NUCLEAR
ALP pledges to block uranium mine
UK generator wants no-fly zones over its N-plants
Sellafield safety boss seeks to calm Irish fears
Test soldiers for depleted uranium, widow urges
Austria demands Czechs yield on N-plant
India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant
Peres confirms France gave Israel nuclear capacity
Testing Mishaps Cloud Missile Defense Plans
US ready for shoot-out if Pak nukes fall into extremists hands
Undetonated explosives found aboard Kursk
Russia boosts steps to thwart "nuclear terrorism"
Spent nuclear fuel pools seen vulnerable to attack
Meltdown In One Hour If Passenger Jet Hits Nuclear Power Plant
Our Nuclear Plants
TEST SITE RADIOACTIVITY
Raising the Stakes
Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee Public meeting
MILITARY
US Accepts Italian Military Support
Bombing the Red Cross
Cruel reality of life in land of minefields
Jails fill amid rising paranoia, says freed reporter
Foreigners Swell Ranks of Taliban
Pakistanis Tone Down Call to Halt Airstrikes
Weapons laws alter acquisition patterns
Firm hopes to restart production of anthrax vaccine
Indian government office tests negative for anthrax
Anthrax found in Pentagon; users assessed
Two Pakistanis held in anthrax case
D.C.
Musharraf, the Indispensable Ally, Grows More Confident
Bin Laden condemns U.N.
Defense budget meets needs
Defense plan doesn't adapt to new face of war
All talk, no action from enlistment calls
U.S. Campaign on Schedule, Generals Say
Doctrine must be updated to fit new war on terrorism
U.S. Makes Amends to Japan for Sinking of Ship
B-52s hit Taliban lines hard in the north
War in Aghanistan could cost U.S. $1 billion a month
ENERGY AND OTHER
South Dakota
S.1333 - Renewable Energy Bill In Senate
Oil Industry Seeks Federal Help Against Terror
Japan set to ratify Kyoto climate pact without US
Mosquito Adapting to Global Warming, Study Finds
Cancer-Stricken Chinese Village Tries to Pierce a Wall of Silence
POLICE / PRISONERS
Wanted - global authority to tame big business
Torture Seeps Into Discussion by News Media
White House, Dept. of Justice at Odds Over Arrests
Delaware
Ex-Air Force Sgt. Pleads Innocent to Spying
Conneticut
NEW YORK DRAFTS BIOTERRORISM RESPONSE PLAN
Saudi: Bin Laden extradition botched
Apocalyptic cult methods explain bin Laden
Loopholes for terrorists
How Afghanistan Went Unlisted as Terrorist Sponsor
Hijackers Depicted as Elite Group
Publishers Joust Over Merit of Terrorist Leader's Words
A Timely Summons
ACTIVISTS
Canaries in a cage
STOP US BIOWARFARE PROJECTS!
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- australia
ALP pledges to block uranium mine
The ALP says it is committed to blocking the Honeymoon uranium mine, north-west of Broken Hill.
Mon, Nov 5 2001
http://www.abc.net.au/news/business/2001/11/item20011105152352_1.htm
The proposed mine intends to use the acid in-situ leaching method of uranium extraction and could mean up to 70 jobs based in Broken Hill.
Its owners, Southern Cross Resources, were only a few steps away from gaining a mining licence from the Coalition Government when the election was called.
The Opposition's environment spokesman Nick Bolkus says the Labor Party has never made secret its distaste for the nuclear industry.
"The major point for the proponents of that mine to keep in mind is, and the public generally, we've had this existing mine policy, the two mine policy for quite a few years, and in essence everyone's been on notice that if there's an existing mine we would have to live with it, but factor into your risk assessment the chance of Labor winning government," he said.
-------- britain
UK generator wants no-fly zones over its N-plants
Story by Matthew Jones,
Reuters:
5/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13109/story.htm
LONDON - British Energy, the UK's largest nuclear power generator, last week urged the government to put in place no-fly zones over the company's power stations.
"We have been telling the government we want no-fly zones over our power stations," group spokesman Bob Fenton told Reuters.
The issue of nuclear safety has been thrust into the limelight after the September 11 attacks in the U.S. and calls on Thursday by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency for governments to improve security around installations.
Fenton said there was a lot of interest in nuclear safety especially after several media organistions overflew on Thursday British Energy power stations with small aircraft and helicopters.
"There are media stunts going on at the moment, but I am not sure what they prove. We could have told them there are not any no-fly zones," he said.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said some nuclear sites such as military installations and several power stations operated by state-run British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) did have no-fly zones.
"The CAA can put in place no-fly zones, but the request has to come from the government," a spokeswoman at the authority said.
BNFL said it could not comment on security at its plants.
A spokesman from the Office for Civil Nuclear Security, the body that oversees issues relating to the security of civilian nuclear sites, said no-fly zones were a safety rather than security issue.
"No-fly zones are not there for security purposes, they are there for safety purposes," he said, adding that security at all nuclear installations was under review.
The Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, which handles aviation matters was not immediately available for comment.
Putting in place no-fly zones to cover Britain's 35 reactors is a long way off what other nations with nuclear power stations have done.
Last month France put in place ground-to-air missiles at its La Hague reprocessing site and said it will use warplanes to shoot down any hijacked aircraft threatening nuclear installations.
The DTI said last week no military equipment had been installed at the country's nuclear plants, although this did not mean the possibility was not being looked at.
----
Sellafield safety boss seeks to calm Irish fears
5/11/2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13110/story.htm
DUBLIN - A safety boss at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant last week sought to soothe Irish concerns about the facility amid fears it could be the target of a terrorist attack.
Ireland last month launched a legal challenge to the expansion of Sellafield, and its longstanding objections to the plant just 180 km (110 miles) across across the Irish Sea on England's northwest coast have been fanned by the September 11 hijack attacks on the U.S.
"Whether it's a potential target or not I really don't know," said John Clarke, head of health and safety at Sellafield, in an interview with Irish broadcaster RTE.
"In terms of how safe it is, I believe it is a safe plant. I believe it's safe under normal conditions, I believe it's as safe as we can reasonably make it under accident conditions."
On Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said an act of nuclear terrorism was for more likely than previously thought.
A report commissioned by the European Union and leaked to the media two weeks ago said an accident at Sellafield could cause greater damage than the Chernobyl explosion in the Ukraine in 1986.
Irish commentators have voiced fears that a plane attack similar to those carried out against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington could result in a devastating release of radioactive material off Ireland's east coast.
"There would be potential for a quantity of radioactive material to be released, but I don't think we should overestimate what we are talking about here," said Clarke.
"Undoubtedly there would be significant damage, but what I have said is we believe the extent of any radiation released would be bounded by our existing emergency arrangements."
The Irish government reacted with fury last month to Britain's decision to allow the commissioning of a mixed oxide (MOX) plant at the Sellafield site, and vowed to pursue "every legal avenue" to stop it.
Norway also expressed concerns over Sellafield recently, calling in Britain to halt emissions from the plant.
Britain first established nuclear facilities at Sellafield - formerly called Windscale - in the 1940s, and the world's first commercial nuclear power station opened there in 1956.
-------- depleted uranium
Test soldiers for depleted uranium, widow urges
Monday, November 5, 2001
The Halifax Herald Limited
By Murray Brewster / The Canadian Press
http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2001/11/05/f160.raw.html
Any of Canada's military personnel who end up in combat zones during the war on terrorism should be tested for exposure to depleted uranium, says the widow of a Gulf War veteran.
"I am begging that this country and the United States take care of these people and their families," said Sue Riordon, whose husband died with a high level of the heavy metal in his bones.
"Immediately upon touching home soil, all of them should be tested. That would be the smart and prudent thing to do."
Riordon has been fighting a running battle with the federal government to acknowledge the apparent health risks of low-level exposure to the radioactive substance that some believe is linked to the Gulf War Syndrome.
She proposes a basic urine test.
"For our people in uniform, it would be an act of good faith," she said. "It's wonderful to support and stand together in a crisis, but there will be a crisis when they come home."
Depleted uranium is used to coat artillery shells and other munitions, making them harder and more likely to penetrate the thick skin of armoured vehicles.
Canada doesn't use the weapons, but the U.S. employed them in the Gulf War and Kosovo. It's not clear whether they're being used in Afghanistan.
The weapons became an issue in Canada a couple of years ago after an independent autopsy on Capt. Terry Riordon showed he died with a high level of the radioactive substance in his body.
Despite the public attention to the issue, the Canadian Forces said it's not interested in a specific testing program for returning veterans.
"When our soldiers go overseas they're not at risk, on a large scale, to depleted uranium exposure," said Lieut. Hollie Ryan, a spokeswoman for the Defence Department in Ottawa.
Canada has committed warships and aircraft to the fight, but the biggest risk of exposure would be for combat infantry.
If Canadian personnel came in contact with the depleted uranium, Ryan said, they would know what to do. They've been issued gas masks, for example, and the means to register radiation.
"We do not anticipate having to treat depleted-uranium casualties."
During the 1991 Gulf War, several American vehicles were hit by their own fire and soldiers ended up with pieces of depleted uranium embedded in them.
Those casualties are thought to be at the greatest risk for long-term health problems.
Another school of thought suggests just being in areas where depleted uranium shells have exploded could be a health hazard.
-------- europe
Austria demands Czechs yield on N-plant
5/11/2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13105/story.htm
VIENNA - Austria's vice-chancellor said on the weekend that the Czech Republic would have to change its position on the controversial Temelin nuclear power plant if it is to join the European Union.
Vice-chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer was speaking one week after Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel rejected the idea of a veto of Czech EU entry for putting the Temelin plant - which lies only 60 km (about 40 miles) from the Austrian border - on line.
"If the Czech Republic wants to become an EU member, the government had better change its stance on the Temelin issue," Riess-Passer said in an interview on Austrian state radio.
Even though Schuessel is against a Czech EU veto, his conservative People's Party opposes putting the plant into operation and would like to see it decommissioned.
But Riess-Passer's far-right Freedom Party, which governs in coalition with Schuessel's party, refuses to budge on Temelin and wants to keep the Czechs out of the EU if they open the plant.
"We will not yield on this," former Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider, who still dominates the populist grouping and sits on the policy-making coalition committee, told Reuters in September.
The Czech government, which hopes to join the EU in 2004, has adamantly rejected Austria's calls to keep Temelin out of operation.
The plant's first reactor was shut down on Wednesday after a leak was discovered in a pump, the CTK news agency reported. It quoted a Temelin spokesman as saying the problem would force the plant to go off line for about three weeks.
He did not say whether there had been any radioactive fluid associated with the leak.
Last month, the Soviet-designed plant boosted output at its first reactor to 75 percent of total capacity.
-------- india / pakistan
India to build Russian-aided nuclear power plant
5/11/2001
Reuters
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13104/story.htm
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 the weekend.
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 ($2.7 billion) for the power project.
India would spend 67.55 billion rupees ($1.4 billion) and 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 the southern state 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.
-------- israel
INTERNATIONAL ISRAEL-NUCLEAR
Peres confirms France gave Israel nuclear capacity
Outlook India
NOV 5 AFP
http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=21116
Jerusalem, Nov 5 (AFP) Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres confirmed that France gave Israel nuclear capacity in 1956, as the two countries, along with Britain, prepared to invade the Suez Canal.
"France agreed to furnish us with a nuclear reactor and uranium," Peres told a documentary on Israel's Channel Two yesterday.
Peres was director at Israel's defence ministry at the time.
Israel operates a nuclear plant in Dimona in the Negev desert, but denies that it possesses nuclear warheads.
