators believe they have information vital to the probe. Another small number -- perhaps 10 -- are believed to lie at the center of the investigation, with ties to the al Qaeda network or some knowledge of the hijackers. But sources say none of those men is cooperating.

The 235 identifiable cases reveal the essential nature of the current effort: It appears to be less an investigative search for accomplices to the Sept. 11 attacks than a large-scale preventive operation aimed at disrupting future terrorism.

That is evident, in part, from the fact that none of the detainees has been charged in the plot or with other acts of terrorism. In addition, the pace of detentions has accelerated visibly as government officials have received information about new threats and issued public warnings -- spiking sharply, for example, after rumors of planned attacks Sept. 22.

The government's strategy and methods have elicited protests from defense attorneys and civil libertarians. They say the campaign is a massive act of racial profiling similar to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans at the start of World War II.

Senior Justice officials deflect such criticism. Except for the material witnesses, they say, all of the detainees have violated some kind of law. What is different after Sept. 11 is that many people are being held -- in what is essentially preventive detention -- who would otherwise be released on bond. Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said: "If there is a violation that you find, we are going to move ahead on the case."

The Post's analysis of the identified 235 detainees shows with greater precision who is being picked up. The largest groups come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. Virtually all are men in their twenties and thirties. The greatest concentrations were arrested in several states with large Islamic populations and what law enforcement officials have identified as al Qaeda sympathizers: Texas, New Jersey, California, New York, Michigan and Florida.

The preventive nature of the campaign is evident from the character of arrests. Immediately after Attorney General John D. Ashcroft spoke publicly in late September of fears of chemical attacks by terrorists using trucks, law enforcement officers picked up 21 Iraqi refugees in a fraudulent truck license scheme; officials later said they appeared unconnected to the attacks.

In a speech late last month to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Ashcroft compared the government's current actions to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's campaign against organized crime in the early 1960s.

"Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, it is said, would arrest mobsters spitting on the sidewalk if it would help in the battle against organized crime," Ashcroft told the mayors in his most revealing public remarks to date about the detentions. "It has been and will be the policy of the Department of Justice to use the same aggressive arrest and detention tactics in the war on terror.

"Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa -- even one day -- we will arrest you."

Three Concentric Circles

From the analysis of the 235 detainees, an image of the investigation emerges that can be seen as a set of three concentric circles.

Nine men appear to be at the hot center of the investigation, including the well-publicized names who have generated the most attention from law enforcement. The next layer consists of 17 men and one woman with more fragile connections -- either to hijackers or to figures in the hot center. They include former roommates, people found with false identification and people who helped the hijackers get false IDs.

By far the largest group of detainees consists of an outer ring of people whose interest to investigators is largely unknown. Some in this outer ring were apprehended because they were in the same places or engaged in the same activities as the hijackers: learning to fly airplanes, traveling or -- as in Mubeen's case -- getting a driver's license. Others appear to have been detained more randomly, because they come from a set of Middle Eastern countries and had immigration violations.

The operation has generated some false leads, especially in the early days, when investigators, looking for Middle Eastern men who fit the profile of the hijackers, erroneously focused on a group of Saudi men who were pilots or in flight schools.

Chertoff, the assistant attorney general, said the investigation began by focusing on the hijackers and their credit-card and phone records and expanded outward. "Where we had information, we'd go out and interview," he said in an interview. "We went in as many different directions as we could."

Government Uses Every Tool Possible

The government's determination to employ every legal tool at its disposal -- to hold detainees as long as possible -- can be seen in cases across the country.

The tiny southwest Miami courtroom where Mubeen was denied bond is far from the only place where the FBI affidavit -- bearing the signature of Michael E. Rolince, chief of the FBI counterterrorism division's international terrorism section -- has been used to keep someone locked up. It was also presented during an immigration hearing in St. Louis, flabbergasting the lawyer who represents Osama Elfar.

Elfar, 30, was arrested by FBI agents at 7 a.m. Sept. 24, at the end of a night shift at his job as an aviation mechanic for Trans States Airlines. He was charged with staying in the United States longer than his visa allowed. The real reason for his arrest, he believes, is that he is Egyptian, Muslim and employed at an airport -- with a memorable first name.

He told the FBI agents he had no sympathy for Osama bin Laden. He volunteered to let them look around his apartment, take his phone bills and search his computer. They found nothing, said he and his attorney, J. Justin Meehan. On Oct. 5, Elfar took a polygraph test and passed, Meehan said, "with flying colors."

Nevertheless, two weeks later, a government lawyer blocked his bond with the affidavit that says the FBI "has been unable to rule out the possibility that [Elfar] is somehow linked to, or possesses knowledge of, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Elfar still is being held in the Mississippi County jail in southeast Missouri. "This is what I do not understand," Elfar said in a telephone interview from the jail, three hours from St. Louis. "When I took the test, the agent promised that if I was clear, I would not be under arrest anymore."

Legal experts said the affidavit's argument to hold people while the FBI builds its mosaic is actually a new twist on an old metaphor. The CIA often relied on the mosaic argument to withhold information, on the grounds that enemies of the United States could gather fragments of intelligence and piece together government secrets.

The FBI's use of that argument to keep people in custody is "very foreign to the way things have been done," said Mark H. Lynch, a Washington lawyer familiar with the legal cases. "If they are holding people in order to rule out the possibility that they're involved, that just turns the system on its head."

On the other hand, William Barr, attorney general for the first President George Bush, said the affidavit is an effort to explain "selective enforcement" of the law and to "say to the judge, 'This is why we are landing like a ton of bricks on this case.' . . . Presidents going back to Lincoln have realized they have to have a willingness to meet an extraordinary threat, which this is."

The affidavit is only one of the techniques that law enforcement officials are using to prevent the detainees from being freed.

On Sept. 18, Ashcroft ordered the INS to revise its rule for holding detainees before they are charged, lengthening that period from a maximum of one day to 48 hours or an unspecified "reasonable time" in a national emergency.

Under another INS regulation that took effect at the beginning of last week, the INS can now automatically detain certain people granted bond on immigration violations for 10 days to give the agency time to appeal, an INS spokeswoman said.

Accounts from several detainees and their lawyers illustrate the government's new hard line.

Months before the attacks, the government had been trying to deport Palestinian activist Ghassan Dahduli, who was free on bond while he fought to stay in the country. Now, those same officials are trying to keep him from leaving.

After the hijackings, INS officials revoked Dahduli's bond and arrested him Sept. 22 at his home in Richardson, Tex., where he lived with his wife and five children. A few days later, news accounts said that the name of Dahduli, 41, who has lived in the United States for 23 years, turned up in the address book of Wadih el Hage, a former personal secretary to bin Laden who has been convicted in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

Dahduli's lawyer, Karen Pennington, said he agreed on Oct. 3 to be deported, but law enforcement officials are unwilling to let him go.

Other detainees are being held on criminal charges that reflect the extraordinary scrutiny now directed at Middle Eastern immigrants. Fathi Mustafa, 65, a Palestinian who has become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and his son, Nacer Fathi Mustafa, 29, a U.S. citizen, have been accused of possessing altered passports. They were detained in Houston four days after the hijacking attacks on their way home to Florida from a trip to Mexico to buy leather goods.

At the Houston airport where they were to catch a connecting flight, the father and son were pulled out of line by immigration officials who said their passports contained an extra layer of laminate, said their lawyer Dan B. Gerson. Federal officials have said that such additional clear sheets can be used to fraudulently insert someone's picture on top of the original photograph -- a method sometimes adopted by terrorists trying to conceal their identities.

Gerson said that his clients did not know why their passports had the extra layer and that they had entered the United States with them before and never been stopped. The elder Mustafa was released and allowed to return to Florida with a leg monitor to track his movements. His son, who has an arrest record, has been denied bail.

Such strict application of new and customary legal tools has enraged defense attorneys and groups that advocate civil liberties and immigration. Randall Hamud, a San Diego lawyer representing several detainees, said, "These are nickel-and-dime matters that have nothing to do with planes crashing into buildings." Those critics have seized on the death of a detainee in New Jersey -- apparently of a heart attack -- and the beating of at least one young man by fellow inmates at a Missouri jail. Last week, a coalition of legal and immigration organizations filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and the Justice Department, demanding information on the detainees.

Law enforcement officials say that every detainee is being granted due process. Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said, "Aside from one complaint about one inmate's treatment at a federal prison, the Department has not received any complaints."

Federal officials also say that their aggressive stance matches the prevailing public mood. "The American people expect us to be absolutely certain," INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said, before letting people go.

Ambiguous Connections to Hijackers

The men who form the hot center of the investigation are striking, in part, because they offer a new way of understanding that the Sept. 11 attacks were carried out by the 19 hijackers with little outside help.

Even at this focal point of the probe, none of the detainees has been accused of an act of terrorism. The only living people charged in the hijacking plot are three men -- two from Morocco and one from Yemen -- who lived in Hamburg, Germany, and now are international fugitives.

Of the 235 detainees who could be identified in the United States, only 10 are known to have any kind of link to the hijackers. Most of those known links are intriguing but ambiguous.

They include a telephone call placed to a former roommate of Atta's in Germany by Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan who was arrested at a Minnesota flight school Aug. 17 and is being held in New York on an immigration violation.

The connections also include two phone numbers left in a rental car at Dulles International Airport by the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. They belonged to Osama Awadallah, 21, a Jordanian student who allegedly met some of the hijackers in San Diego, and Mohammed Abdi, 44, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia who lives in Alexandria.

Several of the men at the hot center are suspected of deeper involvement. Among them are Nabil Almarabh, a Kuwaiti who used to drive a Boston cab and has links to both the hijackers and al Qaeda, and Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, both from India, who were apprehended with box-cutter knives the day after the hijackings on a train to Fort Worth.

Also in this group is Youssef Hmimssa, of Morocco, who lived in a Detroit apartment where police found false ID cards and documents suggesting a planned attack in Turkey on the U.S. secretary of defense.

In the next layer are two students who also allegedly knew some of the hijackers in San Diego: Mohdar Abdallah and Omer Bakarbashat, both of Yemen.

Another young Yemeni man in Southern California, Ramez Noaman, a student at California Polytechnic University at Pomona, was held as a material witness in Manhattan for a dozen days before his release and testified before the New York grand jury. In a brief telephone interview, he confirmed that he rented a room in a two-story San Diego house where two hijackers had lived before him.

In an even more ephemeral connection, Hady Omar Jr., an Egyptian antiques dealer in Fort Smith, Ark., made a plane reservation from the same computer at a Kinko's store in South Florida as one of the hijackers. Omar, 22, is being detained on immigration charges. His wife said the overlapping use of the computer was sheer coincidence.

Others in the second layer have been linked to men at the investigation's hot center, rather than to hijackers. One of those is Mohammad Aslam Pervez, a Pakistani who shared an apartment with the two men arrested with box-cutter knives on the train to Texas.

Several in this second layer appear to be under mounting pressure from investigators. Although the hot center group has not expanded in recent weeks, criminal charges such as perjury have been brought against detainees in the next ring.

Mujahid Abdulqaadir, 51, had been interviewed repeatedly by the FBI about his acquaintance with Moussaoui. Just two weeks ago, he was arrested as a material witness and brought to New York. On Friday, he was returned to Oklahoma, where he faces charges related to guns that FBI agents found while searching his house, his lawyer said.

For Some, Shattered Dreams

The evening of Oct. 11, hours after Ashcroft warned of "credible threats" of more terrorism, Tarek Abdelhamid Albasti was making spaghetti at the Crazy Tomato, the restaurant he owns in Evansville, Ind., with his uncle and his wife.

A former member of the Egyptian national rowing team, Albasti now is a U.S. citizen with a 2-year-old daughter, a father-in-law who is a former U.S. foreign service officer and a mother-in-law who can trace her lineage back to the American Revolution. Still, FBI agents had shown up twice after the attacks, to inquire about his political beliefs and the flying lessons that he had been given as a birthday present.

At 8 p.m. that Thursday night, the FBI returned to take him away with his Egyptian uncle and seven other Muslim men from Evansville. The next morning, they were flown in shackles to Chicago on a U.S. Marshal's Service jet.

After a week in jail, where they staged a hunger strike while being held as material witnesses, Albasti, his uncle and six others were released.

Albasti's detention fits a pattern common to many people in the investigation's outer ring. His family believes he was arrested because his new pilot's license fit the profile of the leaders of the hijacking plot.

Even a man who tried to help investigators wound up in custody. Two days after the attacks, Mustafa Abu Jdai and his wife, Dianna, in Tyler, Tex., called the FBI's 800 number. He told investigators he had answered an advertisement for a job posted at a Dallas mosque and met last spring with several Arabic-speaking men who offered to pay him to take flight lessons in Texas, Florida or Oklahoma. Abu Jdai's wife said that the FBI showed her husband photographs and that he recognized one of the men as Marwan Al-Shehhi, who is believed to have piloted one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.

Abu Jdai's wife said the FBI gave him a polygraph test and told him he gave a wrong answer to the last question. He was then charged with a visa violation and remains in a Dallas jail.

Even for those who have won release, the experience has profoundly soured their feelings toward the United States. When he got home from Chicago, Albasti, the owner of an Italian restaurant in Indiana, ripped up his pilot's license. He left for a visit to his parents in Egypt last week and is unsure whether he will return. Said his wife, Carolyn Baugh: "American dream. Shattered."

Washington Post staff writers Bob Woodward and Jim McGee and Research Editor Margot Williams also contributed to this report.

-------

"Citizen, Can I See Your ID."

