------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Nuclear threat is real
Leftovers From an Old War
DU properties and hard-target munitions
Agni to dominate agenda Rahul Datta/New Delhi
Israel Calls Iran 'Biggest Threat'
Russia denies helping Iran develop weapons
The Nuke Factor
Putin Disputes Iran Weapons Report
Ukraine's Green party protests spent nuclear fuel transportation
Panel Recommends Ending Satellite Plan
Pirro's Election Bid Unaffected by Conviction of Her Husband
Peach Bottom Nuclear Reactor Should Not Be Relicensed
Bush tells of nuclear threat
White House summons biz chieftains
LBJ tape 'confirms Vietnam war error'
Berkley seeks inquiry into document release

MILITARY
Gunman fires on base used by U.S. military
War Support Ebbs Worldwide
No escape for Taleban from the 'daisy cutter'
America turns up the heat
N. Alliance Advances as U.S. Pounds Front Lines
Afghan opposition claims major advances
Fighters seize district, approach Mazar-e-Sharif
Afghan Opposition Claim Key Towns
U.S. Plucks Rebel From Afghanistan for 'Consultations'
Uzbekistan: Bush's New Best Friend
Better tracking urged of labs
Plan to gas Senate building scaled back
Senators Told of Lack of Answers in F.B.I. Inquiry on Bioterrorism
The Front Is Here, and You're Drafted
Bin Laden money networks targeted
DEA resources are stretched thin
Germany Ready to Send Force of 3,900
U.S. Likely to Delay Action on Iraq Curbs
Pakistan Clamps Down on Taliban Envoy
Air Force slow to transfer special bomb kits to Navy

ENERGY AND OTHER
Britain MOD blocks 4 offshore wind power projects
UK wind power firm seeks review of planning block
Fuel cell-generated electricity goes online on Long Island
New strains of rice promise better health and eyesight
World Bank says will help rebuild Afghanistan
WTO meeting shrinks amid attack fears, feuds

POLICE / PRISONERS
F.A.A. Adds to O'Hare Security
Greens, Airports and ID Cards
US strong on theory, weak on evidence
War is a conflict for America's Muslim youth
Terror attacks may have lasting effect on courts
U.S. Takes Steps to Bolster Bloc Fighting Terror
In President's Words: 'Lift This Dark Threat'
On the Dock, Holes in the Security Net Are Gaping
Beyond Our Shores, a Battle for Opinion
America's Resolve, Then and Now

ACTIVISTS
Now Is the Time to Act
70's Radical Reaffirms Guilty Plea
Relief Effort Races Winter to Save Millions
Protests look muted, stymied at Qatar and Ottawa
Environmental radical groups haven't been slowed
HUNDREDS OF EVENTS AGAINST THE WTO MINISTERIAL MEETING
CONFERENCE DU - PRAGUE - INVITATION - INFORMATION - DEADLINE



-------- NUCLEAR

Nuclear threat is real - Bush President says all nations must join fight
"President Bush yesterday delivered his most belligerent speech"

Matthew Engel in Washington
Wednesday November 7, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,589162,00.html

President Bush yesterday delivered his most belligerent speech since the wavering US bombing campaign began, issuing two extraordinary messages to his allies as he tried to keep them in line. After first raising the stakes of the war by giving a bone-chilling description of the consequences if Osama bin Laden should have nuclear weapons, Mr Bush then threatened his less steady allies with action should they remain tepid in the face of the terrorist threat.

"A coalition-builder must do more than just express sympathy. A coalition-builder must perform," the president said. "All nations, if they want to fight terrorism, must do something. It's time for action."

He again insisted that each country must help in its own way, and said he had no specific nation in mind, for now, but added: "It's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or you're against us in the fight against terror."

Mr Bush was speaking outside the White House alongside President Chirac of France after the first of an intensive round of meetings over the next few days designed to bolster the alliance and his own standing as both its leader and its cheerleader.

Mr Bush's new phase of activity comes amid growing concerns of an international wobble exactly one month after the beginning of the US bombing campaign.

He began with an early-morning broadcast to the anti-terrorism conference in Warsaw, when he warned of the nuclear threat from al-Qaida. "They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," he said. "Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation; and, eventually, to civilisation itself. So, we're determined to fight this evil and fight until we are rid of it. We will not wait for more innocent deaths."

When he was questioned about this later, the president reverted to his old tactic of verbally confronting his chief enemy by name.

"I did say that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida were seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. And the reason I said that is because I was using his own words. He announced that this was his intention, and I believe we need to take him seriously.

"If he does have them, we will work hard to make sure he doesn't. If he does, we'll make sure he doesn't deploy them. This is an evil man that we're dealing with, and I wouldn't put it past him to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilisation as we know it."

The mood in the autumn sunlight, as the stars and stripes and the tricolour hung side by side, was one of bonhomie, and the two presidents smiled broadly. But once again, it was clear that American preoccupations in the war are not quite the same as those of their allies. "I must say the military aspect is necessary, yes," said Mr Chirac. "But there are other aspects." And he talked of those: about nation-building, the "urgent" need for humanitarian aid and "the crises in the world, crises that can fuel terrorism".

Like Britain, France is likely to play a leading European role in the coalition. Mr Chirac said he had already mobilised 2,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen for military operations to fight terrorism but gave no further details.

Mr Bush will play host today to Tony Blair, who is flying in on Concorde. It will be Mr Blair's second visit to Washington since the start of the crisis. Tomorrow the president will continue his confidence-building push by addressing the American people, concentrating on domestic terrorism.

On Saturday he will deliver his maiden address to the UN general assembly at the summit in New York, where he intends to repeat the warning that other countries must act or else. And next week he is expected to adopt a more measured tone when meeting Russia's President Putin.

The president has remained in the wings during the anthrax crisis and the indifferent news from Afghanistan over the past few weeks, but he is now seeking to control the agenda once again.

With US politicians and military chiefs giving conflicting signals in recent days over the length of the campaign, Mr Bush made clear his view that he was in it for the long haul - and that Afghanistan was only the start. "We are at the beginning of our efforts in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is the beginning of our efforts in the world."

----

Leftovers From an Old War

November 7, 2001
By KARL F. INDERFURTH
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/opinion/07INDE.html?searchpv=nytToday

MCLEAN, Va. -- After a recent meeting with Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed a new era: "Not only is the cold war over, the post-cold war period is also over." When President Vladimir Putin visits President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., next week, they will have an extraordinary opportunity to turn Secretary Powell's encouraging words into reality. Unfortunately, they will have their work cut out for them - the nuclear arsenals of the two nations are still stuck in the cold war.

The United States and Russia continue to maintain a combined total of over 13,000 long-range, or strategic, nuclear weapons, with the only plausible targets of such destructive power being each other. The two nations also have an estimated 6,000 tactical nuclear weapons - currently operational warheads intended for use on short-range battlefield sytems - most of them on the Russian side. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, among others, has pointed out how preposterous this is. Nonetheless the United States and Russia still have prompt retaliatory war plans, with over 4,000 warheads ready to be launched in a matter of minutes. These missiles cannot be stopped once fired. Russia's deteriorating command and control system further increases the risk of an inadvertent or mistaken launch.

There is also the serious matter of reducing the threat of Russian nuclear weapons, materials and expertise ending up in hostile hands. In the past decade, cooperative efforts have produced impressive results, including the neutralization of more than 200 tons of nuclear material. But it is estimated that Russia still has a stockpile of enough plutonium and uranium, much of it inadequately secured, to produce the equivalent of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs. If even a minuscule fraction of Russia's nuclear weaponry, material or expertise leaked out of the country, it would be a bonanza for states or terrorist organizations that might do us harm. Clearly the safety of Russia's nuclear arsenal and America's own security are inextricably linked.

As President Bush and President Putin discuss these matters, they should know that Congress, during its latest session, has taken a number of steps to reduce the nuclear threat - and is likely to offer bipartisan support for further initiatives that result from the two presidents' efforts in Crawford. Both houses have added funds to Bush administration requests for American-Russian nonproliferation programs. The Senate has repealed the law preventing reductions in American nuclear forces below the floor - 6,000 strategic nuclear weapons - set by strategic arms reduction treaties, allowing Mr. Bush to make the deep cuts he has said he wants.

President Putin has already proposed that the United States and Russia each go down to 1,500 strategic warheads. President Bush's response should be commensurate and include provisions to ensure that mutual reductions are verifiable.

In June, Representatives John Spratt and Ellen Tauscher and Senator Mary Landrieu introduced the Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 2001. It includes a call for cuts in nuclear arms across the board - which would encompass tactical weapons not covered by current treaties - and should become a Congressional priority after the Crawford meeting.

A decade ago, President George H. W. Bush said that we had an "unparalleled opportunity" to "dramatically shrink the arsenal of the world's nuclear weapons." Rarely does history present second chances. President Putin and President Bush have been given one. If they seize it, we will indeed have entered the new era Secretary Powell proclaimed, in which not only the cold war but the post-cold war era will finally be over.

Karl F. Inderfurth was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 1997 to 2001. He is senior adviser to the Nuclear Threat Reduction Campaign.


-------- depleted uranium

DU properties and hard-target munitions

From: <nukeresister@igc.org>,
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 12:32:45 -0000
Subject: Re: Dai's inquiry re d.u. in Afghanistan

I am not a materials scientist, but from my understanding of "ductile" [Malleable, not brittle, easily drawn into wire or molded or shaped or hammered thin] I would not consider ductile as a virtue for large penetrating bombs.

Thanks for asking Jack. I'm not a materials scientist either!But I did check out Jane's informal reply to my enquiry.I was told that DU was not strong enough for hard target penetration.I checked with technical folk who know something about it and the web links at the end of this message.

[Note: Government specialists who probably monitor this site know the answers already.It must quite amusing for them watching us trying to get nearer to the actual facts.It might save media speculation if they will posted the relevant specifications.They may not have been aware of the contamination issues we are picking up].

Properties of DU

I was referring to Jane's original website quote (see below) that "DU's ductility is suitable for making penetrators ..." (see References below).Ductility ranges from very soft (or malleable) to very hard.The Jane's website reference in February (since removed) meant fairly hard.But their recent phone comments tried to suggest this was unsuitable for targets other than armour. "Ductility" is a bit vague but 30 mm DU penetrators (with some added Titanium) don't seem to bend when they hit armor at high speed.

So how is DU too soft for other hard targets?We aren't employed to be weapons designers - that's why I am asking for the facts from Government.But we need enough information to avoid being put off with patronising or misleading comments by politicians or PR people for manufacturers, the DoD or MoD.We got enough of that in the Balkans War.

It appears that several different physical qualities are involved in materials "strength" e.g. Young's modulus, different hardness ratings, tensile strength etc.The properties needed of the "dense metal" in Advanced Unitary Penetrators also depends on different manufacturing processes, alloy mixes and physical design.Its looks as if basic DU comes out a lot harder and less likely to bend than a lot of other metals, similar to the Co/Ni/Fe alloy used for the outer casings. Are these properties unsuitable for hard targets? - not on this data.

Only the weapons designers know exactly what qualities are wanted for specific hard target penetrators.For non-engineers these seem to be the main factors:

Properties needed in hard-target penetrators

The main reason for using"dense" or "heavy metal" in new version hard target bombs and cruise missiles is the increased kinetic energy available for an existing delivery system. High density metal (DU is 2.4 x heavier than Iron) means that the same weight and length penetrator can be smaller diameter.This is important because new upgrades have to fit the same size missile bodies or bomb dispensers.See the FAS sitehttp://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/hdbtdc.htmResearch data on ground penetration weapons relates penetration effectiveness to length against cross section area - thinner ones go deeper for the weight, whatever they are made of.

The pyrophoric (burns in air) quality of DU that helps it burn its way through armor is not relevant for the first stage of hitting hard targets.Bombs and cruise missiles go slower than anti-tank shells so DU is less likely to ignite on initial impact at slower speeds. Kinetic energy and nose cone design are most important to go through earth and concrete.Tungsten may be best for the tip if is not too brittle.But it would be far more expensive than DU for the main ballast or liners.

BUT once inside the target (recognised by the AUP's Hard Target Smart Fuze) and ignited by the weapon's explosive charge, DU's pyrophoric quality are likely to make it an effective incendiary device as in tanks.Tungsten would not do this.

Incendiary effects may be important because one requirement for the new generation of penetrators is for use against suspected chemical and biological weapons facilities (see FAS link above). We are not talking GBU-28 technology here (old gun barrels with explosives and fins).These are highly strategic, high value targets.The FAS link above refers to the AUP (BLU-116) for the GBU-24.See also http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/gbu-24.htmThe same AUP technology seems to apply to the AUP-113 used in the GBU 37 bunker busters http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/gam.htm used since 1997 according to FAS.

DU still seems as functional as Tungsten for hard-target penetration effect, far more effective for incendiary effect and far cheaper, except in health and environmental costs.In military terms it seems suited to purpose.Whether environmental consequences are acceptable, and what precautions are thereforeneeded, are political, not military questions.

DU hazards in the Afghan - facts needed urgently We are concerned citizens, not munitions experts.The points above are taken from available websites, comparing information and using it to test denials that DU is being used in the Afghan war.On 1st November the UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the UK Parliament on 1st November "It is not being used at present".

The UK Government has its own definition of truth - known in UK as "spin".Taken literally Mr Hoon's comment that DU is not being used at present literally means "not at the time I am speaking".It does not answer the questions "has DU been used in the Afghan war in the last 4 weeks?" or " Will it be in the near future?".It does not give the facts needed for the central question - "What is the dense metal used in the latest hard-target smart bomb and cruise missile systems?"

I am an occupational psychologist.I am concerned about the potential occupational health and safety hazards of DU for aid workers, media teams and public health and safety for civilian communities.There is a special concern for troops sent to check out targets hit by hard target guided weapons munitions - the highest DU risk locations if these suspicions are correct. Employers including NGOs and other allied forcesneed these facts urgently NOW - to take precautions or increase medical support.Political delay will cost more lives.

Political responsibility for answers

Thank you for checking the interpretation of my data Jack.I hope this is sufficient explanation to keep asking the main questions. It is important that we check our case before going public to politicians or media.The reasons above increase my suspicions that DU is most likely to be the dense metal in the AUP series of hard-target warheads.

Now it is up to our elected representatives, employers (e.g. NGO's and media companies) and the media to help put these questions to the US and UK governments.We need answers fast.Every day more bombs and missiles are being used and more ground forces being sent into the Afghan War.If DU is being used in some of these systems every day delay will risk more lives.

Dai Williams, UK eosuk@btinternet.com

REFERENCES:

Extracts from Jane's Defence website Depleted Uranium - FAQs (Feb 2001) DU is a heavy metal that, when alloyed with titanium (up to 0.75% by weight), becomes a material with a density (18,600kg/m3) and ductility suited to making penetrators for kinetic energy anti-tank munitions, or liners for shaped-charge warheads. During the Balkans operations from 1992 to 1996, only the US Air Force acknowledges its use in some of its 30mm cannon shells fired from the GAU-8A cannon. It is true that some guided weapons used depleted uranium to increase the penetration effect and that the 20mm Phalanx close-in weapon system, used to protect warships at sea from sea-skimming missiles, also has a percentage of DU rounds.

Current description at http://www.janes.com/defence/news/jdw/jdw010108_1_n.shtml (Jane's Depleted Uranium - FAQs, 7 Nov 01 )
What is Depleted Uranium? Depleted Uranium (DU) is only used as a penetrator. It is not a warhead, bomb or explosive.

Who used it in the Balkans? During the Balkans operations from 1992 to 1996, only the US Air Force acknowledges its use in some of its 30mm cannon shells fired from the GAU-8A cannon. It is true that some guided weapons used depleted uranium to increase the penetration effect and that the 20mm Phalanx close-in weapon system, used to protect warships at sea from sea-skimming missiles, also has a percentage of DU rounds.

Other online sources:

Properties of elements: http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/periodic-table/phys.html see Uranium (238)Youngs modulus 208 similar to Cobalt, Nickel and Iron.Tungsten much higher. Density very similat to Tungsten.Hardness (Brinell) similar to Tungsten, 3-4x higher than Co, Ni, Fe. Properties of alloys: http://www.matweb.com/composition.htm Enter Uranium 50%+ and submit for data.See tensile strength for cast, annealed and wrought versions. Enter Cobalt 5%+, Nickel 5%+ and Iron 5%+ and see properties for some kinds of copper/nickel/steel alloys as used in the GBU 24 outer casing.

-------- india / pakistan

Agni to dominate agenda Rahul Datta/New Delhi

The Pioneer (India)
November 7, 2001
From: Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>

The state of India's Agni missile programme and nuclear weapons preparedness will be the high point of the forthcoming Army Commanders Conference later this month. The ground for sensitive discussion will be prepared during the two-day definitive interaction between the scientists and the Army in Devlali starting on Wednesday.

The seminar organised by the Army Training Command at the School of Artillery, Devlali near Nashik will see scientists from the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the artillery focussing attention of nuclear weaponisation of the Agni missile.

The conclusions of this seminar will form part of the Commanders Conference to be addressed by the Prime Minister. The Commanders are likely to learn the political leaderships mind on the nuclear weaponisation programme in view of China and Pakistan posing a definite threat to India's security concerns, sources said here on Tuesday.

The Prithvi missile system with a range of 250 kilometres and capacity to carry 1,000 kilos of weapon payload yet to be integrated fully into the Army, Pakistan has integrated Hatf-II with composite rocket regiment of its Gujranwala based 30 Corps.

The Indian defence services, moreover, are not in the nuclear loop of the nuclear weaponisation though it became a nuclear weapon state after the Shakti series of tests in Pokhran in 1998. The Commanders are likely to seek the government's views on the involvement of the defence services in the nuclear loop as they will be the end users in case of a war, sources said.

Facing China in the eastern sector is a major concern for the Army as China has deployed its tactical nuclear weapons in Tibet. The Devlali seminar will discuss the state of Agni missile which is to be deployed to counter the Chinese threat.

With a range of 2,500 kilometres and a capacity of carrying 1000 kilos of nuclear weapon payload, the Agni cannot be in operational readiness due to the Government's policy of no first use, sources said. The scientists and soldiers will discuss the process to keep this missile in unweaponised or recessed state. They will also deliberate upon the crucial issue of who will be the controlling authority. The other issues will include the nuclear core and non-nuclear component and safety (arming and fusing). The conclusions will form the agenda for the Commanders conference, sources said.

The Commanders conference will also see a discussion on the delay in acquiring weapon systems.

-------- iran

Israel Calls Iran 'Biggest Threat'

Wed, Nov 07
By BARRY SCHWEID,
AP Diplomatic Writer
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/011107/12/int-us-mideast

WASHINGTON (AP) - Iran is the biggest terrorist threat in the Middle East and receives critical support from Russia for its nuclear weapons program, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Wednesday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted in an American television interview taped Monday in the Kremlin that Russia was not providing dangerous weapons technology to Iran. He called such suspicions a "legend," or fable.

But Ephraim Sneh, a former Israeli general and now transportation minister, said he was certain "the central support for the Iranian nuclear project is provided by Russia."

Sneh told reporters at breakfast that Israel was on friendly terms with Russia. But, he said, "We don't sweep things under the rug."

Informed that Putin was denying the link in an interview on ABC-TV's "20/20," Sneh said "it doesn't change the situation." He said Israel had advised Russia that its support for Iran was damaging Israel's security.

Sneh, in Washington for a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who is President Bush's assistant for national security affairs, said he did not want to advise the United States how to organize its campaign against terrorism in Afghanistan.

"We understand there is an American need and we feel our obligation to help" by not interfering, Sneh said.

But he said Iran and Syria, which the Bush administration has solicited for its anti-Taliban coalition, are countries that support terrorism.

"We believe they cannot be considered as countries that fight terrorism," Sneh said. "If someone forgets that we are willing to remind them."

The ex-general said Iran has deployed thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon, across Israel's northern border. The missiles have a range of 40 to 45 miles, he said.

Hezbollah, a militant group branded a terrorist organization by the State Department, has attacked Israel from southern Lebanon. Its arms are provided by Iran and transit through Syria, Sneh said.

"Iran stands in first place as a sponsor of terrorism," he said.

----

Russia denies helping Iran develop weapons

11/07/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/06/putin.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected U.S. suspicions that Russia has provided dangerous weapons technology to Iran. Putin also praised President Bush, with whom he will meet next week, as someone with whom he can do business and a leader who keeps his word. In an interview in the Kremlin with Barbara Walters for ABC's 20/20 program, Putin struck a conciliatory stand on almost all fronts. He indicated, for instance, that he could be ready to strike a deal to clear the way for a U.S. anti-missile shield program.

"We could reach quite quickly mutual agreements," Putin said in an interview conducted on Monday and set to air on Wednesday. He added that the Russian position on a missile shield "is quite flexible."

But he also cautioned that a settlement "can only be found as a result of very intense negotiations."

Both Putin and Bush have said they would like to cut nuclear arsenals, which now number about 6,000 warheads for each country. The Russians have suggested cuts as low as 1,500; U .S. officials have discussed a range of between 1,750 and 2,250. In exchange, the U.S. would like to conduct missile tests now barred by a 1972 arms control treaty.

On the touchy issue of Iran, the Russian president rejected as a "legend" that Iran is receiving technology from Russia for missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

"We have not ever sold anything to Iran, out of the range of technology or information that would help Iran develop missiles, or weapons of mass destruction," Putin said.

Russia has some projects with Iran in atomic energy, he said. But "it has nothing to do with developing nuclear weapons. We are categorically opposed to transferring any technologies to Iran that would help it develop nuclear weapons."

The issue has been underlined as serious and troubling by U.S. officials, who otherwise speak warmly of growing rapport between Washington and Moscow.

On another front, Putin ruled out sending Russian troops to Afghanistan to help the United States root out Osama bin Laden and smash his al-Qa'eda terrorist network.

"To us this solution would be unacceptable. To us, sending troops to Afghanistan is like for you, the U.S., returning your troops to Vietnam," Putin said. The Soviet Union fought a 10-year war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in defeat in 1989.

Still, Putin said the Russian army is helping the United States in rescue operations, even on Afghan territory, and said he had shown Bush intelligence data indicating terrorists in the separatist republic of Chechnya plan to kill Americans.

"The Americans should know about that," Putin said.

Reaffirming Russia's support for the U.S. war against terrorism, Putin said it would be very difficult but possible to find bin Laden.

"It is important," he said. "The main players in this should be brought to justice. But this will not resolve the overall terrorist problem."

On the war itself, Putin said the United States was losing "not in the military but in the information."

"It seems to me that in the information field, terrorist are acting more aggressively and more offensively, and they're presenting opposition in terms of emotions," he said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Putin was the first foreign leader to call Bush to register support for the United States. In the interview, he said he wished he could have done something to prepare the United States for the assault.

"I had the feeling of guilt for this tragedy," he said. "I don't know whether it would have been possible to prevent these strikes on the United States by the terrorists. But it was a pity that our special services didn't get the information on time, and warn the American people and the American political leadership about the tragedy that came to pass."

Putin praised Bush at several points.

"I believe it's not accidental that he became the president of the United States. He sees better and deeper and understands the problems more accurately," the Russian president said.

"We argue about some problems, disagree about things, but I noticed that if he agrees with something, and if he says yes, he actually pushes the question down to resolution, to fruition, and we assess this quite positively," Putin said.

"We can do business with this man, and he lives up to the agreements that he reaches," the Russian leader said.

-------- israel

The Nuke Factor

Wednesday, November 7, 2001
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51802-2001Nov6.html

George Will ["The F-16 Solution," op-ed, Nov. 1] got a basic fact wrong about Israel's preemptive 1981 attack. He wrote, "Iraq was about to receive a shipment of enriched uranium for its reactor near Baghdad -- enough to build four or five Hiroshima-size bombs."

Although highly enriched uranium can be used to build a bomb, Iraq received only about 25 pounds of such fuel, barely adequate for a single high-tech weapon and insufficient for a Hiroshima-style bomb. The real threat was that Iraq would operate the reactor to produce sufficient plutonium for a much bigger nuclear arsenal.

But Mr. Will is correct that highly enriched uranium fuel can be diverted for nuclear weapons, which is why the United States and its allies stopped building reactors with such fuel in 1978 and have converted nearly all their reactors to low-enriched fuel unsuitable for weapons.

In this light, it is remarkable that Germany recently built a research reactor near Munich that will use 800 pounds of bomb-grade uranium fuel during the next decade.

Given today's terrorist threat, it is reckless in the extreme to provide such a tempting target. American officials should tell their German counterparts to cease and desist from a plan that endangers us all.

ALAN J. KUPERMAN
Venice, Calif.