-------- missile defense
Testing Mishaps Cloud Missile Defense Plans
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39569-2001Nov4?language=printer
By mid-August, the prototype interceptor for the Pentagon's national missile defense system had been packed up in a box and was ready for shipment to a test site in the central Pacific. All signs were pointing to an on-schedule flight test in October -- an important objective for a program long plagued by delays.
Then, trouble struck. A computer-run simulation of the system failed to score an intercept. The Pentagon put the October test on hold and spent weeks looking for what had gone wrong.
The culprit turned out to be nothing more than an aging capacitor in a software evaluation station. The interceptor itself had checked out fine. Still, as a result of the glitch, the next flight test slipped a month and a half and is now set for late this month.
The episode, recounted last week by program officials, underscores the challenge faced by the Bush administration as it tries to step up the pace of missile defense testing with a goal of having a rudimentary system in place in Alaska by 2004. It is a cautionary reminder, as President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin seek to reach an understanding at their Nov. 12-14 summit on missile defense testing, that the test process itself remains prone to setbacks.
Indeed, even if Bush and Putin make progress on avoiding a confrontation over the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, such persistent testing difficulties suggest that the creation of a workable defense system could still be some years away.
The administration's aggressive new development program, announced this summer, involves not only more frequent and more varied testing of land-based interceptors, like those pursued by President Bill Clinton, but also sea-based interceptors and airborne lasers that have yet to undergo their first flight trials. Key to finding out which of those weapons will work -- and therefore constitute the core of a nationwide anti-missile shield -- will be establishing a steady rate of flight tests.
In submitting its request in July for a $3 billion increase in missile defense spending to $8.3 billion in 2002, the administration published a test schedule that showed flights of land-based interceptors averaging about one every three months and flights of sea-based interceptors occurring with about the same frequency.
The plan represented a dramatic surge in activity over the lulls that had beset the program since the first intercept test of the land-based system in October 1999. In that test, an interceptor launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific chased after a mock warhead fired from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base and hit it.
Program officials moved quickly to a second test in January 2000. But that intercept attempt failed, and six months lapsed until the test was tried again in July. When that experiment also ended in a miss, officials ordered a review of the interceptor program.
A year went by before another test was run in July. It resulted in an intercept. But program officials made clear that the pace of testing would have to be accelerated to preserve any chance of deploying even a bare-bones system by 2004.
Officials with the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Pentagon group overseeing the development effort, play down the significance of the latest delay. They say it pales in comparison with past delays and expect to make up the lost time by February, when the test after the next one is scheduled.
"We're still within a month and a half of our original time frame," said Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the organization's director. "That's a big improvement. We're narrowing the length of the delays. We're also looking at much more minor technical problems than we did in the past."
Two other senior defense officials noted that the administration has purposefully avoided setting firm deadlines. Unlike the Clinton administration's plan, which proposed a specific Alaska-based architecture by 2005, the Bush plan commits to no particular system and no certain date. It simply outlines a broad research and testing effort, with flexibility to use whatever anti-missile weapon proves most workable.
At the same time, the whole premise of the program is that the United States needs a nationwide defense against ballistic missile attack as soon as possible. Critics have questioned the urgency, noting that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington could not have been prevented by a missile defense system. But administration officials have argued that the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon only underscored U.S. vulnerability to a number of threats, including a missile attack, that could have even worse consequences than the carnage Sept. 11.
"If these delays persist, the administration will find itself facing two choices," said Philip Coyle, the Pentagon official responsible for assessing weapons testing during the Clinton years. "Either they will have to push back the date for realizing any operational system, or they will say they don't really need to do as much testing."
Having scored two intercepts in four tries with land-based interceptors, defense officials maintain they have demonstrated the principle of using a missile to hit a missile. But the proposed land-based system is complex, requiring many moving parts and exacting coordination among interceptors, radars and battle management computers. And testing the system requires still more equipment to collect data and ensure safety, adding yet another layer of complexity.
Even with all the redundant measures built into the system to prevent the failure of a single element from denying success, the things that went wrong in two of the first four tests had no fallback. The incident in August highlighted the ability of a seemingly minor anomaly to drive the program behind schedule.
The land-based system is not the only one experiencing testing delays. The first flight of a potential sea-launched interceptor -- the Standard Missile III -- had been due earlier this fall but now is slated for January after postponement of some pre-flight ground testing.
After last year's flight test failures, senior officials in the missile defense group had expressed dissatisfaction with the quality control and production discipline being exercised by Boeing Co. and other contractors. Many of those concerns have since been addressed, officials now say, citing improved trends in the building and assembling of equipment.
But the Pentagon is exercising great caution in preparing for the next test. The simulation that failed in August did not involve the interceptor earmarked for the next test but a "sibling" unit being readied for the following test. Nonetheless, the next test was stalled while investigators, fearing a major software flaw in the interceptor, ran the glitch to ground.
"We found the problem, implemented the fix, then ran nearly 1,000 runs with the fix," an official said. "Then we went back and induced the problem in the test system and again saw the failure. Then we fixed the software again and ran another set of 1,000 runs.
"Here's a case of caution, I will say that," the official added.
The conservatism extends to the structuring of the next test. Despite criticism that the first tests have been too simplistic to provide meaningful proof that the system would work under real-world conditions, defense officials plan to make the next test a virtual carbon copy of the last before moving to more complicated scenarios next year.
-------- pakistan
INTERNATIONAL TERROR-PAK-US
US ready for shoot-out if Pak nukes fall into extremists hands
Outlook India
T V PARASURAM
NOV 5 (PTI)
http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=21126
Washington, Nov 5 (PTI) The United States will be prepared for a shoot-out between its Marines and Pakistani troops if President Pervez Musharraf is removed from power and the country's nuclear weapons are in danger of falling into the hands of fundamentalists or Osama bin Laden.
"In case of an uprising in Pakistan or if Musharraf is overthrown by forces friendly to Taliban or bin Laden, the 2,200 troops of the 15th Marine Expeditonary unit cooped up on the assault ship USS Peleliu, presumably itching for action, could be sent to safeguard Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials to keep them away from Laden or other terrorists, a media report said here today quoting sources.
Even unassembled nuclear bomb parts could be dangerous, "A radiological weapon," a conventional explosive device used to scatter radioactive material, would be nearly as devastating as an actual nuclear bomb, producing fallout that could render an American city uninhabitable for years, Newsweek said.
The material, said Newsweek, could come from a weapons programme or a civilian facility, such as a nuclear power plant. Pakistan's nuclear weapons are dispersed across several secret locations, and some elements of the armed forces surely would resist attempt by foreigners to take control of them.
"But if it comes to that," said Newsweek, "a shootout with Pakistan might be preferable to nuclear terrorism in the United States." Whether US Marines would actually be needed for such a task, and whether they could pull it off, remains unclear, the weekly added.
-------- russia
Undetonated explosives found aboard Kursk
USA Today
11/05/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/11/05/kursk.htm
MOSCOW (AP) - Investigators rummaging through the gutted carcass of the Kursk nuclear submarine were forced to retreat after they found undetonated explosives scattered around its forward part, a top prosecutor said Monday.
More than 330 pounds of explosives from torpedo warheads were blown into the Kursk's second and third compartments by the powerful blasts that sank the submarine, chief prosecutor of the Northern Fleet Vladimir Mulov said, according to the Interfax news agency.
The explosives were found Sunday night and safely removed by Monday morning, and prosecutors resumed their work, Mulov said.
The submarine was lifted from the Barents Sea floor and brought to dry dock last month - more than a year after it sank during a naval exercise, killing all 118 men aboard.
Investigators have pulled 56 bodies from the Kursk since it was raised, and 49 of them have been identified, Mulov said. Another 12 bodies were removed by divers during an operation last year.
Funeral services were being held around the country for the sailors whose bodies were recovered.
Navy specialists have also removed 16 out of the Kursk's 22 Granit cruise missiles, but had to suspend the work because deformations in the hull didn't allow taking the remaining weapons out by crane in a normal fashion. The navy will cut them out of the Kursk hull along with their containers when the submarine is dismantled.
Investigators hope that a close study of the wreck would help determine the cause of the Kursk's sinking on Aug. 12, 2000. The disaster was triggered by a practice torpedo which exploded, causing a detonation of combat torpedoes in the bow. Officials said the initial explosion could have been caused by an internal flaw, a collision with another vessel or a World War II mine.
Next year, the navy plans to raise fragments of the Kursk's bow, which was sawed off and left on the seabed because of fears it could break off and destabilize the lifting.
---
Russia boosts steps to thwart "nuclear terrorism"
by Clara Ferreira-Marques
5/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13108/story.htm
MOSCOW - Russia is stepping up training of personnel at its nuclear facilities to combat possible nuclear terrorist attacks amid Europe-wide fears that such installations could be targeted, a Defence Ministry official said last week.
"(We are taking) measures for the preparation of our staff so that they will be able to understand and identify the threats," Viktor Kholstov, head of the Radiation, Chemical and Bacteriological Defence Forces, told a news conference.
"There are detective stories about transporting nuclear substances. But we should take into consideration the possibility of such a situation in real life," he said.
Kholstov's statement follows a warning by the global nuclear security watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose director said on Thursday that an act of nuclear terrorism was "far more likely" than previously thought.
Kholstov did not elaborate on the measures, but other officials have said security has also been stepped up at the country's nuclear facilities.
The 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in then Soviet Ukraine killed dozens in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and exposed more than five million Europeans to increased levels of radiation.
NUCLEAR MATERIAL
Since the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991, there have been a number of cases of nuclear material being stolen from poorly-guarded former Soviet nuclear facilities, sparking grave concern in the West.
In 1994, three men were arrested at Munich airport carrying 363 grams (12.8 ounces) of weapons-grade plutonium from Moscow.
IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei called on countries to take an inventory of security risks at their nuclear power plants, given concern that al Qaeda - the militant group blamed for the September 11 attacks in the United States - had tried to acquire nuclear material.
A former aide to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, testified to a U.S. court in February that he had been asked to obtain uranium for the organisation.
Kholstov said Defence Ministry staff were being trained to deal with chemical and biological weapons along with the threat of "nuclear terrorism".
Russia inherited the world's largest chemical stockpile from the Soviet Union and is aiming to destroy its 40,000 tonnes of toxic agents by 2012.
But Kholstov said there were no biological weapons in the country, categorically excluding any link between the U.S. cases of anthrax and Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a grouping of 12 former Soviet republics.
Russia's chief medical officer Gennady Onishchenko told the news conference that the CIS had only had enough anthrax for medical purposes, and that trade in the bacteria was impossible.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Spent nuclear fuel pools seen vulnerable to attack
November 5, 2001
Reuters
Vibeke Laroi
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13103
SAN FRANCISCO - While the United States steps up security at its nuclear power plants, energy experts warn the plants' fuel dumps are far more vulnerable than reactors to attack by anyone trying to spread radioactivity.
"Spent fuel has never gotten the same attention as the reactor ... as a result you don't have the same level of security and safety as exists for the reactor," David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant engineer now with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Reuters.
"Because it's a softer target and has greater consequences, terrorists may elect to go after the spent fuel," he said.
Security has been tightened at the 103 nuclear power plants in the United States, the source of 20 percent of the country's electricity, since the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks that killed about 4,800 people in New York and the Pentagon.
Amid U.S. calls for increased vigilance at strategic sites worldwide, the head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency warned on Thursday that an act of nuclear terrorism was "far more likely" than previously thought.
Since Sept. 11, much of discussion in the nuclear industry has focused on whether an aircraft could penetrate the steel and concrete containment building surrounding a plant's reactor.
But nuclear experts are warning that guarding on-site storage facilities for these same reactors' highly radioactive spent fuel is also a critical issue that must be addressed.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the U.S. nuclear industry, needs to devote more attention to this issue, agency spokesman Victor Dricks said.