Al Martin Raw
Behind the Scenes in the Beltway
by Al Martin
http://www.almartinraw.com/column37.html

What has not been explained to the American people is the reason why 35,000 Army Reservists and 65,000 National Guard have been called up. It is to maintain internal checkpoints. It has nothing to do with the external "War on Terrorism." All of these people are being trained at the US Army School of Urban Control at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. CNN actually showed an urban training mock-up, what they're training on, and what the new Internal Security checkpoint is going to look like. It was mighty sinister looking.

There was a barrier that went across the road. To the right was an elevated shed like structure, elevated perhaps fifteen feet in the air. It had a small second story that was open. On it was a sign that read "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." There were sandbags and the wooden arm that crossed the road read "100% ID Checked." Then there was a small shed to the right with a small barbed wire area behind that. On this structure was a sign, which read, "All citizens not having proper identification will be detained. All foreign nationals will be detained. All citizens who are deemed to be acting in a suspicious manner will be detained." At each of these posts there will be six armed Army or National Guard reservists with M-16's with full field kit. On top of the structure to the rear, the open structure on top, there's a man with a machine gun emplacement.

They showed the actual mockup used for training purposes. They had new uniforms. They weren't in their regular uniforms. It's a new gray uniform with a gray helmet and a visor so you can't see their eyes. The only thing you can see is from their lips down because they said that's "to prevent any retribution" from people who don't like this new idea.

This uniform looked exactly like the Imperial Storm Troopers from "Star Wars" except instead of white, it was gray. All the helmets have little transceivers so they can communicate with each other. There will be six guards at each internal security checkpoint. And there's another warning on the inside of the barbed wire enclosure, "Any detainees attempting to escape will be shot." It was a yellow and red sign inside the detainment area.

The only person who actually spoke on camera during this story was a sergeant, an Army Reservist sergeant. You could tell that he completely disagreed with what was going on. You couldn't hear the question being asked, but he was looking at the camera and he said, "We're here to protect the people." Then he put his head down and shook his head, and you could tell he didn't believe a word of what he was saying -- like it was some big frigging joke.

Then they showed the procedure they were using to train these guys. An average American car, like a Ford or a Chevy, drives up and there's supposed to be a husband and wife in the front seat and a couple of kiddies in the back. So they drive up to the checkpoint, and the corporal comes up to the car and says, "May I see your identification, citizen."

They call everyone "citizen." I swear to God, I'm not making this up. Then the guy asks for his driver's license, then something else and something else. Then he says, "Very good, citizen."

There's a spot on the gate that goes across the road that they had x-ed out. But you could tell what it said because the sergeant alluded to it. It said, "All citizens are required to present their National Identification Cards." But they left it blank as a black spray-painted out spot because the legislation for that hasn't happened yet.

The big sign on the side of the one and half story shed with the machine gun nest on top said "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." And now we're all supposed to say, "Hail the Republic." That's the new mantra. They showed a bunch of guys being trained at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, probably enlisted and reservists and such. And they kept raising up their right arm saying, "Hail the Republic."

The sergeant even said that they are duplicating the ancient Roman Legions salute to Caesar, using the right arm upraised with the fist. Instead of "Hail Caesar," though they say, "Hail the Republic."

This is what's coming. People don't believe it or people don't understand it but when 80% of the people support whatever "security" measures are necessary.

What does it all mean? We all better start worrying when George Bush starts to play the fiddle.

Congress is supposed to be recessed for the rest of the year, but they will be giving the Administration extraordinary wartime authority -- pursuant to all remaining legislation. In other words, they will simply allow the Administration to act under pending statutes. They are simply going to transfer to the Administration emergency wartime power to act under bills, which are still pending, even though they haven't been passed.

The implication is that we will be under a defacto state of martial law soon. There are 100,000 military being trained for these internal security checkpoints.

When they were showing the lines of enlisted and reserve people being trained in this camp, with M-16s in their hands, I can tell you I don't think any of them would hesitate to shoot at American citizens. I think they're being indoctrinated. The indoctrination they're going through is obvious. The enlisted people are being told by the drill sergeant that they are being given extraordinary authority that "your job is to protect the security of the State at all costs."

There is a direct parallel between the old Soviet Union and the East Bloc and what we are doing. We are establishing internal travel restrictions on the American people. We are essentially following the Soviet textbook. In the Soviet Communist Bloc, for example, there were checkpoints in every city. You had to have what's called an "internal travel visa." You had to have that visa stamped at every checkpoint in every city. Then they checked you out at every entrance to every city. Then if you checked out, they would affix a visa stamp and charge you ten marks for it. It was a real racket.

What will be interesting to see is what kind of a racket is going to go along with these internal security check points. In other words, how much of a "toll" are they going to charge? They're going to have to do something to pay for all of this and one of the obvious ways to pay for it would be to charge everyone a one or two dollar "toll."

And this is what we should be looking forward to - toll booths around the nation. They're not saying this yet, but obviously in an effort to pay for this, there's going to be some sort of a "security tax." Since this system is incredibly cumbersome (having to stop every single vehicle and check identification) and we've been taught to be suspicious of driver's licenses because it's so easy to obtain false driver's licenses, the implication is that national security cards are the only thing that will eventually be accepted as identification. The further implication is that in order to accommodate traffic (this will create traffic jams miles and miles long), there would be a separate line for those carrying pre-approved internal visas whose allegiance to the government has already been checked.

The sergeant on the news report said that all the people involved (100,000 military people) are being forced to swear new loyalty oaths to the United States. He just mentioned the government's overall policy, which Bush talked about last week, that all federal civilian employees are going to have to take new oaths of allegiance to the "Republic." And that extends to some members of the military who will be involved in internal security.

Surprisingly enough all these border checks, you would think, would be handled directly by the military - or under the auspices of the military. They're not. They're under the auspices of "Homeland Security." What it means is that you have 100,000 troops (reservists and national guards people) based in the United States, which will be seconded to the Office of Homeland Security. Their ultimate jurisdiction is being transferred from the Department of Defense to the Office of Homeland Security.

In other words, the Office of Homeland Security is gaining a militarized division of 100,000 troops.

It's finally getting some of the liberals nervous. But it's coming. Day after day, they're showing polls that seventy to eighty percent of the American people are prepared to approve whatever security measures are "necessary" to "fight terrorism."

--

MILITARY FRAUD DEPT.: According to the Friendly Colonel, the Redstone Arsenal base commander was chortling over the fact that the accuracy of the missile strikes in Afghanistan thus far was 37%. He was actually chortling on how "high" the accuracy rate has been. The general's exact words were that "the defense contractors will get paid as long as the things go off and hit the right country."

Also, the Friendly Colonel realizes the reason the FBI didn't stop all those weapons shipments from Huntsville Alabama (See previous story http://www.almartinraw.com/column22.html)

What they were doing was pre-positioning materiel in Pakistan. That leads one to the conclusion which he had already made earlier - that somebody knew this war was going to happen, possibly as long as six months ago (May 2001). In other words, they didn't know specifically the target, but somebody thought it likely that a "terrorist event" would happen that would precipitate a response by the US in Afghanistan.

And Where Did the "Mushrooms" Go? (See previous column http://www.almartin.raw/column32.html) They were intended for use by US armed forces. In other words, they were pre-staging supplies. That's where the "mushrooms" (anti-personnel land mines) went. He got an explanation how these "mushrooms" are used by Special Forces when they are clearing an area. When an area is being swept, they drop this weapons system behind them - to protect their rear and also to prevent anyone else from re-infiltrating an are which has already been cleared. The specific use of these mushrooms is in a sweep operation. When forces sweep an area and they don't want the area re-infiltrated they leave this passive weapons system behind. These weapons are principally used in an urban warfare environment.

The only correlation that can be made is that there would be an attack against the United States of sufficient size which would warrant a response, hence the predisposition of these weapons system, like these mushrooms which are under intense international criticism by an anti-land mine group in London.

The general also said that they're "re-ordering missiles like crazy - the Cruise and Tomahawk missiles." They are being reordered and Rockwell is building them as fast as they can. Cruise Missiles are about $1.6 million each, and the Tomahawks, which are larger, longer range, more advanced with a heavier payload, are about $3.5 million each.

He estimated that about 300 missiles have been used so far. It's not big money, but these missile systems are extremely profitable to build. They have a simple guidance system, a simple conventional explosive, and the micro-processors necessary for the look-forward view capacity is pretty simple. All they have to do is not hit the side of a mountain on the way to their target...

--

MEDIA DEPT.: According to a reliable inside source, all the mainstream media outlets have received a confidential memorandum from the White House asking that they change the monikers they're using "Homeland Security" to "Home Front Security." Apparently they believe that "Home Front Security" sounds more patriotic and less sinister than "Home Land Security."

They have also asked the media not to show any more footage of the urban training and internal security checkpoints and to minimize the coverage of any "future" troop movements within the United States. The implication is that when these internal security checkpoints get set up, there will be a lot of movement of troops, helicopters, etc. So as not to disturb the domestic tranquility of the people by telling the people the truth, the government is asking the media to limit coverage of any domestic troop movements.

All the media will comply because they're all dying to jump on the government line. MSNBC has in fact changed their moniker form "Homeland Security" to "Home Front Security." "Home Front" is more homey sounding and much more patriotic. It strikes a chord with a lot of people especially older people who remember this being so extensively used for security measures put in place during the Second World War.

--

EDUCATION/ INDOCTRINATION DEPT.: A warning of note -- Mothers of America beware. Last week during National Patriotism Day, sixty million American schoolchildren were supposed to stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance together.

There was a little known and briefly shown incident on TV about a teacher in New Jersey. He was a fifth grade teacher who changed the words of the Pledge of Allegiance from "I pledge allegiance to the flag" to "I pledge allegiance to the Office of Homeland Security." Subsequently it was noted that in his opinion children are never too young to be taught obedience to the State. It should also be noted that the teacher in question who professed to be a loyal Vietnam veteran with a flat top hairdo, a Marine Corps. tattoo on his arm and a Timex watch, and replete with a polyester tie. He rather looked like some sort of reject for the corner stool at the local VFW, when he explained that "he never saw a commie he didn't want to bomb."

--

HISTORY OF FBI ANTI-TERRORISM SUCCESS DEPT.: In 1995, pursuant to the first round of "anti-terrorism" legislation a/k/a HR1701, the FBI was given a special $300 million grant to track down terrorist assets worldwide.

After a five-year search and an expenditure of $300 million of American taxpayers' money, they managed to find one bank account belonging to the Hamas terrorist group. It was in a savings bank in New Jersey, and it had $17000 in it.

The Treasury Department's current pronouncements that the terrorist assets they're freezing every day is just so much nonsense. They're not giving us any details about who owns these accounts or how they know they're connected to terrorist groups. One of the accounts they seized in California? Upon further investigation, it turned out that the account with $346 in it was in fact the coffee and donut fund for the local Arab American Chamber of Commerce.

--

FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEPT.: Having gone out to the $8.99 All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet with a bunch of cohorts, we found out that unbeknownst to us, there was an FBI agent sitting in the booth nearby. He was there not in an official capacity, but just having dinner with his wife. Anyway, we were talking about the new Office of Homeland Security and what the internal checkpoints were going to look like and what the new parameters of our new National Identity cards will be and, of course, referencing George Bush as George "Never Saw a Document He Didn't Want to Shred" Bush. And we talked about the number of civil rights that the American people will be giving up in this new campaign against terrorism.

When we got up to leave, the FBI agent said to me, "Hey pal, best flap your gums while you can because a year from now I'll have the power to arrest you for such seditious talk."

He was wearing his FBI badge on the inside to ensure that he would get his 15% discount at the restaurant.

My pals are all older and they're afraid that they'll get their Social Security checks taken away from them for hanging out with me. Then I told the FBI agent that, "Hey, we're just speaking the truth." And he said, "Like I said, seditious talk."

So remember - the new government mantra is "Speaking the truth about government misdeeds and abuses of power equals sedition."

--

AS SEEN ON TV DEPT.: The new checkpoints have been established and they look just like the mockups that were shown on TV. There's a large red and yellow placard that says "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." You have to show your driver's license to go through and you're told that soon even that will not be sufficient. There was a company of National Guard setting up an ancillary facility. They had their new gray helmets with the visors on, so you couldn't see their eyes. And it is true. We went through the checkpoint.

And yes, they really do address you as "Citizen."

AL MARTIN is America's foremost whistleblower on government fraud and corruption. A retired US Navy Lt. Commander and former officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, he has testified before Congress (the Kerry Committee and the Alexander Committee) regarding Iran-Contra. Al Martin is the author of "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider" (2001, National Liberty Press, $19.95; Toll FREE order line: 1-866-317-1390) He lives at an undisclosed location, since the criminals named in his book have been returned to national power and prominence. His column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly on Al Martin Raw: Criminal Govt Conspiracy (http://www.almartinraw.com)

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Disputes Erupt on Ridge's Needs for His Job

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/politics/04RIDG.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - Not since the Second World War has anyone been given such enormous responsibility to protect the nation's homeland security as Tom Ridge. Yet day after day, Mr. Ridge, the strapping former governor of Pennsylvania, does something unheard of in Washington: he begs Congress not to give him more power or more money.

As he tries to define a job whose definition seems to change by the hour, he has sat with lawmakers in the White House and shuttled to Capitol Hill. He insists that his close relationship with President Bush and his proximity to the Oval Office will allow him to coordinate the nearly four dozen agencies and bureaucracies that now need to work together to secure the nation's borders, protect nuclear power plants, share intelligence, secure public facilities and fight bioterrorism.