-------- russia

Putin Disputes Iran Weapons Report

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Putin-Interview.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted in an American television interview that Russia is not the source of anthrax spores circulating in the United States and said his country's smallpox supply is safe.

He also denied that Russia has provided dangerous weapons technology to Iran. And he praised President Bush, with whom he will meet next week, as someone with whom he can do business and a leader who keeps his word.

In an interview in the Kremlin with Barbara Walters for ABC's ``20/20'' program, Putin struck a conciliatory stand on almost all fronts. He indicated, for instance, that he could be ready to strike a deal to clear the way for a U.S. anti-missile shield program.

``We could reach quite quickly mutual agreements,'' Putin said in an interview conducted on Monday and set to air on Wednesday. He added that the Russian position on a missile shield ``is quite flexible.''

But he also cautioned that a settlement ``can only be found as a result of very intense negotiations.''

Both Putin and Bush have said they would like to cut nuclear arsenals, which now number about 6,000 warheads for each country. The Russians have suggested cuts as low as 1,500; U.S. officials have discussed a range of between 1,750 and 2,250. In exchange, the U.S. would like to conduct missile tests now barred by a 1972 arms control treaty.

Asked if he is concerned that either anthrax or smallpox could be bought or stolen from a Russian source, Putin answered, ``No. I believe it would be impossible.''

The highly contagious and deadly smallpox virus was eradicated 21 years ago and is known to survive only in laboratories in the United States and Russia. Germ warfare experts suspect that other countries, including North Korea and Iraq, may have secretly obtained stocks.

Anthrax has been studied for years as a biological weapon with the potential weapon to sicken tens of thousands, including through a Soviet-era germ warfare program.

``Those materials have been guarded, were guarded in the Soviet Union, and Russia, very securely,'' Putin said. ``So I exclude that possibility. I believe this is true of anthrax and smallpox.''

On the touchy issue of Iran, the Russian president rejected as a ``legend'' that Iran is receiving technology from Russia for missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

``We have not ever sold anything to Iran, out of the range of technology or information that would help Iran develop missiles, or weapons of mass destruction,'' Putin said.

Russia has some projects with Iran in atomic energy, he said. But ``it has nothing to do with developing nuclear weapons. We are categorically opposed to transferring any technologies to Iran that would help it develop nuclear weapons.''

The issue has been underlined as serious and troubling by U.S. officials, who otherwise speak warmly of growing rapport between Washington and Moscow.

On another front, Putin ruled out sending Russian troops to Afghanistan to help the United States root out Osama bin Laden and smash his al-Qaida terrorist network.

``To us this solution would be unacceptable. To us, sending troops to Afghanistan is like for you, the U.S., returning your troops to Vietnam,'' Putin said. The Soviet Union fought a 10-year war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in defeat in 1989.

Still, Putin said the Russian army is helping the United States in rescue operations, even on Afghan territory, and said he had shown Bush intelligence data indicating terrorists in the separatist republic of Chechnya plan to kill Americans.

``The Americans should know about that,'' Putin said.

Reaffirming Russia's support for the U.S. war against terrorism, Putin said it would be very difficult but possible to find bin Laden.

``It is important,'' he said. ``The main players in this should be brought to justice. But this will not resolve the overall terrorist problem.''

On the war itself, Putin said the United States was losing ``not in the military but in the information.''

``It seems to me that in the information field, terrorist are acting more aggressively and more offensively, and they're presenting opposition in terms of emotions,'' he said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Putin was the first foreign leader to call Bush to register support for the United States. In the interview, he said he wished he could have done something to prepare the United States for the assault.

``I had the feeling of guilt for this tragedy,'' he said. ``I don't know whether it would have been possible to prevent these strikes on the United States by the terrorists. But it was a pity that our special services didn't get the information on time, and warn the American people and the American political leadership about the tragedy that came to pass.''

-------- ukraine

Ukraine's Green party protests against spent nuclear fuel transportation

Wednesday, November 07, 2001
By Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11072001/ap_45475.asp

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine's Green party started to collect people's signatures across the country against spent nuclear fuel transportation from Bulgaria to Russia through Ukraine, the party's leader said.

A train carrying 41 metric tons (45.1 short tons) of spent nuclear fuel from an atomic power plant in the Bulgarian town of Kozlodui is due to pass through Ukraine on its way to a Russian chemical plant. The Green party is especially alarmed by the lack of information about the transportation route and the nuclear fuel containers' quality, said party leader Vitaliy Kononov, according to the Interfax news agency.

Ukraine was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986, when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded and caught fire, sending a radioactive cloud over much of Europe. Nuclear safety issues remain sensitive in the country.

"Does a country, which went through the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, need alien nuclear waste to be taken across its territory?" Kononov said. He said parliament should cancel Ukraine's participation in the 1997 accord signed with Bulgaria, Russia, and Moldova that authorizes such shipments.

Kononov spoke a week after a group of Russian and Ukrainian environmental organizations appealed to Ukraine's parliament and President Leonid Kuchma to stop the shipment.

Russia has long imported spent nuclear fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Hungary for reprocessing under a Soviet-era system, but a 1992 law prohibits the practice from being expanded. Earlier this summer, a new law overturned that ban, raising fears among environment protection activists that Russia could be turned into a nuclear dump.

Proponents of the plan maintain it is safe and say it could earn the country US$20 billion over the next decade that could be spent on environment clean-up efforts.

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

Panel Recommends Ending Satellite Plan

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/politics/07SATE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - At the urging of its Republican leadership, the House Appropriations Committee is recommending canceling an expensive infrared satellite system that the Pentagon considers vital to missile defense.

The satellites are intended to track ballistic missiles as they soar through the atmosphere, providing data that would help interceptor missiles tell missiles from decoys and home in on and destroy warheads.

The Pentagon had proposed putting two dozen such satellites, at an estimated cost of $11 billion to $20 billion, into low orbits above the earth over the next two decades to provide continuous surveillance against missile attacks.

But in a report that has yet to be voted on by the full House, the Appropriations Committee contends that the satellite program is over its budget and behind schedule. It also cites an internal Pentagon study that questions the effectiveness of the satellites in discriminating between warheads and decoys.

Noting that ground-based radar might be a less expensive alternative to the satellites, the committee recommended denying the Bush administration's entire request of $385 million for the satellite program in the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Instead, the committee proposed transferring most of that money to other satellite and radar programs.

"This was not ready to move forward," said Jim Specht, a spokesman for Representative Jerry Lewis, a California Republican who is chairman of the Pentagon subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

"By taking away the funding, the committee is making clear they need to do more development and testing of this system in order for it to become an integral part of national missile defense," Mr. Specht added.

But Pentagon officials said that canceling or sharply cutting the satellite program would be a major setback to the Bush administration's missile defense plan.

"It would degrade the future capability of the overall missile defense program," said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

"Ground-based systems are limited by the curvature of the earth," Colonel Lehner added. "They don't have the range of a space-based system, which can cover the whole planet."

Congressional officials said the fate of the satellite program before the full House and in the Senate was unclear. The Senate Armed Services Committee has voted to reduce the program by $96.6 million, while the Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to vote on the Pentagon spending bills.

The satellites, known as the space- based infrared system-low, are being developed by two competing teams, one led by TRW and Raytheon, the other by Spectrum Astro and Northrop Grumman.

The system had its roots in the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, when it was known as Brilliant Eyes. Using infrared sensors, the satellites are intended to locate warheads when they reach the mid-course of their trajectory, sending back to earth data that would help ground-based radars and interceptor rockets to fix on a threatening warhead.

Proponents contend that the satellites would be valuable not just for tracking long-range nuclear-tipped missiles, but also short-range weapons, known as theater missiles, that could be fired at American troops overseas.

"It's an essential component if ballistic missile defenses are to work effectively," said Representative John Spratt, a South Carolina Democrat who supports the program. "Not just for national missile defense, but also theater missile defense."

Pentagon officials have often cited the infrared satellites in responding to critics who contend that a missile shield would be easily fooled by decoys released alongside warheads in space. By identifying the difference in temperature between a decoy and warhead, the satellites would, in theory, be able to guide an interceptor toward the real target, the Pentagon contends.

Critics of missile defense question whether any system would be effective in picking out decoys. But they concede that a missile defense is likely to be more effective with the infrared satellites than without them.

"The job of the attacker is easier if there is not a S.B.I.R.S.-low system," said Lisbeth Gronlund, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an arms control group.

But over the years, the satellite program has been repeatedly criticized by Congressional investigators and Pentagon testers.

In a report released in February, the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, asserted that the satellite program was being rushed and was likely to face technical failures and major cost overruns.

The investigators found, for example, that the Pentagon was proposing to launch the first satellites before critical software had been completed.

"The S.B.I.R.S.-low program is at high risk of not delivering the system on time or at cost or with expected performance," the report concluded.

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

-------- new york

WESTCHESTER COUNTY
Pirro's Election Bid Unaffected by Conviction of Her Husband

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/nyregion/07WEST.html?searchpv=nytToday

WHITE PLAINS, Nov. 6 - A year after her husband was sentenced to federal prison on tax fraud charges, Jeanine F. Pirro, the Westchester district attorney, emerged victorious in her bid for a third term tonight, beating an unknown rival who sought to link Mrs. Pirro to her husband's case.

Mrs. Pirro, a Republican, was leading the Democratic challenger, Tony Castro, a former Bronx prosecutor, by 53 percent to 46 percent, with 91 percent of the precincts reporting. That is far short of her 2-to-1 landslide over an unknown four years ago.

Mrs. Pirro declared victory, but Mr. Castro said he would not concede until all the votes had been counted.

"This has been a tough journey and a tough fight, both personally and professionally," Mrs. Pirro told supporters at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains.

Mr. Castro, 44, had portrayed Mrs. Pirro, 50, as a willing beneficiary of her husband's cheating and as evasive about her role in the family's finances. He also criticized her as a relentless media hound who devoted too many resources to garnering publicity.

Mrs. Pirro's victory came as Westchester Democrats posted some key successes. Andrew J. Spano, the county executive, beat Larry I. Horowitz, a Republican making his first bid for countywide office, 55 percent to 42 percent, incomplete returns showed.

In a race that attracted national attention, Maria McHugh, a Republican running for the County Legislature in place of her husband, who died in the World Trade Center attack, lost to the incumbent Democrat, Vito Pinto. According to early returns in other races, it appeared the Democrats would expand their control of the 17-member Legislature by two seats, for a 10-to-7 majority. Mrs. McHugh, 34, a homemaker in Tuckahoe with three children, had never run for political office. But she made appearances with Republican heavyweights, including Gov. George E. Pataki and Mrs. Pirro, and appeared on television news programs.

The Sept. 11 attack, however, for the most part pushed the races to the background, as several candidates suspended campaigning for a few weeks and then sought to gain the attention of voters fixated on the terrorism.

Most political analysts had predicted that the incumbents would be safe because they had raised much more money than their rivals and had presided over relatively calm, prosperous times.

One question was whether voters would punish Mrs. Pirro, who has built a reputation as an aggressive prosecutor focused on crimes against children and women, for the wrongdoing of her husband, Albert, who is serving a 29-month sentence in prison. A lawyer and lobbyist, he was convicted of writing off as business expenses some $1.2 million in personal expenses, including cars, plane tickets and fine art.

Mrs. Pirro had signed the joint tax returns that formed the basis of the federal government's case but has said that she did not know they were improper.

Mr. Spano's election to a second term came as no surprise. He had raised more than $1 million and ran on promises to keep cutting property taxes while continuing work to preserve open space and improve county government services.

His opponent, Mr. Horowitz, raised only a small fraction of Mr. Spano's war chest, and Republican insiders have said he ran as a favor to the party with the expectation that he would be backed for a judgeship next year. Mr. Horowitz has denied that, but, in an interview, suggested that he was owed something by the party.

In the final days of the campaign, the issue of security at the Indian Point nuclear plants in Buchanan played a prominent role, with Mr. Horowitz calling for the placement of anti-aircraft missiles to defend them and Mr. Spano expressing confidence in the existing security.

The incumbent County Clerk, Leonard N. Spano of Yonkers, a Republican who is not related to the victor in the county executive's race, easily defeated his Democratic challenger, Lisa Copeland, the Mount Vernon city clerk.

North of Westchester, in Putnam County, in a fiercely contested race, incumbent Sheriff Robert Thoubboron lost to Donald B. Smith, the deputy county executive by a margin of 76 percent to 24 percent.

-------- pennsylvania

Peach Bottom Nuclear Reactor Should Not Be Relicensed
Reactors Are Terrorist Targets; Aging Reactors Pose Safety Hazards, Generate Dangerous Waste

Nov. 7, 2001
From: Noel Petrie, Public Citizen <NPETRIE@citizen.org>

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania should not be relicensed because, like reactors throughout the countryit is a terrorist target and its equipment will pose safety hazards for surrounding communities as it ages, Public Citizen told federal officials today.

Because of these reasons, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) should halt its process for relicensing Peach Bottom, Public Citizen said in comments filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The comments coincide with two public hearings the NRC is holding today on the reactor's relicensing. The hearings are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. at the Peach Bottom Inn, 6085 Delta Road in Delta, Pa.

"Security is the elephant in the nuclear power industry's living room," said Hugh Jackson, policy analyst with Public Citizen. "Yet the NRC is continuing to move forward and relicense old nuclear power plants as if the September attacks never happened."

Nuclear power plants were originally licensed for 40 years. License renewals would allow them to operate for an additional 20 years. The licenses for Units 2 and 3 at Peach Bottom, located 45 miles west of Philadelphia, are scheduled to expire in 2013 and 2014 respectively. (Unit 1, which was built using a more primitive design, ran for just seven years and was shut down in 1974 because of mechanical problems.)

In the weeks since Sept. 11, the NRC has continued to process relicensing applications as if there were no heightened concerns about the safety of commercial nuclear facilities. Many people, though, are worried. Mock drills have shown nuclear plants to be relatively easily accessed by intruders, and a disciple of Osama bin Laden has been quoted in the news as saying that the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 should have targeted a nuclear plant.

"Relicensing old nuclear power plants, which will continue to tempt terrorists far, far into the future, should never have been started in the first place, and it certainly shouldn't be done now," Jackson said.

Public Citizen has long opposed the relicensing of nuclear power plants, citing, among other issues, increased risks from aging reactors. Reactor vessels can become brittle over time, and steam generator tubes can deteriorate and leak, potentially releasing radiation into the air. The longer a reactor operates, the more nuclear waste it generates. Also, the nation still has no workable solution for the disposal of deadly nuclear waste.

Public Citizen supports a shift in national energy policy away from fossil and nuclear fuels and toward conservation and renewable energy sources. Public Citizen noted in its comments to the NRC that even the commission's so-called "generic environmental impact statement" for relicensing nuclear power plants states that "conservation technologies produce enough energy savings to permit the closing of a nuclear plant" in most electricity service areas.

If the NRC persists in processing Exelon's license renewal application, Public Citizen will call on the NRC to conduct a comprehensive analysis of available conservation technologies as part of the environmental statement to be prepared on Peach Bottom relicensing. Specifically, the NRC should evaluate the potential of conservation and energy efficiencies as the preferred alternative to license renewal.

"The NRC ought to take its own paperwork seriously for a change," Jackson said. "If it did, the agency would close down most of the 103 reactors in operation around the country."

Peach Bottom is one of seven nuclear power plants with active relicensing applications. The other plants are Edwin E. Hatch, located northwest of Savannah, Ga.; Turkey Point, located northeast of Miami, Fla.; Surry, located near Williamsburg, Va.; North Anna, located northwest of Richmond, Va.; Catawba, in South Carolina, just south of Charlotte, N.C.; and McGuire, located west of Charlotte, N.C.

The NRC projects that 29 plants will be relicensed over the next six years. The agency already has relicensed three plants: Calvert Cliffs in Maryland; Oconee in South Carolina; and Arkansas Nuclear One.

-------- us nuc politics

Bush tells of nuclear threat

By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 7, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011107-355377.htm

President Bush yesterday told Eastern European leaders that the al Qaeda terrorist group is seeking nuclear weapons and compared the Taliban regime to the fascist leaders who ravaged Europe for half a century.

The goal of the terrorist groups is "to destabilize entire nations and regions," Mr. Bush said in a speech delivered live via satellite to leaders of 17 nations gathered in Warsaw.

"They are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself," Mr. Bush said.

In one of his most direct global appeals to date, Mr. Bush said, "Like the fascists and totalitarians before them, these terrorists - al Qaeda, the Taliban regime that supports them, and other terror groups across our world - try to impose their radical views through threats and violence.

"We see the same intolerance of dissent, the same mad, global ambitions, the same brutal determination to control every life and all of life."

Mr. Bush said if civilized countries join together - quickly and with full commitment - terrorism can be defeated.

"We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now, because we must lift this dark threat from our age and save generations to come."

As Mr. Bush addressed the Eastern European leaders, paramilitary police yesterday arrested two Turks attempting to sell weapons-grade uranium to undercover officers in Istanbul, police said. The suspects had agreed to sell the officers 2.56 pounds of uranium of a quality that could be used to develop a nuclear weapon, Reuters reported.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Washington Times that if the uranium was confirmed to be of weapons grade, it would be the first time that such material has reached the market.

"As long as I have been in this office, I have not come across a single case of weapons grade uranium," said the official, who noted that the U.S. Embassy in Turkey had not yet confirmed the quality of the seized uranium.

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States has provided friendly countries high-tech detection devices to locate radioactive materials.

The devices can penetrate moving trains or shipping containers, the official said. In his address, the president said coalition partners must cooperate on an unprecedented scope to defeat terror.

"All nations, if they want to fight terror, must do something. It is time for action," Mr. Bush reiterated in a Rose Garden appearance with French President Jacques Chirac. "Over time, it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity. You're either with us or you're against us in the fight against terrorism."

Mr. Bush walked a fine line when speaking to Eastern European leaders from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia.

While seeking to invoke the specter of World War II, the U.S. president risked offending leaders from Russia and former Soviet states, where communism still has supporters.

But Mr. Bush did not cross the line, as Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did last month when suggesting the Bush administration risked repeating the errors of 1938 - when Britain conceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler - by trying to win Arab support for the international coalition against terrorism.

"For more than 50 years, the people of your region suffered under repressive ideologies that tried to trample human dignity. Today, our freedom is threatened once again," Mr. Bush said from the White House Blue Room.

The Eastern European leaders gathered at the invitation of Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski to discuss ways they can cooperate in fighting terrorism. While some are seeking admission into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Bush administration officials said the president made no promise to promote their membership in exchange for cooperation.

Mr. Bush painted a striking picture of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

"It's terrifying. Women are imprisoned in their homes, and are denied access to basic health care and education. Food sent to help starving people is stolen by their leaders. The religious monuments of other faiths are destroyed.

"Children are forbidden to fly kites, or sing songs, or build snowmen. A girl of 7 is beaten for wearing white shoes. Our enemies have brought only misery and terror to the people of Afghanistan - and now they are trying to export that terror throughout the world," the president said.

But Mr. Bush said the Afghan people, many of whom oppose the Taliban and its terrorist arm al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, can still act.

"I've seen some news reports that many Afghanistan citizens wish the Taliban had never allowed the al Qaeda terrorists into their country. I don't blame them. And I hope those citizens will help us locate the terrorists - because the sooner we find them, the better the people's lives will be," Mr. Bush said.

Still, he vowed to protect civilians as the U.S.-led military campaign seeks to destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda.

"Our efforts are directed at terrorist and military targets because - unlike our enemies - we value human life. We do not target innocent people," he said.

Later in the day, after his White House meeting with Mr. Chirac, Mr. Bush said his statement that bin Laden is seeking weapons of mass destruction is not news.

"The reason I said that is because I was using his own words. He announced that this was his intention."

Mr. Chirac endorsed the Bush position, saying the U.N. Security Council had already acknowledged the legitimacy of the U.S. war on terrorism and said all countries must participate.

"Each must contribute according to its capabilities, but none may refuse to help in the war against terrorism," the French president said.

Yesterday's address came at the beginning of a weeklong campaign to boost world support for the war against terrorism, especially the first phase - knocking out the Taliban and bin Laden's al Qaeda.

The president will deliver a national address tomorrow from Atlanta, then this weekend attend a U.N. conference, where he will meet with more world leaders.

• Ben Barber contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.

----

[Some things never change.et]

White House summons biz chieftains

By Peter Bart,
Variety Editor-in-Chief
Wednesday November 7
Reuters
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20011107/en/industry-war_1.html

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - The Bush administration's outreach to Hollywood has taken on new urgency.

The industry's top leaders, including Viacom Inc. chairman Sumner Redstone and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, will assemble in Beverly Hills Sunday morning with Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, to hammer out a specific agenda for the entertainment industry to aid the fight on terrorism.

An initial meeting between White House aides and showbiz figures took place Oct. 17, but some in attendance expressed frustration because of a lack of specifics. The Sunday meeting will attempt to address this problem.

Moreover, while the initial meeting involved mainly filmmakers and actors, the Sunday session will resemble an industry summit. Invitations were signed by Motion Picture Assn. of America president Jack Valenti, Viacom Entertainment CEO Jonathan Dolgen and Paramount Pictures chairman Sherry Lansing on the instigation of the White House. The invites subsequently went out to the owners and CEOs of the various studios and networks, most of whom quickly agreed to attend.

The invitation stressed the nonpartisan nature of the meeting -- Lansing and Dolgen are well-known liberals -- while stressing the importance of launching an industry-wide effort to help the war effort.

The purpose of the meeting will be to identify strategies and agree on practical ideas, which may involve films as well as TV messages.

One source emphasized that the production of outright propaganda films will not be on the table. Showbiz, the invitation said, has long held the power ``to communicate, educate and inspire'' -- skills that must now be dedicated to the present crisis.

Sunday's meeting represents a major coming together of Hollywood and the Bush Administration. A key figure in arranging the session was Gerald Parsky, who ran the Bush campaign in California.

While the initial October meeting included the likes of Academy of Television Arts & Sciences chairman Bryce Zabel and producer-director Lionel Chetwynd, the Sunday session will be limited to Hollywood's senior statesmen.

``Once we work out some specific objectives, the creative community will be invited back in,'' one source said.

The press will be barred from the Sunday summit, which will take place in late morning at a Beverly Hills hotel.

One executive who planned to attend the meeting likened the effort to those that followed Pearl Harbor.

In 1941, the studios quickly mobilized films carrying ``positive'' messages such as ``This is the Army,'' and brought out a series of films like ``Wake Island'' and ``Torpedo Boat,'' which brought the public closer to the war. Film titles were even rearranged to boost morale: ``Message from Main Street'' became ``Main Street on the March.''

The present conflict poses more complex problems for Hollywood, however. There is heightened sensitivity to the possible injection of propaganda into the media bloodstream.

``Hollywood can contribute in positive ways without becoming a propaganda organ,'' one top executive insisted.

----

LBJ tape 'confirms Vietnam war error'

FROM MARTIN FLETCHER IN WASHINGTON
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 07 2001
Times of London
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001384600,00.html

PRESIDENT Johnson admitted in a secret tape recording that the incident he used to win congressional approval for the Vietnam war probably never happened, according to a book published yesterday.

In 1964, days after an alleged North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress approved a resolution authorising the President to take "all necessary steps, including the use of force" to help America's southeast Asian allies.

Johnson used the "Gulf of Tonkin resolution" to drag America ever deeper into the Vietnam war - to the consternation of many Congressmen.

In a secret recording Johnson berated Robert McNamara, his Defence Secretary, for misleading him. "You said: 'Damn, they are launching an attack on us, they are firing on us.' When we got through with all the firing, we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all."

The book, Reaching for Glory, was edited by the historian Michael Beschloss from Johnson's tapes and the diary of Lady Bird, his wife.

-------- us nuc waste

Berkley seeks inquiry into document release

Las Vegas Review-Journal
Wednesday, November 07, 2001
By STEVE TETREAULT
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Nov-07-Wed-2001/news/17394312.html

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., on Tuesday asked the District of Columbia Bar to investigate an impropriety allegation against a law firm working on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project.

Berkley said she is seeking an inquiry into Winston & Strawn, a Chicago-based firm that holds a $16.5 million contract to advise the Department of Energy on license preparations for a proposed spent fuel repository.

Thursday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed it was checking accusations that someone in the agency gave a Winston & Strawn representative a licensing document that has not been made public.

According to Nevada officials, the document later turned up with officials in the Yucca Mountain program. They said the document, which the commission was expected to make public in coming months, could give program managers an advantage in preparing a license application over the objections of the state and environmentalists who oppose the project.

Berkley's letter said "premature release" of the document is a "breach of agency procedure" and is "further corrupting the licensing process for the Yucca Mountain project."