DE FACTO WASTE DUMPS
When most of the energy is wrung from the radioactive pellets used to run the power plants, the spent fuel is tightly sealed in water-filled, on-site pools. Water is needed to cool the fuel, which gives off heat and radiation for many years after it is removed from the reactor.
Over the years, the pile of spent fuel from U.S. reactors has grown to more than 40,000 metric tonnes, enough to bury a football field under 15 feet (4.6 metres) of waste material, the Washington-based industry group Nuclear Energy Institute said.
About two-thirds of this fuel is kept in underground pools, which provide far better containment than for the third stored in above-ground buildings.
But most of these pools are housed in far less robust structures than the reactor containment vessels, which are designed to contain the equivalent of a small nuclear explosion should things go badly wrong in the reactor core.
Though the walls of waste storage pools are thick, reinforced concrete lined with steel, the roofs are made of "pretty insubstantial material" like sheet metal, Lynnette Hendricks, director of licensing at Nuclear Energy Institute, told Reuters.
And while the pools lie within high security areas, there are fewer locked doors and safety barriers between spent fuel and the atmosphere than surrounds the fuel in the reactor.
Another concern is the vulnerability of the pools' cooling systems. "If you knock out that system, there are no automatic back-up systems," Lochbaum said.
If the water boils or drains away, the discarded fuel would overheat, either melting or catching fire, threatening to release a radioactive cloud.
POTENTIAL CONCERNS
The pools, initially designed as temporary containers, can withstand earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural calamities, but were not built to withstand acts of sabotage.
"The pools are not designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner, but they are relatively small ... it would be extremely difficult for an aircraft, even if deliberately targeting one, to hit one," said Dricks of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
When most of the country's nuclear reactors were designed in the 1960s and 1970s, it was assumed their radioactive waste would be shipped off to a central repository or reprocessing facility.
But commercial reprocessing was never successfully developed in the United States, and plans to open a permanent disposal site in Nevada have already been delayed 12 years until around 2010 - if it opens at all.
While legislators, power companies and environmentalists squabble over what to do with the spent fuel, storage space in the temporary facilities gets ever more crowded.
"Now (pools) hold considerably more (spent fuel) than in a reactor," said Gordon Thompson, a nuclear scientist and executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, an independent think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It only takes about five to six years of operation for a power plant to produce more nuclear waste than it holds in its reactor, and the biggest of these pools now holds seven to eight times as much fuel as in a reactor, said Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
---------
Meltdown In One Hour If Passenger Jet Hits Nuclear Power Plant
Rense.com
11-5-1
http://rense.com/general16/if.htm
VIENNA - A reactor meltdown could occur within one hour if a commercial passenger jet hits a nuclear power plant, according to a new Greenpeace report which examines the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to plane crashes in Germany.
Nuclear expert, Dr Helmut Hirsch, says in the report that in a worse case scenario of a commercial passenger jet hitting a nuclear plant, the reactor's containment would be breached, the cooling systems would fail, and within a very short period of time less than one hour - the reactor core would begin to meltdown. A catastrophic release of radioactivity on the scale of Chernobyl would follow. Dr Hirsch's report was released as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General, Dr Mohamed El Baradei, acknowledged that the world's nuclear reactors and other facilities are vulnerable to a September 11th type attack. An IAEA conference in Vienna today will discuss the threat of nuclear terrorism.
The GP report also states that, even if the reactor building remains largely intact, there is a high probability that as a result of the damage caused by the aircraft, a core meltdown could still occur. Such an event would be less catastrophic in the short term due to the containment structure, however, this would eventually fail - either through explosions caused by the meltdown (within ten hours) or within a matter of days due to excessive internal pressure. Dr Hirsch states that in the oldest German nuclear plants the reactor buildings had walls 60 cm (two feet) thick which could withstand a sports plane, weighing 10 tonnes and flying slowly (300 kmph) while others were designed to withstand a crash by a Starfighter warplane and the newest to withstand a crash by a Phantom fighter jet.
However the report points that the mass of commercial passenger jets and the amount of fuel they carry far exceed those of jet fighters. The F4E Phantom II jet has a take off weight of 26,309 kg with maximum estimated fuel reserves of 6,000 litres while a Boeing 747-400 has a take-off weight of 396,890 kg and maximum fuel reserve of 216,840 litres. "In general it can, given the current state of knowledge, be assumed that even in an accidental crash by a big passenger plane the reactor building will probably be broken into - if a 'direct hit' occurs - even if the facility involved is protected against the impact of a Phantom jet fighter.
This possibility cannot be ruled out even with a medium sized passenger plane (eg Airbus A-320). The probability is greater still in the case of a deliberately aimed crash at higher speeds," the report states.
Dr Hirsch questioned the safety of deploying air defence systems at nuclear sites saying the most effective safety measure would be to close down the nuclear plants as soon as possible. "Stationing military units at nuclear power plants for the purpose of air defence, a measure already implemented in France and the Czech republic, must be regarded as extremely problematic," the report said. "Apart from the obvious danger of shooting down aircraft which have no interest in the plants - planes whose radio and navigation systems have failed, for example - new risks are created as a result."
While the IAEA Director General stated that reactors were vulnerable to aircraft attack, he downplayed the threat posed by fissile materials - the ingredients needed for nuclear weapons - being used by terrorists to make weapons. However Greenpeace International spokesperson Shaun Burnie said nuclear weapons experts have stated the contrary, that the design and manufacture of a nuclear weapon is relatively straightforward once fissile materials, such as plutonium, have been obtained. During the last ten years global stocks of plutonium in commercial nuclear programs have grown to over 200,000kg. As little as 5kg of this plutonium would be sufficient for a nuclear weapon.
"The IAEA has two functions: to promote nuclear technology and to safeguard nuclear material. The two are in direct contradiction. Proliferation of nuclear power, the job of the IAEA, increases the threats of nuclear weapons proliferation and nuclear terrorism," Burnie said. "Instead of seeking to reassure the world that it can be protected from nuclear terrorism it would be more effective for the IAEA to admit that the risk is so high that reactors have to be shut down and that the trade in plutonium should be halted," Burnie said. "Future energy requirements must come from energy efficiency measures and renewable energy ."
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
- Shaun Burnie +31 629 0011 33 (London). Franko Petri +43 676 514 7246 (Vienna). - Dr Helmut Hirsch +49 5116063028
The English version of Dr Hirsch's report can be found here: www.greenpeace.org/~nuclear/germannucplantsafety.pdf
http://www.greenpeace.org/pressreleases/nuclear/2001nov2.html
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Our Nuclear Plants
New York Times
November 5, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/05/opinion/L05NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday
To the Editor:
While emergency response teams prepare for additional terrorist threats ("San Jose Emergency Plans Set Example," news article, Oct. 29), the nuclear industry and federal regulators are twiddling their thumbs. In tests by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission since 1992 to evaluate nuclear plant antiterrorism measures, 47 percent of reactors failed to thwart mock terrorist ground attacks.
President Bush's energy plan calls for dozens of new nuclear reactors that would create more dangerous terrorist targets. But we will never be prepared until we phase out existing reactors, establish a fast-track program to exploit the potential of energy efficiency and step up power production from renewable energy sources like wind, biomass and geothermal power.
SCOTT DENMAN BRENT BLACKWELDER Washington, Oct. 29, 2001 The writers are, respectively, executive director, Safe Energy Communication Council; and president of Friends of the Earth.
-------- nevada
TEST SITE RADIOACTIVITY:
Berkley requests cleanup
Letters say nuke dump would add to problem
By KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Tuesday, November 06, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Nov-06-Tue-2001/news/17384293.html
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., wants the Environmental Protection Agency to list the Nevada Test Site as a Superfund cleanup site and has said in letters to officials Monday that contamination from below-ground nuclear weapons tests could affect plans to bury radioactive waste inside Yucca Mountain.
But government scientists argue cleaning up groundwater layers tainted by hundreds of underground atomic bomb detonations at the test site would cost trillions of dollars and put workers at risk.
The result, an Energy Department environmental manager said, would be enormous amounts of contaminated material stored as low-level nuclear waste at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
In a letter to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, Berkley asked whether the Yucca Mountain Project would be halted if contamination from the test site and a high-level nuclear waste repository in the mountain would violate the EPA radiation safety standard.
Berkley also wrote Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and said the test site's existing contamination "has significant repercussions for the Yucca Mountain Project."
She asked Abraham to have his staff start studying how and when contamination from some 260 nuclear tests detonated below or near the water table will affect the groundwater system at Yucca Mountain, which straddles the southwest corner of the test site.
Government scientists estimate that roughly 130 million curies, units of radioactivity, were in the test site's groundwater layers in 1994, mostly as tritium, an isotope that will decay to insignificant levels after 1,000 years.
Earlier this year, the EPA set a 4 millirem per year standard for radiation measured in groundwater around Yucca Mountain that would be tapped for crops and dairy cattle over a 10,000-year regulatory period. A chest X-ray exposes a person to about 5 millirems of radiation.
"What has been overlooked in those standards is the possibility that the groundwater radiation from the Nevada Test Site might contaminate the Yucca Mountain groundwater system," Berkley said in her letter to Abraham.
Abraham spokesman Joe Davis said the department received Berkley's letter "and will be considering it and getting back to the congresswoman in some way shape or form."
A 1997 analysis by researchers for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the test site, said an attempt to clean up remnants from past nuclear weapons tests would be impractical. The cleanup would cost $7.2 trillion for open pit mining of the test cavities, the most effective method, while posing great health risk to the workers involved, the analysis said.
Bob Bangerter, the administration's project manager, said the 1997 study showed a cleanup worker would receive in just one hour the maximum exposure level that safety regulations allow for a whole year.
Monitoring the test site's contamination, he said, is projected to cost $1.5 billion from 2030 to 2130. The monitoring effort, which began in 1989, will cost more than $700 million through 2030.
Berkley said the projected high costs for cleanup and monitoring makes her case stronger for dealing with the problem now.
"Their numbers demonstrate to me that we have a potential environmental catastrophe on our hands. Couple that with the proposal to store 77,000 tons of toxic nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, and you now have a potential monumental environmental disaster," she said in a telephone interview.
"What you have is a site that does not comply with EPA standards. Consequently, Yucca Mountain should not be the site for the nation's nuclear waste," she said.
Designation as a Superfund site would place the test site among the most contaminated locations in the nation and would make its cleanup a higher priority.
Map at: http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Nov-06-Tue-2001/photos/site.jpg
-------- us nuc politics
Raising the Stakes
Bush Warns That Bin Laden Seeks Nuclear, Chemical, Biological Weapons
Nov. 6 2001
ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/STRIKE_MAIN.html
- President Bush warned Central and Eastern European leaders today that indicted terrorist Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was a threat to all nations and "civilization itself" as U.S. warplanes used a 15,000-pound "daisy cutter" fuel bomb on Taliban positions.
"Al Qaeda operates in more than 60 nations, including some in Central and Eastern Europe," Bush said in his speech this morning, referring to bin Laden's terrorist network.
"These terrorist groups seek to destabilize entire nations and regions. They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation; and, eventually, to civilization itself."
He compared the Taliban, the hard-line regime that rules much of Afghanistan and bin Laden's vision for the world to the fascist and totalitarian regimes that dominated Central and Eastern Europe for much of the 20th Century.
Bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban "try to impose their radical views through threats and violence," Bush said via satellite to a 20-nation gathering in Poland. "We see the same intolerance of dissent, the same mad global ambitions, the same brutal determination to control every life and all of life."
As Bush brought his message to the European leaders, in Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder received approval from lawmakers to offer the United States 3,900 troops to join the anti-terrorism fight in Afghanistan, though no final decision has yet been made on whether they would be combat, medical, support or transport personnel.