To emphasize the point, he and Mr. Bush hand out a flowchart of all the agencies that report to Mr. Ridge. It is a morass of lines and boxes so byzantine and complex that some lawmakers mutter they have not seen anything like it since schematics of the abortive Clinton health care plan.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, calls the chart a way to show what a disruptive, politically impossible government reorganization would be required if Congress gave Mr. Ridge cabinet status and tried to create a new homeland security agency that would subsume current departments. Many in Congress take the opposite view: that it is Mr. Ridge's subtle cry for help.

"To me I thought it was an argument for my bill," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, who wants to create a Department of National Homeland Security and give Mr. Ridge the same status as the defense secretary.

Senator Bob Graham, the Democrat of Florida who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "My own feeling is that for Governor Ridge or any other human being to be able to effectively direct all of the boxes on that piece of paper will require more authority than the president can give him in an executive order."

Others question whether Mr. Ridge, without his own department and a Congressionally approved budget, will ever really have the resources he needs to help the country win the war against terrorism. Some cite the office of the drug czar as a failed model and one they fear Mr. Ridge's post may come to resemble.

These are just some of the questions facing Mr. Ridge, the new director of the office of homeland security, as he tries to settle into a job that has as its mission nothing less than protecting Americans from every threat that terrorists might devise. It is the kind of job that no one has had to tackle since the Office of Civilian Defense was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to handle home front safety in World War II.

It is a role that seems filled with contradictions. Mr. Ridge, in his public appearances, has compared homeland defense to such enormous enterprises as "building the transcontinental railroad, fighting World War II or putting a man on the moon." Yet he does not have budgetary authority and can only make spending recommendations to the president's budget director.

His mission as described in the president's executive order establishing his office is one of long-term planning - to "develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist attacks or threats." Yet the anthrax attacks forced him instead into crisis management, as the day-to-day face of the administration.

Some members of Congress complain that Mr. Ridge did not take the stage fast enough. Others say the White House did him a disservice by pushing him forward so fast.

"My advice to the administration would be whoever is in this position will have a steep learning curve," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut. "Let them do it in private."

Still others questioned the administration this week when it told Americans they faced a threat of more attacks, but could not define the threat further. "We're already on high alert," said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. "How much higher can you get? Imaginations run wild."

But Mr. Ridge seems unfazed, even good humored, as he appears before the cameras now perhaps two or three times a week.

On Friday, a puckish smile played on his lips and he danced on his heels as he had to deal with the latest controversy - the decision by Gov. Gray Davis of California to go public with a warning that terrorists could be planning a rush-hour attack on one or more of California's bridges. It was a decision that took aback many in the federal government.

"We are learning every day," Mr. Ridge said wryly when pressed on how he might deal with governors in the future.

Few in Washington envy Mr. Ridge. Some even think he will be the fall guy if another terror strike succeeds. But his friends and longtime associates say he is a man of enormous self-confidence who should not be underestimated. "He's very big in the grace under pressure department," said Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant, who has done political work for Mr. Ridge's campaigns.

Mr. Ridge's résumé is unusual. He grew up in a veteran's housing project, graduated from Harvard and served in combat as an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam. Before being elected governor, he served 12 years in Congress.

"Tom is a very careful and deliberative man," said David Girard- diCarlo, who was chairman of Mr. Ridge's campaigns for governor, "and there are times in his past where care and deliberation made those who are impatient feel he is moving too deliberatively and too slow."

Mr. Girard-diCarlo said that when Mr. Ridge was first elected governor "the media was fond of calling him "one-term Tom." He noted pointedly that Mr. Ridge went on to win re- election comfortably.

Driving from a borrowed temporary apartment in Annapolis, Md., Mr. Ridge arrives at the White House each day at 7. He gets a Central Intelligence Agency briefing, attends the senior staff meeting at 7:30 and joins the president for a briefing by John Ashcroft, the attorney general, and Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

With a first year budget of $25 million, from money set aside by the White House, Mr. Ridge has begun assembling a staff that will be modeled after the National Security Council and grow to about 100 people, most detailed from other government agencies.

His first hires include a handful of former Pennsylvania staff aides he can count on to be his loyalists in the bureaucratic wars, including Mark A. Holman, who was his chief of staff until last December. "Mark has been a key person in everything Tom Ridge has accomplished in his political life," says Tim Reeves, Mr. Ridge's former press secretary.

Vice President Dick Cheney's influence can also be seen in the office. Mr. Ridge's deputy director will be Adm. Steve Abbot, who retired as a four-start admiral in 2000 and was soon running the vice president's national preparedness review designed to strengthen the nation against acts of terror, particularly those using a weapons of mass destruction.

While Mr. Ridge's office is just steps away from the president's, most of the homeland security staff will work from a secure facility outside the White House and should be at full strength in about a month, Mr. Holman said.

White House officials say the staff will split into 11 separate teams with portfolios that show just how seriously the government is preparing for future threats.

The groups will cover such areas as surveillance and intelligence; weapons of mass destruction; medical preparedness; security of borders, water and air space; and security of domestic transportation.

Mr. Ridge has also spent his first weeks trying to take his cause to private industry. He has huddled with senior executives of the software industry to see how they deal with cyberattacks. He has discussed safety with the airline industry. He says he has secured pledges from the pharmaceutical industry to share their products and their scientific know-how should the nation need it.

While lawmakers are willing to give him and the president time to set up the homeland security office, the debate over whether it should become a full cabinet agency is expected to resume next year.

Mr. Holman said, "I don't believe there could be a single entity that could have all the necessary federal missions" for homeland defense. But asked if Mr. Ridge would move to consolidate some of the existing structures, he said, "Just stay tuned."

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Sentencing of spy may be postponed

USA Today
11/04/2001
By Kevin Johnson and Toni Locy
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/11/05/hanssen.htm

WASHINGTON - The January sentencing of convicted spy Robert Hanssen may have to be postponed because so many federal security officials have requested debriefing sessions with the former FBI counterintelligence agent.

Hanssen's espionage activities for Moscow went undetected for more than 15 years. Federal prosecutors recently broached the subject of a sentencing delay with his attorneys, so investigators representing several government agencies could talk more extensively with Hanssen about his unprecedented breach of national security, sources said.

Since the summer, Hanssen has been meeting twice a week with federal prosecutors for all-day interviews, so authorities might learn the full extent of his spying, which began in 1979.

Hanssen broke off contact with the Soviet Union in 1981, only to resume his activities in 1985.

Before his arrest in February, Hanssen, 57, turned over thousands of pages of classified information and the identities of at least two Russian agents who were working for the United States.

Hanssen made a deal with federal prosecutors that spared him the death penalty. Under the terms of the plea bargain, Hanssen has to detail his activities for Moscow or face future prosecution on charges that could bring capital punishment.

In addition to federal prosecutors, the FBI and the CIA, a team of special investigators conducting a wide-ranging review of the FBI's counterintelligence program also has indicated an interest in debriefing Hanssen.

The special investigative team, led by former FBI and CIA director William Webster, is nearing the end of a review that began immediately after Hanssen's arrest this year.

Hanssen's cooperation is expected to be invaluable to the Webster team as it prepares recommendations for tightening internal security at the FBI.

The Webster investigation is one of a half-dozen ongoing internal reviews of FBI operations.

In July, Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage, attempted espionage and conspiracy. Six other counts in the original indictment were dismissed as part of the plea agreement with prosecutors.

If Hanssen satisfies the terms of that deal, he will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

---

Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI
Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks

Lance Williams and Erin McCormick,
Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, November 4, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/04/MN117081.DTL

A former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden's bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was a U.S. government informant during much of his terrorist career, according to sources familiar with his case.

Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen and longtime Silicon Valley resident who pleaded guilty last year to terrorism charges, approached the Central Intelligence Agency more than 15 years ago and offered to inform on Middle Eastern terrorist groups, a U.S. government official said.

Later, according to the sources, Mohamed spent years as an FBI informant while concealing his own deep involvement in the al Qaeda terrorist band: training bin Laden's bodyguards and Islamic guerrillas in camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan; bringing Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy, to the Bay Area on a covert fund-raising mission; and planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, in which more than 200 people died.

The story of Mohamed's dual roles as FBI informant and bin Laden terrorist - - and the freedom he had to operate unchecked in the United States -- illustrates the problems facing U.S. intelligence services as they attempt to penetrate the shadowy, close-knit world of al Qaeda, experts said.

Mohamed "clearly was a double agent," Larry C. Johnson, a former deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism and a onetime CIA employee, said in an interview.

Johnson said the CIA had found Mohamed unreliable and severed its relationship with him shortly after Mohamed approached the agency in 1984. Johnson faulted the FBI for later using Mohamed as an informant, saying the bureau should have recognized that the man was a high-ranking terrorist, deeply involved in plotting violence against the United States and its allies.

"It's possible that the FBI thought they had control of him and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that they did not have control," Johnson said. "The FBI assumed he was their source, but his loyalties lay elsewhere."

The affair was "a study in incompetence, in how not to run an agent," Johnson said.

FBI spokesman Joseph Valiquette declined to comment on Mohamed, as did a spokesman for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose office prosecuted the case of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

A law enforcement source familiar with the case said the FBI had followed appropriate procedures in attempting to obtain crucial information from Mohamed, whom he conceded was "double-dealing" and difficult.

"When you operate assets and informants, they're holding the cards," this source said. "They can choose to be 100 percent honest or 10 percent honest. You don't have much control over them.

"Maybe (the informant) gives you a great kernel of information, and then you can't find him for eight weeks. Is that a management problem? Hindsight is 20/20."

Mohamed, 49, is a former Egyptian Army major, fluent in Arabic and English, who after his arrest became known as bin Laden's "California connection." Last year, when he pleaded guilty in the embassy bombing case, he told a federal judge that he first was drawn to terrorism in 1981, when he joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group implicated in that year's assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

For almost as long as he was a terrorist, Mohamed also was in contact with U.S. intelligence, according to court records and sources.

In 1984, he quit the Egyptian Army to work as a counterterrorism security expert for EgyptAir. After that, he offered to become a CIA informant, said the U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The agency tried him out, but because he told other possible terrorists or people possibly associated with terrorist groups that he was working for the CIA, clearly he was not suitable," the official said.

The CIA cut off contact with Mohamed and put his name on a "watch list" aimed at blocking his entrance to the United States, according to the official.

Nevertheless, Mohamed got a visa one year later. He ultimately became a U.S.

citizen after marrying a Santa Clara woman. In 1986, he joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man. He was posted to Fort Bragg, N.C., home of the elite Special Forces.

There he worked as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, then as an instructor on Middle Eastern affairs in the John F. Kennedy special warfare school.

Mohamed's behavior and his background were so unusual that his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, became convinced that he was both a "dangerous fanatic" and an operative of U.S. intelligence.

Anderson, now a businessman in North Carolina, said that on their first meeting in 1988, Mohamed told him, "Anwar Sadat was a traitor and he had to die."

Later that year, Anderson said, Mohamed announced that -- contrary to all Army regulations -- he intended to go on vacation to Afghanistan to join the Islamic guerrillas in their civil war against the Soviets. A month later, he returned, boasting that he had killed two Soviet soldiers and giving away as souvenirs what he claimed were their uniform belts.

Anderson said he wrote detailed reports aimed at getting Army intelligence to investigate Mohamed -- and have him court-martialed and deported -- but the reports were ignored.

"I think you or I would have a better chance of winning Powerball (a lottery), than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California . . . getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit," he said. "That just doesn't happen. "

It was equally unthinkable that an ordinary American GI would go unpunished after fighting in a foreign war, he said.

Anderson said all this convinced him that Mohamed was "sponsored" by a U.S. intelligence service. "I assumed the CIA," he said.

In 1989, Mohamed left the Army and returned to Santa Clara, where he worked as a security guard and at a home computer business.

Between then and his 1998 arrest, he said in court last year, Mohamed was deeply involved in bin Laden's al Qaeda. He spent months abroad, training bin Laden's fighters in camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. While in Africa, he scouted the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, target of the 1998 bombing. In this country,

he helped al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, enter the country with a fake passport and tour U.S. mosques, raising money later funneled to al Qaeda.

According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had also established himself as an FBI informant.

"He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from other law enforcement agencies," Emerson said in an interview.

One particularly troubling aspect of the case, Emerson says, was that Mohamed's role as an FBI informant gave bin Laden important insights into U.S. efforts to penetrate al Qaeda.

The case shows "the sophistication of the bin Laden network, and how they were toying with us," he said.

Some information about the nature of Mohamed's contacts with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies is contained in an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in New York at the time of his 1998 arrest. The document describes contacts between Mohamed and the FBI and Defense Department officials.

At times, Mohamed made alarming admissions about his links to the al Qaeda terrorists, seemingly without fear of being arrested. Mohamed willfully deceived the agents about his activities, according to the affidavit.

In 1993, the affidavit says, Mohamed was questioned by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after a bin Laden aide was caught trying to enter the United States with Mohamed's driver's license and a false passport.

Mohamed acknowledged traveling to Vancouver to help the terrorist sneak into the United States and admitted working closely with bin Laden's group. Yet he was so unconcerned about being arrested that he told the Mounties he hoped the interview wouldn't hurt his chances of getting a job as an FBI interpreter.

(According to the affidavit, he had indeed applied for the FBI position but never got it.)

Later that year, Mohamed -- again seemingly without concern for consequences -- told the FBI that he had trained bin Laden followers in intelligence and anti-hijacking techniques in Afghanistan, the affidavit says.

In January 1995, Mohamed applied for a U.S. security clearance, in hopes of becoming a security guard with a Santa Clara defense contractor. His application failed to mention ever traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan, trips he had told the FBI about earlier. In three interviews with Defense Department officials, who conducted a background check on him, he claimed he had never been a terrorist.

"I have never belonged to a terrorist organization, but I have been approached by organizations that could be called terrorist," he told the interviewers.