Charles Connor, a Winston & Strawn attorney and spokesman, said Tuesday he had not seen the Berkley letter and wouldn't comment on it.

Cynthia Kuhn, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C., bar, said Berkley's letter will be forwarded to the Office of Bar Counsel, which fields complaints against lawyers licensed to work in the city and conducts hearings into allegations of wrongdoing.

The bar counsel has a separate conflict of interest complaint Berkley filed Oct. 12 against Winston & Strawn, Kuhn said. That complaint was based on reports that the firm had been performing work on the nuclear waste program while it was registered to lobby Congress on behalf of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which favors a Yucca Mountain repository.

The Energy Department's inspector general also is investigating possible conflicts of interest by the law firm.


-------- MILITARY

Gunman fires on base used by U.S. military

USA Today
11/07/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/11/07/gunman-usbase.htm

DOHA, Qatar (AP) - A Qatari gunman opened fire Wednesday on an air base used by U.S. military aircraft and was shot and killed by guards. The Pentagon didn't have any reports of Americans being wounded.

The Al-Adid Air Base base is some 60 miles south of the capital, Doha, where a major World Trade Organization meeting kicks off on Friday.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the shooting did not immediately appear to be connected to the WTO meeting. "From all early appearances, there are no indications of such a connection. That can change, of course."

The shooting took place several hours before the American WTO delegation was scheduled to arrive at a different military facility, Fleischer said. "The delegation we have sent there landed safely without incident, proceeded to their hotel."

The official Qatar News Agency, quoting an Interior Ministry official, said the shooting at Al-Adid Air Base took place at 10:30 a.m.

In Washington, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke declined to answer a question on how many U.S. soldiers or planes might have been at the base at the time of the incident.

Clarke said the Pentagon didn't have any reports of Americans being wounded.

Under an agreement between the United States and Qatar, the base is being used by U.S. military aircraft. Last month, a U.S. master sergeant was killed in a forklift accident while building an air strip in Qatar, becoming the first U.S. casualty linked to the strikes on Afghanistan.

The Qatari agency identified the gunman as Abdullah Mubarak al-Hajiri. It said that al-Hajiri fired several bullets at the air base. The guards shot back, killing al-Hajiri instantly.

Investigations were under way to determine the cause of the incident, the agency added without giving details.

---

War Support Ebbs Worldwide
Sept. 11 Doesn't Justify Bombing, Many Say

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 7, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51068-2001Nov6.html

MEXICO CITY -- It was a traditional altar for Mexico's Day of the Dead observance, filled with flowers, candles and sweet bread laid out for departed loved ones. Except this one also featured bagels and photos of New York, and it sat next to the U.S. Embassy here as a show of solidarity with the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mexicans who showed up to inaugurate the display made clear their sympathy for the dead in the United States. But they also made clear that sympathy did not necessarily translate into support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. "I think the government of President Bush has gone too far; the war frightens me," said Guadalupe Loaeza, a columnist and social commentator who helped organize the altar display.

Such views seem to be increasingly widespread around the world. The initial outburst of solidarity after Sept. 11 has frayed considerably as U.S. warplanes bomb Afghanistan relentlessly for the fifth week running. This is true not only in Arab and other Muslim countries, where the U.S. military campaign has provoked popular outrage, but in other countries where people feel less of a direct connection to the events.

In opinion polls and interviews in several countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, many people who said they were horrified by the Sept. 11 attacks added that the horror then does not justify the bombing of Afghanistan now -- even if their governments continue to back the U.S. campaign. In a war that Bush has described as a battle between good and evil, many said it is not so simple.

A poll taken this week for France 3 television and France Info radio, for instance, showed support among the French for the U.S. military campaign has dropped to 51 percent, down from 66 percent shortly after the bombing began Oct. 7. Support also has declined in Germany, where polls show more than 65 percent of respondents now want the U.S. attacks to end, and in Spain, where a poll for Cadena SER radio showed 69 percent of those surveyed want the bombing to stop.

Even in Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair has become a cheerleader for the U.S. campaign, popular support for the bombing has begun to slip, sinking from 74 percent soon after the attacks in Afghanistan began to 62 percent in a poll conducted last week.

The views of Xu Maomao, 31, a human resources manager in Beijing who attended a candlelight vigil in late September to mourn the U.S. victims, typify the evolution of public opinion in many countries: "I supported the military strikes at first, but now I don't know what to say," she said. "I keep hearing about the lack of electricity in Afghanistan, or civilians and children being killed. But only once in a while is there anything about a terrorist base being hit. With all that high technology, can't the United States do better?"

The Chinese government still supports Washington, but popular support seems to have weakened as more bombs have fallen. The government has offered strong endorsement of the fight against terrorism and cautious support for the U.S. military campaign, but it has done little to rally the public behind the cause.

"I think the United States has been too harsh and unreasonable," said Tong Zhifan, 22. "It's big and powerful, and it doesn't care how others feel. You can't behave like that. Isn't that why America was attacked?"

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin's strong backing of the bombing campaign muted most criticism at first. But in recent weeks, many Russians seem to have developed doubts about the U.S. venture into a country known as the Soviet Union's Vietnam. One poll this week found 46 percent of respondents convinced that the United States will fail.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, there were outpourings of public sympathy in Moscow, including huge mounds of flowers, teddy bears and traditional Russian icons piled up outside the U.S. Embassy. But that has not necessarily translated into public support for the bombing.

With the new war in Afghanistan unfolding uncomfortably close to Russia's southern border, concerns range from practical complaints about U.S. military tactics to longer-term fears about the new American presence in Russia's Central Asian sphere of influence. Some fear that the United States will drop bombs, then walk away from Afghanistan, leaving Russia to deal with a mess in its back yard.

"With every day, the Americans and the world public are increasingly doubtful about the efficiency of U.S. actions," said Vladimir Lukin, deputy speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament. While Russia remains a willing participant in the anti-terrorist alliance, he warned, "the possibility of difficulties cropping up within the coalition itself is growing because the U.S. does not offer what is usually called the light at the end of the tunnel."

Misgivings are growing among close allies as well.

"The basic pro-American sentiment is still there, but there is growing unease because of the reports of the women and the children being killed," said Tim Pat Coogan, a prominent Irish author and historian who lives in Dublin.

Coogan said that many Irish think the United States did not give enough thought to the long-term political future of Afghanistan before starting the military campaign. "They seem to have bombed first and worried about the political alliances afterward," he said.

"People here know that many of the scenes of horror and civilian casualties are Taliban propaganda," Coogan said. "But we've heard so much about elite troops and smart bombs and modern electronic devices -- where are they? The Americans seem to be making a mess of their campaign. Sometimes it makes you shake your head in despair and think of Vietnam."

Here in Mexico, an increasingly close U.S. ally and a country that has traditionally stayed out of international disputes, President Vicente Fox is walking a political tightrope by supporting the U.S. military effort. He and his top advisers have been blasted by critics who say that Mexico should support only peaceful, diplomatic solutions to international conflicts.

Pedro Reyes Linares, a leader of Mexican labor and community groups, said the United States should have turned to international courts, not bombs. He said the U.S. effort resulted from typical American impatience.

"It's clearly not a war between good and evil," he said. "The impression is that there are other motives behind the war. It's not just hunting down the terrorists, but achieving greater control in a strategic area with rich resources, and the possibility of exploiting oil and minerals."

Criticism of the United States has even shown up on the radio in Mexican folk songs known as corridos . One song, "The Mistake of the CIA," goes, in part: "They are looking for you, bin Laden, the terrorist that the CIA trained, that was the biggest mistake of the American government."

Farther south, the media in Argentina and Brazil have focused increasingly on civilian casualties in Afghanistan, fueling already strong anti-American sentiment. Bin Laden has emerged as a symbol of anti-Americanism among Brazil's leftist and anarchist youth. His photo now shows up at rallies alongside local favorites such as Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

Members of two of the main soccer clubs in Rio de Janeiro have worn bin Laden T-shirts to games and unfurled bin Laden flags when their team scored a goal. Bin Laden has also become an underground hero among the street gangs that rule Rio's hillside ghettos. Already resentful of the U.S. war on drugs, they see bin Laden as a symbol of power and resistance to the United States. The paper bags of cocaine selling for $1 each in Rio's ghettos have bin Laden's image stamped on them and sport new names such as "Taliban Cocaine."

In South Africa, sympathy for the United States has turned to scorn with reports of Afghan civilian casualties.

"I do not understand the arrogance of the Americans," said Siphiwe Moerane, a graphics designer sitting in a Johannesburg coffee shop. "How do you wage war against an entire country to get one man? We were all sorry to see the loss of so many American lives on September 11. But why do Americans seem to think that their lives are more valuable than lives outside their borders? This is what makes people so angry at the U.S."

Many Africans, who empathize with Afghanistan's impoverished population, also hear echoes of colonialism and racism in the U.S. and British attacks. Many Africans still hold a grudge against the British for their colonial role in Africa. And they recall bitterly Washington's support for such despots as the late Mobutu Sese Seku of Zaire, warlords such as Angola's Jonas Savimbi and South Africa's apartheid-era white-minority government.

"No one in his right mind can defend the gruesome murder of innocent children and the elderly in pursuit of one man whose guilt cannot be proved beyond doubt," Garth le Pere, director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, told reporters in Johannesburg.

"It simply means that America has no regard for innocent lives lost in other parts of the world," said Sipho Seepe, a South African political analyst. "For them the concept of innocent lives lost applies to situations where white and people of Western origin are involved. When it is black people's lives or those of people of Indian origin, the concept does not apply."

Public support in Kenya for the U.S. campaign appears to be holding firm, despite a demonstration in the heavily Muslim port city of Mombasa that turned into a riot. That incident was at least matched in the public consciousness by the unprecedented spectacle of President Daniel arap Moi leading a march supporting the United States in the aftermath of the attacks. And Kenyans still remember vividly the 1998 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that killed 207 Kenyans and 12 Americans.

"I'm supporting it definitely, since the Americans are trying to attack the terrorists, not Islam," said John Ngagna, 19, a student. "They're not fighting the religion, they're fighting those responsible. Kenyans understand that."

Elsewhere as well, public support is still strong. In Canada, a poll last week found that 74 percent of people surveyed support the war in Afghanistan. Rudyard Griffiths, executive director of the Dominion Institute, a Toronto charity that promotes the study of history in schools, said Prime Minister Jean Chretien deserves much of the credit because he did not raise false expectations of a short war.

"The result is, Canadians are more reconciled with complexities we entered into," Griffiths said.

"I am proud to have such a close association with the United States," said Joe Warmington, 36, a Canadian who writes a column for the Toronto Sun called Night Scrawler. "I think we should be where Great Britain is; we should be the first off the block."

In Japan, which has clung to pacifism since the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, polls show that most people either support the bombing of Afghanistan or see it as unavoidable. Support for military action has actually increased, from a range of 42 to 52 percent just before the airstrikes began to a range of 57 to 83 percent in the past two weeks.

The popular prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, pushed for and won passage of a bill on Oct. 29 allowing Japan to send its military outside the nation's territorial waters to give logistical support to U.S. troops. Analysts describe the government as eager to avoid a repeat of the Persian Gulf War experience, when Japan was criticized for offering financial assistance but little military support.

Asked about the bombing of Afghanistan, Yoshihito Nakagawa, a 46-year-old architect, said Japan had to be involved and support the United States. "For now, it's the only way," he said.

But Japan's deep pacifist streak is still evident. Yoshiaki Nagashima, 59, dug out photographs of Afghanistan he took in 1978 and exhibited them this week at a small gallery in Tokyo -- photos of children laughing and smiling. When the airstrikes began, he said, "I felt the egotism of the superpower."

Correspondents DeNeen L. Brown in Toronto, Anthony Faiola in Buenos Aires, Susan B. Glasser in Moscow, Jon Jeter in Johannesburg, Philip P. Pan in Beijing, Kathryn Tolbert in Tokyo and Karl Vick in Nairobi, and special correspondent Sarah Delaney in Rome and researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City, contributed to this report.

-------- afghanistan

No escape for Taleban from the 'daisy cutter'

Tim Ripley
Wednesday, 7th November 2001
The Scotsman
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/text_only.cfm?id=121413

Photo Fuel Air Bomb in action:
http://www.antiwar.com/photos/airburst.gif

AMERICA'S enemies in Afghanistan are now being attacked with huge 15,000lb fuel air bombs that kill every creature within a square mile radius of the impact point.

The first of these weapons, sometimes called "vacuum bombs" or "daisy cutters", were dropped out of the rear cargo ramps of a USAF C-130 Hercules transport aircraft on Sunday with the aim of terrorising Taleban troops opposing Northern Alliance forces.

Short of nuclear weapons, fuel air explosives are the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal and their use indicates that the Pentagon is trying to break Taleban morale.

Officially called the BLU-82, the bomb was designed during the Vietnam war to clear helicopter landing zones in thick jungle, but has since been used as a psychological terror weapon to break enemy resistance at key points of the battlefield.

Eleven were used to devastating effect during the 1991 Gulf war, with one attack alone killing an estimated 4,500 Iraqi troops. US Special Force troops are the only units equipped with the bombs and they co-ordinate their attacks with leaflet drops and propaganda broadcasts to induce enemy troops to desert or surrender.

The tactic worked spectacularly well in Kuwait, where thousands of Iraqis surrendered rather than risk being on the receiving end.

According to one British Army expert: "Within the blast effect radius of the BLU-82, lethality to personnel is 100 per cent" - which is military speak for saying anyone caught by the explosion dies.

The weapons are a combination of warheads, which first explode and spread a fine kerosene vapour into the atmosphere. A secondary explosion then ignites the fuel vapour, creating a massive pressure wave. Anyone caught in the conflagration is incinerated and the blast wave sucks out oxygen behind it, creating a vacuum that ruptures lungs.

"Personnel near the ignition point are obliterated," added the expert. "Those on the fringes are likely to suffer internal injuries - burst ear drums, crushed organs, ruptured lungs, severe concussion and possibly blindness."

No confirmation has emerged from the Pentagon of where the BLU-82s have been used, but they are "wide area" rather than precision weapons so cannot be used near civilian population areas or Northern Alliance lines.

The ideal targets would be concentrations of Taleban troops protected by field fortifications, bunkers or armoured vehicles. The fuel vapour of the weapon instantly penetrates into bunkers, vehicles or buildings before ignition. Experts say conventional body armour and bunkers provide no protection.

One US Special Forces soldier described the aftermath of a BLU-82 attack on Iraqi troops: "Many of our soldiers were at loss to explain what caused the Iraqis to die. After days or even weeks worth of exposure to the desert , evidence of blood had typically dried or become obscured by oil and sand particles so the Iraqi corpses showed absolutely no outward sign of violent death.

"Fuel air bombs merely suffocated their victims and they fell where they stood. Victims were typically found with massive amounts of blood flowing from all bodily orifices."

He added: "It is a very violent and painful way to die ."

----

America turns up the heat
15,000lb fuel-air bombs dropped on Taleban front line

BY ROLAND WATSON IN WASHINGTON AND
MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 07 2001
UK Times
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001380017-2001385141,00.html

Germany prepares to send in troops THE drive for a pre-winter military breakthrough in Afghanistan took off yesterday, with a dramatic escalation in US bombing clearing the way for the first significant advance in weeks by the Northern Alliance.

The US deployed for the first time its fearsome 15,000lb "daisy cutter" fuel-air bombs, guided by scores of American special forces troops who were dropped on to Afghan soil at the weekend.

The Northern Alliance seized the three districts of Zari, Keshendeh and Aq-Kupruk, taking it a significant step closer to the strategic city of Mazar-i Sharif. Two hundred Taleban fighters were reported to have been killed and 300 taken prisoner in heavy ground fighting.

US aircraft are now flying up to 120 sorties a day as they work closely with the Northern Alliance, focusing their efforts increasingly on trying to force the fall of Mazar-i Sharif. The city would offer the coalition forces a key staging-post and airbase from which to conduct operations through the winter, making it easier for the US to maintain the aerial bombardment of Taleban forces and to resupply opposition and US forces on the ground.

The fall of Mazar-i Sharif is regarded in Washington as the minimum requirement before the onset of winter, if only to show the world and the Taleban that the bombing, now into its fifth week, has achieved some success.

Military planners and Western diplomats have not yet given up hope that the Taleban could collapse quickly, undermined by mass defections once territory starts to change hands, but the more realistic planning is on the basis that they will not, and that even with Mazar-i Sharif captured the coalition will need to supply thousands of troops in the field.

The clearest sign of escalation came with the massive daisy cutter bombs, which float to the ground by parachute. The blast impact is said to be similar to that from a small tactical nuclear weapon. General Peter Pace, vice-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: "They make a heck of a bang when they go off and the intent is to kill people."

To underline the Pentagon's co-operation with the Northern Alliance, military chiefs said for the first time that it was supplying weapons to the anti-Taleban forces. They had previously only admitted to sending ammunition, food and other supplies.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said that the number of US special forces troops had been doubled, with many landing on Afghan soil over the weekend.

Until last week Washington had maintained an even hand among opposition groupings, wary of the political consequences of one force claiming power before a broad-based interim government had taken shape. That caution has been abandoned, partly because of assurances from the Northern Alliance, and partly because the failure to mobilise anti-Taleban opposition in the south means their forces represent the only possibility of a breakthrough on the ground.

Mr Rumsfeld and President Bush cautioned, however, against expecting swift progress on the battlefield. Mr Rumsfeld said that it was "not going to be a steady march", and advances would occasionally be matched with setbacks, while President Bush said that the conflict in Afghanistan was of "uncertain duration".

The developments came as President Bush evoked the terrors of totalitarian rule and the horrors of a terrorist nuclear threat as he tried to mobilise world opinion for the fight.Mr Bush used a satellite address to a conference of 17 Eastern European countries to give warning that the whole world was vulnerable.

"What afflicted the American nation could afflict any nation," he said. "Freedom is threatened once again. These terrorist groups seek to destabilise entire nations and regions. They are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and eventually to civilisation itself."

President Chirac of France used a visit to the White House to say that 2,000 members of the French Armed Forces were already committed to the coalition military effort. France has also committed a number of ships and reconnaissance aircraft. Germany also paved the way for the first deployment of its troops in a fighting role outside Europe since 1945, agreeing to mobilise 3,900 troops.

President Bush said that countries that did not offer concrete military help in the war would be held "accountable for inactivity". "A coalition partner must do more than express sympathy," he said.

The Pentagon meanwhile provided a full casualty list from the commando raid on Kandahar over two weeks ago, seeking to counter suggestions that the mission had been aborted after heavy Taleban fire. Mr Rumsfeld said that two of the special forces troops had broken bones in their feet on landing, 23 others had suffered minor cuts, five were injured by flying fragments from US explosives and one broke a finger.

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N. Alliance Advances as U.S. Pounds Front Lines

By Keith B. Richburg and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 7, 2001; 12:37 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54770-2001Nov7.html

JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan, Nov. 7 - American warplanes bombed Taliban front-line positions around the key city of Mazar-e Sharif, allowing the opposition Northern Alliance to claim significant territorial gains, while farther south U.S. planes dropped propaganda leaflets aimed at winning the support of ordinary Afghans.

The bombing around Mazar-e Sharif appeared to be part of a more coordinated military effort between the American forces in the air and the Northern Alliance on the ground. An alliance spokesman was quoted as saying that American fighters assisted an opposition advance by pinpointing Taliban forces as they were retreating in their pickup trucks.

The aerial leafleting, meanwhile, is part of a stepped-up psychological warfare, or "psy-ops" campaign that included the start of new propaganda radio broadcasts on three frequencies today. One set of leaflets encouraged Afghans to tune in to the radio broadcasts at designated hours in the morning and early evening.

Another leaflet distributed over this northern area was about the size of a dollar bill, with color pictures printed on each side. One picture shows women in traditional flowing "burqas" being struck by a male guard with a turban, and the caption reads; "Do you want such a future for your wives and children, begging for food?" The opposite side shows a picture of masked and hooded gunmen brandishing their weapons and encircled in what appears to be a bull's-eye. The caption says, "Push Out the Foreign Terrorists."

The writing on the leaflets is in both Dari and Pashtun, the dominant languages of Afghanistan.

U.S. officials see the information campaign, also referred to as "unconventional warfare," as a critical element of the overall effort to capture or kill Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, wanted for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and to dismantle his al Qaeda terrorist network. While bin Laden has tried to convince Muslims worldwide that it is their duty to join in a "jihad," or "holy war," against the United States, American officials want to undermine bin Laden's credibility in the Moslem world by stressing the thousands of innocent people killed when hijacked planes slammed into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and into a field in Pennsylvania.

"On September 11, 2001, thousands of people were killed en masse in the United States," the transcript of one radio broadcast says, according to the U.S. military press service. "Among them was a two-year-old girl. Barely able to stand or dress herself. Did she deserve to die? Why was she killed you ask? Was she a thief? What crime had she committed? She was merely on a trip with her family to visit her grandparents. Policemen, firefighters, teachers, doctors, mothers, father, sisters, brothers all killed. Why?"

Another broadcast says, "We have no wish to hurt you, the innocent people of Afghanistan." It warns people to "stay away from military installations, government buildings, terrorist training camps, roads, factories or bridges," according to a transcript of the broadcast.

The psy-ops campaign is run by members of the Army Special Operations Unit from Fort Bragg, who were reportedly dispatched here in the early days of the military campaign against Afghanistan which began one month ago. Along with the bombers in the sky are EC-130E Commando Solo II aircraft from the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, which are constantly broadcasting music, news and information inside Afghanistan.

The effort is similar to other psy-ops campaigns undertaken in Kosovo, Bosnia, Panama, and Somalia.

What is less certain is how many Afghans are actually listening.

Today's leaflets, announcing the new radio broadcasts and frequencies, caused some confusion when some Afghans mistakenly believed they were being given free radios from the United States; no radios ever materialized. Others said they had trouble tuning in to the frequencies at the designated 5 p.m. start-up time. And in this dirt-poor, war-ravaged country, many people simply cannot afford to own a radio.

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Afghan opposition claims major advances

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Tim Friend, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/06/attacks.htm

KHOJA BAHAUDDIN, Afghanistan - Commanders of forces battling the ruling Taliban in northern Afghanistan claimed progress in the ground war Tuesday. They said they had captured three districts near the key city of Mazar-e Sharif. They also claimed that hundreds of Taliban troops had surrendered and that half a dozen Taliban commanders had been captured.

None of the claims by commanders of the Northern Alliance forces could be verified independently. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't comment on the reports.

"You know, there are so many reports about this village or that village. I like to let the dust settle and see where it is at the end of some period of time after there has been a pause," he said.

Abdullah, the Northern Alliance's foreign minister, said the reported victories are an "important beginning" for what is likely to be a long and difficult campaign over the next weeks and months in northern Afghanistan.

Anti-Taliban forces appear to be preparing for major ground offensives across a 100-mile swath of front lines stretching from Mazar-e Sharif to Kalakata, about 20 miles from the Northern Alliance's military headquarters here. But Abdullah stressed that an all-out assault cannot be made without more intensive U.S. airstrikes and better coordination between the United States and the alliance.

Abdullah said one example of how coordination could be improved is better communication of the timing and intensity of airstrikes to facilitate follow-up action by rebel ground troops.

Despite more than a week of bombing in this part of northeast Afghanistan, Taliban troops have not retreated from their strongholds. Abdullah said the hard-line Islamic militia's front lines near Kalakata are among the strongest in Afghanistan. He said he came to the military headquarters here to assess the Taliban's stronghold and the rebels' ability to recapture the region.

Hashmattullah Moslih, a military analyst and member of the Northern Alliance, said he met here Monday night with key officials, including alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani, to discuss military strategies. He said Rabbani echoed Abdullah's desire for more intensive airstrikes and better coordination from the United States.

Moslih said the goal here is to retake the Taloqan district before winter sets in. He said Taloqan is crucial to creating a direct supply pipeline from the front lines in the far north to the capital, Kabul.

Now, supplies to Northern Alliance ground forces near Kabul must be routed far to the east through Afghanistan's highest mountains. Taloqan is near a mountain pass. Control of that city and the pass would make it far easier to move supplies of arms and aid from Tajikistan and Northern Alliance territory in the northeast to troops near Kabul.

Mazar-e Sharif, which is now controlled by Taliban forces, is also an important battleground. The largest airfield in northern Afghanistan is there. Control of that airfield could give U.S. and Northern Alliance forces a key staging point for bringing in troops, equipment and supplies.

Control of the city and roads leading in and out could also encourage neighboring Uzbekistan to open its border at Termiz, allowing easier movement of humanitarian aid and military supplies into Afghanistan from Uzbekistan.