At the same time, the U.S. military has stepped up the intensity of its campaign against the Taliban.
Warplanes continued to target the regime's front-line troops, and dropped the 15,000-pound "daisy cutter," a weapon not used since the Vietnam War. The bomb, the world's largest conventional weapon, ignites in a ball of flame that incinerates everything within a 600-yard radius.
The bombardment of Taliban troops, targeted by U.S. personnel coordinating with Northern Alliance troops, helped the rebel forces capture several villages around Mazar-e-Sharif, a key northern city that the opposition has claimed it is close to taking for two weeks.
The U.S. presence on the ground in Afghanistan has more than doubled over the last few days, as the Pentagon tries to boost the outnumbered rebel troops' chances against the Taliban with more accurate bombardment.
After a meeting with Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes in New Delhi on Monday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that U.S. personnel directing strikes in Afghanistan had vastly improved the efficiency of the bombing campaign.
'We Are Watching'
A new phase has been opened in the propaganda war within Afghanistan as well. New leaflets being dropped in the country tell the Afghan people, "We are watching," and back it up with a photograph of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and the license plate of car he drives.
The Taliban are claiming a victory of their own, though. According to a report in the Afghan Islamic Press, an American helicopter was shot down near Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is the stronghold of the Taliban.
According to the report, the four servicemen on the aircraft were killed.
A source in the Defense Department Central Command Center denied the report and said no U.S. helicopter had been fired at in the region.
Getting Closer to the Target
U.S. military personnel are in Tajikistan studying three airfields to determine whether they could be used as bases of operation in Afghanistan, as bombing continued near the Afghan capital of Kabul, U.S. officials said on Monday. Despite denials from an official in the Tajik defense ministry, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said there is a U.S. team looking at air bases in the former Soviet republic whose borders are still guarded by Russian troops.
"In terms of the airfields in Tajikistan ... there is an assessment team in the country to do just that," Stufflebeem said in a briefing at the Pentagon. He added that there were also teams in "all of the countries that have offered assistance," studying whether bases would be suitable as staging areas for U.S. operations.
"Certainly airfields closer to Afghanistan would give us an advantage in being able to generate sorties," Stufflebeem said.
The U.S. assessment team in Tajikistan is examining bases at Kulyab, Khojand and Kurgan-Tyube, all of which are within 50 miles of the Afghan border.
Opposition Leader Rescued
In one military operation Sunday, the U.S. military and CIA helped to rescue a leading opposition figure from southern Afghanistan, just as the Taliban was moving in to capture and kill him, sources told ABCNEWS.
Hamid Karzai, a minister in the pre-Taliban government, was reportedly having success in urging tribal leaders in southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. But several of those he had met with were reportedly caught and hanged.
Officials said Karzai was flown to safety by a U.S. helicopter. More than a week ago, another opposition leader on a similar mission, Abdul Haq, was captured and killed by the Taliban.
The rescue mission comes as the United States has stepped up its presence on the ground in Afghanistan, with five U.S. military personnel reportedly joining a group of Northern Alliance fighters 40 miles from Kabul, to examine an airfield.
U.N. Says Taliban Shares Blame for Aid Problems
In other developments:
President Bush received a further endorsement of the U.S. military campaign Monday from President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria during a White House meeting. "We share the same suffering," Bouteflika told reporters afterward, referring to his country's struggles with terrorists and Muslim fundamentalists.
A spokesman for the Taliban regime said Monday that the world can expect a drawn-out campaign. "We are preparing for a long war," Education Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said at a news conference. "This power that the world calls a mighty force will face fiasco."
The Taliban Monday urged the United Nations to bring aid into the war-ravaged country before winter sets in, but a U.N. spokeswoman said that the regime itself is one of the main obstacles to getting help to the Afghan people. U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker told Reuters that until the Taliban guarantees the safety of U.N. personnel, no international aid workers will be sent in to Afghanistan.
The latest numbers of victims from the attacks on the World Trade Center, according to New York City officials are: 3,897 are missing and 499 identified dead.
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Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee Public meeting
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011105-672568.htm
The Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee (NERAC) holds a public meeting. Topics include Generation IV technology, use of fisson reactors in space, the role of nuclear energy in implementing President Bush's national energy policy and future NERAC activities. Location: Doubletree Hotel, 300 Army Navy Drive, Arlington. Contact: 202/586-5806.
-------- MILITARY
US Accepts Italian Military Support
The Associated Press
Sunday, Nov. 4, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20011104/aponline174059_001.htm
ROME -- The United States has accepted Italy's offer of military support in the campaign against terrorism, officials said Sunday.
Italy has offered an armored regiment, attack helicopters and fighter jets, and is also expected to make four warships available.
In all, some 1,000 Italian servicemen could be deployed, Defense Minister Antonio Martino told parliament last month.
Italy has also offered the use of specialists in nuclear, chemical and bacteriological warfare.
The United States formally accepted the offer over the weekend, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
The Italian Defense Ministry said Sunday that Italian forces are an "integral part" of Operation Enduring Freedom but gave no deployment dates.
The ministry said the government will seek approval from parliament, where it has a comfortable majority in both houses.
-------- afghanistan
Bombing the Red Cross
By William M. Arkin Special to Washingtonpost.com
Sunday, November 4, 2001; 8:17 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39407-2001Nov4?language=printer
At one o'clock in the afternoon on Oct. 16, an F/A-18 Hornet fighter attacked a warehouse of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, injuring a security guard and destroying foodstuffs, blankets, and plastic sheeting. The Pentagon quickly explained that the warehouses "were among a series of warehouses targeted ... because the Taliban used them for storage of military equipment." The U.S. did not know that the ICRC was using the warehouses, the Defense Department said.
"We felt horrible when we learned that the Red Cross ... warehouse had been struck," White House chief of staff Andrew Card told Meet the Press.
So horrible that at 8 o'clock on the evening of Oct. 25, two more Hornets dropped two 2,000 lb. guided weapons on the warehouses. The next morning a B-52 bomber delivered three more 2,000 lb. smart bombs. A third Hornet dropped another bomb that missed the warehouses and hit a residential area 700 feet to the south.
"The U.S. sincerely regrets this inadvertent strike on the ICRC warehouses and the residential area," the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) stated on Oct. 26. The Florida based command blamed "human error in the targeting process"--a euphemism, I guess, for the United States hasn't got a clue.
A week later, with reports of increasing numbers of civilian casualties and worsening conditions for the civilian population as winter approaches, we still don't have a good explanation of what happened in the bombing of the Red Cross facilities.
To many, the attacks symbolize American arrogance and lack of concern for civilian life. To me, the attacks more reveal a bankruptcy in strategy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may stress that Enduring Freedom is a marathon and not a sprint, but it seems that this kind of bombing cuts our Achilles heel before we've even run a few miles. High-level military sources tell me that the bombing of the Red Cross facility was both deliberate and justified and that the Pentagon and government are dissembling to protect fragile coalition partners. But both the air warriors and the Pentagon just don't get it. The road to success in toppling the Taliban or getting Osama bin Laden does not go through some obscure warehouse complex two kilometers south of the Kabul airport.
He Said, She Said
Why, you might ask, didn't U.S. officials responsible for selecting and approving targets know where Red Cross warehouses were? The Red Cross says that the facility was "clearly distinguishable from the air by the large red cross painted against a white background on the roof of each building." The ICRC says it "informed" the United States government of the location of its facilities in Afghanistan. It calls the attacks on a building with a Red Cross emblem "a violation of international humanitarian law."
U.S. military sources see the situation somewhat differently. They point out that the ICRC did not include a Kabul warehouse on a map of its operations in Afghanistan that was published on Sept. 21. They also claim that even if the Red Cross provided information about the Kabul facility to someone, the warehouses were never placed on any "no strike" target list by the State Department or CENTCOM.
Regardless of the Red Cross on the roof, U.S. targeters also say they watched Taliban military vehicles go in and out of the facility, and that there was growing general intelligence of how the Taliban was stealing supplies of non-governmental organizations for their own forces. What is more, sources say, the second attack was completely justified because the Taliban plundered the facility after the initial attack.
"We are not sorry for taking supplies away from the Taliban, and if the Red Cross thought those supplies were going to anywhere else than the Taliban murderers they are just plain foolish," says a senior U.S. officer directly involved in the bombing.
A senior Air Force lawyer further explains that it is conceivable that the ICRC did report to the U.S. where its facilities were in Afghanistan, but he says "it would not surprise me if certain things are not on the `no strike' list." The reason, he says, is that such a list "isn't intended to cover every conceivable thing that cannot be lawfully hit. Thus, for example, it would not necessarily list every school, hospital, mosque, etc. If a marked ICRC compound wasn't on it, the explanation may well be that it was assumed to be inconceivable to even think about striking it."
Nonetheless he says, "simply because something is not on the no-strike list, doesn't mean that it can be struck." There are "several filters" for selecting and approving targets, he says. In the case of dual-use civilian and military targets, there may be reasons, some purely political, not to strike them. In other words, there should be no assumptions that a target can be hit just because military activity is detected.
That is why the U.S. has officially apologized and why the British government calls the attack "regrettable." A senior Navy officer told me even if the targeters are correct on all points, "it was bad judgment to think that they [the warehouses] were targets."
The Weakest Link
I'll leave the legal black and white to the lawyers. But nothing is black and white when it comes to warfare. When it comes to air warfare, the troika of doctrine, strategy and targeting are key. Doctrine and strategy have become ever more sophisticated since the Gulf War, and weapons have continued to advance in accuracy while cost has declined. Targeting is the weakest link. At the Defense Intelligence Agency, gigantic databases of objects of prospective military value are created. For some countries, such as North Korea, the most militarily significant are finely understood. But most of the time, the U.S. finds itself with the unanticipated cases-the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait or the war in Afghanistan--where it really doesn't have a textured understanding of its opponent, or much information about the very things that the United States needs to know to prosecute precision guided air war. In the lingo of war planners, targeting is done "on the fly," with generic airfields and barracks from the databases targeted first while more significant targets are "developed" that "support" political and military objectives.
In the Afghanistan strategy, the bombing itself is intended not just to destroy the enemy's capacity but to generate new targets. By watching the Taliban's response to attacks and how its reduced operational security functions, the U.S. finds new places to attack.
In fact, the United States is not following a single bombing strategy in toppling the Taliban or finding bin Laden in Enduring Freedom. There is one effort to synchronize bombing of fixed targets with intelligence collection and special operations to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda command structures directly. Then there is a separate effort to bomb Taliban forces in the north and around Kandahar to weaken Taliban ground forces.
Bombing thus has to be seen on two tracks. The primary effort, even if it is not the main effort in terms of sorties and strikes, goes into finding and hitting the "critical nodes" and exotic places. This has been the leading strategy in all recent air wars - going after Saddam's palaces, the factories of Slobodan Milosevic's cronies in Yugoslavia, and now al Qaeda's caves in Afghanistan. This is a hypnotic and highly secretive enterprise, where the best intelligence, the best minds, and the best weapons are combined in hopes of delivering the silver bullet that will clinch victory.
Academics love to debate whether "strategic bombing" in this form is effective. But there is a much more immediate question in Afghanistan: Should the U.S. refrain from hitting food and blankets in the course of pursuing its overall war strategy, particularly when its very ability to run the quiet and true marathon depends on coalition support rooted in the credibility that precision war is sparing civilians? Since the United States is trying to build a future for an impoverished and angry Afghanistan, the answer is clearly yes. The U.S. should clearly refrain from hitting targets that cannot be explained in any way other than its marginal importance. The Red Cross warehouse should not have been bombed because such a mistake - even the perception of mistake - undermines an otherwise just and necessary war.