According to the affidavit, he told FBI agents in 1997 that he had trained bin Laden's bodyguards, saying he loved bin Laden and believed in him. Mohamed also said it was "obvious" that the United States was the enemy of Muslim people.

In August 1998, after the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, he told the FBI that he knew who did it, but refused to provide the names.

Two weeks later, after lying to a U.S. grand jury investigating the embassy bombings, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty last year, but he has never been sentenced and is once again believed to be providing information to the government -- this time from a prison cell.

"There's a hell of a lot (U.S. officials) didn't know about Ali Mohamed," said Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert and criminology professor at the University of Long Island. "He infiltrated our armed services and duped them."

Yet, Kushner said, such duplicitous interactions may be a necessary component of intelligence work.

"I hate to say it, but these relationships are something we should be involved in more of. That's the nasty (part) of covert operations. We're not dealing with people we can trust."

E-mail the reporters at emccormick@sfchronicle.com and lmwilliams@sfchronicle. com.

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The Spy Puzzle

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/opinion/04SUN1.html

Much is expected of the Central Intelligence Agency these days, probably too much. As a pivotal front-line organization in the war against terrorism, the agency is supposed to detect and prevent new terror attacks, help locate and perhaps even kill Osama bin Laden and let President Bush know if the anthrax in the mail comes from Iraq - to mention only a few of Washington's expectations. These are lofty demands to make of an institution that before Sept. 11 was still struggling to reinvent itself a decade after the end of the cold war. As much as the nation may yearn for a crack intelligence service that can save the day, there is no such outfit in Washington at present.

But there could be someday, if the White House and Congress are prepared to address some longstanding structural and operational problems that have hobbled the C.I.A. and its fellow intelligence services. The need for radical change was evident on Sept. 11. The failure of the C.I.A. and other spy agencies to anticipate the attacks on New York and Washington was not the fault of a single institution. It was the failure of the government's entire $30 billion-a-year intelligence apparatus.

After five decades of helter-skelter growth, the system is unwieldy and disjointed. There are no less than 13 different intelligence agencies affiliated with five different cabinet departments. Any company that was organized this way - with overlapping divisions, ambiguous lines of authority and no cohesive strategy - would go out of business. In the intelligence world, it's business as usual.

Some of the problems have been visible at the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center. The center, established in 1986, was designed to be the flywheel for the government's antiterror activities, a place where analysts and operatives would work side by side, exploiting information provided by a host of agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Defense Department. While the center has recorded important successes over the years, it has been hampered by institutional frictions and an aversion in some agencies to sharing information. There is still no common database where all intelligence about terrorists can be stored and reviewed.

Organizations that specialize in foreign intelligence, like the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, which monitors international communications, are accustomed to pooling information and giving it to the president and other policy makers. Domestic agencies like the F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service are not. In part, this was a function of legal restrictions that were eased by Congress last month. But don't expect to see an integrated database anytime soon. The man who runs the Counterterrorist Center, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, lacks the authority to compel cooperation. He must rely on goodwill and a form of information bartering to get domestic intelligence into the center's databank.

Mr. Tenet cannot even count on getting all the information he needs from core spy agencies like the N.S.A. and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which collects and analyzes the pictures collected by reconnaissance satellites. Under obsolete budgetary and bureaucratic arrangements established during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the Pentagon controls most of the nation's espionage machinery and manpower. Not surprisingly, its primary interest is using intelligence to help plan and fight wars. Mr. Tenet needs the authority to make sure sufficient resources of all the main spy agencies are devoted to the C.I.A.'s concerns, including terrorist threats.

Even if the system were managed more rationally, the torrent of information pouring into Washington from satellites and other electronic devices would be overwhelming. American ingenuity has created remarkable spy machines that can intercept millions of phone calls from the air and take magnified pictures of the earth from hundreds of miles out in space. Unfortunately, for years the government hasn't employed enough linguists to handle all suspect communications in Arabic and other languages in a timely way or enough photo interpreters to make sense of many of the satellite images.

Investing more money in intelligence can help, and Congress has provided more than $1 billion extra since Sept. 11. The call has already gone out from intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. for speakers of Arabic and the languages of Central Asia like Pashto, Dari, Uzbek and Turkmen. Photo analysts can be hired and trained relatively quickly.

It is much harder to recruit and train spies, infiltrate terrorist cells and run effective covert operations. C.I.A. case officers capable of running espionage operations against terrorist cells cannot be hired cold from college or the private sector. It takes years of training and field experience to prepare them. Building effective networks of foreign informants is no easier. Since his appointment in 1997, Mr. Tenet has strengthened the agency's operations staff, but years of neglect caused in part by lavish spending on technical systems have left the C.I.A. without a strong cadre of battle-tested operatives.

Mr. Tenet, with President Bush's support, has made good use of the frantic days since Sept. 11 to energize the C.I.A. and to break down the barriers between government agencies. He has also acted quickly to further enhance the C.I.A.'s clandestine operations. The critical job of ensuring better coordination and information-sharing will require a cooperative effort, involving major structural reforms and the active engagement of Mr. Bush and the Congressional leadership.

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Secret C.I.A. Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04INTE.html http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001380015-2001383004,00.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - The Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine New York station was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, seriously disrupting United States intelligence operations while bringing the war on terrorism dangerously close to home for America's spy agency, government officials say.

The C.I.A.'s undercover New York station was in the 47-story building at 7 World Trade Center, one of the smaller office towers destroyed in the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers that morning. All of the agency's employees at the site were safely evacuated soon after the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, the officials said.

The intelligence agency's employees were able to watch from their office windows while the twin towers burned just before they evacuated their own building.

Immediately after the attack, the C.I.A. dispatched a special team to scour the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports that had been stored in the New York station, either on paper or in computers, officials said. It could not be learned whether the agency was successful in retrieving its classified records from the wreckage.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

The agency's New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas.

The agency's officers in New York often work undercover, posing as diplomats and business executives, among other things, depending on the nature of their intelligence operations.

The recovery of secret documents and other records from the New York station should follow well-rehearsed procedures laid out by the agency after the Iranian takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The revolutionaries took over the embassy so rapidly that the C.I.A. station was not able to effectively destroy all of its documents, and the Iranians were later able to piece together shredded agency reports. Since that disaster, the agency has emphasized rigorous training and drills among its employees on how to quickly and effectively destroy and dispose of important documents in emergencies.

As a result, a C.I.A. station today should be able to protect most of its secrets even in the middle of a catastrophic disaster like the Sept. 11 attacks, said one former agency official. "If it was well run, there shouldn't be too much paper around," the former official said.

The agency's New York officers have been deeply involved in counterterrorism efforts in the New York area, working jointly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. Many of the most important counterterrorism cases of the last few years, including the bureau's criminal investigations of the August 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa and the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen have been handled out of New York.

The United States has accused Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network of conducting both of those attacks.

But United States intelligence officials emphasize that there is no evidence that the hijackers knew that the undercover station was in the World Trade Center complex.

With their undercover station in ruins, C.I.A. officers in New York have been forced to share space at the United States Mission to the United Nations, as well as borrow other federal government offices in the city, officials said. The C.I.A.'s plans for finding a new permanent station in New York could not be determined.

The agency is prohibited from conducting domestic espionage operations against Americans, but the agency maintains stations in a number of major United States cities, where C.I.A. case officers try to meet and recruit students and other foreigners to return to their countries and spy for the United States. The New York station, which has been led by its first female station chief for the last year, is believed to have been the largest and most important C.I.A. domestic station outside the Washington area.

The station has for years played an important role in espionage operations against Russian intelligence officers, many of whom work undercover as diplomats at the United Nations. Agency officers in New York often work with the F.B.I. to recruit and then help manage foreign agents spying for the United States. The bureau's New York office, at 26 Federal Plaza, was unaffected by the terrorist attack.

The destruction of the C.I.A.'s New York station has added to the intense emotions shared by many of its employees about the agency's role in the battle against terrorism. For some, the station's destruction served to underscore the failure of United States intelligence to predict the attacks.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, morale suffered badly within the C.I.A., some officials said, as the agency began to confront what critics have called an intelligence failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor.

But the terrorist attacks have also brought an urgent new sense of mission to the agency, which has been flooded with job applications as well as inquiries from former officers eager to return to work. Congress is pouring money into the agency's counterterrorism operations, and the C.I.A. seems poised to begin focusing its resources on terrorism in much the same way it once focused on the Soviet Union in the cold war.

The attacks were not the first in which the C.I.A. was directly touched by terrorists. In 1983, seven agency officers died in the suicide car bombing of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Among the others killed was the agency's station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, who died in captivity after being kidnapped by terrorists in 1984, and Richard Welch, the agency's Athens station chief, who was shot to death by Greek terrorists in 1975.

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Torture, treachery and spies - covert war in Afghanistan
America may be carpet-bombing Afghanistan. But the real battle for power is being waged with bundles of cash and more sinister means

Jason Burke in Peshawar
Sunday November 4, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0%2C1501%2C587388%2C00.html

The men were sitting in a circle with their weapons beside them. One, a balding 47-year-old, was the centre of attention. Hamed Karzai, an urbane American businessman and a leader of one of the key Pashtun tribes, was gathering the clans.

He had entered Afghanistan nearly a month ago, travelling from the Pakistani border city of Quetta across the rocky mountains that line the frontier and, on remote tracks too rough even for a four-wheel-drive jeep, deep into the rugged hills of the central Oruzgan province. There, in the desperately poor ancestral homelands of his branch of the Pashtuns, he began trekking from village to village, rallying for the attack he planned to launch against the ruling Taliban to clear the way for a return for the exiled king.

But last Thursday it was the Taliban who attacked him. Halfway through a traditional jirga - the debate by which a consensus among tribal leaders is reached - the alarm went up in the village of Dehrawut. Fighters from the Islamic militia were entering the town.

Karzai and his men escaped after a fierce gun battle during which, according to American military officials, US jets acting on a pre-arranged plan fired missiles at their opponents. Karzai is now in hiding, working his way across the hills towards the safety of opposition-held territory or back to Pakistan. He last spoke to his family at 11.10pm on Friday night. They were optimistic that he would make it unscathed. But his plan failed.

It was the second time in as many weeks that such an operation had run into grave difficulties. Ten days ago Abdul Haq, another prominent Pashtun opposition leader, was killed by Taliban forces after his own attempt to foment revolt, sanctioned and supported by American intelligence agencies, met with disaster.

Haq's frantic calls to the CIA resulted in a single unmanned aircraft firing missiles that missed the attackers, and he was executed soon after being captured. Now, for the first time, the efforts of the Americans to collapse the Taliban from the inside have been laid bare.

While the B52s and the F14s have rumbled and howled through the clear skies over Kabul and Kandahar, a quieter conflict has been taking place, pitting the intelligence services of the US-led coalition against the those of the Taliban. It is being fought in the air-conditioned lounges of the luxury homes of the top Afghan commanders, in the panelled chancelleries of foreign ministries, in dark corners of filthy bazaars and in rooms with mud floors in timber-roofed Afghan huts. But, though there is no obvious battlefield, it is a war as fiercely fought as its more overt counterpart.

Though on the map Afghanistan divides nicely - in the north there is the opposition alliance, largely composed of Afghanistan's ethnic minorities, across the rest of the country are the Taliban, largely drawn from the Pashtun tribes which predominate - the ground reality is far more complex. It is a shifting three dimensional jigsaw of tribal, religious, ethnic and political allegiances, both national and international. But where conventional military planners see challenges, less conventional operatives see opportunities. The warriors in the secret war are the spies and specialists of a dozen nations, ranging from Turkey to India, all vying for some advantage in the new 'Great Game'.

It's not a new situation. Just over a century ago the region was the playing field for the first 'Great Game' - fought out between the Russians and the British Raj. Both tried to manipulate Afghanistan for their own advantage through secret agents, subsidies and, only in the last resort, military intervention. The aim was to secure a government in Afghanistan that was in their own strategic interests. Now, as giant American bombers continue to pound Afghanistan, the second great game has secretly kicked off on the ground - with exactly the same motives for those involved.

This time, however, there are dozens of players. And, like the Afghans themselves, they too form a complex and shifting helix of agendas, interests, alliances and enmities.

The biggest players are the Pakistanis. With their large Pashtun population and sense of strategic insecurity, they are determined to secure a government in Afghanistan that is to their liking. Partly this is for commercial reasons - to access the big untapped markets, and oil and gas reserves, of Central Asia. Partly it is because Pakistani military planners, fearing an attack from India, say that 'strategic depth' (ie somewhere to retreat to) is essential.

Islamabad's military intelligence services, the ISI, have unparalled connections in the southern, Taliban-held parts of Afghanistan and, as the ISI were instrumental in creating the hardline Islamic militia, they are also the only people with contacts at the heart of the Taliban's leadership and thus any putative breakaway faction.

Islamabad has also traditionally been close to Saudi Arabia. Both are Sunni Muslim countries who have always been keen to restrict the influence of Shia Muslim Iran. Without the assistance of the two states the Taliban would never have grown so swiftly. Iran, predictably, has backed the opposition to the Taliban, funnelling aid to the Persian-descended Shia Muslims in the west of Afghanistan. In recent months Tehran has also helped train and arm the forces of Ismail Khan, one of the most promininent opposition leaders, in camps around the eastern Iranian city of Mashhad. Uzbekistan has helped General Abdul Rashid Dostum, himself an Uzbek, with funds and weapons. They too are worried about Pakistani and Saudi influence. So is Tajikistan which has helped the Tajik forces who have been holding out against the Taliban in the north and east of Afghanistan.