Questions have been raised here about whether the rebel forces are equipped well enough for a sustained battle against Taliban positions on the front lines. But Monday afternoon, 20 truckloads of munitions provided by the Russians were transported across the Tajik border to northern Afghanistan and taken to the front lines near Kalakata, sources said.

The shipments reinforce the likelihood that a ground attack on Kalakata could begin in the next week.

---

Fighters seize district, approach Mazar-e-Sharif

USA Today
11/07/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/07/attacks.htm

JABAL SARAJ, Afghanistan (AP) - The Afghan opposition claimed its fighters edged closer to the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on Wednesday, and U.S. special forces reported Northern Alliance fighters on horseback charged Taliban tanks and armored personnel carriers. Officials of the ruling Taliban denied losing territory but acknowledged fighting was intense. In Washington, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace said the fighting south of Mazar-e-Sharif was "very fluid" and that the opposition appeared to be making progress. Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the alliance fighters: "They're taking the war to their enemy and ours."

Capturing Mazar-e-Sharif would be a major victory for the Northern Alliance because it would open supply corridors to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and cut Taliban supply lines to the west of the country.

U.S. bombers were also in action Wednesday across northeastern Afghanistan, pounding Taliban artillery positions near the border with Tajikistan. Reporters at this village 45 miles north of Kabul could hear the roar of warplanes and the thud of distant explosions after sundown.

The private South Asia Dispatch Agency also reported air attacks around Kandahar in the south and Jalalabad in the east of the country.

After 10 days of heavy air attacks along the front lines south of Mazar-e-Sharif, opposition spokesman Ashraf Nadeem said the Northern Alliance had captured Shol Ghar district and that some opposition units were within 10 miles of the city.

In Kabul, Taliban officials denied losing Shol Ghar but said they were rushing 500 fresh troops to front lines south of Mazar-e-Sharif to block the opposition advance.

The claims could not be independently verified. The border with Tajikistan, 35 miles north of Mazar-e-Sharif, is closed, and Western reporters in Northern Alliance-controlled territory more than 150 miles to the east cannot reach the area without crossing Taliban lines. However, reporters stay in daily contact with commanders by telephone.

Pace confirmed that U.S. special forces teams were with opposition forces near Mazar-e-Sharif "to help in directing airstrikes." The general said the American soldiers reported cavalry charges, with opposition fighters on horses going against Taliban armor. "These folks are aggressive," he said of the alliance.

The commander of Shiite Muslim fighters in the alliance, Mohammed Mohaqik, said opposition officers would confer over the next two days on plans to capture Mazar-e-Sharif without incurring large civilian casualties.

President Bush launched airstrikes against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the ruling Taliban militia refused to hand over Osama bin Laden for his alleged role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, reportedly said Wednesday that the Taliban will never hand over bin Laden and will fight America if necessary for 100 years. Zaeef made his comments during a dinner for Pakistani editors in Islamabad; one of those who attended provided details on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, Pakistan told Zaeef to stop using the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad for propaganda against any third country after a series of news conferences in which he accused the United States of "terrorism" and "genocide" in the bombing of Afghanistan.

In other developments:

- The brother of Afghan tribal leader Hamid Karzai insisted he was still in Afghanistan despite a statement by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he had been "extracted" by U.S. helicopters over the weekend. Ahmed Karzai said in Quetta, Pakistan, that his brother was in Afghanistan organizing resistance to the Taliban.

- Authorities across Europe raided homes and businesses and seized thousands of documents as part of a global crackdown on bin Laden's terrorist network.

- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf arrived in France on his first international trip since Sept. 11. Musharraf supports the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign despite opposition from Muslim groups at home.

Three opposition columns - each led by warlords representing different ethnic groups with competing interests - are moving on Mazar-e-Sharif, and coordination among the different groups has been less than seamless.

U.S. jets played a key role in Wednesday's opposition advance, targeting several pickup trucks packed with departing Taliban troops as well as hitting fortified positions, Nadeem said by satellite telephone.

Elsewhere, U.S. warplanes struck at Taliban positions on the Kabul front and in northern Takhar province near the border with Tajikistan. The attacks in Takhar were aimed at helping the opposition recapture its former stronghold in the city of Taloqan, which the Taliban took in September 2000.

On the front north of Kabul, an opposition commander, Qand Agha, said a U.S. jet hit a Taliban tank and that a B-52 bomber dropped 20 bombs around the front line in one hour Wednesday afternoon.

"It is improving but it is not enough," Agha said of the bombing. "I would like to see the Americans drop at least 200 bombs a day."

The latest attacks indicated yet another shift in U.S. bombing strategy during the air campaign, now in its fifth week.

In the first stage, attacks centered on Kabul and other major cities, followed about two weeks ago by a shift to front line positions about 30 miles north of the capital and in the far north of the country.

In recent days, however, the number of attacks on the Kabul front appear to have diminished and airstrikes in northern Takhar and in the Mazar-e-Sharif area have increased.

"We are preparing for an attack on Kabul," said opposition spokesman Mohammed Abil. "But the first priority is the northern offensives," meaning Takhar and Mazar-e-Sharif.

In villages surrounding Jabal Saraj, leaflets that witnesses said were jettisoned from a B-52 bomber tumbled from the sky. Children and adults scrambled to pick them up.

The leaflets showed a picture of a radio and antenna, and detailed times and frequencies for radio broadcasts in the Pashtun and Dari languages. The United States has been broadcasting anti-Taliban statements into Afghanistan.

Others showed a Taliban official beating a woman and included the message: "Is this the future you want for your women?"

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Afghan Opposition Claim Key Towns

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Afghanistan.html?searchpv=aponline

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -- Backed by heavy U.S. bombing, Afghan opposition forces claimed the capture Tuesday of several key towns on the road to Mazar-e-Sharif in their first reported significant advance against Taliban defenses.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said an assessment of the claimed move against the strategic northern city would have to wait until the ``dust settled'' and there was a pause in the fighting.

Even if true, it would mean opposition forces were several dozen miles away across mountainous terrain from Mazar-e-Sharif, with winter closing in.

But after seesawing battles south of Mazar-e-Sharif in recent weeks, the opposition said intense strikes by American planes helped open the way for Tuesday's advance. The alliance had complained earlier that U.S. bombing was not heavy enough.

U.S. jets also hit Taliban positions on another main front of the war, north of the capital, Kabul, dropping more than a dozen bombs and raising black smoke over the valley.

Rumsfeld said U.S. military planners hope that American help to the opposition alliance -- including weapons and ammunition -- will unite its factions so ``that we will see more success'' on the ground.

The Pentagon has said small numbers of American special forces teams are working with northern alliance forces to train and equip them, provide them with additional ammunition and weaponry, and identify targets for U.S. strike aircraft.

U.S. forces are playing similar roles with other opposition groups in the south and elsewhere, although the closest coordination has been with the northern alliance.

The Pentagon also intends to start delivering cold-weather clothing to the northern alliance, officials say.

President Bush launched airstrikes against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the ruling Taliban militia refused to hand over Osama bin Laden for his alleged role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In other developments:

-- Bush pledged ``to keep relentless military pressure'' on bin Laden and the Taliban, saying it is essential to keep terrorists from acquiring nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

-- Germany said it would commit 3,900 troops for the U.S. war on terrorism, opening the way for the nation's widest-ranging military engagement since World War II. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said there are no immediate plans to deploy ground troops.

-- Rumsfeld said the United States extracted Hamid Karzai, a southern opposition leader, from Afghanistan over the weekend. Taliban forces had been chasing Karzai as he tried to rally support among ethnic Pashtun tribes for an alternative to the Taliban.

-- The Bush administration said it will help Pakistan stop smugglers from trucking weapons across its porous border with Afghanistan, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan said.

The northern alliance, which launched a three-pronged attack Sunday toward Mazar-e-Sharif, seized Ogopruk and two other towns in a pre-dawn assault, said Ashraf Nadeem, an opposition spokesman. The area is 45 miles south of Mazar-e-Sharif.

``We attacked while the Americans were bombing,'' Nadeem said in a satellite telephone interview. ``It was not only us who killed. It was mostly the Americans.''

In recent weeks both sides have taken and lost villages around Mazar-e-Sharif. Retaking the city, which the Taliban captured from the opposition in 1998, would likely lead to the collapse of the Islamic militia's power in the northern region.

Nadeem claimed 300 Taliban defenders died and 300 defected to the opposition during Tuesday's fighting. Five opposition fighters were killed and nine wounded, he said. His account could not be independently verified, and there was no comment from the Taliban on the claims.

The towns' capture allowed opposition forces to push Tuesday toward Shol Ghar, and heavy fighting was reported about 30 miles southeast of Mazar-e-Sharif, Nadeem said.

Rumsfeld declined to confirm the claims of an opposition advance. ``There are so many reports about this village or that village,'' he said. ``I like to let the dust settle and see where it is at the end of some period of time after there has been a pause.''

The United States wants the Afghan opposition, a loose coalition of fighters dominated by ethnic minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, to make significant gains ahead of winter. Fighting traditionally tapers off then because snow closes roads and hampers the resupply of troops.

At the front line north of Kabul, U.S. jets targeted Taliban-held territory Tuesday near the Bagram air base and later the villages of Khan Agha and Barikab, and black smoke blanketed the area.

On the ground nearby, shots rang out on each side of the front. Opposition fighters say Taliban fire has lessened in recent days, but some say the lull is a sign the Taliban is saving ammunition to repel a large opposition advance.

Beyond a row of abandoned buildings, Taliban soldiers in baggy shirts and pants could be seen pacing, Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders.

Zaubet, a 19-year-old opposition fighter, said he had seen the Taliban bringing in men and supplies in pickup trucks in the past few days.

In Kabul on Tuesday, Taliban gunners opened fire at what appeared to be a small U.S. spy plane that cruised over the city at mid-afternoon.

Later, puffs of black smoke could be seen in the southern outskirts of the city. Taliban gunners fired repeated bursts of anti-aircraft rounds, but it was unclear whether they hit anything.

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THE DISSIDENT
U.S. Plucks Rebel From Afghanistan for 'Consultations'

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By JANE PERLEZ with STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/international/asia/07REBE.html

QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov. 6 - Hamid Karzai, the Afghan exile who has emerged as the Bush administration's main hope for forging a southern alliance against the Taliban, was plucked from Afghanistan by American forces early Monday, brought to Pakistan and then ferried back across the border, senior Pentagon officials said today.

The operation showed considerable coordination between Mr. Karzai and the Bush administration, which has been criticized for lacking a strategy in the south, where the Taliban are strongest. Until now, the administration has concentrated its political and military support on more organized opposition forces in northern Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai, who secretly entered Afghanistan several weeks ago to organize opposition to the Taliban in their southern stronghold, survived a battle with the Taliban in the district of Derawat in Uruzgan Province last Thursday. A senior American military officer said today that Mr. Karzai, the head of a well-known Afghan family, had asked to be taken out of the mountainous region when it became clear that Taliban forces were closing in on his position.

"If we had done nothing, he would have died," the officer said.

At the Pentagon today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Mr. Karzai had been spirited out with "a small number of his senior supporters and fighters" so that he could conduct "consultations."

Mr. Rumsfeld played down the operation to remove Mr. Karzai, which involved American Special Operations forces, saying "it was not an extraction in the sense of a military campaign."

Mr. Karzai apparently met with American officials and some of his own supporters in northern Pakistan before being taken back to his redoubt. Mr. Rumsfeld described the extraction of Mr. Karzai and the apparent sharing of information as a "very sensible arrangement."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States had provided Mr. Karzai with ammunition and food, but what else the administration has provided Mr. Karzai, who is considered more of a politician than a military strategist or commander, was not clear. The secretary suggested over the weekend that Washington was poised to place American advisers with him, but the senior Pentagon officials said advisers were not accompanying Mr. Karzai, though he remained in close contact with American officials.

In the family home in this border town, word of American cooperation infuriated Mr. Karzai's family, who said they feared that the American embrace would severely damage his efforts inside Afghanistan.

"Does he want people to think he is an American agent?" said Ahmed Karzai, a younger brother, during an interview today. Ahmed has become the chief conduit between Hamid Karzai and the outside world, giving interviews to foreign journalists about news from his brother, who calls in by satellite phone.

Ahmed also serves as a line to other anti-Taliban commanders who live here and appear to be waiting for the right moment to join Mr. Karzai.

Since the battle last Thursday, the Taliban have been denouncing Mr. Karzai as a tool of the United States and have insisted that they captured and then executed several of his supporters. "The moderates who oppose the Taliban are not happy with this," said another brother, Shah Wali. "The Taliban are now calling him an American agent. What should we fight against: Taliban propaganda or Rumsfeld propaganda?"

Both Ahmed Karzai and Shah Wali denied today - despite news reports to the contrary - that Mr. Karzai had left Afghanistan. They appeared concerned by the notion that he had left Afghanistan, a move that would be interpreted as one of weakness by the Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Mr. Karzai, and most of the Taliban, are Pashtun.

On Monday, Ahmed Karzai said he had spoken to Hamid twice by satellite phone and was told by his brother that he was still in the region of Derawat. Today, Ahmed Karzai said his brother had phoned to say he was well and continuing his "political work" inside Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai is regarded warmly in Washington, in part because he has long seen Osama bin Laden as a serious threat. After the battle last Thursday, Mr. Karzai told Ahmed by satellite telephone that most attackers were Arabs and Pakistanis.

On Monday night, one of Mr. Karzai's supporters, a man in his 20's who returned to Quetta from the battlefield in southern Afghanistan, stressed that Arabs and Pakistanis had led the Taliban charge against Mr. Karzai.

The supporter, who had driven for more than a day from Mr. Karzai's hideout, said Mr. Karzai fielded about 200 fighters against the Taliban's 700s. Although the numbers could not be independently verified, it appeared that Mr. Karzai was outgunned and outmaneuvered until help came from American warplanes.

The supporter, who came to the Karzai home Monday night, said the fighting stopped when "the planes came." One of Mr. Karzai's anti- Taliban allies in Quetta, Yusef Pashtun, said Mr. Karzai had told him by telephone that the Taliban attack against him last Thursday was "highly professional."

Although Mr. Rumsfeld and other officials declined to discuss the "consultations" Mr. Karzai held, they suggested he had valuable intelligence that could be useful in the American campaign, now entering its second month.

Mr. Karzai is a leader of the Populzai clan, which is strongest in the Taliban heartland around Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand and Ghor Provinces. Mr. Karzai is asking the people in those areas to choose between their clan and the Taliban.

Because economic conditions had deteriorated and the Taliban had become so unpopular, Mr. Karzai was confident that the people would choose clan over the religious rulers, Ahmed said.

Rebel's Nephew Is Executed

JABUL-US-SIRAJ, Afghanistan, Nov. 6 - Taliban forces executed the 20-year-old nephew of the Pashtun dissident Abdul Haq on Monday night, family members reported today. The young man, Izetulla, was captured with Mr. Haq late last month during a failed expedition to organize Pashtun resistance to the Taliban government inside Afghanistan. Mr. Haq was hanged within hours of his capture.

"He was killed last night in Kabul," said Haji Kadir, Mr. Haq's brother and a leader in the opposition Northern Alliance, said in an interview today. "They shot him."

Mr. Kadir said he learned of his nephew's death this morning. Mr. Kadir said that Izetulla was the son of a third brother in the family, Haji Den, who served as education minister in the government that briefly ruled Afghanistan in the early 1990's before the country disintegrated into civil war.

-------- arms sales

Uzbekistan: Bush's New Best Friend

Thursday, November 8, 2001,
Common Dreams,
by Frida Berrigan

The United States' new relationship with the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan once again raises questions about what sort of alliances the Bush administration will build to fight the war against terrorism. Uzbekistan has granted the U.S. access to its airfields for what it insists are "humanitarian" and "search and rescue" missions, but adamantly denies (in the face of evidence to the contrary) that U.S. troops, including Special Operations Forces, are on the ground.

In a special article on The Nation magazine's website, author Dilip Hiro relates a Uzbeki military officer's most up-to-date definitions for "humanitarian and "search and rescue." "If it means you have to take out half a dozen Taliban positions to 'rescue' your colleagues, then that is what you have got to do.... It could be considered 'humanitarian' to remove Taliban forces from a valley filled with civilians in need of food and medical supplies."

A recent New York Times article revealed that U.S. Green Beret troops were stationed in Uzbekistan and were training the Uzbeki military in marksmanship, infantry patrolling, map reading and other skills. In addition, the article made public the United States provision of "nonlethal" equipment like helmets, flak jackets, Humvee transport vehicles, and night-vision goggles to the Uzbeki military and border guards.

In the decade since its independence from the Soviet Union, U.S. weapons sales to Uzbekistan have gone from zero to more than $4 million in the last three years. Funding for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has also risen in the last few years, from $526,000 in 1999 to $550,000 for 2000. Now that Uzbekistan is our close ally in the war on terrorism, that figure is likely to increase substantially.

Although the New York Times made clear that U.S. Special Forces have been operating in Uzbekistan since 1996, the Uzbeki President denied it as recently as two weeks ago. In a news conference with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Karimov was asked the following question:

"Mr. President, how many American forces will be in your country? Which airfield have you offered? Did you agree that American Special Forces would be allowed to operate from Uzbekistan?"

He replied by saying, "Special Operations Forces will not be deployed in the territory of Uzbekistan."

Karimov's disavowal of the depth of his relationship with the United States points to the nation's iron fisted control of information, something that makes the country an attractive launching pad for U.S. operations. One Air Force official, quoted in the Washington Post, happily noted that "CNN can't film" U.S. aircraft taking off from Uzbeki airfields. Karimov's spokesman described Uzbekistan, which shares an 85-mile border with Afghanistan, as a "closed country."

According to the State Department's 2000 Human Rights report, "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights. [In 2000] the Government's poor human rights record worsened, and the Government continued to commit numerous serious abuses... Citizens cannot exercise their right to change their government peacefully... There were credible reports that security force mistreatment resulted in the deaths of several citizens in custody. Police and NSS forces tortured, beat, and harassed persons. The security forces arbitrarily arrested or detained pious Muslims and other citizens on false charges, frequently planting narcotics, weapons, or forbidden literature on them."

But the Bush administration is now turning a blind eye to the ugly underbelly of its new best friend. One unnamed U.S. government official compared the new Uzbeki-U.S. relationship to " modern dating...Sometimes you get married, sometimes you get a temporary restraining order." In the case of the relationship between Uzbekistan and the United States, "it seems like we're engaged and things are going well."

But, this "marriage" between Uzbekistan and the United States is one more instance of U.S. dependence on allies in the fight for "enduring freedom" that are not free or even democratic.

Frida Berrigan is a Research Associate at the World Policy Institute .

-------- biological weapons

Better tracking urged of labs

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/07/bioterror-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Alarmed by anthrax attacks, senators called Tuesday for a new registration system for laboratories possessing deadly microbes with potential uses as biological weapons. Regulations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) require that public or private labs register with the government only if they ship deadly "select agent" microbes - about 40 bugs responsible for diseases such as anthrax and smallpox. Labs aren't required to register if they simply possess the microbes.

Nationwide, 250 labs have registered, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. James Caruso, deputy assistant FBI director for counterterrorism, said at a Senate hearing that "as of now, we don't know" which labs nationwide have stores of anthrax, despite efforts by agents to collect registry information.

Of the registered sites, Caruso said about 100 labs or private culture-shipping firms are registered to transfer anthrax. Investigators do not believe the anthrax used in the attacks, identified as belonging to the widely distributed Ames strain of the bacteria, came from a registered lab, he said.

"To my mind, this has been an area of intense sloppiness," said Sen. Diane Feinstein D.-Calif., who chaired the hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information. "Entities are handling these agents, and no one knows who they are."

The regulations were created in 1996 after an Ohio microbiologist obtained bubonic plague germs through mail fraud. Before the rules were instituted, microbiologists traded select agents from lab to lab through informal means - such as a hand-off at a scientific conference. About 20 to 30 university labs nationwide currently work with anthrax on a regular basis, said hearing witness Ronald Atlas, head of the American Society of Microbiology.

Feinstein proposed new rules to require that all labs that possess select agents register with the CDC. Although hearing witnesses agreed with her call for more lab oversight, they cautioned that research labs still need access to dangerous microbes.

"Bioterrorists are not likely to follow the biosafety manual" and register their labs, regardless of whatever new rules are created, Atlas said. He estimated that perhaps 1,500 labs worldwide, including about 550 domestic facilities, handle select agents, "many of them in places with much looser transfer rules than we have here." Biological agents.

---

Plan to gas Senate building scaled back

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Robert Davis and Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/07/anthrax-cleanup-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Federal cleanup crews have scaled back their plan to use gas to rid the Hart Senate building of anthrax. Instead, Senate leaders announced Tuesday that crews will use chlorine dioxide gas in and around Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's office - where a contaminated letter released anthrax spores when opened on Oct. 15 - and in the building's ventilation system. But the cleanup crews will use other, less risky cleaning techniques in parts of the building where less anthrax was found.

"The EPA has advised us that the original plan to gas the entire building is not one that they now subscribe to," Daschle told reporters. "There are too many dangers inherent with using gas throughout the entire complex."

The revised plan further delays the cleanup project and may keep the office building closed until Thanksgiving.

"I think most senators understand how these things need to change as circumstances warrant," Daschle says. "We just hope we can get the job done as quickly but as safely as possible."

The Environmental Protection Agency, which last week had floated a plan to gas the entire building, said it could not discuss the details of the cleanup project. All decisions are being made on Capitol Hill and the EPA is acting only as an adviser, a spokesman said.

Daschle outlined the revised cleanup project in four steps:

- Hot spots will be doused with anthrax-killing foam.

- Daschle's office and the office of Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., will be sealed and chlorine dioxide gas would be used to kill spores.

- The gas will also be used to clean the ventilation system.

- The entire building will be retested to ensure that it's thoroughly decontaminated.

The revised plan emerged as the 50 senators and their staffs found some routine after being displaced from their office for nearly three weeks.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., got a lot of help finding work space for her staff. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, has opened a conference room to some of Feinstein's staff. Still more were squeezed into other offices in and around Capitol Hill.

But questions still remain about decontaminating the Hart building and reopening it for business.

Scientists who reviewed the EPA's first plan to use chlorine dioxide gas to rid the entire building of anthrax, urging the EPA to scale back because the project was too risky, say cleanup crews may still have to decide which items inside Hart might be impossible to clean without harm.

"There may be some things that just have to be destroyed," says T. "Kip" Howlett Jr., executive director of the Chlorine Chemistry Council and one of the advisers to EPA.

Brian Weiss, who works for Sen. John Breaux, D-La., says he and his co-workers are not yet ready to give up their stuff.

He is among about 45 staffers who are taking Cipro and working in a Capitol office designed for 10. Among their concerns are three freshwater fish in a large aquarium inside the office.

Breaux slipped into the office once after the evacuation - after signing an agreement with Capitol police - to put time-released food into his fish tank. He calls the pets "strong Louisiana fish."

Now, such visits are not allowed and two big goldfish and a suckerfish must wait as people wonder: When will Hart open?

Says the EPA's Patrick Boyle: "I wouldn't hazard a guess."

---

THE INQUIRY
Senators Told of Lack of Answers in F.B.I. Inquiry on Bioterrorism

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/politics/07INQU.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - In a blunt exchange with members of the Senate, a senior counterterrorism official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation acknowledged today that one month into its bioterrorism investigation, his agency still could not answer such basic questions as how many laboratories in the United States handle the anthrax bacteria.

The official, James T. Caruso, deputy assistant director of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism division, told senators that the agency was "pressing hard" to answer that question and many others, including how many people had access to the strain of anthrax that has been sent through the mail, killing 4 Americans and sickening 14. He said the number could be in the thousands.

"The research capabilities of thousands of researchers is something that we're still trying to run down," Mr. Caruso told Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, when she asked why the agency did not know how many laboratories handled the anthrax germ.

This and other frank admissions by the man the F.B.I. sent to the Senate to testify as its expert irritated and surprised the senators.

"I'm very surprised by how little people know," said Senator Feinstein, who is sponsoring legislation to tighten laboratory security.

Referring to gaps in the government's system for keeping track of laboratories that work with deadly germs, she added, "It's just a symbol of a kind of laissez-faire system that is very detrimental to the security of the American people."

Senator John Edwards, Democrat of North Carolina, said to Mr. Caruso: "But the bottom line is this: As of now, you don't know where the anthrax came from and you have not been able to identify all the people who may have access to it. Is that fair?"

Mr. Caruso replied, "That's correct."

In an interview after the hearing, Senator Edwards said, "My impression is that they are not that close to figuring out the answer to these questions."

Not all laboratories that handle biological agents are required to register with the government, one reason, F.B.I. officials say they do not know how many there are. Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, said today's testimony convinced him that he should cosponsor Mrs. Feinstein's legislation.