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Cruel reality of life in land of minefields
War against terror: Children
By Patrick Cockburn in Faizabad
05 November 2001
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=103216
We had just driven through the village of Jorm, a huddle of mud-brick houses surrounded by trees in an upland valley in northern Afghanistan, when we saw about fifty people running towards us in a sort of bewildered panic.
As they grew closer we saw that two of them were carrying children, their faces covered in blood, on their backs. We stopped and asked a man beside the road what had happened and he said a mine had exploded - one of the thousands of devices that litter this land after two decades of war.
Just outside the village people, almost all men, were milling about in ineffective confusion. Even in this emergency Afghan women did not leave their houses, apart from one old woman who was cradling a boy's head in her lap. She was wailing and rocking to and fro, but she had not even wiped the blood off his face.
We found that three small boys, not just the two we had originally seen, were injured. One of them, Barot Mohammed, aged 10, lay on the stony ground, bleeding heavily from wounds in his right leg where pieces of flesh had been torn away by the blast. His left hand was wrapped in a sodden brown bandage, but whatever it covered looked too small to be a fist. The boys were so drenched in blood that I could not see how badly they were wounded. One of them was half sitting up, clutching his stomach. None of the men, some armed with sub-machine-guns, seemed to know what to do.
Through our driver, Daoud, whose knowledge of English is limited to about twenty words, we asked where was the nearest hospital. They replied that it was in Baharak, a market town about an hour's drive away, but they had no car or truck.
I was with two other correspondents, one from France and the other from Spain, with whom I had driven in a sturdy Russian-made jeep through the mountains from the Panjshir valley north of Kabul. None of us knew much about first aid, or had any bandages, but it seemed possible that, unless the boys received help soon, they would bleed to death.
My two colleagues volunteered to stay behind in Jorm to make room for the children in the small jeep. We lifted them in, wrapped in blankets. None of the three cried out or made any sound other than a whimper, either because they were in shock or because Afghan boys are expected to endure pain without complaint.
Two older men also crammed themselves into the jeep. One, with a grey beard, was the boy's uncle. He said the boys were brothers. Barot Mohammed was the oldest and the other two were called Rajab Mohammed, 7, whom I had seen clasping his stomach, and Najmaddin, 5, who did not seem quite so badly hurt.
It was a horribly bumpy ride to Baharak. Daoud is a highly skilful driver and the dirt road, by Afghan standards, not too bad. But even so the boys were jolted up and down as he nursed the jeep across deep gullies where streams cut across the road. Rajab's eyes, deep-set and very dark those of like most Afghans, kept closing and his head falling sideways, so I thought he was dying.
The hospital in Baharak, a typical dusty market town, represented the best hope of safety for the boys. There were no lights inside. I walked through several rooms shouting for a doctor. I saw two women in the distance and explained about the mine explosion. They clucked sympathetically, but did nothing, presumably because they were not wearing veils. Finally a man appeared who said he was an assistant doctor. In a cluttered room with two operating tables he began to treat Najmaddin.
Another doctor called Dr Suleiman arrived and a German nurse called Mathias, an energetic looking man with long brown hair, offered to come and help.
With three doctors and nurses treating the boys I became more hopeful. When I asked the assistant doctor how they were he said "good, good" in an absent way. He and Mathias were working on Barot's right arm, which had deep cuts in it. But when they gently removed the blood-sodden bandage on his left hand, I saw that only the little finger was left.
Barot must have been holding the mine or shell in this hand when it exploded. It had ripped away four fingers, leaving white tips of bone sticking out of the flesh. "I'm afraid we'll have to cut away the whole hand," said Mathias, sadly shaking his head.
A little later Dr Suleiman revealed that Rajab had a puncture wound in the abdomen. He said both boys would have to go for surgery to a proper hospital two hours' drive away in the large town of Faizabad. As we left, Dr Suleiman was saying he would look in the bazaar for somebody with a car.
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Jails fill amid rising paranoia, says freed reporter
By Pierre Lhuillery in Peshawar, Pakistan,
Agence France-Presse
Monday, November 5, 2001
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0111/05/world/world6.html
The Taliban are filling their jails with political prisoners as they round up anyone suspected of favouring their downfall, says a French journalist released from the Islamic militia's custody.
Michel Peyrard, of Paris Match, who was detained on October 9 with two Pakistani journalists, was released on Saturday and handed over to Pakistani and French officials at the Torkham crossing point.
Peyrard, who had been held in the eastern city of Jalalabad, said he was able to interview numerous fellow detainees and build a dossier on the security situation there. He was arrested after sneaking into Afghanistan dressed in a burqa, the traditional head-to-toe garment worn by Afghan women in public, and was held in one of an estimated six detention centres in Jalalabad.
"These centres are for political detainees whose numbers were growing all the time. There were clearly organised roundups taking place," Peyrard said in Peshawar, north-western Pakistan.
"The main prison in Jalalabad is full. I think there are now around 400 prisoners, compared to 150 on September 11."
Many had supported the Taliban when they came to power in 1996 but were now suspected of plotting against the Islamic militia, he said.
"Anyone suspected of putting forward a possible alternative [to the Taliban] has been rounded up and put in prison."
Among them Peyrard saw a significant number of supporters of the exiled Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Mr Hekmatyar earned notoriety for his non-stop rocketing of Kabul after the collapse of the Moscow-backed regime in 1992 until the Taliban pushed him out of the mountains south of the capital in 1995. The ethnic Pashtun and Sunni Muslim militant is living in exile in Iran.
Peyrard also said his Taliban captors seemed to be holding up well in the face of the United States-led air strikes.
Despite obvious fears during the initial days of the bombardment, the Taliban were now "totally calm", he said. While many had expected heavy blanket bombing, the feeling was that, in the case of Jalalabad at least, the US strikes had been "extremely limited".
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Foreigners Swell Ranks of Taliban
Thousands Crossing Into Afghanistan, Witnesses Report
By Keith B. Richburg and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39557-2001Nov4?language=printer
AINGARI, Afghanistan, Nov. 4 -- Thousands of armed Pakistanis and other foreigners are pouring into Kabul and fanning out toward the front lines to help the Taliban fight any U.S. ground offensive or advance by the opposition Northern Alliance, according to Afghans arriving here in alliance territory from Taliban-held areas.
The accounts of refugees, some of whom are fleeing the U.S. bombing campaign and the Taliban tactic of taking cover in civilian areas, appear to confirm claims by Northern Alliance commanders that the Taliban was reinforcing its front lines with thousands of foreign "volunteers," mostly from Pakistan but also from Arab countries.
The reports are difficult to verify independently. But Afghans reaching here offered consistent accounts. They reported seeing truckloads of Pakistanis crossing the border into Afghanistan in the last two weeks, and Pakistanis and Arabic-speaking foreigners milling about on the streets of Kabul, the Afghan capital, and moving north and northeast in large groups.
"Every night, I saw lots of Pakistani fighters enter Afghanistan," said Said Maqsood, 37, who recently arrived from Peshawar to this village in opposition territory about 45 miles northeast of Kabul. "I saw it with my own eyes," he said. "Ten days ago. They were dressed like Taliban." He said he spoke to them in Urdu, the main Pakistani language, and they told him, "We are going to Afghanistan."
Maqsood said he saw as many as 30 truckloads of fighters crossing the border, some carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Later, in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, he said he saw another six truckloads of Pakistani fighters.
While the current influx of foreign volunteers appears to be in answer to the Taliban's call and to have no direct connection to Osama bin Laden, thousands of other Arab and Pakistani members of the Taliban are known to have trained in al Qaeda camps.
Mohammad Zahir, 22, and Najibullah, 18, who work in a rock quarry in Peshawar, also said they saw truckloads of armed Pakistanis crossing into Afghanistan at the Towr Kham border post. The two were traveling in the back of a crowded blue minibus to their home village of Jabal Saraj.
"Nobody stopped those trucks," Zahir said. "We saw the Kalashnikovs. Maybe the bigger guns were inside."
Pakistan has consistently said that its border with Afghanistan was closed except to the most needy refugees, and that it was preventing the so-called volunteers from crossing the border to heed the Taliban's call for jihad (holy war) against U.S. troops.
But as they prepare for what could be their own military offensive in the coming days -- timed to take advantage of a week of intensified U.S. bombing of front-line positions -- Northern Alliance commanders and political leaders rejected Pakistan's assertions. They cited their own intelligence reports -- including monitoring of radio traffic and conversations with refugees -- in accusing the Taliban of swelling its ranks with up to 3,000 foreigners, mostly Pakistanis.
They also accused Pakistan of playing a double-sided diplomatic game, with President Pervez Musharraf supporting the U.S. anti-terrorism coalition while his intelligence services covertly undermine that policy by supporting the Taliban.
"A lot of Pakistanis are coming into Kabul and the Nejrab district, across this mountain," said Nader Shah, 45, the commander of the Dernama district at the front line here across a mountain range. "They came to Kabul two or three days ago. They are crossing the border in groups every day. There is not any prevention for Pakistanis to cross the border. They are going to the front lines. They are mixed -- Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens. But mostly Pakistanis."
"They have weapons when they cross," the commander said. "A lot of weapons enter Afghanistan in trucks loaded with food. We send some men to buy rice. They told the story of how they put weapons on the bottom and rice, wheat or oil on top."
Another refugee who arrived here Saturday from Kabul, 48-year-old Sediqi, confirmed the commander's account, saying, "I saw them in Kabul. I saw them in their cars, going north, going to the east. Some were going to Mazar-e Sharif," a strategically important city in northern Afghanistan.
Sediqi, who like many Afghans uses only one name, also provided a rare glimpse of life inside Kabul after nearly a month of U.S. bombardment. "It's causing all the houses to shake," he said. "It's breaking the windows. People are running out to buy plastic, because it's cheaper than glass. Glass is too expensive."
He said that for the most part, the United States appears to be careful in its targeting, hitting mostly military installations. But he said he has seen a few bombs go astray -- including one that hit a residential district near the airport and caused eight houses to collapse. There were few casualties, he said, because most people had already fled that neighborhood.
----
Pakistanis Tone Down Call to Halt Airstrikes
Rumsfeld Is Cautioned About Muslim Reaction
By Vernon Loeb and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39750-2001Nov4?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 4 -- Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, today backed away from calls to halt the bombing of Afghanistan during Ramadan, but cautioned visiting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that continued airstrikes during the holy month could cause negative political fallout throughout the Muslim world, senior U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
Rumsfeld and Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar later told reporters that while they were sensitive to Islamic concerns, military objectives took precedence in the war on terrorism.
"I'm certainly aware of the views of the president of Pakistan and interested in the views of any number of countries in the Muslim world," Rumsfeld said. But he said Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network still pose a threat to Americans, and "it is important that the terrorists be stopped."
Sattar said that "the military campaign should be reduced to a time as short as possible, consistent with the realization of objectives."
In the United States, top military leaders said the Afghan campaign was on schedule and making "great progress" toward its goal of destroying al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who heads the U.S. Central Command and is the commander of U.S. forces in the war, warned in separate television interviews that the United States and its allies still face a long and difficult task.
Neither suggested that the United States was close to locating bin Laden, the Saudi-born exile suspected of being behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As the U.S. bombing entered its fifth week, Rumsfeld said in Islamabad that the Taliban militia was no longer functioning as a government and was not providing for the basic necessities of the country's population.
"There really is not a government to speak of in Afghanistan today," he said. "As a military force, they [the Taliban] have concentrations of power; they exist. They have capabilities that remain, tanks and antiaircraft and some Stinger" missiles.
But Taliban forces "are not making major military moves," he said. "They are pretty much in a static position. They are using mosques for ammunition storage."