Bigger players are based further afield, with Russia and China both concerned about the Taliban's potential for spreading Islamic extremism into their own territory. Turkey has a natural affinity with the Turkic-descended Uzbeks. They sent 90 military advisers to Afghanistan last week, who are to fight alongside Dostum. A secondary aim of the Turks, and the Uzbeks, is to counter the Persian and Iranian influence in the region. India, which has sent money and a military delegation to the Afghan opposition, just wants to make sure that Pakistan doesn't gain - whatever it takes.

'The idea of anybody committing sizeable quantities of ground troops is anathema. It's a road to diplomatic and military disaster. Instead they do it with secret supplies and spooks,' one Western diplomat in Islamabad said last week. The overall losers, of course, are the Afghans.

The Taliban's fearsome intelligence agency is known as the Istakhbarat. For the past three years it has been run by Qari Ahmedullah, the hardline former Interior Minister. He reports directly to Mullah Omar, the reclusive one-eyed cleric who leads the Taliban from the southern desert city of Kandahar.

The Istakhbarat uses the facilities, offices and often even the former personnel of Khad, the feared KGB-trained secret police set up by the Communists when they were in power.

Qari Ahmedullah has been ruthless in cracking down on potential discontent, imprisoning and executing hundreds of alleged conspirators over the last three years. According to refugees interviewed in Peshawar, the former Khad torture centres in the Shashdarak quarter in Kabul are full of sobbing, screaming victims. So is the infamous Pul-e-Sharki prison on the city's outskirts.

In recent days the Istakhbarat have arrested dozens of people in Jalalabad who, they claim, were working for the return of Zahir Shah, the exiled king. There have also been similar purges in Kabul - where the Istakhbarat foiled an attempt by opposition forces to smuggle hundreds of guns into the city - and in the eastern city of Khost where, before the US-led air strikes, local tribes looked to be wavering.

Tactics similar to those used against Haq were employed. The Taliban drew out potential dissidents with offers of discussions and compromise. Then they were rounded up, imprisoned and their houses were demolished. The Taliban are no strangers to such 'black operations'. Over the past three years a series of opposition leaders have been assassinated at their homes in Pakistan. Abdul Haq's own wife and son were killed in one such attack three years ago. Others, including Hamid Karzai's father, have been shot dead in the southern Pakistani city of Quetta.

One man, arrested in the city after a shoot-out, told local police the Taliban had offered him 250,000 rupees (£2,800) to kill one senior opposition military commander. Last week a hit-list containing the names of 106 enemies of the Taliban was found on the premises of a makeshift and illegal embassy closed down by the German authorities.

The Istakhbarat have been helped by Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect for the 11 September attacks, who is currently hiding in Afghanistan. He is believed to be behind the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massood, the Northern Alliance's military commander, on the eve of the New York and Washington strikes and, in recent weeks, has launched what security sources in Peshawar call a 'cash counter-offensive', handing out large sums to ensure the loyalty of key frontline commanders. The sources also say that money is still reaching bin Laden and his organisation from rich sympathisers in the Gulf despite attempts by the Saudi Arabian regime to clamp down on the flow of funds.

Money is critical to any war in Afghanistan. Though there are a range of factors determining the allegiance of any one warlord, the prospect of financial gain is often key. The CIA was running operations to foment revolt in Afghanistan long before 11 September. Sources in Peshawar have disclosed that, as early as April, CIA operatives in Pakistan were attempting to exploit tribal and political differences between various Taliban commanders in the north-eastern province of Kunar, the eastern province of Paktia and among the Murzai tribe around Kandahar. At the time American diplomats told their contacts that the operation was hampered by a lack of funds.

Following the attacks, however, efforts to tempt Taliban commanders into defecting have been redoubled. Dozens of satellite phones accompanied by packets containing $10,000 have been sent to carefully selected warlords and tribal chiefs within Afghanistan. Several have been turned over to the Taliban who have kept the phone, but returned the money as a reward.

Meanwhile, the CIA prepares for a next phase in its war on terrorism on the ground, and the issue of torture comes to the fore as a legal and political hot potato in Washington.

Behind the scenes, reports from Washington say that the agency is now short of agents who know how to torture or to extract information. The CIA was amply staffed with people who developed torture expertise during the 'dirty wars' in Central and South America, but these agents have gone into retirement.

Now the agency is trying to redevelop and retrain agents in rough interrogation techniques. Among them are the use of high-decibel music, and recordings of dying people and animals.

One intelligence source told The Observer that former agents are being drafted back to advise the CIA on how to conduct 'interrogations involving an element of physical pressure'.

The Americans are also waging war by radio. In addition to broadcasts over Afghanistan from converted C130 transport planes the frequencies used by Kandahar for its 'Radio Shariat' are being jammed. In their place messages condemning the Taliban and Bin Laden's Arab fighters are being sent out and traditional instrumental music - banned by the Taliban - is being broadcast. In response Taliban sympathisers in Pakistan have set up their own radio stations. Opposition commanders are still sceptical however. 'It'll take more than light entertainment in bad Pashto to unseat Mullah Omar,' said one Peshawar-based former Mujahideen leader last week.

Infiltration

The two men thought they had done everything right. Wearing local clothes they had taken a bus from Peshawar and headed west up the Khyber Pass. It was only as they pressed through the throng of refugees and soldiers towards the blue steel gates of the border with Afghanistan that things went wrong. Suddenly, in sight of the ragged Taliban guards across the barbed wire, they were surrounded by heavily armed Pakistani police and agents from the Pakistani military secret spy agency, the Interservice Intelligence or ISI. Ibrahim Ghazi al-Hamzi and Saleh al-Hajaili, two young Saudi Arabians on their way to join al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, were under arrest.

It was late October. Their mistake had been not to keep up with the rapidly shifting politics of Pakistan. A cursory glance at the local newspapers would have told them that they were not the first such volunteers to be seized. In a raid in Peshawar's quiet University Town neighbourhood, where Bin Laden himself was based during the war against the Russians, five Arabs had been arrested a few days earlier. In recent weeks, ISI sources claim, dozens of young Muslims heading from the Middle East to Afghanistan have been stopped and held by Pakistani authorities. One large group, which the ISI say have links to al-Qaeda, were stopped on their way into Afghanistan the eve of the 11 September attacks.

The arrests of men like al-Hamzi and al-Hajaili is a clear indication of the determination of President Pervez Musharraf's government to crack down on extremists. So far several senior firebrand clerics have been arrested, a number of Islamic organisations banned and demonstrations of dissent swiftly dealt with. Yet, though he has the support of the vast bulk of the army and most civilians, Musharraf cannot be entirely certain of the backing of one key organisation: the ISI.

'They are a state within a state,' said one Western diplomat last week. 'The ISI is the only institution powerful enough to dare to disobey the President.' Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, diplomats say, makes that a serious cause for concern.

Musharraf himself is well aware that the ISI, set up on Pakistan's independence in 1948 and modelled on eastern bloc intelligence services, plays a crucial role in the current crisis. One of his first acts following 11 September was to replace its head with a personal friend. However he still cannot rely on the agency's total loyalty.

The ISI grew rich and powerful during the war against the Russians. The then President Zia ul Haq demanded, as a condition of his support, that the agency be charged with the distribution of American aid and weapons to the mujahideen.

That allowed the ISI to develop formidable contacts in Afghanistan as well as a lucrative sideline in arms and drug-dealing.

In 1989 the Soviet Union pulled out. To ensure Pakistani interests in the mayhem the ISI funnelled aid to their favourites, the hardliners of the Gulbuddin Hekmatyrar's Hezb-e-Islami. Then, from 1994, they backed the newly formed Taliban. Many Taliban recruits were trained in camps run by extremist religious organisations - many linked to the ISI - in Pakistan.

Now the same men who nursemaided the Taliban are the men the Americans hope will destroy the movement. The ISI are the only people with the contacts and knowledge - the CIA had only a single Afghan analyst until two months ago, and no one who spoke any of the various Afghan languages - the Americans so desperately need. Now the ISI is being asked to dismantle its creation and share all intelligence on the Taliban with Washington.

'Musharraf is asking Dr Frankenstein to kill the monster, a monster that shares its creators' flesh and blood and opinions,' said one Western diplomat. 'It's very hard for them to do it, and will be a very unpopular murder.'

To make matters worse there is considerable sympathy for bin Laden among many ISI elements. Bin Laden himself referred to 'government agencies' in Pakistan who 'have thankfully been guided by Allah'. It was clear whom he meant. The result has been a bizarre mixture of measures, some which have helped the Taliban, others which have hindered them. Though the ISI has been happy to arrest Arabs it has been equally happy to permit thousands of heavily armed pro-Taliban volunteers from Pakistan's Pashtun tribes to cross the border. In Afghanistan's Kunar province, a secret massive recruitment and fundraising drive for the Taliban has been undertaken by an extremist group called Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (the war party of the prophet) that is known for its close links to the ISI. The group was formed by the intelligence service to fight in Kashmir and has only recently switched its attention to Afghanistan. At least 5,000 Pakistani tribesmen have also been permitted to cross the border to fight for the Taliban in the past week.

And there has been material assistance, too. On 16 October, according to one border tribal chieftain, 35 top of the range twin-cab pick up trucks - the favoured mode of transportation for the Taliban military - were driven over the high mountain passes from Bajaur in Pakistan into Kunar. 'It could not have happened without ISI sanction,' the chieftain told The Observer .

Similarly, two attempts to buy weapons for Abdul Haq's ill-fated expedition into Afghanistan were foiled by Pashtun tribesmen from the fierce Afridi tribe - almost certainly acting on ISI orders. First 75 Haq supporters in a training camp near the border town of Parachinar were abducted and roughed up by the Afridis. Then, a few days later, men trying to buy weapons for the warlord's venture were 'arrested' by the tribesmen. However, when a poorly armed Haq set off for Afghanistan with a mere 19 followers, he successfully negotiated several Pakistani checkposts - and the Afridis - without difficulty.

Analysts say that Karzai's trip would have been similarly impossible without the involvement of the agency. ISI policy, according to Western diplomatic sources, is this: 'If they can get rid of Bin Laden and his Arabs and possibly Mullah Omar but keep everything else like it is now, they'll be happy.'

'That's why they've been arresting the foreign extremists but also making sure the Taliban aren't faced with any serious internal or external threat. The last thing the ISI want is the Northern Alliance, backed by the Indians, the Russians, the central Asian republics and the Iranians, making big gains at the Taliban's expense.'

Whatever happens, it is likely to be too late for the followers of Hamid Karzai. The Taliban claimed yesterday that they had hanged three tribal leaders who had backed his rebellion in Kandahar. Often the only visible evidence of the secret war are the corpses.

· Additional reporting: Ed Vulliamy, New York, and Peter Beaumont, London

-------- terrorism

Guns Won't Win the Afghan War

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/opinion/04MEAR.html

CHICAGO- Neither the current bombing campaign nor the deployment of American ground forces to Afghanistan offers good military options for dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. A better approach would emphasize ground-level diplomacy, with open wallets, among Pashtun leaders in central and southern Afghanistan, the fullest use of Pakistani intelligence and influence, and selective military actions. The moment for dramatic demonstration of American military power has passed. Our resolve must now be expressed through many careful steps, or we will never achieve the victory we seek against Al Qaeda.

American airpower is of limited use because there are few valuable targets to strike in an impoverished country like Afghanistan. Taliban ground forces are hard to locate and destroy from the air because, in the absence of a formidable ground opponent, they can easily disperse. Furthermore, the inevitable civilian casualties caused by the air assault are solidifying Taliban support within Afghanistan and eroding support elsewhere for the American cause. Britain's defense minister, Geoff Hoon, recently warned that public opinion in Britain, America's most loyal ally, is turning against the war because of the bombing campaign. This will only worsen in the coming winter as refugees die from cold and starvation and the American air war is blamed.

Nor is the Northern Alliance likely to deliver victory. It is despised by many Afghans (and Pakistan), and the Taliban outnumber it by about three to one. Alliance soldiers are poorly led, trained and equipped. Despite recent talk about how the Northern Alliance would capture Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, it has launched no major offensives. Indeed, the Alliance may be losing ground to the Taliban, even with American air support.

The bleak prospects have led some to call for deploying large contingents of American ground forces. Senator John McCain has advocated this strongly. But the Bush administration will only make a bad situation worse if it follows the senator's advice.

For starters, it is not clear how the United States would get a large army into land-locked Afghanistan any time soon. Some light infantry troops could be flown into Uzbekistan or makeshift airfields in Afghanistan. But mechanized forces, which are essential for gaining military superiority, would have to be moved across either Pakistan or Russia and Uzbekistan to reach Afghanistan. It seems unlikely that any of these states will agree to such an arrangement, which would be a logistical nightmare in any case.

The United States would also run the risk that China and Iran, both of which are suspicious of Washington's motives and share borders with Afghanistan, would try to undermine the war effort out of fear that a victory might mean a permanent American military presence on their borders.

Even if logistical and diplomatic problems can be overcome and ground forces are deployed in Afghanistan, our problem is not solved. The American expeditionary force would easily rout the Taliban in a conventional war - which is why there would not be one. The Taliban would launch a guerrilla resistance from the countryside. It is unlikely that the United States could win this armed struggle at any reasonable cost. Afghanistan is ideally suited for guerrilla warfare, as the Soviets discovered in the 1980's.

If history is any guide, most Afghans would oppose an American invasion and fight the foreign occupiers, probably with substantial help from "freedom fighters" from around the Arab and Islamic world. Finally, to stand any chance of winning the guerrilla war the United States would have to employ brutal tactics, further alienating support within and outside the Muslim world just when we would most need it to destroy the far-flung Al Qaeda.