"There is no doubt we can make some improvements in the law," Mr. Kyl said.

The hearing, before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, came as federal health officials announced, to their relief, that there had been no new anthrax infections in the country since Friday. Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, pronounced it "good news."

But public health officials said they were still confounded by the case of Kathy T. Nguyen, the 61-year- old Bronx woman who died of inhalation anthrax, the deadliest form of the disease, even though no traces of the bacteria had turned up at her home, the hospital where she worked or any place she visited.

The question of where the anthrax germs have come from is equally confounding, however, and the authorities repeated today that they had come to no conclusions about whether the germs came from a foreign or domestic laboratory.

Under federal law, anthrax is classified as a "select agent" - one that could be used to make a biological weapon and, therefore, is regulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 1996 law requires any laboratory that ships select agents to register with the federal centers when doing so.

Jim Reynolds, chief of the Justice Department's terrorism and violent crimes section, told senators today that investigators were combing through those shipping records for clues. "I don't want to leave the impression," he said, "that we have no idea where anthrax is."

But there are loopholes in the law, said Ronald M. Atlas, president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology. If a laboratory acquired anthrax before 1997, when the law took effect, it could continue to possess anthrax without notifying the government, so long as it did not ship the germs, Dr. Atlas said.

Senator Feinstein would like to eliminate that grandfather clause, and Dr. Atlas said his society did not object, saying, "It makes sense.".

But Dr. Atlas added that he worried that too much regulation would prevent university researchers from studying deadly pathogens and developing drugs and vaccines that could protect people against them.

"We can't cripple the biomedical community," Dr. Atlas said in an interview. "You can impose all the biosafety rules you want and the bioterrorists aren't going to necessarily follow them."

By Dr. Atlas's estimate, there are 200 to 300 university laboratories in this country, and an additional 1,200 government and academic laboratories around the world, that work with deadly pathogens. He said in the interview that he drew those figures from a survey he did for the Department of Energy. A statistical analysis suggested that 20 to 30 of the American laboratories worked with anthrax.

F.B.I. officials said today that they were trying to put together a more detailed list of every American laboratory that might have access to the anthrax germ, in particular the so- called Ames strain, which was used in the bioterrorist attacks. But Mr. Caruso testified that the number of people with access to the strain was "too diverse a population at this time" for the agency to identify.

"There are veterinary colleges and other types of facilities that don't have to report on that," a senior law enforcement official said after the hearing. "We have to check hundreds of people. We are building our own list and we have to check every person."

Mr. Caruso was cautious in his public remarks, and at one point offered to tell senators more about the investigation privately. In an interview after the hearing, Senator Kyl, who has been a strong supporter of the F.B.I., said he came away with the impression that "this witness didn't know if he had the authority to tell us things."

But Senator Edwards said the testimony was clear. "Our responsibility, as an oversight committee, is to make sure that the F.B.I. is doing everything in its power" to investigate the attacks, the senator said.

---

The Front Is Here, and You're Drafted

New York Times
November 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/opinion/L07ANTH.html

To the Editor:

You report that the United States government does not know who is behind the anthrax attacks and is appealing to the public for help ("Baffled F.B.I. Asks for Aid in Solving Riddle of Anthrax," front page, Nov. 3).

There is a simple reason for this. The government has yet to genuinely involve the public in its homeland war against terrorism.

Congress must officially solicit the assistance of ordinary people to get on the front lines - subway systems, airports, bridges, mailboxes, anywhere there is a reasonable threat - to protect our national health, safety and peace of mind.

The law enforcement infrastructure is overburdened and insufficient. The battles we must fight will not be won unless we make fundamental changes in the way we think about and respond to the enemy.

FRANK X. WHITE III Silver Spring, Md., Nov. 3, 2001

•To the Editor:

What a mess we are in when the public is asked to help the F.B.I. ("Baffled F.B.I. Asks for Aid in Solving Riddle of Anthrax," front page, Nov. 3). Now we are asked to check handwriting and look for shady labs. The Salem witch trials have returned.

HELENE BENARDO Bronx, Nov. 4, 2001 •

Bioterror Dangers To the Editor:

Re "U.S. Sets Up Plan to Fight Smallpox in Case of Attack" (front page, Nov. 4):

The risk of smallpox as a weapon of bioterrorism appears real, and the current supplies of vaccine are low. But there is a low-tech method to mass-produce smallpox vaccine in calves that had been used for decades.

If there is the will, the New York State Health Department could produce sufficient vaccine for city residents within months. The danger appears acute, and it may be wise for New York City to protect its own.

RICHARD S. KALISH, M.D. Stony Brook, N.Y., Nov. 4, 2001 The writer is director of immunodermatology, University Medical Center Stony Brook, SUNY.

-------- business

Bin Laden money networks targeted

Wednesday, 7 November, 2001, 14:49 GMT
BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1643000/1643253.stm

The United States Government has taken steps to freeze the assets of financial networks linked to Osama Bin Laden, the chief suspect behind the 11 September terror attacks.

The names of 62 groups and people have been added to a list of suspected terrorist associates signed by President George W Bush in an executive order last month, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The new list covers networks in at least nine countries including the US and includes groups and people linked to two suspected Bin Laden money networks - known as Al Taqua and Al-Barakat.

They are informal money transfer agencies , known as hawalas, which are suspected of funnelling funds towards terrorism.

The list, which President Bush is due to make public later in the day, is also said to target assets in several countries, including Somalia, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, Sweden, Canada, Austria, Italy and the United Arab Emirates.

-------- drug war

DEA resources are stretched thin

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/07/dea.htm

WASHINGTON - Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, federal law enforcement agencies have been locked in a "battle of resources" between fighting terrorism and continuing to investigate crime, the nation's top drug enforcer says.

Asa Hutchinson, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Tuesday that he is concerned that efforts to stop drug trafficking will be hindered by two recent moves: the FBI's pullout from several DEA-FBI drug task forces, and a reassignment of Coast Guard resources that has left the USA vulnerable to drug smuggling from Caribbean routes.

Hutchinson said FBI agents have been pulled off drug investigations from Boca Raton, Fla., to Boston to Detroit to work on the massive terrorism investigation, and the transfer has forced his agency to "pick up the slack."

"When the dust settles" in the inquiries into the anthrax attacks and the terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Hutchinson said, he expects officials to determine what role, if any, the FBI will have in large-scale drug investigations in the future.

In the 1980s, the FBI lobbied for and was given joint jurisdiction with the DEA to investigate drug offenses.

But in the past 2 decades, Congress has piled more responsibilities on the FBI, from tracking down deadbeat dads who owe child support to patrolling Indian reservations.

Now, terrorism has given the FBI dual roles: Root out terrorists and their associates here, and thwart future attacks rather than wait for them to occur.

"They (the FBI) are clearly spread thin," Hutchinson said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. "It remains to be seen whether there's going to be a functional shift or whether it's followed by a formal reworking" of the relationship between the FBI and DEA.

FBI officials declined to comment on Hutchinson's remarks.

The Coast Guard also has shifted its resources to combat terrorism. To increase its ability to guard U.S. ports, it has taken most of its resources away from drug interdiction, particularly in the Caribbean, Hutchinson said.

Acknowledging that the "war on drugs" has taken a back seat to the "war on terrorism," he said, "I think we are holding our own."

But, he added, "We don't want the Caribbean to go back to the way it was in the '80s. We don't want to give a window of opportunity for the traffickers."

He said he has raised these concerns with Congress, but "it's a battle of resources right now."

"For the long term," he said, "we need to balance this out and devote the resources we need" to terrorism and drug enforcement.

-------- germany

BERLIN
Germany Ready to Send Force of 3,900

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/international/europe/07GERM.html?searchpv=nytToday

BERLIN, Nov. 6 - Despite nervousness among Europeans about the length and tactics of the American-led war against Afghanistan, European governments have not wavered in their support for Washington. The Europeans have had their own experience with terrorists, regard themselves as vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and understand that to oppose Washington now would put them on the side of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Germany lined up even more emphatically behind the Americans today, announcing that it would mobilize up to 3,900 specialized troops to support the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, would not say where or when the troops would be used, and there was no indication that they would be sent into combat.

But Mr. Schröder's announcement marked another important step in a reunited Germany's re-emergence - more than 55 years after the end of World War II - as a serious power in Europe. Germany, with troops leading a NATO peacekeeping mission in Macedonia and taking part in similar tasks in Kosovo and Bosnia, has now shown itself willing to use military force to defend its allies, and this deployment could see its troops in combat for the first time since 1945.

"This is a historic decision," Mr. Schröder said. Guido Westerwelle, the leader of the Free Democratic Party, which hopes to join the government after next year's elections, said "this is an hour that will find its way into the history books."

Germany was responding to an American request, Mr. Schröder said, but Washington had not asked Germany "to participate either in airstrikes or in putting in ground troops."

The chancellor said the Americans had asked for five kinds of assistance: Fuchs armored vehicles, equipped to check terrain for nuclear, chemical and biological contamination, with up to 800 soldiers; up to 100 special forces troops; some 250 troops to evacuate the wounded; 500 troops for air and matériel transport; and up to 1,800 sailors on ships.

Germany, like Italy, has been pressing Washington to respond to offers of military assistance made immediately after Sept. 11.

The British government, already fighting on the side of the Americans, has been urging the Bush administration to take up offers for military assistance made by Germany, France, Italy and other European countries.

After the Kosovo conflict, which was run by NATO, Washington has been reluctant to engage in another "coalition war," with countless debates among allies about military targets in the air or on the ground.

But British officials have argued that active military participation by European allies is the best way to keep the international coalition against terrorism together and help maintain support for the war among a skeptical European population. Many Europeans, and not just those on the left, are put off by the image of B-52 bombers hitting one of the poorest nations in the world with no easy end in sight.

While German planes flew defensive and reconnaissance missions in the Kosovo war in 1999, today's decision in principle to send German troops into combat represents "a qualitatively new level in foreign and security politics," Mr. Westerwelle said.

The normally pacifist Greens, the junior partners in Mr. Schröder's coalition, went along, but the party's defense spokeswoman, Angelika Beer, said, "The German Parliament is approaching its most difficult decision."

Some prominent Greens have called for a bombing pause in Afghanistan, a position Mr. Schröder has rejected out of hand as a move that would only help the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But a Forsa poll in the weekly Die Woche found 69 percent of Germans favoring a bombing pause and only 28 percent against. The same poll found 60 percent against German soldiers participating in a ground war in Afghanistan, and 35 percent in favor.

A similar poll, by Dimap, found 50 percent of Germans favoring airstrikes until the Taliban falls, and 39 percent favoring a bombing suspension to provide humanitarian aid. Neither poll gave a margin of error, but both polling organizations are considered reliable.

Mr. Schröder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, a Green, see Afghanistan as a test of their generation, and officials say they intend to pass the test. Mr. Schröder did note today, however, that military efforts were only one part of the war against terrorism, and that "political and diplomatic efforts should also be pursued."

The German cabinet is expected to approve the proposal on German troops on Wednesday, and the German Parliament will also go along, with the main opposition Christian Democrats on record as supporting a German military contribution to the war. The Parliament will be asked to approve the deployment of the troops for up to one year.

Mr. Schröder's announcement came two days after a mini-summit meeting of European leaders at 10 Downing St. The host, the British prime minister Tony Blair, had originally invited only the leaders of Germany and France, but other nations complained, especially Italy, and there was talk of a dismissive attitude toward the European Union.

In the end, Mr. Blair also included the Italians, the Dutch, the Belgians (who currently hold the rotating European Union presidency) and Javier Solana, the European Union's security chief.

In Paris today, as President Jacques Chirac was meeting President Bush in Washington, the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, told Parliament that France was "ready to increase the density of our support" for the American war effort in Afghanistan, particularly with naval forces.

Mr. Jospin said, "Beyond the facilities we have given - intelligence cooperation, which is proving fruitful - and support already given to American forces, propositions have been made in terms of aerial, naval and special forces." Mr. Chirac said France already had 2,000 troops engaged in the war against terrorism, but he did not specify where.

The Americans have also made concrete requests of the Italians in recent days, one reason the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was invited to the Downing Street dinner.

-------- iraq

U.S. Likely to Delay Action on Iraq Curbs
Concern About Alienating Russia Cited

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2001; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50571-2001Nov6.html

The Bush administration is likely to delay its efforts at overhauling U.N. economic sanctions on Iraq this fall and instead accept a continuation of the oil-for-food program for another six months, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources.

Administration officials have said for months they would seek to revamp the 11-year-old sanctions when they came up for renewal Dec. 3. But that plan has faced opposition from Russia, which could veto the proposal on the U.N. Security Council.

With Russia emerging as a key supporter of the American-led war in Afghanistan, U.S. officials are wary of provoking a disagreement with Moscow, U.S. and diplomatic sources said. Administration officials also see an opportunity to reach agreement with Russia over U.S. plans to test a missile defense system, a top U.S. foreign policy priority to which Moscow has long objected.

This delay would represent another setback for U.S. efforts to overhaul the sanctions, which have been an important element of the administration's overall Iraq policy. It was one of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's earliest initiatives after taking office in January.

Senior U.S. officials have not decided whether to accept a six-month renewal of the sanctions, but "that's where we seem to be going," a State Department official said.

Officials said it remains unclear whether that determination will come before President Bush meets Russian President Vladimir Putin during a three-day summit next week. Bush intends to raise the issue of Iraq sanctions during those talks, U.S. officials said.

At a meeting last week, Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov discussed the issue, leaving open the unlikely prospect of a last-minute deal on a new Security Council resolution.

But U.S. officials have already begun telling foreign diplomats the administration will likely wait until spring to press for "smart sanctions," designed to ease restrictions on civilian imports while tightening those on goods bound for President Saddam Hussein's military and weapons programs.

The oil-for-food program allows Iraq to sell its oil and spend the revenue on food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies. U.S. officials have criticized the program, arguing that it has too many loopholes even as it leaves Washington open to criticism that the sanctions are contributing to civilian suffering in Iraq.

Hoshyar Zebari, a top Iraqi Kurdish official opposed to Hussein's government, said he was told of the proposed delay during recent talks with officials from the State Department and United Nations. European and other diplomats said they were aware the administration has been considering deferring taking the issue to the Security Council.

An earlier attempt by the United States and Britain to reshape the sanctions program stalled in the spring, when they failed to win Russian assent. U.S. officials settled for an extension of the oil-for-food program through December and pledged to redouble their efforts during the summer and fall to win Moscow's agreement.

With commercial interests in Iraq, Russia has wanted to see the sanctions suspended and previously threatened to veto a restructured set of restrictions. The sanctions were imposed on Baghdad after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Since the spring discussions at the United Nations, U.S.-Russian relations have improved markedly, raising the hope in Washington and other capitals that differences over Iraq could be ironed out. "If the Russians are intent on blocking it, they can block it," a diplomat said. "I really don't know where the Russians are right now. It's a little unclear."

At the same time, with U.S.-Russian cooperation growing in efforts to fight terrorism and reach a new accommodation on missile defenses, administration officials have little appetite to confront Moscow over Iraq, U.S. and diplomatic sources said.

"There's a sense after September 11th that there's a larger issue out there -- an issue that strikes more clearly at American national security," a State Department official said.

Some Bush officials are unsure whether restrictions on civilian imports to Iraq should be eased now. Though the United States has long said it does not seek to make ordinary Iraqis suffer, the administration is trying to demonstrate since the Sept. 11 attacks that it is getting tough with state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iraq.

"There is some concern that any refining changes to the sanctions regime could be seen as lessening the burden on Saddam Hussein. In this atmosphere, it's not the message the U.S. would like to send," a diplomat said.

Administration officials, however, recognize there are several reasons to press ahead with a new sanctions program this fall. For one, an effort to ease the suffering of Iraqi civilians might improve American standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds at a time when U.S. bombing of Afghanistan faces criticism in some quarters.

Moreover, the task of adopting a new sanctions program could be complicated next year by the presence of Syria on the Security Council beginning in January. Syria has criticized the sanctions and has been looking to enhance economic and other ties with neighboring Iraq.

Special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan Clamps Down on Taliban Envoy
Ambassador Asked to End Anti-U.S. Speeches From Embassy in Islamabad

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 7, 2001; 1:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55761-2001Nov7.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 7--Over the past month, the Afghan Taliban regime's embassy here has been the scene of frequent, often tumultuous news conferences at which Taliban diplomats have denounced U.S. military attacks on Afghanistan, complained of resulting civilian casualties and defended Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden.

But this week, Pakistani authorities suddenly called in the Taliban ambassador here and asked him to stop holding such briefings, reportedly because of complaints by U.S. officials.

Pakistani officials today confirmed they had called in Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban regime's envoy, on Tuesday and "reminded" him that foreign embassies are not permitted to make public statements "against a third country."

"We felt the need to remind him, he heard us and left," said Aziz Khan, the Pakistan foreign ministry spokesman. "He was advised to observe diplomatic norms." Khan refused to name the third country, and he would not comment on whether U.S. officials had asked Pakistan to take such action.

Taliban diplomats here could not be reached today, and the embassy's front lawn, often a mob scene with dozens of camera crews jostling for space, was silent and empty for the second day in a row. Journalists were turned away at the entrance, diplomats would not come to the phone and no information was available.

American embassy officials also refused to comment publicly on the issue today, but they said privately that it "might have come up" in recent discussions between Pakistani and U.S. Embassy officials.

They also expressed frustration that Taliban diplomats had been issuing a stream of provocative claims here that were quickly reported by local and foreign news outlets but could not be immediately challenged by officials in Washington because of the 10-hour time lag between Pakistan and the U.S. East Coast.

Taliban officials here have repeatedly claimed, for example, that up to 1,500 Afghan civilians have been killed by Western bombing. U.S. and allied officials say the actual toll is only a fraction of that amount, and that they are doing everything possible to minimize civilian losses.

"There has been a clear perception here that we were losing the war, though not on the battlefield," said one diplomat. "When [Taliban officials] make outrageous statements here that cannot be countered quickly or effectively, they become part of the accepted wisdom."

At the same time, Western diplomats here are stepping up efforts to promote their version of the war in Afghanistan. Final plans are being made to open a Coalition Information Center here, with support from the U.S., British and possibly other embassies, that will provide regular information and briefings to the press. The center is expected to open within two weeks.

The American embassy has also issued a series of press releases on paper and via its Web site with titles such as, "Taliban Actions Imperil Afghan Civilians" and "US Committed to Improving Human Rights in Afghanistan." Diplomats said they plan to begin issuing such releases in the Pakistani and Afghan languages of Urdu, Dari and Pashto.

In the past two months, the Taliban embassy here has been one of the regime's few outlets to the world. No other country maintains diplomatic ties with Taliban authorities, and although Pakistan's government is supporting the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, it has allowed the embassy to remain fully functional.

While Zaeef's news conferences have largely been grim events full of anti-American pronouncements and descriptions of alleged bombing damage to schools or hospitals, they have also offered both moments of comic relief from war news and windows into the isolated, desperate world of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic militia that has been shunned by the world and rules over a barren, impoverished society.

At one briefing, Zaeef shrugged in apparent perplexity when asked about possible Taliban use of anthrax, saying, "we don't know what it is." On another occasion, asked if the Taliban regime had control of nuclear weapons, the black-turbaned cleric replied with a grin, "we can't even produce glass."

Recently, however, Pakistani officials increasingly have become concerned at the stream of dramatic allegations made in Taliban news conferences, in part because they are broadcast in Pakistan, where public emotions are running high against the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, a close Muslim neighbor and longtime ally of Pakistan.

According to press reports here this week, the government has also clamped down on domestic broadcasts by Al-Jazeera television, the Qatar-based network that has regularly aired footage of alleged bombing damage from inside Afghanistan and has also broadcast statements by bin Laden from undisclosed locations. Al-Jazeera's coverage has been highly controversial in the United States.

According to Al-Jazeera staffers here, the network has suddenly been denied access to privately owned cable television stations here, and its tapes are no longer being credited on Pakistan state television. Today, however, Aziz told reporters he had no knowledge of any official restrictions on Al-Jazeera's material. Some analysts here said the Pakistani government is worried that repeated broadcasts of bombing damage in Afghanistan, anti-American statements by bin Laden and comments by Taliban diplomats may further inflame emotions among Pakistani Muslims, especially during the holy month of Ramadan that begins next week.

Extremist religious groups in Pakistan have held numerous demonstrations against the United States and denounced the government for supporting the U.S. attacks. The groups have called for a nationwide transit strike Friday and have demanded that the bombing be halted during Ramadan.

But Aziz today dismissed suggestions that the government was worried about the religious protests, saying they represent only a small minority of public opinion. "In Pakistan things are normal and peaceful. Only small groups are agitating," he said, adding that the government will take any measures needed to prevent "the disruption of normal life."

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

Air Force slow to transfer special bomb kits to Navy

By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 7, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011107-29483111.htm

The Navy is running low on special kits used to turn "dumb" bombs into precision munitions for attacks in Afghanistan, but as of yesterday the Air Force had not agreed to transfer the equipment, said Pentagon officials.

"The Navy has asked the Air Force to share," said one official. "The Air Force is resisting, but I don't think they'll refuse."

The Navy is doing the bulk of tactical air strikes while Air Force fighters sit on the sidelines due to a lack of bases in countries near Afghanistan. Precision munitions are in high demand to hit military and terrorists targets, but leave nearby civilians unharmed.

Meanwhile, two officials told The Washington Times that Gen. Tommy Franks, the war's U.S. commander, has requested the Navy further increase its role by sending a fourth carrier to the region.

The Navy is examining how to meet the request without upsetting deployment schedules. The Navy's carrier battle groups cover specific regions of the world, such as the Pacific and Persian Gulf, while other carriers receive repairs or conduct training for the next six-month deployment.

"The Navy is figuring out what sacrifices to make to get it there," said a senior official. "They're living with 12 carriers in a war where we need 15."

Officials said the request for a fourth carrier is a sign the Bush administration plans to step up bombing in anticipation of commando strikes against the ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

There are now three carriers off the coast of Pakistan: the USS Carl Vinson, the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Kitty Hawk.

The Kitty Hawk is primarily being used as a platform to launch special-operations troops and helicopters.

The bombing began Oct. 7 with the carrier USS Enterprise in the region, but the Navy last week ended its extended deployment.

The officials say the Navy-Air Force negotiations are part of a much larger debate going on among Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's staff on the future of tactical aircraft and long-range bombers.

In Afghanistan, the Navy is flying virtually all tactical strike missions. The imbalance is due to the fact the Air Force has no basing rights in Central Asia.

It has sent a few F-15E strike fighters from Kuwait, but the 14-hour round trip makes the sortie questionable for the limited amount of ordnance the jet carries.

Defense officials say basing rights, or "denied access," as policy-makers call the issue, has prompted Pentagon officials to rethink the allocation of future bombers and fighters. The sources say some are discussing whether meeting 21st- century threats means the Navy should be buying more strike aircraft. And some are suggesting the Air Force should acquire fewer fighters in favor of a new long-range bomber whose larger bomb payload justifies lengthy flight times.

The Afghanistan campaign, these officials say, has bolstered the Navy's argument that the country still needs large-deck carriers and their 80 warplanes to project power overseas, even when elusive terrorists are the enemy.

Some Rumsfeld aides have looked at the idea of developing smaller, faster carriers instead of the large flattops - much to the Navy's chagrin.

With the Air Force virtually locked out of the tactical air war, the Bush administration is trying to win basing rights in Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan on the north. A U.S. military team is now in Tajikistan surveying three former Soviet air bases for their suitability to launch warplanes.

Such an arrangement would get the Air Force into the tactical air war and perhaps douse Pentagon talk of cutting their buy of new fighters. The Air Force has plans to buy 339 F-22 stealth fighters for about $62 billion. The Air Force, the Navy and Marine Corps want to procure thousands of a multirole warplane, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

Pentagon budgeteers are examining both programs this fall as the administration prepares it first five-year defense plan.

The needed "kits" are guidance systems and fins that turn a 2,000-pound bomb into a laser-guided munition or a satellite-linked Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAMs). The Navy and Air Force have dropped thousands of munitions during 31-days of bombing, and a larger portion are either laser bombs or JDAMs.

In Afghanistan, the Air Force's bombing role is limited to heavy bombers: B-2 stealth aircraft from Whitman Air Force Base, Mo., and B-2 and B-52 bombers based on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

"Experts believed the Air Force would always provide the lion's share of fighters," said one Pentagon official, who, like other sources for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Hence, the Air Force has more fighter munitions than the Navy. But in this war, Air Force fighters can't get to the fight. So we need to use the munitions the Air Force was supposed to be dropping right now. That's the issue in a nutshell."