However, Afghans arriving in territory held by the opposition Northern Alliance reported that thousands of armed Pakistanis and other foreigners were pouring into Kabul, the capital, and fanning out toward the front lines to help the Taliban fight any U.S. ground offensive or advance by the Northern Alliance.
Their accounts appeared to confirm claims by Northern Alliance commanders that the Taliban was reinforcing its front lines with thousands of foreign "volunteers," mostly from Pakistan but also from Arab countries.
Rumsfeld accused the Taliban today of "lying about civilian casualties" from the U.S. bombing. Sattar also made reference to Taliban propaganda, saying that Musharraf was particularly disturbed by uncritical media reports that simply repeated the Taliban's inaccurate claims about civilian casualties.
Musharraf raised this issue during his meeting with Rumsfeld today, when several of his aides said they believed the United States and its allies were losing the information war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
Rumsfeld agreed that the United States needed to do a better job countering Taliban propaganda, a U.S. official said.
But Sattar publicly applauded the U.S. military for its attempts to avoid civilian casualties, saying Musharraf found it particularly gratifying that Rumsfeld had stressed this point.
"I don't think there has ever been a bombing campaign in the history of the world done with more care and precision," Rumsfeld said.
Despite those efforts, the Pentagon has acknowledged a string of mistaken bombings, including attacks on a U.N. land mine removal office that killed four people, a residential neighborhood near Kabul and a warehouse complex there run by the Red Cross.
The Taliban claims that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed since the bombing began Oct. 7, but has offered little evidence to substantiate more than several dozen casualties. The Pentagon has taken responsibility for a handful of civilian deaths, calling the Taliban's estimate wildly exaggerated.
In keeping with Sattar's conciliatory public tone, Musharraf privately offered Rumsfeld the use of three additional air bases in western Pakistan to support the bombing campaign, Pakistani officials said. Pakistan already has opened four air bases and airfields to U.S. forces for logistical operations, search-and-rescue missions, medical facilities and other ground support efforts.
A senior U.S. official involved in the talks said the offer did not come up during the formal session between Rumsfeld and Musharraf, but that the two leaders, or some of their aides, could have discussed it separately.
Musharraf attempted to assuage concerns that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal could be in danger of falling into the hands of radical Islamic factions if the country's political situation deteriorates and destabilizes Musharraf's military government, according to officials familiar with the discussions.
Musharraf, who was flanked by four of his most senior military and intelligence officers -- all wearing civilian suits -- noted that the reorganization of those services on the night the U.S. bombing began sidelined some of the most recalcitrant and hard-line officers.
The Pakistani president and Rumsfeld also discussed the continuing, but so far largely unsuccessful, efforts to encourage defections and dissension among tribal leaders and commanders in Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan. Rumsfeld asked for as much intelligence assistance as Pakistan could provide, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.
Pakistani intelligence officials claim to have lost much credibility within the Taliban, and the Pashtun ethnic group that accounts for most of its members, when Musharraf reversed Pakistan's long-standing support for the Taliban and agreed to assist the United States in ousting the movement.
Rumsfeld flew through Afghan airspace on his way to Pakistan from Uzbekistan at the end of a four-day, five-country trip, crossing the snow-covered northern tip of the country this afternoon at 37,000 feet aboard a giant C-17 transport plane.
"It's tough terrain. You wouldn't want to march around there too long," Rumsfeld said, peering down at the peaks. Before landing in Pakistan, the plane's pilot flew a "tactical descent," dropping thousands of feet in seconds to make the plane harder to track by potential adversaries.
Rumsfeld's entourage switched from the secretary's regular Boeing 757 to the transport for security reasons after the first leg of his trip in Moscow. The C-17 is equipped with various countermeasures in the event of attack by a surface-to-air missile.
Correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
-------- arms sales
Weapons laws alter acquisition patterns
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 5, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011105-91316327.htm
More gun-carrying criminals are turning to friends and family for their weapons rather than buying them at stores, gun shows or flea markets, the Justice Department reported yesterday.
Nearly 40 percent of state prison inmates in 1997 who used or possessed a firearm during a crime got the weapon from a friend or relative, compared with 34 percent in 1991.
Over the same period, the percentage of those inmates who bought or traded for their gun at a pawn shop, flea market, or retail outlet fell from 21 percent to 14 percent.
That shift is due in part to the passage of tougher gun-control laws during the 1990s, including the 1993 Brady Law that imposed nationwide background checks on buyers, said the report's author, Caroline Wolf Harlow.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics survey also showed that the number of state prisoners who used guns to commit their crimes rose from 16 percent to 18 percent between 1991 and 1997. Federal prisoners followed the same trend, increasing their gun possession from 12 percent to 15 percent over the same period.
Researchers on both sides of the gun-control issue interpreted the statistics differently.
"What this shows is that making it harder for stores to sell guns does nothing to deter criminals from getting weapons," said Jeffrey Wendell, a criminal justice professor at the University of Texas. "They just turn to other sources. No one is walking into a store, finding they can't buy a gun and then deciding not to commit a crime."
Paul Stevens, a lawyer and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says tougher laws are needed on all fronts. "We need less guns in society in general," Mr. Stevens said. The data came from interviews of 18,000 state and federal prisoners.
The survey found that about 10 percent of federal and state prisoners carried a military-style, semiautomatic weapon when committing a crime. These weapons included the Uzi, Tec-9, AK-47 rifle and several varieties of shotgun. The firearm most favored by inmates was the handgun, carried by more than 80 percent of the inmates who said they used a gun.
Of the prisoners convicted of a violent crime - murder, rape, robbery and assault - 30 percent of state inmates and 35 percent of federal inmates said they had a gun when they committed their crime. Young, minority men were the most likely to have been carrying a firearm. The use or possession of weapons resulted in tougher sentences for many inmates - 40 percent of state inmates and 56 percent of federal inmates reported getting longer sentences because they were armed.
-------- biological weapons
Firm hopes to restart production of anthrax vaccine
USA Today
11/05/2001
By Anita Manning, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/anthrax-vaccine.htm
The lone producer of anthrax vaccine in the USA, sidelined for 2 years by manufacturing problems, is gearing up for a federal inspection that may have it back in business soon. The Food and Drug Administration is expected to begin inspections at BioPort Corp.'s plant in Lansing, Mich., within a couple of weeks, says Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. If the company's manufacturing processes meet FDA standards and extensive remodeling of the facilities checks out, he says, the company could, and should, be making new vaccine by Nov. 22.
Thompson has been negotiating with the Department of Defense to extend the use of the vaccine from the military to civilians, and to transfer some vaccine, once it has been judged safe by the FDA, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Health officials are discussing whether to order a supply large enough to vaccinate all those potentially at risk, including postal workers.
BioPort spokeswoman Kim Brennan Root says she can't say when the FDA's review will be complete. The process "can take several months, (but) we recognize that there's very high visibility of this product, in terms of public health interest in this vaccine," she says.
BioPort submitted documents to the FDA on Oct. 12 that "we believe fully satisfy all the issues the FDA had in its 1999 and 2000 inspections," Root says.
Those inspections, part of the FDA's routine scrutiny to ensure drugmakers use good manufacturing practices, turned up design and construction problems that could've affected the sterility of products. Also cited: inadequate monitoring procedures and incomplete record-keeping.
BioPort was forbidden to distribute vaccine, though it has continued to manufacture it. The U.S. military, which plans to immunize 2.4 million service members, has been relying on vaccine manufactured by a BioPort predecessor.
The Defense Department holds an exclusive contract to buy about 5 million doses of vaccine, Thompson says. Before agreeing to transfer any of it for civilian use, he says, the Pentagon "wants to make sure that what we're asking for is a supply that they can afford to give up."
The vaccine was developed during the 1950s and '60s and was licensed by the FDA in 1970. It is given as a series of six injections over 18 months. Though some military personnel have been concerned about chronic fatigue, memory loss and other health problems they say are side effects of the vaccine, the Pentagon says severe reactions are rare and 18 human studies have shown the vaccine to be safe.
---
Indian government office tests negative for anthrax
USA Today
11/05/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/anthrax-india.htm
BOMBAY, India (AP) - Tests conducted at a military laboratory showed that a white powdery substance found in an envelope mailed to an Indian state government office last week does not contain anthrax spores, officials said Monday. The letter arrived on Oct. 24 at the office of the second highest ranking official in the western state of Maharashtra, deputy chief minister Chagan Bhujbal.
One of two previous tests on the substance came back positive. But the latest examination, conducted by the national Defense Research and Development Organization, was negative, Maharashtra state health secretary Subhash Salunke said.
He said the results should put an end to anthrax fears that have gripped the state.
Six members of Bhujbal's staff who were exposed to the powder were healthy and showed no symptoms, he said.
The suspicious envelope was one more than 200 that have been tested in India since anthrax spores were discovered in the mail in the United States. None of the others have tested positive for anthrax.
Also Monday, a laboratory in Lithuania said traces of anthrax apparently were limited to one mailbag received at the U.S. Embassy in the former Soviet republic on the Baltic Sea. Tests on four other bags from the embassy showed no signs of the potentially deadly bacteria.
---
Anthrax found in Pentagon; users assessed
USA Today
11/05/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/05/anthrax-pentagon.htm
WASHINGTON (AP) - Two postal boxes at a post office inside the Pentagon have tested positive for anthrax and individuals renting other boxes are being screened at a Pentagon health clinic, a Pentagon spokesman said Monday. A Navy sailor who had rented one of the two boxes has been seen at Bethesda Naval Hospital, a Pentagon spokesman said, but no further information about his identity or condition was available. The second box was unassigned, Pentagon officials said Monday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took samples from the office on Tuesday, and the test results were returned Saturday. Two of 17 samples taken tested positive, the Pentagon said.
The office was decontaminated Sunday and "retesting results were all negative," said a Pentagon statement.
Pentagon spokesman Glen Flood said he had no information about the quality of the anthrax found during the testing.
There are 214 post boxes at the office, which is located in a concourse inside the Pentagon.
All those renting the boxes are being contacted and offered the chance to come to the Pentagon's clinic for screening, Flood said. He said he had no information on the number of renters who might have accepted the offer.
The post office was closed Monday. Yellow police tape covered the alcoves housing the boxes, which are located outside the post office itself in a far corner of the concourse.
The concourse is a commercial section of the Pentagon and contains a bank, several shops and food kiosks that serve the thousands of workers in the building.
It is separate from the Defense Department's own mailroom, which has been tested twice with negative results, Flood said.
The facility had been scheduled for random testing because it gets its mail from the Brentwood post office in the District of Columbia, which was closed Oct. 15 after anthrax was discovered inside.
Six employees in the concourse post office had been put on medication as a precaution shortly after the discovery of anthrax at Brentwood, the Pentagon said.
---
Two Pakistanis held in anthrax case
11/05/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/03/anthrax-pakistan.htm
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) - Police in Pakistan have detained two men in connection with a letter that was believed to contain anthrax. Mohammed Salim, detained Sunday, is suspected of putting powder in an envelope along with a news release that was sent to Pakistan's largest newspaper, the Daily Jang. Another man, Mohammad Yousaf, was detained Saturday.
Yousaf, who works for a non-government organization that runs education projects in Karachi, told authorities he suspected his friend, Salim, had mailed the letter. Salim had earlier taken some letterhead stationery from Yousaf's organization, which apparently was mailed along with the powder.
It wasn't clear when Yousaf became aware the letter had been sent.
The editorial offices of the newspaper reopened Saturday, one day after they were sealed for decontamination because of the letter.
The Daily Jang has set up a special room for handling mail and provided masks and gloves to workers who open it, said Zahid Hussain, a reporter.
At a news conference in Islamabad, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said two people at the newspaper had been exposed to anthrax but had not been infected.