Afghanistan is four times the size of South Vietnam, 60 times the size of Kosovo. Victory in Afghanistan would probably require at least 500,000 troops. (The initial peacekeeping deployment in Kosovo was 50,000 troops.) Such a large force would be needed in Afghanistan because the United States would have to control most of the countryside as well as the major towns and cities. Otherwise the Taliban and Al Qaeda would be free to operate in those areas outside American control.

In short, it makes little sense to continue the current bombing campaign or to send American ground forces into Afghanistan. The best available strategy for the United States is to use the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in mid-November, as an excuse to halt the bombing campaign and pursue a different strategy. Specifically, the Bush administration should rely on bribery, covert action, dissemination of the American message by radio to Afghans and increased humanitarian aid, particularly to refugees, to break apart the Taliban and replace it with a regime that does not support Al Qaeda. The key to undoing the Taliban is to sow dissension within its ranks by offering carrots - bribes and positions in a new government - to elements that might defect. American policymakers should enlist Pakistan's assistance in this effort, and they should also work with the various factions in Afghanistan to create a framework for a broad coalition government.

The principal target is Al Qaeda, and the United States should not rest until it has destroyed that terrorist organization. Removing the Taliban from power, and discouraging states like Somalia and Sudan from taking in Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists, are major steps in that direction. But probably the most important ingredient in the war against Al Qaeda is good intelligence, which will allow the United States to locate the terrorists and strike at them with deadly force when the time is right - and to locate, protect and reward those who come to the American side. The Bush administration should devote abundant resources to improving America's intelligence capabilities and to buying information on the terrorists from other governments.

Americans must face a hard reality: massive military force is not a winning weapon against these enemies. It makes the problem worse. In contrast, a strategy that emphasizes clever diplomacy, intelligence-gathering, and carefully selected military strikes might produce success eventually if we pursue it with patience and tenacity.

This is not terribly heartening. But it is the least bad alternative at the moment, and international politics is often about choosing among lousy alternatives.

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Echoes of Sept. 11 on the Rio Grande

New York Times
November 4, 2001
LOS EBANOS JOURNAL
By SAM DILLON Brad Doherty
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04BORD.html

The hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, Tex., provides the only cross- river service for 45 miles along a stretch of the Rio Grande.

LOS EBANOS, Tex., Nov. 2 - Turn off Route 83, the highway that parallels the Rio Grande here; head south through a stretch of sorghum fields and mesquite; and the road ends at this bucolic river crossing between Texas and Mexico.

A flat-bottomed raft ferries three cars at a time through the curling eddies of the Rio Grande. Five Mexican boatmen earn $10 a day to haul the craft back and forth, heaving hand over hand on a rope.

Routines have changed little since President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated this river ford as one of the 43 official crossings on the Southwest border, and it remains one of the country's richest pockets of local tradition. Yet the echoes of terrorism reverberate even here. Like the rest of America, Los Ebanos is on highest alert, at least officially. "We've refocused our mission," said Leopoldo Reyes, the baby- faced 41-year-old United States Customs Service official who oversees the crossing, and whose agents used to focus largely on drug interdiction. "Now we're looking mainly for weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Reyes watched as two cars and a pickup truck rumbled off the ferry onto Texas soil and up a dirt track for inspection. Agents ordered trunks opened and hoods lifted, and shined flashlights behind car seats and under tarpaulins.

They found no weapons of mass destruction during this search. One woman had returned from Mexico with a Batman piñata for her son's birthday. Another was transporting a load of nopal cactus.

Still, Mr. Reyes and the other customs and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents are keeping their guard up, with sentries watching the crossing 24 hours a day, although the ferry runs only from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Each day about 150 vehicles use the ferry, which provides the only cross-river service for 45 miles along this stretch of the Rio Grande.

"We've got one advantage here," Mr. Reyes said. "In a small place like this our agents know immediately whether you're from the area. But everybody's getting more scrutiny, no matter how well we know them."

Despite the increased security, not all residents here seem to have focused much on America's terrorist emergency. For instance, Alberto Simo, the 83-year-old landowner who collects the $1.50 ferry toll from motorists heading into Mexico, said he simply could not connect when, a few weeks back, he watched a television report on the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It just didn't come into my mind," Mr. Simo said, gazing at a visitor from beneath the brim of a battered gray Stetson. The terrorism seemed far away, beyond the frontiers of comprehension, he said.

Hands slapped at gnats as motorists and pedestrian crossers, waiting for the ferry, gathered under a grove of gnarled ebony trees, for which the settlement is named. They mostly ignored the egret stalking through the water grasses just off shore. Talk drifted from the price of tortillas to county politics.

Nobody mentioned the national emergency until a reporter raised the issue, and then some comments revealed a hazy grasp of events.

"I heard there's a war because an old man with a beard ordered the death of the people in those towers," said Eligio Flores Sanchez, 66, who lives in the Mexican settlement across from Los Ebanos but picks up trash at the ferry site for the Customs Service. "That old man struck without warning - what infamy!"

If terrorism seems distant from the borderlands, the region's artists have nonetheless begun to assimilate Sept. 11 into popular culture. Out on the ferry in midriver, a car radio was blasting ranchera music, the guitar-and-accordion genre featuring ballads, known in Spanish as corridos. This afternoon a singer on a Spanish-language broadcast from a border station crooned "Black 11th," a corrido recounting the World Trade Center attack: Translated, one stanza recalled:

It was September 11, when the tragedy happened,

On a Tuesday morning, the two towers were flattened

Two planes destroyed the pride of Manhattan.

Later, ferry operations closed for the day. The boatmen chained the steel craft to a stake and paddled a skiff back to the Mexican shore. And at a country store 200 yards from the river, David Ramirez, the Texas-born proprietor, sipped an afternoon beer with David Garza, his cousin.

Talk shifted to Afghanistan.

"Bush is being too much of a gentleman," said Mr. Garza, whose infantry experiences in Vietnam cultivated strong opinions about military affairs. "We shouldn't give bin Laden any more time to get organized. Otherwise, he'll get the upper hand."

Could the long arm of terrorism reach out to touch an out-of-the-way place like Los Ebanos? Mr. Ramirez noted that some of the humanitarian food being airlifted into Afghanistan was packaged in the nearby border city of McAllen.

"That could make us a target," he said. But then he reconsidered.

"I don't really think we're at much risk of terrorism here."

---

More and More, War Is Viewed as America's

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Agence France-Presse
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/international/04ABRO.html

A concert, top, dedicated to victims of terrorism throughout the world drew thousands of people in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Protesters in Santiago, Chile, above, held pictures of injured Afghan children and slogans that read "We are not terrorists" and "No to the United States war."

PARIS, Nov. 3 - Whatever doubts the world's intellectuals and politicians may raise about America's war on terror, the world's people do not seem to be voting with raised fists - yet.

Despite a war in Afghanistan that has dropped thousands of bombs and killed some civilians, there have been no devastating anti-American riots; there is forbearance, as sympathy for the victims of Sept. 11 still lingers.

However, if the people follow where intellectuals and editorialists are leading, that will change soon. Portraits of the United States as a lonely, self-absorbed bully taking out its rage on defenseless Afghanistan are on the rise.

More and more, the war is being seen abroad as "America against Osama," not, as the Bush administration would prefer, "All of us against terrorism." The intense Sept. 12 rush of "We are all Americans" seems to have faded in the breasts of all but Tony Blair, the prime minister of Britain, who continues to jet around the globe more actively than American leaders themselves to recruit support for the cause.

T-shirts lionizing Osama bin Laden are hits with those who feel themselves the world's dispossessed and see the terrorists striking a blow against an overweening superpower: in Algerian-populated suburbs of Paris and the Cape Flats of South Africa, in the streets of Cairo and Jakarta.

Newspapers in the Arab world have been full of references to America's "Zionist- controlled press" and to the common rumors that no Jews died on Sept. 11 and that America thinks Afghanistan has oil.

But there are also calmer, more considered Muslim voices, pondering the wisdom and consequences of America's actions now.

In the Egyptian newspaper Al Gomhuria, Samir Ragab, who is said to be close to President Hosni Mubarak, asked: "Where are the Americans now? We all thought they were superhuman, equipped with invincible power, wealth and the ability to manipulate." Because Americans bomb while being unable to catch Mr. bin Laden, he said, "innocent civilians in Afghanistan who complain that they have not tasted beef for three years are suffering most of the casualties."

A Turkish editor and a Saudi royal counselor agreed that the bombing was hurting America more than the Taliban. "As long as the U.S. keeps killing civilians, it will not differ from the organizations it is fighting against - the only difference is that the U.S. apologizes," said Ismet Berkan, editor of Radikal.

Ihsahn Ali Bu-Hulaiga, a Saudi adviser, said 99 percent of the Afghans were innocents, and added: "We watch what happens in Afghanistan and we feel bad, and the following item in any newscast is that the Israelis killed X number of Palestinians or destroyed so many houses. It sends the message to us Arabs."

Because no other country has had a huge terrorist attack, because the hundreds of overseas envelopes that spilled powder have turned out - so far - to be hoaxes, not anthrax, the fear so widely felt in the United States has not spread elsewhere in the world. Instead, scrutiny of American actions, past and present, is on the rise.

While Americans compare Sept. 11 to Pearl Harbor - forgetting perhaps that the world was already primed to hate the Axis powers by their invasions of Poland, France, Korea, Manchuria and Ethiopia - a stronger sense of "What does this mean for me?" has emerged.

Kenyans, who lost 207 people in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, which is attributed to Mr. bin Laden, wonder what took America so long. But other Africans are dismayed that the world seems to have lost interest in AIDS, which will kill 25 million, not 5,000.

Russians see parallels to Chechnya and are ready to see America strike as brutally as they do there. The Japanese agonize over whether to send troops. The Chinese, who have a border with Afghanistan, seem strangely silent.

While no one speaks so forcefully for America as Mr. Blair, presidents of countries usually skeptical of American militarism have played along. Vicente Fox of Mexico has offered America more oil, lamented the Mexicans who died, and said "we consider this problem our problem," although 62 percent of his people, in one poll, endorsed neutrality. Jacques Chirac of France offered troops, though cynics here say he used the nationalist card to make his opponent in next year's presidential elections look like a cranky Old Left naysayer.

However, in newspapers around the world, the backlash is under way.

The American notion that anger at America is simply resentment of its culture, that foreigners are unhappy because McBurgers outsell escargots or Stallone outsells Truffaut, is seen overseas as just more American smugness.

When foreign writers complain about America now, their complaints are quite specific, and foreign-policy oriented: America should not silently let the Israelis commit assassinations, bulldoze houses and colonize Palestinian land; America should pay attention to Muslim fury that American troops occupy the land of the Prophet Muhammad; America should not bomb dirt-poor Afghan cities with no antiaircraft defenses.

When old sores are scratched, they are usually about American foreign policies: Alfredo Pita, a Peruvian writer, recalled that the 1973 coup encouraged by Richard Nixon that killed Chile's elected president, Salvador Allende, also began on Sept. 11.

Eduardo Galeano, a Mexican journalist, asked why 5,000 New York deaths were televised, but not the deaths of 200,000 Guatemalans "sacrificed not by Muslim fanatics but by terrorist militias supported by the successive American governments."

A commentary in Britain's left- leaning Guardian newspaper said the United States had been "training terrorists" in its Fort Benning, Ga., school for Latin American soldiers and police officers for 55 years and suggested that the British bomb Georgia and also drop packages of nan and curry stamped with the Afghan flag.

America's newest "traditional friends" may be Eastern Europeans.

Poles, firmly pro-American, understand that civilians die in every war and are dismayed only that Mr. bin Laden is proving hard to catch, said Bronislaw Geremek, a former foreign minister.

A Romanian newspaper, Evenimentul Zilei, ran a stirring editorial, "Ode to America," that circled the globe by e-mail and was read to American soldiers. It celebrated American multiracial unity, its rush to help victims and its flag-flying, and described a charity concert of Hollywood stars as "the heavy artillery of the American soul."

Africa has its hands full with poverty and AIDS. Among intellectuals, hard feelings linger over America's refusal to attend the United Nations racism summit meeting, over high AIDS drug prices and, historically, over slavery.

Ethnic rioting in the continent's most populous country, Nigeria, took a strange twist after Sept. 11. Thousands have died in Muslim-Christian clashes in the last two years; now, Christians have taken to wearing American flags as war decor.

In South Africa, the issue "has polarized this country on racial lines, with whites supporting America, and anti-American feeling very strong among blacks," said Bongani Sibeko, 40, a black advertising executive who has lived in New York. He suggested that frustration with American policy in the Middle East reverberated far beyond the Arab world.

"I worked in the World Trade Center and the anger and fury I felt will never wane - but this is against the background of the U.S. role in the Middle East," Mr. Sibeko said. "It's very difficult to balance images of Israeli tanks and images of those planes crashing."

The angriest are the country's Muslims - mixed-race descendants of 17th-century Malay slaves. One radio poll found that 85 percent "sympathized" with American victims but 70 percent thought American policies were to blame and 60 percent thought Mr. bin Laden's guilt had not been proved.

"Of course we feel sorry for the innocent victims, but don't you think CNN is dragging this out to the hilt?" asked Aeysha Adams, manager of a nonprofit journalism training program, and a Muslim. "I guess they think they're the only country that gets bombed or where people die."

Exactly the same comment could be heard in Switzerland, one of the world's richest countries, with a very small Muslim population.

"The U.S. is not used to attacks on its soil," said Claude Monnier, the former editor of The Geneva Journal. "But 5,000 people - if you compare this to the world wars, or to Rwanda, there is a kind of imbalance. People are beginning to be angry here. They were moved by Sept. 11, but feel that the U.S. is being overbearing. Normally, the Swiss are pro-American, but in Afghanistan, we see a small and powerless country being trashed out by the U.S. As a small country, we have some sympathy."