In other recent conflicts, the Air Force enjoyed generous basing rights near their targets. Its jets launched from NATO bases in Italy for the relatively short trip to Kosovo in 1998. For attacks on Iraq in 1991, Air Force jets took off from the neighboring states of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the Gulf.

"The Navy is doing all the work and the Air Force is scared," said a defense official. "This 'denied access' is a huge issue that everyone knew would come to haunt the Air Force."


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Britain MOD blocks 4 offshore wind power projects

by Margaret Orgill,
Reuters:
7/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13159

LONDON - Britain's Ministry of Defence wants to stop four offshore wind projects because of fears their whirring turbine blades could interfere with air defence radar systems, said a ministry official yesterday.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has objected to plans for four wind schemes off north-west England as they are close to a testing ground for low-flying military jets, said a spokesman.

"Where we are testing planes we need to minimise the risk to aircraft and personnel," the spokesman told Reuters.

The government sees offshore wind power as a key part of its strategy to boost the use of green energy and the MOD objections will threaten its target of generating 10 percent of Britain's electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

The MOD wants to block offshore sites in the Irish Sea at Southport, where a scheme has been put forward by German wind energy developer EnergieKontor, and at Shell Flat which is home to three schemes.

The developers at Shell Flat include Danish energy company Elsam, Royal Dutch/Shell and CeltPower, a joint venture between Scottish Power and Japanese trading consortium Tomen Corp.

"These sites are near Warton where British Aerospace undertakes aircraft training for the RAF (Royal Air Force)," said the MOD spokesman.

In addition, the MOD is in talks with London Electricity and Germany's Enertrag as it is unhappy about their plans for a wind power site off Cromer in Norfolk, in eastern England.

BLADES COULD INTERFERE WITH RADAR

The MOD's main concern is that the whirring blades on the towers, which can be over 100 metres high, could show up on radar systems and look like moving aircraft.

Shell says it has carried out studies of the effect on radar and believes any impact can be managed by existing systems.

"The wind farm is not in the line of approach of any runway. Blackpool airport which is closer to the farm than Warton has not anticipated any problem," the Shell spokesman said, adding the company was in talks with the MOD on the issue.

Only one offshore wind scheme is operating in Britain, at Blyth off England's north east coast, but the government wants to expand the offshore wind sector so that it provides 1.8 percent of Britain's energy needs by 2010.

Britain has installed about 400 megawatts of wind generating capacity, almost all of it onshore. This is only a fraction of Germany's total capacity of 6,900 megawatts.

In countries like Germany, Spain and Denmark wind power has been developed without compromising defence systems, say UK wind power companies.

The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a working group on the radar issue which includes officials from British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), which represents wind power developers, and from the military.

"The idea is to get some movement in the current impasse. We need to bring some clarity to the issue," said Chris Shears, BWEA board member responsible for radar issues.

The group has commissioned three reports and hopes to issue guidelines on the radar problem within a year, he said.

The MOD is also trying to block the huge 80 MW onshore Kielder wind farm in northern England on radar grounds.

The project's developer, Ecogen, said yesterday it was asking the courts to review the Department of Trade and Industry's decision to stop the scheme, taken on MOD advice.

---

UK wind power firm seeks review of planning block

Reuters
7/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13161

LONDON - British wind farm developer Ecogen will ask the UK courts next month to review a government move to block construction of Britain's biggest wind power project so far, the company said yesterday.

Ecogen will go to London's High Court on December 10 seeking a judicial review of a Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) decision earlier this year to block an 80-megawatt wind project at Kielder in Northumberland because of objections from the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The MoD was concerned the project's tall turbines could get in the way of low-altitude training for fighter pilots.

"We will argue for a judicial review on the grounds of procedure," Ecogen's managing director Tim Kirby told Reuters.

"We argue that the DTI didn't have the right to decide on the project without going to an inquiry," he said.

The DTI declined to comment.

The row over Kielder comes as the MoD raises objections to four windfarms off England's northwest coast on the grounds that they could interfere with aircraft testing.

Kielder would almost double England's existing wind power capacity, said Kirby.

The government is relying on the expansion of wind power to boost the use of green energy and to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, cited by many scientists as a key contributor to global warming.

----

Fuel cell-generated electricity goes online on Long Island

Wednesday, November 07, 2001
By Environmental News Network
http://enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/11/11072001/s_45474.asp

Under a $7 million, first-of-its-kind program to show how fuel cell technology can generate electricity for Long Islanders, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) has installed 55 fuel cells at its West Babylon substation.

This application of fuel cell technology is the first large-scale use of fuel cells for this purpose in New York state. The fuel cells could produce as much as 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity over the duration of the program, which is enough electricity to power about 100 average-sized homes.

Installation is now underway and should be completed before winter sets in. By connecting the fuel cells directly to the transmission grid at the substation, the electricity they generate will be distributed to customers through LIPA's electric transmission and distribution system.

LIPA owns the retail electric system on Long Island and provides electric service to nearly 1.1 million customers in Nassau and Suffolk counties and the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The authority is seeking clean energy technologies that will help meet Long Island's growing demand for electricity, increasing at a rate of approximately 100 megawatts a year.

In this initial LIPA fuel cell program, a total of 75 fuel cells, all manufactured by Plug Power, will be installed at the West Babylon substation. Presently, 18 of the 55 fuel cells are fully installed and generating electricity for LIPA's grid. Plug Power is a designer and developer of on-site electricity generation systems using fuel cells for stationary, rather than mobile, applications.

"The town of Babylon recognizes the need to look toward alternative fuel technologies as a way of supplying clean, efficient power for the future," said Babylon town Councilman Steve Bellone. "I am proud that this demonstration project is located in Babylon and that we are on the cutting edge of electric energy generation."

A fuel cell is a device that converts the energy of a fuel - which could be hydrogen, natural gas, methanol, or gasoline - and an oxidant - air or oxygen - into useable electricity.

Unlike traditional fossil power plants that burn fuels to produce power, fuel cells generate electricity through an electrochemical process from which the only emission is water vapor. They do not contribute to the formation of smog and acid rain, nor do they contribute to global warming.

LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel called fuel cells "an environmentally friendly electric generating technology." The information and experience gained through this program will help fuel cells evolve as a technology that can be utilized by electric utilities as a source of power and eventually by residential and commercial customers for their own on-site power needs, he said.

LIPA has previously worked with Plug Power to help advance the development of fuel cell technology. Under a LIPA financed program, six of the company's fuel cells were field tested at locations around Long Island last year to gain operational experience that was integral to the development of the next generation of fuel cell power systems.

The agreement between LIPA and Plug Power provides for additional training, engineering services, and technical support to operate and maintain the fuel cell units. The company and the power authority will jointly develop software for remote operation, dispatch, and monitoring of the fuel cells.

Plug Power is based in Latham, N.Y., with offices in Washington, D.C., and the Netherlands. The company says its fuel cell systems may have a future in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana through a joint venture with General Electric.

The entire LIPA fuel cell project is geared towards the future distributed use of fuel cells to support the Long Island electric grid and contribute to its overall reliability and performance.

The Long Island fuel cell installation is part of the state's Clean Energy Initiative, a program first proposed by New York Gov. George Pataki as a way to promote new energy technologies and energy-conservation projects such as fuel cells, solar, wind generation, and geothermal systems.

-------- health

New strains of rice promise better health and eyesight

Wednesday November 7, 6:06 PM
By Dolly Aglay
Reuters
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-70819.html

MANILA - A modest bowl of rice is something Asia's poor and hungry will always look forward to, but scientists hope new strains of the staple food will do much more than fill empty stomachs.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, seeking to improve the diets of countless millions, is working on a new generation of healthier rice.

In one of the largest human feeding trials of a staple food, 300 nuns in the capital Manila will be enlisted next year to help test a rice variety rich in iron and zinc that may help combat anaemia.

The institute is also helping develop genetically-modified rice known as "golden rice", aimed at combating Vitamin A deficiency, responsible for half a million cases of irreversible blindness and up to a million deaths a year among the world's poorest people.

"We are not only developing higher yielding rice but also developing super-value rice," 36-year-old Filipino scientist Glenn Gregorio of the institute told Reuters by telephone.

The Institute estimates that about one third of the world's population suffers from anaemia, which impairs immunity and reduces physical and mental capacity.

About 60 percent of all pregnant women in Asia and about 40 percent of school children are iron deficient.

GOLDEN RICE

The institute, credited widely for helping the world feed itself by developing high-yielding rice during the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, is one of several organisations around the world carrying out systematic work on improving crops.

Rice feeds about half of the world's population, and 90 percent of the total annual harvest comes from Asia.

Not all research into new crop varieties involves genetic engineering, but the institute is helping with work on genetically-modified Vitamin A enriched rice, or "Golden Rice".

This rice was developed by German scientists by implanting two genes from a daffodil and one from a bacterium into a japonica rice variety called T309. Samples of the grain were donated to IRRI this year for research and breeding.

The institute's chief plant biotechnologist, Swapan Datta, believes genetic engineering could speed the quest for healthier rice.

"If there is a need and there is a possibility to have a new technology and new ways to improve nutrition, we should be doing that," he said.

Datta said the planting material for golden rice would be ready within two to three years. "Farmers can have them in five years. That's our hope," he said.

NUNS EXPERIMENT

In a bid to improve the nutritional value of rice, the institute's Gregorio is developing a new rice variety which it stumbled upon while working on research into rice with tolerance to low temperatures.

The variety, rich in iron and zinc and known as IR68144, was developed by cross breeding two varieties. It will be fed to nuns from eight Manila convents early next year, Gregorio said.

The institute, based near Manila, said the trial aims to convince nutritionists that the iron and zinc-enriched rice is capable of reducing the incidence of iron-deficiency anaemia. The trial was originally set to begin this April, but delayed because of an inadequate harvest of the iron-rich rice.

"Typhoons late last year swamped our farm, resulting in a poor harvest," said Gregorio.

The institute said it had recently harvested enough rice in a nearly 13 hectare (32 acres) farm inside the institute to feed the sisters over a period of seven to nine months in the test which will be supervised by Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University in the United States.

"We tested 27 religious sisters in 1999," Gregorio said, adding that the iron status of the nuns improved after eating the rice exclusively for a period of six months.

"But nutritionists remained unconvinced, and that trial is now being regarded as a dress rehearsal for the main event," the IRRI said in its recent annual report.

In the new trial, about half of the 300 sisters will be fed with IR68144 and the rest will eat normal rice for up to nine months.

Gregorio said that if next year's trial succeeds, the rice variety could be released to farmers within two years.

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

World Bank says will help rebuild Afghanistan

By Mark Wilkinson
Thursday November 8,
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-70898.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Afghanistan is in dire need of international aid for reconstruction and development, the World Bank said Wednesday, while American forces continue to pound the landlocked country in their hunt for those blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

The bank will participate in an international effort with the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and Afghans to rebuild and develop the country, from which an estimated 5-7 million have fled through the years.

The Washington-based lender said the reconstruction program -- the details of which will be discussed at the end of the month in Islamabad, Pakistan -- will be coupled with a development program designed to promote stability.

"Reconstruction cannot be separated from the longer-term economic and social development of Afghanistan," William Byrd, Acting Country Manager for Afghanistan at the World Bank, said in a statement.

"Tomorrow's leaders in Afghanistan could have a real opportunity to develop their country in a way that doesn't just clear the rubble, but opens a whole new horizon," he said.

The bank outlined top priorities, such as restoring basic services like health care, education, access to food and establishing sound institutions that would put the devastated country on the road to development.

CRIPPLING POVERTY, DECADES OF WAR

Afghanistan has, for decades, been one of the world's poorest nations. It has endured conflict for more than twenty years: first with the decade-long war against the Soviet Union, then ensuing years of civil strife opposing the ruling Taliban to the Northern Alliance and in the past month the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign.

The country is plagued by crippling poverty and a severe drought that has badly damaged agricultural production in the past three years. In addition, the vast majority of the 20 million-strong population have no access to education nor health care, the bank said.

According to U.N. data, Afghanistan has one of the world's highest infant mortality rates, with 165 deaths per thousand births. More than a quarter of toddlers die before reaching age five.

Basic infrastructures such as roads, irrigation, electricity and telecommunications have been destroyed by years of war, the bank said, and governmental institutions like a central bank, a treasury department, a civil service and a judicial system are weak or nonexistent.

The bank said that priorities also include humanitarian efforts such as providing food and shelter to a population of whom 7 million are vulnerable to famine, the bank said.

An agricultural recovery will also be put in place, which Byrd said offered "good prospects" for economic growth, in a country that relied mainly on agricultural production.

The restoration of services such as education, health care, the rehabilitation of the country's battered road system and the expansion of the current demining program will follow the humanitarian aid.

The bank said that in the mid 1990s, 500 people fell victim every month to the millions of land mines left from decades of strife.

Further steps comprise the establishment of sound economic institutions, the development of the energy resources and initiatives to stimulate the private sector to boost growth.

Byrd could not say when the program might begin, or how much it would cost, although the price tag, the bank reckoned, would be substantial.

Similar reconstruction programs were implemented in other countries across the world, where war had been waged.

Such international aid in Bosnia cost $5.4 billion during the period 1995-1999, while East Timor, whose population is forty times smaller than that of Afghanistan, is currently receiving $350 million in reconstruction aid over three years. Lebanon received $400 million per year for a decade, according to the World Bank.

----

WTO meeting shrinks amid attack fears, feuds

By James Cox, USA TODAY
By Raveendran,
AFP
11/07/2001
http://usatoday.com/money/bcovwed.htm

Supporters of India's opposition party sit in front of a symbolic World Trade Organization body during a protest rally Tuesday in New Delhi.

The out-of-the-way desert kingdom of Qatar once seemed like a good place to pick up the pieces from the spectacular collapse of the global trade summit in Seattle 2 years ago.

It struck the world's trade negotiators as a tranquil oasis where they could hash out differences without having to dodge angry protesters in turtle costumes and police firing rubber bullets.

Not anymore.

Trade chiefs from 142 countries are jetting to Doha, Qatar (pronounced "gutter"), for the Friday start of a 5-day World Trade Organization summit. The goal of the meeting is the same as it was in Seattle: to launch multiyear talks aimed at writing new trade rules and lowering barriers in services and farm goods.

- WTO issues at a glance

But the gathering promises to be extremely tense. Fears of a terrorist attack have forced countries to shrink the delegations they are sending. And friction between rich and poor nations threatens another collapse, one that could halt five decades of progress in removing global trade barriers.

"We have to decide whether to keep advancing the international trading system or to let it slip backward," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said recently. "The meeting in Doha needs to get the WTO back on track."

A triumph, he said, would reassure markets, reverse a sudden slowdown in trade and help lift economies around the world out of recession. It also would put terrorists on notice that world leaders stand ready to "counter the revulsive destructionism of terror."

The 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle dissolved in a cloud of acrimony and tear gas. Poor countries complained that the proposed agenda for a new negotiating round contained nothing for them. They bitterly rejected President Clinton's suggestion that the WTO build minimum labor and environmental standards into trade rules.

At the same time, the USA and the 15-nation European Union fought to a stalemate over elimination of farm subsidies and bans on genetically modified crops.

Since Seattle, WTO countries have managed to narrow some of their differences. The USA, EU and bureaucrats at WTO headquarters in Geneva have spent 2 years lobbying poor countries to come back to the table.

They also have shrunk the document outlining the agenda for a new round of trade talks from 30-plus pages in Seattle to a dozen in Doha. The thinking: The more vague the wording, the less there is to fight about.

"The hoped-for scenario is one with a truncated meeting, where everybody gives something, they sign, declare victory and run for the airport," says David Woods, editor of World Trade Agenda, a Geneva-based newsletter.

Prickly issues remain, though. Among them:

- Farm subsidies. The EU, along with Japan, is resisting efforts to kill export subsidies and other farm payments that distort world prices for grain, produce, meats and other agricultural goods. The USA had led a four-decade battle to dismantle European farm supports. But now, the Europeans and Japanese are demanding that U.S. export credits and other types of farm aid also be targeted for elimination.

- Environmental and food-safety concerns. The EU wants to find a way to build environmental concerns into trade rules. It also wants the right to ban genetically modified foods and other products without having to scientifically prove they are harmful. And it wants to be able to mandate labeling of hormone-treated beef and foods containing genetically altered ingredients.

- Import restraints. The USA is trying to deflect attacks on laws it uses to block cheap imports that hurt domestic steel producers, timber companies and other interests. Japan, South Korea, Russia, Brazil and several European countries want new rules limiting the ability of the USA to shield its market with anti-dumping laws and other import safeguards.

The issue is a double-edged sword for President Bush. Congress is unlikely to give him sweeping authority to negotiate new trade pacts unless U.S. import restraints remain strong.

But if Bush can't send trade deals to Congress for simple up or down votes - without amendments - most countries won't do any hard bargaining with the USA for fear any deal will be picked apart.

In Doha, the best that U.S. negotiators can probably hope for is a delay in the start of new rulemaking on anti-dumping and other laws, says Woods, a former WTO spokesman. "Everyone wants this. The Americans are completely isolated."

Louder voices

Poorer countries plan to flex their muscle in Doha.

They complain that the areas of their greatest economic strengths - farm commodities and textiles - are the same ones most heavily protected by the EU and USA. Many vow to walk out if the EU or USA tries to link trade to environmental or labor standards. "We want to be sure it is about trade and it is only trade-related," Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said this week. "There is a tendency to smuggle in all kinds of extraneous matters. ... They bring in child labor, lack of human rights and all that. All of these focus on developing countries."

The developing countries want major concessions. They say the WTO's dispute system, which acts as a court to hear trade cases between countries, is tilted dramatically in the favor of rich nations with squadrons of lawyers and big missions in Geneva. Swamped by their legal obligations under existing WTO rules, they want changes and clarifications - more time to rewrite their laws or change customs guidelines, more technical help from Geneva.

India, Brazil and South Africa head a bloc demanding new language giving them the right to ignore drug patents. They want to be able to make cheap generic versions of costly brand-name drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other pandemics.

Drug companies in the USA, Switzerland and other developed countries accuse India and Brazil of using public health crises as a cover for building up their own pharmaceutical industries.

The USA is trying to broker a compromise that would give the poorest countries an additional decade to comply with WTO drug-patent rules that take effect in 2006. It also would put a 5-year moratorium on most patent cases against AIDS-ravaged African countries.

A jittery group

The Bush administration fears the war in Afghanistan makes the WTO gathering an irresistible target for hard-line Muslim groups, possibly even Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terror network.

The size of the official U.S. delegation has been slashed by two-thirds. In closed-door briefings, attendees have been told they might need gas masks and special medicines. They were briefed on security precautions and plans to evacuate them in case of emergency to a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf.

Only a handful of members of Congress now plan to make the trip, down from an original list of 30-plus. And the corporate executives, lobbyists and trade groups that swarmed Seattle will be largely absent.

Negotiating sessions will be carried on the Internet. Officials from the Commerce, Agriculture and State departments who stay home can monitor the talks and weigh in with colleagues in Doha.

Delegations from other countries are no more anxious to go. They blame the USA for failing to persuade the Qataris to allow the meeting to be moved or postponed.

Zoellick reportedly explored the idea of moving the meeting to Singapore several weeks ago. But Qatari officials pleaded their case to Vice President Dick Cheney, who agreed that a move would erode support among Muslim governments for the U.S.-led coalition in the terror war.

"People either aren't going or they're taking out extra life insurance," says William Ehlers, the No. 2 trade negotiator at Uruguay's mission in Geneva. "There is a feeling the U.S. forced us into this when we could easily have done something else, maybe even had it in Qatar in the spring, when things have calmed down."

U.S. officials are especially wary of Qatar's huge population of foreign guest workers, many from Muslim countries. Qataris are a minority in their own country, numbering only 200,000 out of a population of 740,000.

Thousands of recruits from Yemen form the core of the country's security forces. Workers from other Muslim countries, including many from Pakistan, are maids, shop clerks, laborers and drivers.

Qatar was the only nation in the 142-member WTO to offer to host the 2001 meeting. And at first, it seemed the perfect antidote to Seattle. The small, remote sheikdom has a tight visa policy and a relatively small number of hotel rooms. It has a docile media, despite being home to Al-Jezeera, the Arab satellite network that has aggressively covered the war in Afghanistan.

Qatar has no labor unions, no political parties and no domestic anti-globalization groups. It is a place "known for being unknown," says the Lonely Planet travel guide.

No Seattle

The anti-globalization protesters who jammed the streets in Seattle used the last WTO summit as a springboard to disrupt subsequent international gatherings in Washington; Genoa, Italy; Prague, the Czech Republic; and Davos, Switzerland.

This time, security concerns and visa restrictions have forced them to abandon plans to blockade Doha with a flotilla of protest boats. Instead, they will hold anti-trade concerts, rallies, teach-ins, marches and workshops in cities around the world.

The lone protest vessel in Qatar is expected to be the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior. The environmental group won permission to dock at Doha with 30 crew members and what the group says is a "Noah's Ark" of free trade victims - displaced farmers, unemployed fishermen and others.

Any street protests are likely to be tiny affairs. Qatar has limited non-governmental organizations to 500 credentials. Protesters complain that business groups snapped up 350 of those slots.

Qatari authorities have warned they will crack down on disorderly protests.

Inside the meeting rooms, negotiators are hoping for order, as well.

After the flameout in Seattle, Woods says, "it is almost unthinkable they could fail."

WTO issues at a glance

Here are the main issues and players at the World Trade Organization meeting Nov. 9-13 in Doha, Qatar.

Issue For Against

Elimination of farm subsidies and supports that distort export prices U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, many developing countries European Union, Japan

Review of rules on anti-dumping laws "import-surge" safeguards Japan, South Korea U.S.

Creation of new rules for investment and anti-trust policies European Union U.S., many developing nations

Elimination of textile quotas before previously-agreed 2005 date African, Caribbean, Latin countries; Pakistan, India, China, Sri Lanka, Thailand U.S.

Weakening intellectual property protections on drug patents for public health emergencies India, Brazil, South Africa and other Sub-saharan African countries U.S.

Study of "core" labor standards European Union, U.S. Developing nations

"Precautionary" restraints allowing countries to block genetically modified foods and other products without scientific proof they are harmful European Union U.S.

Source: USA TODAY research

-------- police / prisoners

F.A.A. Adds to O'Hare Security
Travelers on Tuesday at the security point where a man with weapons made it through on Saturday.

New York Times
November 7, 2001
Scott Olson
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/national/07OHAR.html

CHICAGO, Nov. 6 - The Federal Aviation Administration said today that undercover agents had increased monitoring of checkpoints at O'Hare International Airport after a security lapse in which a man carrying knives and a stun gun passed through a United Airlines security station on Saturday.

The added monitoring of security checkpoints by F.A.A. agents is on top of the heightened surveillance generally at airports across the country since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, officials of the aviation agency said.

"We have stepped up the monitoring of the checkpoints," said Elizabeth Isham Cory, a spokeswoman for the agency. "What that entails is basically plainclothes agents, not necessarily identified to the screener. They're watching the checkpoints at all hours unannounced, basically monitoring to ensure that all is going as it should."

"Because we have this issue that came up that we're still investigating," Ms. Cory said of the Saturday incident, "we do want to pay particularly close attention to the United checkpoints at O'Hare right now.

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Greens, Airports and ID Cards
Airport Security Nixes Nancy Oden

Counterpunch
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
November 7, 2001
http://www.counterpunch.org/oden3.html

Consider what happened to Nancy Oden in Maine the other day.

Oden's an organic farmer who lives in Jonesboro, Maine. She's also an organizer for the Green Party USA. She was on her way to Chicago for a Green Party convention, got hassled by a National Guardsman at Bangor airport and finally told she couldn't board her flight. Oden thinks it's because of a Green Party statement she co-authored that ran in the local newspaper. The statement calls for universal health care, limitations on free trade, and a stop to "U.S. military incursions" including the bombing of Afghanistan. The US Green Party has labeled the U.S. military actions there an act of "state terrorism."

Here's how Oden described her experience to Declan McCullagh, political editor of Wired. "Just a few weeks ago I had a piece in the Bangor paper. It's on our website, greenparty.org... I submitted it under my name alone. It's a fairly radical piece; that's what I do. I'm a political and environmental activist. "I walked into the Bangor airport. What I saw was National Guardfolks all over carrying machine guns... The atmosphere was very tense... This was Thursday... I went over to the American Airlines ticket counter way down at the end. Nobody else was there, except the clerk.

"I gave him my name. He didn't even ask for photo ID. It was almost like they were expecting me. He put it into the computer. He stayed on the computer a long time, like 10 minutes. "He put an S on the boarding pass, for search. He said, 'You've been picked for having your bag searched.' ... I said to him, 'This wasn't random, was it?' He said, 'No you were in there to be searched, no matter what.' I went over to baggage to put my bags through the X-ray and then went into the boarding area.