Dozens of staffers, including the reporter who opened the letter, were taking antibiotics as a precaution.
On Friday, workers in protective suits sealed the newsroom after tests at a private laboratory showed the presence of anthrax in powder on the press release, which arrived Oct. 23.
However, Health Minister Abdul Malik Kasi questioned the accuracy of the test and said the Pakistan National Institute of Health would conduct its own test on the powder.
Officials feared the incident might be in retaliation for the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
The Urdu-language Jang newspaper has generally been supportive of Musharraf, who has sided with the United States in its war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement and terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden.
---
D.C.
USA Today
01/11/05
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm
Concerns over anthrax have stalled the district's efforts to boost tourism, said Bill Hanbury, president of the Washington Convention and Tourism Corporation. A campaign started after the Sept. 11 attacks was sidetracked by the bioterrorism threat, Hanbury said. The agency asked pro basketball star Michael Jordan to help lure more visitors to the city.
------- pakistan
THE MAINSTAY
Musharraf, the Indispensable Ally, Grows More Confident
New York Times
November 5, 2001
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/05/international/asia/05ALLY.html?searchpv=nytToday
<http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/2001/11/05/international/05stan.1,0.jpg>
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 4 - For a man ruling a nation of 140 million Muslims, who is torn between a reluctant military alliance with the United States and Islamic militants who almost daily urge his overthrow for siding with "infidels," Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is radiating an impressive calm.
After a taut, nervous start in mid-September, when he took the hazardous gamble of switching Pakistan's allegiance from the Taliban to the United States, General Musharraf has seemed to grow in confidence, to the point where he plans to leave Pakistan this week for the first time since the start of the war.
He will visit New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, and to see at first hand the destruction the terrorists wrought at the World Trade Center.
On Saturday, in a sign of his crucial importance to America's war, he will have his first meeting with President Bush. American forces rely on Pakistan's airspace, remote air bases in its western desert as staging posts for commandos, and intelligence gathered by Pakistani agents.
The 58-year-old general will leave behind a country where Friday Prayers have become a prelude to protests by thousands of Islamic militants who march from the mosques to burn effigies of President Musharraf beside those of President Bush, while photographs of Osama bin Laden are hoisted high.
"Death to Musharraf!" they cry. "Musharraf, traitor to Islam!" Militant leaders have called for his overthrow by the army, and even hinted that God would reward his assassin.
The possibility that he could be unseated haunts Western officials, for it could leave Pakistan's fate, and that of America's war, in the hands of generals less resolute in their support of the United States. Or, in a nightmare scenario that American officials hardly dare to contemplate, it could pave the way for a militant Islamic leadership to take over Pakistan and the nuclear devices it successfully tested in 1998.
So General Musharraf now has America's clear support, even though he was condemned by the United States for his military coup on Oct. 12, 1999, and so disparaged by President Clinton that Mr. Clinton was reluctant to be photographed shaking his hand during a stopover in Pakistan last year. He was still deeply distrusted by Washington right up to Sept. 11, because he led a military government with close ties to the Taliban and even, clandestinely, with Al Qaeda.
"Men either grow or diminish in crisis, and General Musharraf is one who has grown," said one high-ranking American official who has talked to the Pakistani ruler frequently since he metamorphosed, almost overnight, from an embarrassment to a man who is central to America's hopes for victory. "He's been straight, he's delivered what he's promised and he hasn't faltered. The only question now is whether he can carry all the other generals with him. Does he really have their loyalties? Does he really know what they are doing, especially the ones who have links to the Taliban? These are things we don't know yet, and we don't know if he really knows them either."
Entire echelons of the army officer corps, a power in Pakistan since it was founded in 1947 and the provider of military rulers for exactly half the years since, are believed to have sympathies for the Taliban, and some even for Al Qaeda. Last week, as Pakistan arrested three top nuclear scientists for questioning about their links to the organizations, those fears seemed less fanciful than ever.
Only this summer, General Musharraf was regarded in Washington as a man entrapped by his past. Above all, he was seen as fixated on the rivalry with India - bruised by two lost wars in 1965 and in 1971 - and by harsh memories as the son of a "mohajir" family that fled to Pakistan from New Delhi, losing all it possessed, in the great migration of Muslims and Hindus that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.
America and Pakistan have had an on-again, off-again relationship for years, mostly off in the decade since the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan and Washington lost the need for Pakistan as a base for supplying the Muslim guerrillas who were its allies then.
None of that has been forgotten by General Musharraf, who has coupled his pledge of "full support" with a shrewd understanding of how that commitment can be used to benefit Pakistan. American sanctions imposed because of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, then broadened and stiffened after the nuclear tests of 1998 and the military coup, have been lifted in haste.
Some of Pakistan's crushing $37 billion in foreign debt is being hastily rescheduled through international financial institutions and new loans extended, despite Pakistan's record of failing to repay or to use the money to help the impoverished.
Whether the new money will be sufficient to distribute tangible benefits to the legions of dispossessed here, and thus cut into the constituency on which Islamic militancy feeds, is another open question.
The United States has said it will hold General Musharraf to his pledge to restore civilian rule by October 2002. But if he does, many Pakistanis fear that it will start another slide into the politics of "loot and plunder," in the general's phrase.
In the 1990's the corrupt governments of two civilian prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, emptied the country's treasury of billions of dollars.
For the moment, though, the Americans are confident that the general has matters firmly in hand, or as firmly as any Pakistani ruler could, and his own demeanor seems to support that view. Far from the edgy, almost apologetic figure he cut in the televised announcement of his "full support" for the United States, he has seemed almost bouncy, as if the crisis were something he had been waiting for all his life.
Aides say that is the reflection of a deep-seated belief, rooted in a moderate but devout form of Islam, that all matters are decided by God.
"He's a man who believes in destiny, and that all we do is ultimately in the hands of God," said Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi, General Musharraf's military spokesman, who has known him since they were junior officers. "He's never been a particularly ambitious person, only a man who believes in letting fate decide where he's going.
"And now, he believes that fate has put him where he is, with the responsibility of saving Pakistan."
Before Sept. 11 he had a reputation for mingling only rarely with civilians. The only moments when he really relaxed, his friends said then, were when he bantered with fellow officers over an evening drink or the evening games of tennis he favors.
At his official army chief's residence in Rawalpindi, he plays with his dogs, telephones his son Bilal, who is an actuary in Boston, and until the present crisis played the occasional round of golf.
Meeting journalists was not something he did often, and interviews brought out a certain stiffness.
But he positively bounded into his first news conference after Sept. 11, crisply saluting hundreds of reporters as if there were few greater pleasures.
In the weeks since, he has become something of a media hound, allowing few days to pass without appearances on Western television and even switching dress to match the occasion: British-style dress uniform for the BBC, business suit for CNN, the uniform again for fellow general Colin Powell, the suit for the visiting Tony Blair.
In a meeting with foreign reporters 10 days ago, he seemed to relish the toughest questions.
What did it feel like to have gone so abruptly from being a shunned military dictator to a member-on-probation of the international establishment?
"I don't think I was an unwanted military ruler," he said, almost winking.
Wasn't he afraid of assassination?
"I am stepping on the toes of some people who may not want me around," he said, adding, "So therefore one has to be careful."
And what of the dangers of a generals' coup?
"There is no fallout whatsoever in the army," he said.
But behind the amiable demeanor and the rimless spectacles, there has been a cut of steel.
Under pressure from the street protests, he has placed several of the most powerful Islamic militant leaders under house arrest.
In early October he moved swiftly against military commanders who resisted his support for the United States, retiring or sidelining many. Now all the top army posts are filled by men who owe their jobs to him personally. Pakistani military analysts say it has been a coup within a coup, and the most important change in 20 years.
General Musharraf, a former special forces commando with combat experience, renewed his own mandate as army chief of staff for an "indefinite" period. Next, late at night, he unseated three generals who played crucial roles in securing his power in 1999.
Most strikingly, he fired the chief of the powerful military intelligence directorate, Inter-Services Intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, an old friend who had riled the Bush administration with his pro-Taliban views when he found himself in Washington, by chance, on Sept. 11.
Associates of General Ahmed said it was he who brought back the White House's message that Pakistan would either support the war against the terrorists or be considered their ally and treated accordingly. Associates say General Musharraf interpreted that later as a threat that the United States and India, and possibly even Israel, might somehow try to seize Pakistan's nuclear armory, believed to comprise about 20 bombs.
In his address announcing his decision to side with the United States, he said archly that Pakistan's "strategic assets," meaning the nuclear weapons, and its foothold in Kashmir could have come "under threat" if he had refused America's demand for support.
"If these come under threat, it could be a worse situation for us," he said. "The negative consequences can endanger Pakistan's integrity and solidarity."
Against that, he set the advantages of siding with the United States - in effect, the terms of the gamble he was taking. By supporting America, and trusting that Washington would keep its side of the bargain, he said, "we can re-emerge politically as a responsible and dignified nation, and all our difficulties can be minimized."
Seven weeks later, that remains his charter, as do the words with which he concluded his speech. "May Allah be with us," he said.
------- u.n.
Bin Laden condemns U.N.
USA Today
11/05/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/03/bin-laden.htm
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Osama bin Laden condemned Arab leaders who turn to the United Nations for peace negotiations, saying in a videotape broadcast Saturday that this amounts to a renunciation of Islam. "They are infidels," said bin Laden, whom the United States believes was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed thousands of people.
"Those who claim they are the leaders of Arabs and are still in the United Nations have renounced the message of Muhammad. Those who resort to international legitimacy are renouncing the legitimacy of the holy book and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad," he said.
"Today, without any evidence, the United Nations issues decisions supporting the oppressive, tyrannical and arrogant America against those oppressed who have emerged from a ferocious war at the hands of the Soviet Union," he said, referring to the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation of 1979-89.
Al-Jazeera television, based in the Gulf emirate of Qatar, said the video was delivered to its office in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.
Al-Jazeera news coordinator Ali al-Kaabi, in Qatar, said the tape was made in the past week, but he did not know exactly when. If that is the case it would be the first bin Laden tape that was recorded after the U.S. air strikes began Oct. 7.
Bin Laden's statement appeared to be aimed at Arab leaders who have called for international efforts to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Bin Laden made only brief references to Afghanistan in the 20-minute videotape, and asked: "Who was responsible for the partition of Palestine in 1947?"
On Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly approved the partition of Palestine, which allowed the creation of the state of Israel.
"The whole West is supporting this unjust, ferocious campaign" against Afghanistan, bin Laden said. "No evidence proves that what happened in America (is related to) the people of Afghanistan, and the people of Afghanistan have nothing to do with this, but the campaign is going on, exterminating civilians including children, women and innocents."
The United States is attacking Afghanistan in an attempt to dislodge the Taliban regime, which is providing bin Laden and his al-Qa'eda network a safe haven.
While American officials have stressed their campaign is aimed at terrorists, not at Muslims, bin Laden tried to argue just the opposite.
"Muslims should understand the nature of this struggle, and the truth about this struggle, so they can decide in which ranks they stand.
"In essence, this war is a religious war," he said.
"This is a matter of belief and ideology, not like (President) Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair paint it as a war against terrorism."
Bin Laden wore a white turban and scarf with a black-and-green camouflage jacket. An automatic rifle stood at his left side as he gestured with his right hand in front of a plain brown backdrop.
He spoke calmly, pointing a finger at the camera as he made his points. However, he sometimes appeared to be breathing heavily. He interrupted his speech to take two sips from a cup.
In Washington, White House spokeswoman Anne Womack dismissed bin Laden's remarks, saying: "This is more propaganda that shows how isolated he is from the world."
In London, Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain described bin Laden's criticism of the United Nations as "contemptible."