---

TERROR BY THE BOOK / A SPECIAL REPORT
Hijackers' Meticulous Strategy of Brains, Muscle and Practice

New York Times
November 4, 2001
By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and KATE ZERNIKE
The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/national/04PLOT.html

The hijackers are said to have done much of their planning in Las Vegas; Mohamed Atta stayed at the hotel above.

American Airlines Flight 11 was in line for takeoff from Logan International Airport, the passengers already reminded to turn off personal electronic devices, when Mohamed Atta, in seat 8D in business class, dialed his cellphone for the last time.

The call rang aboard another sparsely occupied jetliner a bit farther back on the same tarmac, on a cellphone belonging to Marwan al- Shehhi, in seat 6C on United Airlines Flight 175.

The conversation between the two men, so close that they called each other cousin, lasted less than one minute - just long enough, investigators say, to signal that the plot was on. That simple communication was the culmination of months of meticulous planning and coordination that by 10 o'clock on the morning of Sept. 11 would become the worst terrorist attack in history.

With all the suspects dead and no conclusive evidence, as yet, of any accomplices, investigators have been left to recreate the architecture and orchestration of the plot largely from the recorded minutiae of the hijackers' brief American lives: their cellphone calls, credit card charges, Internet communications and automated teller machine withdrawals.

What has emerged, nearly two months into the investigation, is a picture in which the roles of the 19 hijackers are so well defined as to be almost corporate in their organization and coordination.

Investigators now divide the 19 into three distinct groups:

Mr. Atta, considered the mastermind, and three other leaders who chose the dates for the attack and flew the planes; a support staff of three who helped with the logistics of renting apartments, securing driver's licenses and distributing cash to the teams that would take the four planes; and beneath them, 12 soldiers, or "muscle," whose main responsibility seems to have been restraining the flight attendants and passengers while the leaders took over the jets' controls.

The leaders had researched their plans so well that they knew just when each of the four cross-country flights would reach its cruising altitude - the moment, investigators say, when the hijackers stormed the cockpits to confront the pilots with box cutters. The coordination was so thorough that each of the four hijacking teams had its own bank account, and each team's A.T.M. cards used a single PIN. The slightest misstep could trigger intense frustration: more than once last summer in Florida, when money transfers from abroad had not arrived on the expected dates, security cameras captured several hijackers glaring impatiently into A.T.M. screens.

The hijackers made a true technophile's use of the Internet, online chat rooms and e-mail. But when it came to their most crucial communications, they did what Al Qaeda's manual on terrorist operations instructs: they met in person. They chose as their meeting place the same locale where generations of American conventioneers have met to exchange information about their crafts: Las Vegas, where investigators say the most crucial planning in the United States occurred.

But unlike traditional conventioneers who cluster in casino hotels that replicate the Pyramids or the New York City skyline, the leaders and their logistics men stayed at the seediest end of the famous Las Vegas Strip, next to the "Home of the $5 Lap Dance," at a cheap motel guaranteed not to have surveillance cameras. They stayed briefly, only as long as it took to exchange important information, and apparently did not visit the casinos or any of the other purveyors of easy vice in America's City of Sin.

Most of the 19 hijackers, perhaps all of them, spent time in Osama bin Laden's Afghan training camps, investigators now say. Some of the Sept. 11 soldiers appear to have met there. And like Mr. Atta and the other pilots, the muscle did not seem to fit the profile of suicide bombers as desperate and impoverished young men. With the exception of one, they were all Saudis, relatively well off and well educated. While the leaders seemed to be Islamic zealots, the muscle did not, indulging often in pornography and liquor.

There is still much that investigators do not know. While they contend, for instance, that the plot cost nearly $500,000, they have been able to trace only half of it back to a suspected Al Qaeda source. They know where the leaders met, but not what information they exchanged - among hundreds of e-mail messages seized from computers in Florida and Las Vegas, there is no "smoking gun" or reference to the Sept. 11 attacks, a senior investigator said. The investigators say they are unsure how the soldiers were recruited. And they do not know how those men thought the story was going to end - if they were aware that they had signed on to die. "This went totally by the book," one senior government official said. "It has all the earmarks of Al Qaeda. It was well organized, far from a half-baked operation. They had good coordination, excellent communication that is hard to track, and a good, simple plan. Somebody did their homework."

Following the Manual

Investigators say their best theory is that Sept. 11 was a franchise operation, and that the leaders hewed closely to the dictates of Al Qaeda's terror manual.

The plot was first pieced together, they say, at least two years ago, in Hamburg, Germany, where three of the men who would later be leaders and pilots - Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah - were part of a terrorist cell. Three other suspected members of that cell fled in early September and are being sought as accomplices.

Senior law enforcement officials say the Hamburg plotters received the blessing - and, crucially, cash - from Al Qaeda, although investigators say they do not know who in Osama bin Laden's organization approved the operation. Several officials say they suspect it was Mr. bin Laden himself, and investigators have also said his top three associates were involved in the planning. "They met with somebody else who was calling the shots" in Germany, one official said. "But we don't know who that person is.'`

Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Atta received visas to enter the United States in January 2000, and Mr. Jarrah arrived in June of that year. Another pilot, Hani Hanjour, had been living in Southern California since 1996, and two of the logistics men, Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, had moved to San Diego in 1999.

Investigators are not certain how the Hamburg and California groups came together, but evidence suggests it was through Al Qaeda channels. Investigators say they have linked Mr. Midhar to the attack on the American destroyer Cole and perhaps to the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa.

The money for the operation began arriving at branches of the SunTrust Bank and Century Bank in Florida, in the summer of 2000. Mr. Atta received slightly more than $100,000, Mr. Shehhi just less than that amount. About half of the $500,000 used to pay for the operation, senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials say, was wired by an important bin Laden operative, Mustafa Ahmad, from the United Arab Emirates, and much of the rest from Germany. However, one official said the authorities suspected the money trail began in Pakistan. Travel records show each of the men making several trips in and out of the United States in 2000 and early 2001 - to Spain, Prague, Bangkok and Saudi Arabia. Mr. Atta took seven international trips; Mr. Shehhi took five. In this country, they all had begun taking flying lessons, in Phoenix, San Diego and South Florida.

By spring 2001, the 12 men whom investigators call the muscle had begun to arrive from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government, stung by reports that most of the hijackers had visas from their country, initially said that the hijackers used fake identities stolen from innocent citizens. But the F.B.I. says that it has confirmed the identities of all 19 of the hijackers, and that 15 were Saudis.

While the Saudi government has restricted the F.B.I. and reporters from interviewing the families of the men, the families of some of the foot soldiers have told Arab newspapers that their sons left within the last 18 months, variously saying they were going to seek religious counseling, on pilgrimage or on jihad in Chechnya. An investigator said there was evidence that these men spent at least a year in Al Qaeda training camps.

The family of one, Mohand Alshehri, said he had studied at Imam Muhammed Ibn Saud Islamic University in Abha, Saudi Arabia, for one semester. The father of two others, Wail and Waleed Alshehri, said they had studied to become teachers. Another, Ahmed Alnami, had studied law in Abha. The man the F.B.I. identifies as the third logistics man, Majed Moqed, studied at King Saud University in Riyadh, in the faculty of administration and economics, according to Arab newspapers.

Most hailed from poor villages where fundamentalism thrives. But their families appeared to be on the upper rungs; their fathers were religious leaders, school principals, shopkeepers and businessmen.

None had visited the United States before, and several appeared to speak little or no English. Once they arrived, the logistics men helped them fade into American life.

Hani Hanjour helped some rent an apartment in Paterson, N.J. Others cycled through one apartment in Delray Beach, Fla. Mr. Midhar helped some obtain illegal driver's licenses and photo ID's in Virginia.

The leaders and logistics men seemed to "buddy up" with their junior partners. When Ahmed Alhaznawi had an ulcerated leg, Mr. Jarrah took him to Holy Cross Hospital in Palm Beach County, Fla. At first, Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi lived together in Florida; Mr. Shehhi then moved in with Fayez Ahmed , and Mr. Atta with Abdulaziz Alomari, the last hijacker to arrive.

Most of the 19 obtained Social Security numbers, which allowed them to open bank accounts and obtain credit cards. They seemed, the F.B.I. says, to remain self-contained, with little or no help from a support network in the United States. Investigators suspect the help came from money men in the United Arab Emirates and several important lieutenants in Germany and Afghanistan.

Research and Planning

Al Qaeda's manual, which prosecutors say was used in the embassy bombings, outlines three stages of any operation: research, planning and execution.

"In order to discover any unexpected element detrimental to the operation," it says, "it is necessary, prior to execution of the operation, to rehearse it in a place similar to that of the real operation."

So beginning in May, the leaders and logistics men began taking trial flights on cross-country routes, though they never took the exact flights that they would later hijack.

After each flight to the West Coast, they flew to Las Vegas. And each time, they flew first class - as most of the 19 would on Sept. 11. Although they traveled first class, their accommodations were distinctly low- rent, at an Econo Lodge on the faded end of the Strip.

Although several of the hijackers are believed to have had numerous meetings in South Florida and Paterson, senior investigators say they are convinced that the most important American planning occurred in that dingy hotel room.

Investigators say they can confirm only one overlapping visit to Las Vegas, on Aug. 13 and 14, although they say the picture may not be complete. An Algerian who is believed to have helped train the pilots, Lotfi Raissi, drove from Phoenix to Las Vegas at least once last summer, and hijackers may have done the same.

Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Hanjour arrived together and appear to have spent most of their time together; Mr. Atta spent most of his time alone, disappearing into the dark cavern of Cyberzone, an Internet cafe where young men slouch in front of a half-dozen brightly lighted computer terminals, surfing the Web.

Investigators are not sure why the plotters chose Las Vegas. "Perhaps they figured it would be easy to blend in," one senior official said. The men were most likely following the manual's protocol: meet at a place that offers good cover.

It is not unusual for criminals to launder money in Las Vegas casinos, but surveillance tapes show no trace of the hijackers. Based on that and on interviews, the F.B.I. says it believes the hijackers did not gamble. Nor have investigators found any local terrorist cells there.

There was one curious disruption in their pattern, on the last trip east from Las Vegas. For the flights in May, June and July, the hijackers booked nonstop, round-trip tickets. But on that final flight, they bought one-way tickets to different destinations, with layovers, and they flew coach, not first class.

Investigators speculate that with their test flights completed, the hijackers now wanted to save money. They may also have wanted to see if they could buy one-way tickets without attracting attention - which is what they did over the next two weeks as they purchased tickets for Sept. 11.

Carrying Out the Mission

Those return flights put the men in position to execute the plot. Mr. Hanjour and Mr. Alhazmi flew to Baltimore, where they would soon join their soldiers in nearby Laurel, Md. From there, on the morning of Sept. 11, they would leave for Dulles International Airport and American Airlines Flight 77.

Mr. Atta flew from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., near where much of the muscle was living.

Investigators see a spike in the number of cellphone calls between the 19 in those final weeks. The hijackers bought plane tickets, each team choosing almost exactly the same seats on the planes. The Florida group moved north to Boston; the New Jersey group moved out of the Paterson apartment. Three hijackers wired money back to Mr. Ahmad in the United Arab Emirates.

On Sept. 10, Mr. Atta and his charge, Mr. Alomari, drove from Boston to Portland, Me.

Why Portland? Again, it may have been protocol: the manual warns against traveling in large groups and suggests boarding "at a secondary station" to deflect notice.

The next morning, they almost missed their connecting flight at Logan Airport in Boston, making it with minutes to spare.

As the hijackers may have anticipated from test runs, the planes hit cruising altitude after about 40 minutes. The hijackers, who had cared so little about learning to take off and land a plane, began their work.

Four of the five men on American Flight 77, the jet that plowed into the Pentagon, had helped with the logistics or are considered by investigators to have been leaders. It is assumed that several of the logistics people, including Mr. Midhar, also carried box cutters and served as muscle.

That plane, apparently flown by Mr. Hanjour, began to jerk wildly in the air. There may have been a struggle with the pilots, but investigators say it was more likely a result of Mr. Hanjour's poor skills - his flying school teachers would later say he had been a sorry student.

Based on one cellphone call from one of the planes, the F.B.I. now contends that the muscle began to herd passengers into the back of the planes, and forced the pilots from the cockpit by telling them it was a traditional hijacking, one where, if demands were met, the passengers and crew would be released without harm.

As the planes accelerated toward their targets, the muscle men, too, may have believed the same thing. This question remains the subject of debate within the F.B.I. Some investigators note that in surveillance photographs taken at a Portland A.T.M. the previous night, Mr. Alomari appears to be grinning, an expression more befitting a petty thief about to go on a stealing spree.

One F.B.I. official said the prayers found at the crash sites seemed to exhort the foot soldiers to be strong in prison - unlike the four-page set of instructions and prayers found in Mr. Atta's luggage, which made it clear he believed he was going to his eternal paradise.

Investigators in this country and abroad note that this would be in keeping with terrorist patterns.

As Al Qaeda's manual instructs, "The operation members should not all be told about the operation until shortly before executing it, in order to avoid leaking of its news."

------

Anthrax jokes could bring life term in prison

November 4, 2001
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20011104-90025940.htm

A Rockville, Md. man apparently had a practical joke in mind when he sprinkled white powder around the office of a co-worker. It's not so funny now that he faces life imprisonment and a $250,000 fine after FBI agents arrested him for threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction.

Anthony Salvatore Mancuso is the second person in the Washington area and the 20th in the country to be arrested on such federal charges.

President Bush yesterday said anthrax cases during recent weeks are "a second wave of terrorist attacks" on America.