"There was this National Guard guy there. He yells over at me, so everyone can hear, 'Bring your bags over here.' You know how they are when they're all puffed up with themselves. He said, 'Hurry up,' so I slowed down some more. I put my bags on the table. The two women employees were standing there. I tried to help them with a stuck zipper. He grabbed my left arm, he started yelling in my face, 'Don't you know what happened? Sep. 11, don't you know thousands of people died?' I said, 'You can't do that.' He went to grab my arm, and I said, 'Don't touch me.' I saw an older airline guy shake his head, 'No,' and he backed off.

"They did the wand thing, they were done, and I heard him say real soft, 'Don't let her on the plane,' like he was talking to himself. Then this little guard guy, it wasn't enough to stop me, wasn't done with me. He said, 'Come with me.' I followed very slowly; I sat down for a while. I said I'm carrying these bags; I need a rest... It's called passive resistance.

"He went and found the airport police to come and talk with me. He went and got six other National Guard guys and they all approached me. Here are these six untrained, ignorant, don't-know-how-to-deal-with-the-public, machine-gun-armed young guys in their camouflage suits with their military gear hanging off of it.

"I looked up and started laughing, 'Is all this for me, guys? What is this about?' There was this big burly guy, he was in front. He said, 'You didn't cooperate with the search.' ... I said what he did was grabbed my arm, and I backed away... He said he only hit your arm. I said even if that's all he did, he's not allowed to do that. He can't hit my arm and demand I listen to him. They had the airport policeman tell me, 'You're not flying out of this airport today.' ... Of course I had cooperated; why do I care if they search my bags? ... What I didn't like was being singled out because of my political views. I never made it out of Bangor. I had to turn around and drive 100 miles back home... The fact that they gave the other airlines my name... They told me they did that... That's incredible."

Here's a little footnote on sectarianism. Oden's a member of the Green Party USA, as distinct from the Association of Green Parties with which Ralph Nader is associated. There's ill-feeling between the two groups. When Oden's experience at Bangor went the rounds, Naderite Greens were quick to belittle the affair. "Leader of Green splinter group fibs about airport hassle" was the title on one sneering email forwarded by Naderite Bill Kaufman of the Manhattan Greens. It went on, "while the undue harassment of airline travelers is to be condemned, it does not seem that this incident warrants fears of a major violation of Constitutional guarantees of free speech, as it first appeared. The group that Nancy Oden leads is nevertheless using the incident to draw attention and support to itself."

When we posted Oden's press release about the incident on our site, along with Declan's interview with her, we were flooded with emails from angry Naderite Greens, who smeared Oden in the vilest terms. Lorna Saltzman denounced her as "Marxist-Stalinist-lentilist." Another referred to her as a "hysterical woman" who probably deserved whatever she got. Yet another said that she wasn't really a political leader but only "an organic farmer with an axe to grind about genetically engineered crops." Other Green Party flacks were just glad that their faction of the party wasn't on a no-fly list and they could continue to rack up the frequent flier miles.

You'll recall that when a Boston cop stopped Nader from attending the first debate between Bush and Gore, his supporters rushed to denounce the breach of Nader's constitutional rights. Anyone wanting further illumination about the perils of political sectarianism should watch Python's Life of Brian, for my money the greatest political movie ever made. Whether or not Oden's name was in the computer list or whether the National Guardsman was just being an asshole, you can be sure she's on some sort of a list now.

Oden is not the only victim of paranoia in these panicky times. As he related a couple of weeks ago on this site, our friend Tariq Ali, the noted radical, was recently hauled off by the polizei in Munich for the crime of having a book by Marx in his suitcase as he was trying to board a plane back to London. The fact that he is Pakistani by ethnic origin probably didn't help. Tariq, whose historical novels are immensely popular in Germany, reports that the guard searching his bags became excited at a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, particularly in the notes Tariq had scribbled in the margin. Then the guard espied a slim vol, still in its cellophane, titled Karl Marx on Suicide. That was it. Tariq was hauled off by the guard who said complacently, "After September 11, you can't travel with books like this." "In that case," Tariq snappily replied, "You should stop publishing them or burn them in full public view. " Finally Tariq pulled rank about his friend the Mayor of Munich and was put back on his plane.

Further proof of the advantages of reading Marx. If he'd been properly educated in the Classics, the guard would have realised that no follower of Marx would believe in the political efficacy of acts of terror. That was the province of hateful anarchism, as promulgated by Marx's sworn foe, Bakunin. We doubt Marx is on the Al-Qaeda reading lists.

That National ID Card

The last time there was a big push for a national ID card was back in Reagantime. The notion was being batted around in one cabinet meeting and, as he later related the episode, domestic policy advisor Martin Anderson put up his hand and the Gipper benignly offered the floor. Anderson said he had a better idea. "Why not just tattoo a number on everyone's arm." That ended the debate for the timer being, though like all such instruments of bureaucratic control, the ID card has always been lurking in the wings awaiting fresh opportunity, which of course it found with September 11.

Oracle's Larry Ellison has been pushing the card, as have supposed civil libertarians like Alan Dershowitz, friend of torture, whom we heard duking it out with Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute on CNN the other day. Lynch made a principled case against the idea of the ID card as an intolerable affront to the Bill of Rights. If it comes to pass, the card probably won't do much in the way of foiling terrorists, but it will become a standard tool of law enforcement, like a driver's license, only worse. These days you can have your driver's license yanked without due process, for such offenses as showing up on the computer as a deadbeat dad. No car or truck in many places in this country means you can't work, unless you're prepared to get caught for driving without a license and without insurance coverage, which can get to be heavy.

So suppose, a couple of years down the road, you show up at an airport without your ID card, you join the line going through intensive search and interrogation. Or you have your card, and maybe that misdemeanor conviction for a demonstration twenty years early shows up, as well as all your outstanding parking tickets and credit card bills. CP

-------- terrorism

US strong on theory, weak on evidence

By Vincent Browne,
Irish Times
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/opinion/2001/1107/opt1.htm

The two most respected newspapers in America, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have carried stories in the last few days about the perpetrators of the terrorist attack on September 11th. The stories in both newspapers obviously have been based on briefings from what are known as "intelligence sources", mainly in the United States but also in Europe. Therefore they probably convey the extent of "official" knowledge of who the perpetrators were and from where they came.

The New York Times article of last Sunday identified Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian who had qualified as a city planner in Hamburg, as the ring-leader of the group. It said it was he and three others, who also died in the attacks, who chose the date of the atrocity, flew the planes, planned the whole operation and organised the logistics.

The newspaper reported how, in Las Vegas, they planned the assault, how the plot was devised in Hamburg two years ago, how there was "evidence" (unspecified) how the 15 Saudi hijackers (out of the total of 19) had spent "at least a year" in al-Qaeda training camps.

In showing any links with al-Qaeda or specifically with Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, the report is at all times vague. It states that most of the hijackers - "perhaps all of them" - had spent time in Afghanistan, but there are no specifics. It quotes investigators as saying that their "best theory" is that the attack was "a franchise operation" - in other words that al-Qaeda is outsourcing suicide hijackings (some proposition!). It claims the operation "received the blessing" of al-Qaeda but "investigators say they do not know who in Osama bin Laden's organisation approved the operation".

It says investigators "suspect" half the $500,000 that funded the attack came from someone in the United Arab Emirates, who is believed to be an associate of bin Laden. They have no idea where the other half came from.

The Washington Post story of Monday said the cell responsible for the attack "had little if any contact with other al-Qaeda terror cells in Europe". It reports: "While Western investigators say they believe the September 11th plot was approved by al-Queda they continue to struggle to piece together its internal organisation." It goes on to record that investigators don't know what links there were between the terrorists and Afghanistan.

It reports intelligence officials as suggesting that al-Qaeda has developed "a multi-tiered hierarchy". And that "there is still no evidence of how many of the September 11th hijackers visited Afghanistan, although US intelligence officials have said Atta made the trip, possibly in 1997 or 1998". European officials say they believe it is likely that all the hijackers were either trained in Afghanistan or vouched for by one of a small group of al-Qaeda veterans". What all this amounts to is intelligence organisations in the US and Europe don't know whether the attack was carried out by al-Qaeda and certainly do not know whether the attack had anything to do with Afghanistan. There may be "suspicions" and theories but no hard evidence.

All of which raises a few questions. The first is: why is the US bombing the bits out of Afghanistan? Surely, at a minimum, before an entire country is terrorised by the kind of massive bombardment the people of Afghanistan have been subject to for a month today, there should be evidence of a direct link between what happened on September 11th and the country that is being devastated? Surely it is not enough that someone in Afghanistan gave their "blessing" to what happened. Surely there must be some direct and substantial involvement on the part of a major group in Afghanistan with what happened before such a bombardment could begin to be justified?

Perhaps Tony Blair knows more about the perpetrators of the attack than the intelligence organisations the two respected American newspapers talked to (also Jack Straw, who yesterday said the whole world now knows that al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, was responsible for the attack). If this is so, then surely Mr Blair and Mr Straw should be telling the intelligence organisations of what they know and The New York Times and The Washington Post should talk to them next time they report on who was responsible for the attacks.

But there is another question: if bin Laden and his chums in Afghanistan were not responsible for what happened or if they "outsourced" the operation, it means this other outfit (or what remains of it after September 11th) is still around and largely undisturbed.

George Bush, in a speech to central European leaders, yesterday, hinted at a real danger: that terrorist organisations may acquire or many have acquired nuclear weapons.

The former US Senator, Howard Baker, and a former White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, chaired a task force report on the dangers of the unauthorised proliferation of Russian nuclear weapons. It noted in its report in January last year: "Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, we have witnessed the dissolution of an empire having over 40,000 nuclear weapons, over 1,000 tonnes of nuclear materials, vast quantifies of chemical and biological weapons materials and thousands of missiles".

It stated: "The most urgent unmet national security threat to the untied States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen or sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states and used against American troops broad or citizens at home".Would you think the war on Afghanistan is likely to diminish or increase that threat?

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War is a conflict for America's Muslim youth

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Larry Copeland, Michael A. Schwarz
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/07/muslim-youth-usat.htm

Ahmed El-Helw, a freshman at Georgia Tech, was shocked by the terror attacks on the USA. But "when they go in and start bombing Afghanistan, I feel the same thing."

ATLANTA - Ahmed El-Helw, an intense young man who talks passionately and to the point, has a different perspective on Sept. 11 from most of his classmates at Georgia Tech. The 18-year-old freshman says he was shocked and saddened by the terrorist attacks. But he has been even more disturbed by subsequent events. "I feel bad because there are folks that died for no reason. There are children that will have to grow up without their parents," El-Helw, a U.S. citizen of Egyptian descent and a computer science major, says of the attacks on New York and Washington. "At the same time, when they go in and start bombing Afghanistan, I feel the same thing, because those people are my brothers in religion."

Muslim youths of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent in the USA are watching the war on terrorism from a complicated, often tortured vantage point. They say they have felt the soul-searing tug of competing loyalties and have seen their beloved religion distorted by both the nation's enemies and its media.

They have seen dedicated Muslim protesters their own age venting on the streets of Pakistan over the U.S.-led bombing of Afghanistan and watched youths in other Islamic nations torch the American flag or burn President Bush in effigy. They've seen young people in Saudi Arabia and Egypt celebrating Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, as a Muslim hero.

Those images, they say, have shifted their focus from the usual worries of teenagers and young adults. Things like fitting in, acing an exam or finding the right job can seem trivial when they see Palestinian kids younger than themselves charging Israeli tanks armed only with rocks.

Questioning U.S. policy

Many of these young people say their non-Muslim peers have stereotyped them as disloyal to the United States or dangerous because of the terrorist attacks. Some young Muslims say they have changed their appearance or lifestyles to avoid being harassed.

Young Muslims - ages 14 to 29 - interviewed recently in Atlanta, Seattle and suburban Denver were serious, thoughtful and intimately familiar with Middle Eastern geopolitics. Beyond that, Agha Saeed, national chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, cautions against generalizing about Islamic youth in this country, noting that the Arab world alone encompasses 22 nations. "When you think about people from so many diverse backgrounds, it would be erroneous to paint with such a broad brush," he says.

But several common themes emerged in interviews with young Muslims. All of them deplore the terrorist attacks, but their opinions vary over the U.S. military response. Those who favor the bombing of Afghanistan say it should be restricted to military targets or to the Taliban, the radical Muslim government that is harboring bin Laden.

They tend to dismiss bin Laden's call for Muslims worldwide to take up arms against the United States and its allies in a religious "jihad," or holy war. But many say the Bush administration has not sufficiently proved its case against bin Laden, and almost all complain about a central aspect of the nation's foreign policy: support for Israel.

"I think the American people really need to take a good look at U.S. government policy vis-a-vis the Middle East, especially Palestine and Israel," says Zaynab Ansari, 24, who is majoring in Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgia Perimeter College near Atlanta. "U.S. policy toward Palestine has been greatly biased in favor of Israel."

She and most of the other youths say the nation should take a more even-handed approach to Israel's long conflict with Palestinians in the region. Most said they support creation of a Palestinian state.

Explaining Islam

Ansari's mother is African-American, her father Lebanese. Four fighter jets in tight formation from nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base roar overhead as she discusses the war on terrorism during a recent open house at Masjid Al-Hedaya. It is one of several mosques and masjids founded in Atlanta in the past two decades to serve a growing Muslim population.

Many parents from the mosque have been visiting their children's schools trying to help non-Muslims gain a better understanding of Islam, says Amjad Taufigue, director of Masjid Al-Hedaya.

They say they are trying to correct what many young Muslims perceive as a distortion of Islam by U.S. media. They cite few specific examples, but several mentioned Timothy McVeigh, who bombed Oklahoma City's federal building in 1995 and killed 168 people. The media, they say, did not call McVeigh a Christian terrorist, but simply a terrorist.

Atlanta has more than 20 mosques with about 75,000 members - about 40% of them African-American. Nationally, a study this year by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Hartford Institute for Religious Research found that 30% of those who attend mosques regularly are African-American and 25% are of Arab descent.

Some young black Muslims say their loyalty has been questioned since Sept. 11 - even by other African-Americans - and that they have been subjected to mostly subtle religious slights. Many of them also oppose the strikes in Afghanistan on moral grounds.

"Being a person who grew up in America, you pretty much understand how things are done," says Salahud-Din Abdul-Razacq, 20, an exercise science major at Georgia Perimeter College who was born in Detroit. "When the government wants people to see something, they give it to them. They tell people what they want them to know and not what they should know."

But his perspective on the war on terrorism lacks the conflicted nature of that shared by many Muslims of Arab and South Asian descent living in America. The latter group finds itself "between the proverbial rock and a hard place," says Muneer Fareed, associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. "They are, after all, Americans. They were born here or lived here the greater part of their lives. That gives them a natural loyalty to apple pie and baseball hats.

"On the other hand, they are members of the Islamic faith. In addition, they may have cultural and heritage ties to the land of their parents."

'I'm really torn'

That conflict eats at Ahmad Jodeh, 18, a senior at Overland High School in Aurora, Colo., near Denver.

"I'm really torn," says Jodeh, who was born in the USA to Palestinian parents. "I do back the United States, but I don't want to see Muslims die. Sometimes I sit and think about it, like, who am I going for here? I'm always rooting for the United States, but I don't want to see them (Muslims) die at the same time. Really, I don't want to see anybody fight."

Tall, thin, soft-spoken and thoughtful, Jodeh says of the U.S. raids on Afghanistan: "I support our retaliation, but I don't see how this is going to do anything. We might as well just carpet-bomb Afghanistan. I think it might end up like Vietnam. Time and again, a superpower has gone into a Third World country and tried to win a war and they can't."

Bin Laden is a hero to many young Muslims in Pakistan and Arab nations, including some U.S. allies in the war on terrorism.

But not to Gina Aaf, 24, an Afghan native, U.S. citizen and graduate student in geography at the University of Washington-Seattle. "I have yet to meet a single person who has said anything good about him," she says. "A lot of people are really insulted that he is allowed to reflect Muslims in this country. We would never associate with someone like him."

Moneereh Jafarzadeh, 16, is an 11th-grader at Duluth High School in suburban Atlanta. She says that some Muslim students have been shunned by their peers because of misperceptions about their faith. "They treat them like they are different from the rest of the students," says Jafarzadeh, a U.S. citizen whose father is Iranian and her mother American. "It's unfair. It's not like Muslims have done anything."

"I don't feel like the Taliban are Muslims," she says, minutes after finishing a class on Islam for young Muslims at the Zainabia Cultural Center, a mosque and school north of Atlanta. "They just act like they are."

Munzir Naqvi, 19, is no less vociferous in his condemnation of the Taliban. "I don't think they represent what Islam is," says Naqvi, a Pakistani. "What they have done is pretty contradictory to Islam, from my understanding. That's one of the reasons why I support the U.S. action against the Taliban. But I think it should be limited to the Taliban."

Jafarzadeh, Naqvi and about a dozen other young Muslims are sitting barefoot on the bright-colored carpet of the center's mosque.

"You will not see any Taliban support in this group," says Riaz Khan, 52, a veterinarian in Marietta, Ga., and chairman of the center. He has sons, 17 and 18 years old. "They're devastated. They're hurt. Especially, they're wondering why is this happening with so much hate, when we never teach our children hate. We teach our children to live peacefully with their neighbors."

On the other side of the country, Humza Chaudhry, president of the Muslim Student Association at the University of Washington, describes how troubled he is by the U.S. strikes in Afghanistan. He is 20, a senior from Blaine, Wash. His family is Pakistani, and he's a U.S. citizen. "I don't think you'll find very many Muslims who support the bombings," Chaudhry says. As a campus imam, he leads Friday prayer in a long black cloak, a turban and shawl. But on campus, he's more likely to sport jeans and a kufi (white knit cap) or UW baseball cap. "The majority of Muslim students are more or less against it."

So they watch as the war unfolds, and they wonder how they will respond if they are called - in a compulsory draft - to help wage it. Several say the Islamic tenet of Ummah forbids one Muslim killing another.

"I wouldn't take another Muslim's life," says El-Helw of Georgia Tech.

Contributing: Tom Kenworthy in Aurora, Colo., and Patrick McMahon in Seattle

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Terror attacks may have lasting effect on courts

USA Today
11/07/2001
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/acovwed.htm

In Los Angeles, former Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Sara Jane Olson pleaded guilty to trying to bomb police cars, saying she could not get a fair trial because the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have made juries more sympathetic to police. In Little Rock, an Arab-American business executive who sued American Airlines for injuries from a crash in 1999 settled just before the trial, fearing that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have turned juries against Middle Easterners.

And in Atlanta, a judge delayed the trial of a man accused of interfering with a flight attendant, a case that began when the man pinched the woman's breast during a flight in February. The man's attorney says his defense - that the attendant encouraged him - would have been doomed in light of the hijackers' assaults on flight crews.

Less than 2 months after the terrorist attacks that killed more than 4,000 people and made security a national passion, the attacks are having a profound impact in a surprising place: the nation's courtrooms.

The attacks have triggered a rash of postponements and settlements in cases involving Arabs, airlines and military personnel. In cases that have gone forward, judges appear to be looking for signs of new prejudices as juries are selected. And in many courts the heightened concern over security has significantly altered the daily routine, as judges have allowed flight-wary witnesses to testify by video.

But judges and legal analysts say the impact of Sept. 11 could go well beyond postponed cases and changed routines.

New concerns for national security and personal safety, legal experts say, could inspire a fundamental shift in the law and the way it is applied by judges and juries. Just as the Depression opened the door for increased government regulation in the 1930s, and just as images of African-Americans being beaten and sprayed with fire hoses in the 1960s gave life to civil-rights laws, the still-vivid images of Sept. 11 could become enduring symbols for homeland defense.

"If this all turns out to have a profound societal effect, it will have a profound effect on the law," says Stanford University law professor Pamela Karlan, adding that jurors and even judges cannot help but bring their personal experiences into the courtroom. "The law is many things ... including what a judge sees on TV."

Among the changes that many analysts expect to see in courts:

- Jurors who in recent years might have distrusted testimony from police are likely to have more faith in people in uniform because of the heroic roles that police officers and firefighters played on Sept. 11.

Lawyers who specialize in police-brutality cases say they are worried that jurors will automatically defer to law enforcement.

Some lawyers already are talking about forgoing cases that might be a close call for the jury. "Marginal cases are going to be sifted out," says New York lawyer John Cuti, who represents people with claims of police brutality.

A September survey by Lawyers Weekly USA, a legal industry trade magazine, reported jury consultants saying that the testimony of police would carry new, enhanced weight with jurors.

Olson, who reaffirmed her guilty plea Tuesday, told reporters last week that she wanted to avoid a trial because of the new credence accorded law enforcement officials by many jurors since Sept. 11. She faced 25-year-old charges of trying to bomb police cars in retaliation for the deaths of six members of the radical SLA in a 1974 shootout.

- Seasoned trial lawyers and jury analysts predict that claims for relatively minor injuries will get short shrift because the losses will pale in comparison to those of terrorism victims and their families. On the other hand, some analysts think that jurors could become more empathetic toward those who have lost loved ones.

- Some analysts speculate that judges, juries and lawmakers are apt to be more lenient in allowing authorities to conduct searches, crack down on illegal immigrants and generally deal more harshly with those who cause disorder.

Congress has made the first move on that front, passing anti-terrorism legislation that, among other things, expands the U.S. government's ability to monitor suspected terrorists' phone conversations and Internet use. It also makes it easier to detain immigrants suspected of terrorism.

Public opinion can affect laws

In a recent speech at New York University, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor acknowledged that the terrorist attacks could alter America's notion of what's fair under the law. She did not say whether this was necessarily good or bad, but seemed intent on raising the possibility of changes in the law - particularly in areas of surveillance and immigration.

"No single response (to a national emergency) is always appropriate," O'Connor said, emphasizing the need to "maintain a fair and just society with a strong rule of law at a time when many are more concerned with safety and a measure of vengeance."

If the terrorist attacks lower Americans' expectations of privacy in the long term, they will be the latest in a series of benchmark events to affect the law and how judges and jurors look at cases.

In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's social programs known as the New Deal "put a huge amount of pressure on the Supreme Court," Yale law professor Paul Gewirtz says. "Constitutional law doctrine ultimately underwent a major transformation" that gave the U.S. government more control over commerce and helped to usher the nation out of the Depression.

Gewirtz and other legal experts note that shifts in public opinion that affect the law aren't always for the better.

The Supreme Court's 1944 decision upholding the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, for example, might have reflected most Americans' sentiments at the time, but now the decision is viewed widely as an overreaction to wartime. The decision was never reversed, but in 1988 Congress offered a formal apology "on behalf of the nation" to those who had been held in the camps and paid reparations.

"We are now horrified by the notion that we put behind barbed wire an entire population that was innocent, because it didn't look like us," New York University law professor Joshua Rosenkranz says.

Judges and jurors usually are faced with resolving cases that are months or even years old. Typically, fundamental public attitudes cycle just as slowly. But nothing about Sept. 11 was typical.

"I have been practicing law since 1976," says John Howie, a lawyer based in Dallas. "I think this is the most dramatic event since then in terms of affecting people's attitudes. People's core values have been focused differently."

Howie has represented several passengers who were injured when American Airlines Flight 1420 tried to land in a thunderstorm in June 1999 in Little Rock, broke in two and burned. Eleven people, including the pilot, were killed. At least 80 of the 134 survivors were injured.

Among Howie's clients was Cisco Systems executive Mohammad Abdel Khaliq, 40, who claimed to have suffered physical injuries and emotional distress. Abdel, who uses only that surname in the USA, was one of the last Flight 1420 passengers to get a trial date. It was scheduled for Sept. 24.

But a week after the terrorist attacks, Abdel, a dual citizen of Jordan and the USA who has lived here for 20 years, decided to settle his lawsuit against the airline, concerned that the attacks had prejudiced potential jurors against Arabs. (The terms of the settlement have been kept confidential.)

"I don't think this is a good time for jury trials in some cases," Howie says. "We have emotions that are very deep-seated now, because of self-preservation concerns."

Abdel says that "even though I've had continuous nightmares since my own tragedy ... I just want to get everything over with. I can see how people have been affected."

Defense lawyers say it's also not a good time to be an accused terrorist headed to trial.

The plea bargain Olson struck last week - and reaffirmed Tuesday - was a surprising turn in the long-running case. She had long maintained that she was innocent and played no part in the conspiracy to kill two Los Angeles police officers in 1975. The bombs placed under their cars never went off.

Olson went into hiding shortly after the incident, when the FBI arrested several members of the SLA, including publishing heiress Patricia Hearst.