"Coming only weeks after the United Nations was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work for a more peaceful world, this claim is based on fantasy."
In a statement that would appeal to his supporters in Pakistan, bin Laden referred to Muslims fighting against India in the border province of Kashmir.
"Our brothers in Kashmir, since more than 50 years have been subjected to the worst tortures - slaughtered, murdered, their honor, blood and houses have been transgressed, and the United Nations doesn't lift a finger," he said.
The video shown Saturday was the fifth communique from bin Laden or his al-Qa'eda organization that Al-Jazeera has broadcast since the U.S.-led airstrikes against Afghanistan began Oct. 7. Four were videos of bin Laden or his spokesmen. The other, shown Thursday, was a handwritten letter bearing what Al-Jazeera said was bin Laden's signature
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Defense budget meets needs
USA Today
11/05/2001
By Donald H. Rumsfeld
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-11-05-ncoppf.htm
The Sept. 11 attacks awakened our nation to new dangers and the reality that to secure freedom, we must adequately invest in our armed forces. America has the best-trained, best-equipped armed forces in the world - and they are doing us proud today. But for too many years, we have underfunded and overused that force, neglect that has now caught up with us.
With the end of the Cold War, the United States began a defense drawdown that went too far, even as our forces were asked to undertake a plethora of new missions. Those in uniform saluted and did their best, but to keep up, they had to put off critical investments in people, procurement, maintenance, modernization and transformation.
Digging ourselves out of that hole will not happen in 1 year. It will take sustained investment over a long period. That's why the president has requested the largest increase in defense spending since the mid-1980s, funds critically needed to repair aging planes, tanks and ships, fix collapsing roofs, improve military quality of life and pay for long-delayed modernization and transformational research and development.
We need Congress to approve the president's request for increases in military pay, housing and health care. We need funds for procurement, modernization, building maintenance and research and development to prepare for a range of new, asymmetric threats. We need Congress to approve the request of $8.3 billion for missile defense research, development and testing.
As the president has made clear, we must prepare to defend the American people against all emerging asymmetric threats - the threats from cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, cyberattacks and terrorism.
Many of the countries that today harbor and sponsor terrorist networks are the same countries that have weaponized chemical and biological agents, are working to acquire nuclear weapons and are developing ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States and its friends and allies.
On Sept. 11 terrorists took civilian airliners and turned them into missiles, killing thousands. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if they had real missiles and weapons of mass destruction, capable of killing not just thousands but hundreds of thousands, they wouldn't hesitate to use them?
We need every nickel of the defense budget - and we need it soon.
Donald H. Rumsfeld is secretary of defense.
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Defense plan doesn't adapt to new face of war
USA Today
11/05/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-11-05-nceditf.htm
From the opening salvo of airliners assaulting buildings to anthrax attacks that come in the mail, the war on terrorism has proved to be one of unexpected turns.
Yet, judging from the $329-billion defense budget for 2002 that's now before Congress, the Pentagon leadership has done little new to prepare for surprise scenarios, whether they arise in a few months or a few years.
That's despite Sept. 11's wake-up call and the fact that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last spring asked his uniform and civilian staffs to transform the military to fight wars of the future. They instead remained largely on their current path, coming up with a budget that keeps the military oriented toward Cold War threats - tank battles across Europe, confrontations between U.S. and enemy fighter aircraft, and the like.
As a result, the military isn't transforming as much as possible to meet threats exposed by this crisis, much less those that lie beyond the horizon. Among the needs:
Rapid deployment: If Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's regime were threatened with a popular uprising of the type seen in Iran in 1979, as many now fear, the U.S. Army might be forced to invade the country to protect the government, save U.S. soldiers and keep Pakistan's nuclear weapons out of the radicals' hands. This could require the immediate deployment of troops. Yet, the Army is slower than that, taking 6 months to deploy for the Gulf War in 1991. And its 2002 budget commits money to such heavy equipment as the 80-ton Crusader artillery system, robbing funds from the research and production of faster vehicles.
Ability to fight from remote bases: If Taliban sympathizers gained control of Pakistani air defenses or nuclear weapons, U.S. ability to fly carrier-based and non-stealthy aircraft there could be at risk. Yet, the 2002 budget does not follow the widespread recommendation from defense experts - some of whom now serve Rumsfeld - to buy more stealthy, long-range B-2 bombers that have been flying to Afghanistan from safe bases in the USA.
Means to prevail in urban combat: If the Taliban and terrorists hid out in Afghan cities or the U.S. had to fight in Pakistan's densely populated urban areas, the adversaries would have the advantage of blending in and knowing their surroundings. With a technological edge, the U.S. might prevail in such urban warfare. Yet, the 2002 budget doesn't direct much research and development to promising futuristic technologies such as robots, see-through-wall sensors or special "exoskeleton" suits that give soldiers the strength to kick down doors and carry massive firepower and equipment. Instead, new research-and-development funds in 2002 are overwhelmingly concentrated on missile defense.
The 2002 budget is chock-full of expensive, old-style programs that individual members of Congress protect because they represent jobs in their districts, or that the services protect for similar reasons. Among the most egregious examples: continued funding for three different short-range fighters for the Air Force, Navy and Marines, whose total cost is $340 billion, and billions more to keep open military bases the Pentagon wants to close.
None of this is to say the U.S. military is incapable of meeting the surprises that are bound to arise in this war on terrorism. Indeed, if the surprises come tomorrow, the 2002 budget won't help anyway.
But judging from that document, the Pentagon is hedging its bets against a surprising future far less than is prudent.
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All talk, no action from enlistment calls
November 5, 2001
By Frank J. Murray
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011105-487192.htm
The surge of patriotism that triggered a flood of inquiries about military service after September 11 produced no spike in enlistments, but thousands of young men who had failed to register for a potential draft seized the chance to sign up late.
"On September 11, that particular Tuesday, we had 6,400 men register via the Internet where, over the previous 52 weeks, we were averaging 1,600 online registrations per day," said Lew Brodsky, director of public and congressional affairs for Selective Service.
"For the next two or three weeks we had 2,500 to 3,500 online registrations per day and it's tapered off now," Mr. Brodsky said. In addition, the mailed-in registrations sent by teen-agers getting cards at the post offices or when getting driver's licenses "at least doubled for a time."
While Selective Service declares that draft registration is "what every man's gotta do," military recruiters seek volunteers one at a time through "Uncle Sam Wants You" ads like the Air Force television ad campaign that premiered yesterday during National Football League timeouts on CBS and Fox.
"The new ads are not overtly patriotic and don't seek to take advantage of any sentiments heightened by the attacks," ad executive Eric Webber, of the GSD&M Agency in Austin, Texas, said of the first recruitment campaign begun since Muslim terrorists attacked the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Mr. Webber said the TV spots seek to market long-term Air Force careers, not the battle of the moment.
"You don't want to get people who come to the military on the four-week plan just because they're angry and seek revenge," he said.
Other young men apparently seek only to avoid legal trouble for failure to obey draft-registration laws.
The draft was put on standby 28 years ago, but since 1980 all U.S. men - including illegal immigrants - must register on the ready list within 30 days before or after their 18th birthday and remain registered until they turn 26. That roll provides more than 13 million names should Congress order a draft.
Almost two decades have passed since the last man was prosecuted for failure to comply with that registration law.
Gillam Kerley, now a civil rights lawyer in Madison, Wis., was indicted in 1982 for failing to register after President Carter ordered the present system in 1980 when world tensions came to a boil over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Mr. Kerley, then 19, fought through the courts for six years and eventually served four months in prison.
"I had made my point," Mr. Kerley said. "Selective Service wants [registration] to be seen as a rite of manhood. They don't want people to think about it."
"Our philosophy here is registration, not prosecution," Mr. Brodsky said.
For the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, since 1973 the philosophy of an all-volunteer military has required inducements including signing bonuses of $3,000 to $20,000, guaranteed job training and up to $20,000 more for college later. The military also is paying out $350 million a year in re-enlistment bonuses.
Local school-board policies still bar Pentagon recruiters from some 2,000 public high schools, but military leaders hope that task will be eased by the education bill expected to pass Congress soon, which ensures military recruiters the same access to schools as colleges and private employers.
Pentagon figures show all four services topped recruiting goals in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, with the Air Force signing up 102.3 percent of its goal, the Navy drawing 100.3 percent, and the Marine Corps and Army each receiving 100.1 percent.
"The Army achieved its recruiting mission in September prior to the September 11 attacks, so there was no direct effect," said Douglas Smith, spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky.
He said recruiters were swamped with visits and calls, but most came from teen-agers too young or veterans too old to enlist, and from medically ineligible people who thought the rules would change in a crisis.
"If there's been any uptick, it's been minimal," Mr. Smith said.
Air Force recruiters got plenty of visits, "but we haven't had an actual increase in recruits," said Senior Airman Marti Ribeiro, of the recruiting headquarters at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio.
"There's an awful lot of patriotism going on right now and some people think they might run off and join the Air Force," she said. "It's really too early too tell."
Lt. Ingrid Mueller, of the Navy Recruiting Command in Millington, Tenn., said increased interest may pay dividends later, and the Navy is confident it would absorb all qualified people who apply even if goals were exceeded.
"Sure we could, but that's not a problem that we have right now," Lt. Mueller said.
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U.S. Campaign on Schedule, Generals Say
Commanders Deny Report That Taliban Inflicted Serious Injuries on Army Unit in Raid
By Edward Walsh
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 5, 2001; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39616-2001Nov4?language=printer
The nation's top military commander and the general who is directing the U.S. assault in Afghanistan said yesterday that the military campaign is on schedule and making "great progress" toward the goal of destroying the al Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban regime that harbors it.
Appearing on separate television interview programs, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who heads the U.S. Central Command, gave decidedly positive assessments of a war effort that some critics have characterized as bogged down in recent days.
But both generals also warned that the United States and its anti-Taliban rebel allies still face a long and difficult task. Neither suggested that the United States is close to locating Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile and suspected mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
Myers and Franks denied a report in the New Yorker magazine that a raid last month on a Taliban stronghold by members of the top-secret Delta Force encountered stiff resistance and that 12 U.S. soldiers were injured. They said there were some injuries during the operation, but that none resulted from enemy fire.
Interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," Myers said that over the weekend the United States inserted additional Special Forces teams into Afghanistan to help coordinate U.S. air attacks with ground operations by the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces. As he spoke, the Pentagon announced that U.S. bombing over the weekend focused on targets close to four key cities near the Taliban front lines with Northern Alliance rebels: Bagram, Taloqan, Konduz and Mazar-e Sharif.
Declaring that "we're going to fight right through the winter," Myers suggested that the harsh Afghan winter could work to the advantage of the United States and its allies in the region.
"We are resupplying the opposition with ammunition, with food, with blankets, we hope in the not-too-distant future with cold weather gear," he said. "The fighting forces on the side of the opposition, on our side, will be much better prepared for winter than the Taliban."
But while describing the war effort as "going exactly according to our plan," Myers said that a Pentagon spokesman misspoke two weeks ago when he said the Taliban's combat power had been "eviscerated" by U.S. airstrikes.
"I think we do have a substantial fight ahead of us," he said. "In some ways they have been eviscerated, but not in all ways. So we are pretty much where I think I said we are. We have the initiative, the Taliban do not."
Myers described bin Laden as "somebody that is quite sick mentally." He added that the war against terrorism that President Bush declared after the Sept. 11 attacks "is the most important assignment we've had in the military since World War II."
Franks, whose Central Command is in charge of the Afghanistan operation, said on ABC's "This Week" that "great progress" was being made in the war effort "because we're doing our work on our timeline. We're doing our work on the basis of our initiative, an initiative which we have an