"Those who believe this is an opportunity for a prank should know that sending false alarms is a serious criminal offense," Mr. Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "We will pursue anyone who tries to frighten their fellow Americans in this cruel way."

[In a related development, the Associated Press reported yesterday that Anthrax spores have been found at a third New Jersey postal facility. A sample taken by the FBI at the Bellmawr mail distribution facility came back positive for anthrax, authorities said.]

Mr. Mancuso was charged Friday with sprinkling the white powder - believed by authorities to be bleached flour - around his workplace late at night. He told law enforcement agents that the incident was meant as a "joke."

Federal prosecutors say U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has instructed them to throw the book at Mr. Mancuso and other anthrax hoaxsters such as Sharon Ann Watson, a Stafford, Va., postal worker who appeared in Alexandria federal Court Thursday on charges she sprinkled baby powder on open mail at the post office where she works.

"We are going to go after these people," Mr. Ridge said at an Oct. 18 White House roundtable. "I hope we throw them in jail, and we ought to throw away the key."

Miss Watson told FBI agents she spread powder because she felt post office management wasn't taking anthrax seriously enough, court documents say.

She now faces up to 25 years behind bars on felony charges of threatening communications and tampering with mail.

The justice system so far is showing little patience with people who cause anthrax hoaxes. Since mid-October, the Postal Inspection Service has received more than 8,600 hoax threats or reports of incidents related to anthrax. That's an average of 578 a day for an agency more accustomed to dealing with a few hundred such calls a year, said postal spokesman Dan Mihalko.

Beside the Mancuso and Watson cases, several others nationwide are moving toward federal courtrooms.

In Connecticut, a state environmental agency worker is charged with making false statements after he reported finding a powdery substance near his workstation.

Authorities say Joseph Faryniarz, 48, of Coventry, didn't tell the FBI the substance wasn't anthrax. If convicted, he faces up to five years in federal prison and $3 million in fines, double the cost of closing the agency for two days.

In Kentucky, Murray State University students Amy Wood, 22, of Benton, and Erin Creighton, 21, of Morganfield, each faces a charge of mailing a threatening communication, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Authorities believe the two mailed a letter with Arabic-looking writing and powdered sugar to a friend. Postal operations were halted temporarily after the contents leaked onto a postal clerk.

"Prosecutors want to grab these initial hoaxers and effectively hoist the wretch for all the other potential hoaxers to see," said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.

"The basic description of the charge [against Mr. Mancuso] is threatening the use of a weapon of mass destruction," said a federal prosecutor close to the Mancuso case.

"The language includes threatening the use of a biological agent."

Mr. Mancuso put a "malicious, wasteful and dangerous" burden on his colleagues at the offices of Financial Initial Systems at 111200 Rockville Pike, where he sprinkled the powder, the U.S. Attorney's Maryland District office said in a statement.

"The business was shut down, the whole operation was halted and the result was seriously disruptive," a federal prosecutor said.

A possible anthrax hoax has kept many on edge in the Glen Echo area of Bethesda since a plastic bag of white powder was found on the dashboard of an unlocked car Friday afternoon. Authorities said they expect test results of the powder to come back tomorrow.

Mr. Turley separates the pranksters into two categories: "dim-witted" jokesters who essentially mean no harm, and malicious people who would spread anthrax if they could.

"Prosecutors are very good at drawing the distinction between the guy who is just stupid," said Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County, Mo. "You have to be able to distinguish that from the guy who is truly malicious."

For his part, Mr. McCulloch, representing the National District Attorneys Association, favors throwing the book at all pranksters, regardless of intent.

Judges should have some discretion in sentencing because the prescribed punishments may be too harsh, said Martin Pinales, secretary of the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, whose Cincinnati law firm represents Jonathan Silz, an Ohio man accused of sending his boss white powder.

Anthrax scares have also rattled countries in Europe and Asia. In Europe, thousands of scares have turned out to be false alarms, malicious hoaxes or pranks that have backfired.

In Pakistan, government officials appeared in confusion yesterday about reported anthrax attacks, with President Pervez Musharraf confirming two incidents but seemed unaware that an official statement had already expressed doubts that they were little more than a hoax.

News of the hoaxes comes as the real biological attack on America has killed four and infected 13 others nationwide and as federal investigators chase "as many as 1,000 leads," according to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

In Trenton, N.J., Friday, FBI agents wearing hazardous materials suits raided an apartment, seizing bags of materials and taking one man in for questioning.

But investigators have made little progress explaining how a 61-year-old New York hospital worker, unconnected with mail-handling activities, contracted respiratory anthrax and died.

CDC officials said the anthrax that killed Kathy T. Nguyen was identical to that sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and New York news outlets, suggesting she was infected by spores that leaked from the known anthrax-laced letters during mail processing.

Environmental tests continued into the weekend at 259 postal facilities around the country. Four Food and Drug Administration mailrooms in Rockville joined the growing list of contaminated sights Thursday and in Florida, a sixth post office tested positive.

In Kansas City, the Stamp Fulfillment Center was closed after the CDC confirmed patches of anthrax were found on a trash container.

The center received a shipment Oct. 19 of 7,000 pieces of mail from Brentwood, that earlier processed the anthrax-laced letter sent to Mr. Daschle and where two employees died of inhalation anthrax.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.


-------- activists

Oden a Victim of Dirty Politics

From: "Paul" <webmaster@globalcircle.net>
Sun, 04 Nov 2001

As a member of both Green parties, I must protest Starlene Rankin's "USGP advisory on detention of a Green at Maine airport" at http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=83634&group=webcast.
Her failure to support a fellow Green manhandled by the military and barred from her flight raises disturbing questions about Rankin herself.

The GPUSA statement on Nancy Oden's airport ordeal needs no "correction" from Rankin, as it is clearly labeled "GREEN PARTY USA COORDINATOR DETAINED AT AIRPORT" (GPUSA) -- SEE http://www.greenparty.org/bangor.txt.

The real confusion arises from Rankin's attempt to conceal the fact there are TWO Green parties. She is NOW working for Green Party of the United States - GPUS, but in fact she WAS the office secretary for Green Party USA -- GPUSA -- until recently -- when she deserted under a cloud of allegations of embezzlement and sabotage against her employer, GPUSA. She fails to mention these publicly known facts. Also missing is any mention of her long-running war against Nancy Oden, the very subject of the Maine airport ordeal. Some have called Rankin's post dirty politics.

Yet Rankin made the astounding claim: "The Green Party of the United States is the only Green political organization organized nationally as a party". One can imagine why she would like people to believe that.

The confusion over party names is not the fault of the Green Party USA. The Green Party USA has been the Green Party for years, and held national conventions since 1984. SEE http://www.greenparty.org/intro.html. But it wasn't until July 1, 2001 that the Association of State Green Parties formed a national party called Green Party of the United States --GPUS. SEE GPUS own page at http://www.greenparties.org/fec/fec.html. "7.01.01 - In our annual meeting in Santa Barbara on July 27 and 28, the Association of State Green Parties will vote on whether to form the national Green Party of the United States" And SEE GPUS own page at http://gpus.org>/press/pr_07_30_01.html. "July 30, 2001: Greens Create National Party - Santa Monica, Calif. -- Green Party leaders today celebrated the formation of the Green Party of the United States".

The choice of party name, Green Party of the United States, is unfortunate. But of course the confusion was predicted by the 16-year old Green Party USA when GPUS announced themselves last July as THE ONLY Green Party of the United States.

For those interested in facts, there's an interview with Nancy Oden at http://www.wartimeliberty.com/article.pl?sid=01/11/03/1813233 -- AND The Bangor, Maine paper report is at http://www.bangornews.com/editorialnews/article.html?ID=44958. Even AFTER she was completely searched and cleared, and her baggage, she was STILL barred from her flight, or any other flight out of there. Officials did not report that she refused any search. IF she had, you can be certain they would have told the paper, and the paper would have reported it. The officials did not report any kind of disturbance or prohibited items on her or in her baggage, nor any abusive language or threats from her. Note: Nancy Oden is a 60-year old activist. Does anyone seriously believe they had any legitimate reason to bar her from her flight to her party convention, and forfeit hundreds of dollars she paid for her ticket?

Some political enemies are claiming it would be happening to others, if her account is true. But it IS happening to others, and probably far more often that we hear about. People lose their jobs when it gets back. But here's one such story, from a Sacramento reporter. http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2001-10-25/cover.asp#. A Green Party leader in Canada --Joan Russow, PhD-- was "tagged" as a terrorist threat and barred from the APEC convention THREE YEARS ago http://www.green.ca/english/news/nr980929.htm. She found out by accident that she was on a secret hit list.

We know thousands of activists have been stopped at border crossings, airports, train stations etc where WTO meetings were scheduled in different countries. We saw police using video cameras to record marchers. We know they use face recognition computers for matching records on people.

Bangor International Airport is a jumping off point for Canada. Nancy's enemies on the Right insist she wasn't on any target list. THEY haven't had problems with the law. Yet Nancy is a well known, highly visible activist in Maine, a veteran of Monsanto campaigns and antiwar efforts, among others, and her signed articles have been published in Maine newspapers. Of course the FBI knows who she is. They know who everybody is.

Unfortunately, Nancy's flight plans were public information in advance, and serious activists have serious enemies who work covertly with intelligence and law enforcement.

--paul, webmaster http://globalcircle.net
networking for ecology, justice, and all our relations


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Alternatives to War

New York Times
November 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/opinion/L04DOWD.html

To the Editor:
Re "These Spooky Times," by Maureen Dowd (column, Oct. 31):

Our government's so-called war on terrorism is not "about protecting ourselves and the way we live" just because our government says it is.

Within international law there are many alternatives to pulverizing Afghanistan from the air, which is not likely to make us one bit more secure; on the contrary, it is most likely to inflame passions against the United States throughout the Islamic world, and for good reason. Killing thousands of Afghan civilians by bombs and starvation will not help us, and it certainly won't help them.

And not all campuses are gripped by R.O.T.C. and C.I.A. chic; there is a burgeoning, vibrant and coordinated antiwar movement blossoming across the country.

ALAN MEYERS Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 31, 2001

--------

Just War or Criminal Bombing? The Rule of Lawlessness

Counterpunch
October 23, 2001
By Carl Estabrook
http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook7.html

The Bush administration has answered the crimes of September 11 with crimes of its own, potentially greater in scale. Launching a war on Afghanistan and killing poor people whom we do not know, because people we do know have been killed, is not only cowardly and vicious, it will also ramify in human misery. It's not only a crime, it's a colossal blunder.

It's important to note that Mr. Bush's war is entirely illegal. As Canadian lawyer Michael Mandel writes, "It violates international law and the express words of the United Nations Charter." The administration in fact seems to have a bad conscience on the point, nervously repeating that it is exerting its "right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter." It's the same transparent justification that the Clinton administration offered for its attack on Serbia, also not sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

Article 51 of the UN Charter (as a treaty, binding on the US government) says, "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." But no candid observer could see the US-directed attack on Yugoslavia as "self-defense" to "an armed attack ... against a member of the United Nations"; and, although the US was surely attacked in the present instance, killing Afghan peasants is hardly self-defense against that attack, or even an effective way to prevent future such attacks. In fact, it will have the opposite effect: Bush's war is the answer to Bin Laden's prayer, sending new recruits to resist this further insult to the Muslim world.

The US government's contempt for the United Nations and the rule of international law was illustrated once again the day after the bombing of Afghanistan began. The new UN ambassador, John Negroponte, who participated in the Reagan administration's terrorist war against Nicaragua as ambassador to Honduras, delivered a brief letter to the Security Council that managed to refer twice to "the inherent right of self-defense," and included a top-lofty line that would be comical, were it not murderous: "We may find that our self-defense [third mention] requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other States." Even the diplomatic Secretary-General admitted that that was "disturbing."

Some have argued that the atrocities of September 11 justify an armed response by the US against those who might bear some responsibility for the attacks or who supported them. Such a war would be a "just war," it is argued, with reference to a long legal and philosophical tradition. It is in fact a tradition worth examining, because it represents accumulated wisdom on when you might kill someone. (The first president Bush called his invasion of Panama "Operation Just Cause," and the original name for the current assault was "Operation Infinite Justice.")

But one of the requirements for a just war is that it be a last resort, that all attempts to settle the matter short of force be exhausted. That is manifestly not the case in the present instance. Not only has the Bush administration brushed aside the UN, it has also refused the offer from the effective government of Afghanistan to discuss the terrorist networks purportedly based in their country -- just as, it must be said, the US refused offers to negotiate from the other side before both the Gulf War and the Serbian War.

It has become clear in the last decade that military force -- killing people -- is the area in which the US has its greatest comparative advantage in competition with the rest of the world. The US government intends to make sure that attempts, however brutal and horrific, to equal its readiness to kill, will be met with even more killing. The US has simply refused to use the mechanisms of international law -- the UN Security Council, authorized to take "measures necessary to maintain international peace and security"; the World Court, which has rendered judgements about international terrorism (admittedly, against the US); and perhaps a special court constructed for the purpose, as in the cases of Lockerbie and the former Republic of Yugoslavia -- to pursue the perpetrators of the September 11 crimes and their accessories.

That would of course be easier, had the US not spent a generation undermining the UN. In that period the US constantly ham-strung the Security Council with vetoes, far more than any other country, and subverted the specialized agencies, as in Iraq. The US, the state that advertises itself as founded on reason and the rule of law, has transformed itself into an international outlaw, the greatest rogue state. Much of humanity may suffer from this crime for years to come. CP

Carl Estabrook teaches at the University of Illinois. He also hosts The News from Neptune, a weekly talk show on politics and the media. His column appears weekly on CounterPunch's website.


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