Olson, who shed her given name of Kathleen Soliah, ended up living quietly in St. Paul, Minn., married to a physician and raising three children. She acted in local theater productions and became a community volunteer. She was discovered in 1999, shortly after television's America's Most Wanted broadcast her picture and the charges against her.

Since her arrest 2 years ago, her trial had been delayed repeatedly as the defense sought continuances. In seeking the postponement last month, Olson argued that the events of Sept. 11 would lead jurors to be biased against her. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler rejected her argument, but said, "If we see a pattern developing, we will have to rethink whether this case can move forward."

That was not enough for Olson, who decided last week to plead guilty to possessing explosive devices with the intent to murder. In return, prosecutors dropped three other felony charges. But in another twist, after she left the courtroom Olson declared to reporters that she was really innocent but had been forced into plea by the current climate.

Fidler responded by calling a hearing about her conflicting statements. A chastened Olson reaffirmed her plea on Tuesday.

Pinching a flight attendant

Claims that the Sept. 11 attacks have made it difficult to get a fair trial extend to those charged with less serious crimes.

Boston area real estate developer Todd Cellura, who is accused of pinching and wrapping his arms around a flight attendant, recently won a delay after claiming that he could not get a fair trial.

Cellura was charged with interfering with a flight crew during an AirTran flight from Boston to Atlanta last February. He acknowledges touching the flight attendant but says he was drunk and that the attendant had encouraged his overtures by engaging in a "pornographic" chat with him. Cellura also says his actions did not interfere with the work of the crew.

His attorney was prepared to emphasize the flight attendant's alleged flirtatious conduct, but the attacks Sept. 11 gave him pause.

"The hijacking of airlines and the assault on flight crews has dramatically altered the way any jury would view ... this case," attorney Donald Samuel said as he sought to delay the Oct. 1 trial. "To ridicule a flight attendant ... within a few weeks of the events that have traumatized the nation would be a suicidal defense."

The new trial date is Nov. 26. If found guilty, Cellura could face 20 years in prison.

'People are much more serious'

Meanwhile, judges are watching for signs of new prejudices as juries are selected. In Dallas, the judge overseeing the trial of a laboratory accused of defrauding the government asked potential jurors last month whether they would have trouble deciding against the government at a time of intense patriotism.

The case involves a Richardson, Texas, environmental testing laboratory that is accused of falsifying test data. As U.S. District Judge Sidney Fitzwater questioned potential jurors, he mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks: "This case has nothing to do with the events at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The government is a party to this case, however. Is there anything that would prevent you from being fair and impartial?"

No one asked to be excused from the jury for that reason.

U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele, who has been on the bench for 31 years, says that during particularly tense or emotional times, judges' role in protecting courtrooms from prejudice becomes more important. "Whether this is lasting, we don't know," he says. "People are much more serious. What was important yesterday isn't important today."

Many legal scholars are most concerned with the potential for shifts in judges' interpretations of the Constitution, such as allowing greater police powers.

Adds Gewirtz: "Given what we now know of new threats, don't we all have to be willing to rethink exactly where the balance between order and liberty is struck?"

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THE WHITE HOUSE
U.S. Takes Steps to Bolster Bloc Fighting Terror

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/international/07PREX.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - The Bush administration is taking its first steps to expand the coalition fighting the Taliban and the Qaeda terrorist network after weeks of deflecting offers from several European allies of forces to support the American war in Afghanistan.

The shift in strategy follows signs overseas of waning popular support for the bombing - however carefully targeted - of one of the world's poorest countries. Initially, some administration officials, particularly in the Pentagon, felt that expanding the military coalition beyond Britain and a small number of troops from Turkey, Canada and Australia would complicate decision-making.

In a speech today to Central and Eastern European leaders and at an appearance in the Rose Garden with President Jacques Chirac of France, President Bush also sought to bolster support overseas by drawing a still darker picture of Osama bin Laden.

Using a video link to address the Central and Eastern Europeans gathered in Warsaw, the president compared Al Qaeda to the "fascists and totalitarians" with whom those nations grappled for most of the 20th century. The terrorists, he said, demonstrate "the same mad, global ambitions," and display a "brutal determination to control every life and all of life."

For the first time, too, Mr. Bush also stated baldly that Mr. bin Laden was seeking to obtain biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Asked about this later by reporters, the president said it was essential to to stop Mr. bin Laden from realizing his declared aim of obtaining nuclear weapons.

In recent days, the British government, mindful of wavering European popular support for the war, had lobbied for the allies' inclusion in the military coalition.

Today, Germany pledged 3,900 troops, including Fuchs reconnaissance vehicles, which can detect nuclear, biological and chemical contamination, naval units, flying hospitals and special forces. The deployment could become the first of German troops outside of Europe since the end of World War II.

NATO diplomats, meanwhile, are discussing a dramatic new mission for the alliance: taking the lead role in transporting food into Afghanistan as winter approaches.

The effort to find a broader military role for America's allies is a delicate attempt to increase the Europeans' personal stake in the war while avoiding the complications that come with a multinational military operation.

The discussions over more NATO action have the strong support of the alliance's secretary general, Lord Robertson, and some American officials in Washington. Under the proposal, NATO aircraft would fly food and other relief to nations near Afghanistan. NATO nations might also take the food by truck into areas controlled by the Northern Alliance and American forces.

There are already plans for American C-17 transport planes to fly relief supplies from a base near Pisa, Italy, to Turkmenistan, which neighbors Afghanistan, an operation that could be incorporated into a larger NATO effort.

NATO's military officials have not yet been instructed to plan for such an operation, but diplomats said that could happen swiftly if the alliance's 19 member governments throw their weight behind the notion.

On Sunday, Italy had signaled the Bush administration's new willingness to accommodate European troops when the government in Rome announced that Washington had accepted its offer of 1,000 troops, including an armored regiment, reconnaissance and transport planes, warships and vehicles to check for biological and chemical weapons.

France has already sent several support ships to the Arabian Sea and is conducting reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan from a base in the United Arab Emirates.

France has also offered to send commandos and warplanes. But a French official said today that Washington had previously indicated that it had no immediate need for French commandos and France has not been able to find a place to base its warplanes in the region.

Mr. Chirac, who today made much of having some 2,000 French troops in the region near Afghanistan, also said the United States made an "additional request yesterday which we will study.'

"We are entirely ready to send special forces, provided, of course, we know what the nature of their mission would be," he said.

A Western diplomat said: "In the beginning it was clear that the Pentagon did not want to open up its operational military plan against the Taliban to a lot of other players. It's a balancing act."

The official added, "But there are nations that want to show that they are players and now some have been given signals that it is O.K."

Referring to the Pentagon stance, a senior administration official acknowledged that there has been " a strong desire to keep the decision- making here and in London."

Even as they were accepting foreign forces, the administration indicated that it was willing to draw more of its own people into the war. Pentagon officials said that today, for the first time, the number of National Guardsmen and Reservists mobilized for the war on terrorism exceeded 50,000 - the number Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld initially told President Bush would be needed.

In addressing the leaders of 16 nations who wriggled free of Communist rule just over a decade ago, Mr. Bush this morning was speaking to the converted. All the leaders - aside from the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians who already gained admission to NATO in 1999 - are eager to bring their small countries under the alliance's umbrella and to demonstrate their credentials as true partners of the more established Western democracies.

The Poles have already offered Washington special forces, and the Czechs have proposed deploying a chemical warfare unit of some 300 troops.

The president was warmly applauded as he intoned: "The peoples of your region suffered under repressive ideologies that tried to trample human dignity. Today, our freedom is threatened once again."

Aleksander Kwasniewski, the president of Poland, said, "Bush's speech to us proves that East-Central Europe has a hugely important role to play."

Appearing with Mr. Chirac, Mr. Bush also suggested that he was planning in a speech to the United Nations on Saturday to step up the pressure on other, unidentified countries that had done little to contribute to the cause.

"A coalition partner must do more than just express sympathy; a coalition partner must perform," he said. Some countries may send troops, others intelligence, while still others would cut off terrorist funds, he said. "But all nations, if they want to fight terror, must do something. It is time for action."

Administration officials said there was no new evidence that Mr. bin Laden had obtained chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Last week a senior defense official said there was a risk that Mr. bin Laden might obtain enough radiological material to make a "dirty bomb" that is, a conventional explosive that could spread radioactive material in a city.

Manufacturing a nuclear bomb, the official said, was most likely beyond Al Qaeda's ability, although presumably Mr. bin Laden's agents are also trying to steal a nuclear weapon.

"Al Qaeda has, over the years, had an appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction of various types, including nuclear materials," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said on Nov. 1. Mr. bin Laden has periodically referred to his desire to obtain an "Islamic bomb," and Mr. Bush said that motivated his warning today.

"The reason I said that is because I was using his own words," Mr. Bush said. "He announced that this was his intention. And I believe we need to take him seriously. We will do everything we can to make sure he does not acquire the means to deliver weapons of mass destruction. If he doesn't have them, we will work hard to make sure he doesn't; if he does, we'll make sure he doesn't deploy them."

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In President's Words: 'Lift This Dark Threat'

New York Times
November 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/international/07PTEX.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 - Following are excerpts from President Bush's speech by satellite to Central and Eastern European leaders meeting in Warsaw, as transcribed by the Federal News Service Inc.:

You are our partners in the fight against terrorism, and we share an important moment in history. For more than 50 years, the peoples of your region suffered under repressive ideologies that tried to trample human dignity. Today our freedom is threatened once again.

Like the fascists and totalitarians before them, these terrorists - Al Qaeda, the Taliban regime that supports them, and other terror groups across our world - try to impose their radical views through threat and violence. We see the same intolerance of dissent, the same mad global ambitions, the same brutal determination to control every life and all of life.

We have seen the true nature of these terrorists in the nature of their attacks. They kill thousands of innocent people and then rejoice about it. They kill fellow Muslims, many of whom died in the World Trade Center that terrible morning, and then they gloat. They condone murder and claim to be doing so in the name of a peaceful religion. . . .

Al Qaeda operates in more than 60 nations, including some in Central and Eastern Europe. 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.

So we're determined to fight this evil, and fight until we're rid of it. We will not wait for more innocent deaths. We will not wait for the authors of mass murder to gain the weapons of mass destruction. We act now because we must lift this dark threat from our age and save generations to come.

The people of my nation are now fighting this war at home. We face a second wave of terrorist attacks in the form of deadly anthrax that has been sent through the U.S. mail. Our people are responding to this new threat with alertness and calm. Our government is responding to treat the sick, provide antibiotics to those who have been exposed, and track down the guilty. . . .

And we fight abroad with our military, with the help of many nations, because the Taliban regime of Afghanistan refused to turn over the terrorists.

And we're making good progress in a just cause. Our efforts are directed at terrorists and military targets because, unlike our enemies, we value human life. We do not target innocent people, and we grieve for the difficult times the Taliban have brought to the people of their own country.

Our military is systematically pursuing its mission. We've destroyed many terrorist training camps. We have severed communication links. We're taking out air defenses. And now we're attacking the Taliban's front lines.

I've seen some news reports that many Afghan citizens wish the Taliban had never allowed the Al Qaeda terrorists into their country. I don't blame them. And I hope those citizens will help us locate the terrorists, because the sooner we find them, the better the people's lives will be. . . .

The defeat of terror requires an international coalition of unprecedented scope and cooperation. It demands the sincere, sustained actions of many nations against a network of terrorist cells and bases and funding.

Later this week at the United Nations, I will set out my vision of our common responsibilities in the war on terror. I will put every nation on notice that these duties involve more than sympathy or words. No nation can be neutral in this conflict, because no civilized nation can be secure in a world threatened by terror.

I thank the many nations of Europe, including our NATO allies, who've offered military help. I also thank the nations who are sharing intelligence and working to cut off terrorist financing. And I thank all of you for the important practical work you're doing at this conference.

The war against terrorism will be won only when we combine our strengths. We have a vast coalition that is uniting the world and increasingly isolating the terrorists, a coalition that includes many Arab and Muslim countries. I'm encouraged by what their leaders are saying. The head of the 22-nation Arab League rejected the claims of the terrorist leader and said he, Osama bin Laden, doesn't speak in the names of Arabs and Muslims.

Increasingly, it is clear that this is not just a matter between the United States and the terror network. As the Egyptian foreign minister said, there is a war between bin Laden and the whole world. All of us here today understand this: We do not fight against Islam. We fight against evil. . . .

The last time I was in Warsaw, I talked of our shared vision of a Europe that is whole and free and at peace. I said we are building a house of freedom whose doors are open to all of Europe's people and whose windows look out to global opportunities beyond.

Now that vision has been challenged, but it will not change. With your help, our vision of peace and freedom will be realized. And with your help, we will defend the values we hold in common.

Thank you for joining us, and may God bless you all.

---

THE SEAPORTS
On the Dock, Holes in the Security Net Are Gaping

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By PETER T. KILBORN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/national/07PORT.html?searchpv=nytToday

PORTLAND, Me., Nov. 3 - The big cargo ships and ships with truck- size containers pull up to docks where no one inspects their contents. Brown tankers from the Middle East steam into the bay, slide under a drawbridge that bisects the Fore River and tie up by terminals, tanks and a pipeline that carries the oil that heats Montreal.

In warmer weather, cruise ships like the QE2 and the Royal Empress with up to 3,000 tourists park at piers on busy Commercial Street, right next to Portland's lively downtown.

For Portland's officials, the scene, at least before Sept. 11, was a point of pride, the sign of a strong economy and a proud maritime heritage. Now it evokes fear and uncertainty. The unscrutinized containers, the bridge, the oil tanks, the dormant but still- radioactive nuclear power plant 20 miles north of the harbor - all form a volatile mix in a time of terrorism.

The usual barrier is chain-link fence. "It keeps out the honest people," said Paul D. Merrill, owner of a cargo terminal. "That's what it comes down to." The Port of Portland, Police Chief Michael Chitwood said, "is a tinderbox."

Remote as it seems on the northeastern ear of the nation, Portland is not particularly exceptional among the nation's 361 seaports. The ports of New York and New Jersey, Miami, Long Beach, Calif., and Los Angeles are much bigger and busier. Yet like most ports, the one here is near a population center and it is packed with bridges, power plants, and combustible and hazardous materials.

All that makes ports among the country's greatest points of vulnerability.

Even so, no national plan exists to thwart attacks against them, to respond if one happens or to organize a community afterward. No federal agency regulates seaports the way the Federal Aviation Administration manages airports. They are managed locally, often by the private businesses that use them. All are overseen by a patchwork of agencies, already stretched thin, some monitoring hundreds of ships a day.

Compared with the attention being given to airline security, security at the ports has gone largely unnoticed, even though they handle 95 percent of the cargo that enters from places other than Canada and Mexico. A bill to tighten port security has passed a Senate committee. The full Senate could vote on the bill within two weeks, but the debate has yet to begin in the House of Representatives.

"People in Congress don't have any idea it's a problem," said Senator Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, who is chairman of the Commerce Committee and co- sponsor of the bill with Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida. "I've got folks who don't have ports in their states. It's hard to get it in front of their heads."

Port officials are aware of various threats, like using a tanker or fuel- loaded cruise liner as a bomb, secreting weapons and explosives in containers, hijacking a ship and ramming it into a nuclear plant on the shores of a river, or infesting a cargo of grain or seeds with a biological weapon.

Given the potential dangers, the security measures in place are far from adequate.

"We're looking for needles in a haystack," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the United States Customs Service. "And the haystack has doubled." International trade has doubled since 1995 while the number of people to handle inspections has remained roughly constant, he said.

The Coast Guard patrols coasts and harbors but little of the land or the cargo. It checks out ships coming in from the open sea but has no way of thoroughly searching everything that comes by.

The Customs Service says it can inspect only 2 percent of the 600,000 cargo containers that enter seaports each a day on more than 500 ships. Of the 2 percent, many are not inspected until they reach their final destination, sometimes on the opposite coast, where they travel unguarded by rail, barge and truck.

Last year, a government commission on crime and security at seaports found similar weaknesses. The commission surveyed 12 major ports including those of New York and New Jersey, Miami, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Charleston.

While withholding their identities for security reasons, the report found that only three of the ports tightly controlled access from the land and that access from the water was completely unprotected at nine of them.

The report also emphasized the hazards posed by materials unloaded from ships. "The influx of goods through U.S. ports provides a venue for the introduction of a host of transnational threats into the nation's infrastructures," the report said.

A tangled chain of authority further compromised security, the commission said, a point echoed by the authorities in Portland.

"No one's in charge," said Jeffrey W. Monroe, director of transportation for the city. "There's no central guidance."

And ports have a strong economic incentive to limit control. With the taxes that cruise ships, tankers and other businesses pay, ports are the lifeblood of their communities. Port authorities' principal constituencies are private industry and economic development offices, whose mission is growth, not security. "They win if they move more cargo," Senator Hollings said.

In Portland, the seaport has been a boon, generating millions of dollars a year in revenues. Mr. Monroe said that in the past year the bulk cargo business grew 10 percent, passenger traffic and oil imports both rose by 20 percent. But the stalling economy and now the cost of heightened security have wiped out nearly all that the seaport and airport contribute to the city budget.

In Congress, the Hollings-Graham legislation would help cities meet some of the cost of securing their ports. It would give the Coast Guard regulatory control over ports, require background checks of waterfront workers and provide for 1,500 new Customs agents.

Before the September attacks, the seaport industry's principal lobby, the American Association of Port Authorities, fought the legislation, arguing that it would impose one- size-fits-all security systems for all seaports.

Though the group now supports many provisions of the bill, it still has questions over the matter of who controls security. Meanwhile, ports have taken their own steps to improve security. In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush announced he would deploy the National Guard to oversee four of the state's busiest ports. In California, Gov. Gray Davis tightened security around bridges.

In Portland, officials and businesses have taken similar steps. Minutes before the drawbridge opens for a tanker, police officers arrive to monitor both sides of the bridge. Fences are being repaired and installed.

At the city's International Marine Terminal, where from May to October the Scotia Prince carries 170,000 passengers on 11-hour cruises between Portland and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, visitors used to roam freely around the pier. Now only passengers are allowed there, and then only after they and their baggage are cleared by metal detectors and bomb dogs. The pilings below the pier are now illuminated at night.

For its part, the Coast Guard now focuses primarily on harbor security. It requires vessels weighing more than 300 tons to notify the port 96 hours before arrival. The big ships also must fax crew lists, said Lt. Cmdr. Wyman W. Briggs, executive officer of the guard's facilities in Portland. The crews of fishing boats must carry picture ID's.

For all this, much tighter seaport security may prove impossible. Seaports cannot be secured like airport, said Brian Nutter, administrator for the Maine Port Authority in Augusta. "You can't fence off the whole state of Maine," Mr. Nutter said.

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Beyond Our Shores, a Battle for Opinion

New York Times
November 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/opinion/L07WARR.html

To the Editor:
Re "More and More, Other Countries See the War as Solely America's" (news article, Nov. 4):

You say many around the world are saying this is America's war and asking what this means for them. The answer is simple. To be blunt, America is the world's strongest country, militarily and economically. What happens in America and to America affects everyone around the world.

The economic downturn in America, which was worsened by the terrorist attacks, is reported to be spreading throughout the world economy. America is under attack by antidemocratic forces that make no secret that they want to take over the world. If they can defeat America, then nothing stands between them and world domination.

Americans led the way in saving the world from totalitarian forces in two world wars and the cold war. We will do it again this time, even without solid international support, because there is no other choice.

MICHAEL GEWIRTZ Carmel, Ind., Nov. 4, 2001

•To the Editor:
Re "U.S. Tries to Sway Worldwide Opinion in Favor of War" (front page, Nov. 6):

We Americans are learning some truths that Israelis have known about for years. If you are the victim of a terrorist attack, you may get sympathy from other countries; but when you take necessary action against terrorists, you will draw only criticism.

PETER B. SHALEN Chicago, Nov. 6, 2001

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America's Resolve, Then and Now

New York Times
November 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/opinion/L07ACKE.html

To the Editor:
Re "On the Home Front, a Winnable War," by Bruce Ackerman (Op-Ed, Nov. 6):

I am beginning to suspect that this generation of Americans is not made of the same stuff as those who paved the way for our wealthy and powerful country. From the American pioneers who conquered a wild continent to the "Greatest Generation" that laid down their lives by the thousands to defeat Nazism, our country's history reflects a can-do spirit and an iron resolve toward success.

The war against terrorism is this generation's first real test. But even after the slaughter of thousands of our citizens, we still don't seem prepared to defend ourselves in what could be a long and bloody campaign. Did the lavish comfort of the 90's weaken our willingness to get our hands dirty? If so, we do not deserve what our ancestors left us, and it will surely be taken away.

JOHN VAN AMBURG St. Louis, Nov. 6, 2001

•To the Editor:

Bruce Ackerman ("On the Home Front, a Winnable War," Op-Ed, Nov. 6) makes a good point about the feasibility of trying to win the war on terrorism abroad. It does make sense to focus our efforts on securing the home front, but his analysis overlooks the extent to which the United States is involved outside our borders.

Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans live and work overseas, and we have many other interests abroad that are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. A concerted effort to target these people and businesses could have a devastatingly disruptive effect on our country.

We no longer live in an insular world. Globalization is here, and with America in the forefront, we are exposed in almost every corner of the world.

PETER S. ALLEN Providence, R.I., Nov. 6, 2001 The writer is a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College.

•To the Editor:

Re "On the Home Front, a Winnable War," by Bruce Ackerman (Op-Ed, Nov. 6):

I am tired of reading that Americans are addicted to Arab oil. The loss of thousands of American lives through the acts of terrorists financed by oil-rich Arab states should help cure us of this "addiction."

Becoming independent of Middle Eastern oil through sustained energy conservation, accompanied by concentrated efforts to produce energy from alternative sources, is the only way to end this conflict permanently.

I believe that most Americans are more than willing to make personal changes in their lifestyles to accomplish this crucial goal. Isn't it peculiar that President Bush and his administration are not asking us to do just that? But we don't have to wait to be asked. We can do it on our own and then watch oil consumption decrease. This is what freedom-loving Americans can do for their country, starting now.

LEILA ACHENBAUM New York, Nov. 6, 2001

•To the Editor:

To use Bruce Ackerman's reasoning about the war on terrorism (Op-Ed, Nov. 6), imagine that after Pearl Harbor someone had written:

"We should be seriously engaged in antifascist efforts at home, but we should satisfy ourselves with limited victories abroad. There are millions of fascist sympathizers in the world, and there is nothing we can do to change this in the short run.

"We should figure out clever ways to declare victory at the first decent opportunity and remove our troops. Lengthy military engagement will simply increase the number and tenacity of fascists. The administration should not be preparing to take the war to other fascist states."

Fortunately, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not pursue this course. We may hope that President Bush is no more likely to follow Mr. Ackerman's advice on fighting terrorism.

FRANK LECHNER Atlanta, Nov. 6, 2001


-------- activists

Now Is the Time to Act

November 07, 2001
By Starhawk
From: Joan Norman <defender5@mindspring.com>

I'm sitting here scrolling through my backlog of email, and two themes predominate: the illegitimacy and horror of America's New War, and a multitude of voices from the movement I thought I was a part of telling us to pause, to keep quiet, that protest now might jeopardize our cause.

And I find myself thinking about Emma Goldman, who, when she took an extremely unpopular position, said that the more people disagreed with her, the more strongly she had to speak out. We need a little more of her spirit in the movement today.

Now is the moment when we need to move forward, not retreat, when we need to step up our activism, not pull back.

The media and the government are trying to construct a reality for us. If we silence ourselves, we play into their hands. If they accuse dissenters of being unpatriotic, and we stifle our dissent in response, we are accepting their view of reality.

If they accuse us of being terrorists, and we hide, we confirm the association in the public mind. And we have no reason to hide, nothing to apologize for, no reason to retreat one inch. We stand for the very values the U.S. is presumably fighting for: democracy, accountability, real security, true justice-and we should be loud and proud about it.

The best way to truly differentiate ourselves from the terrorists is to do what we do, loudly, publicly, and visibly, to continue to speak, to march, to gather publicly, to organize blatantly, and yes, to mount actions that challenge the institutions of corporate control, actions that embody the principles of freedom, direct democracy, respect for diversity and love for life.

If the government passes laws that define dissent as terrorism, they still have to implement those laws, prosecute people under them, defend their position in court. Whether they do so or not will depend on what they perceive will be the political price. If we have a strong, vital movement and strong solidarity, we can make each step costly and difficult.

If we stifle our own dissent out of fear, we've done their work for them. Repression requires compliance. No repressive system, no matter how pervasive and strong, can afford to actually enforce its every decree. Instead, such systems depend on intimidating people so that we police ourselves out of fear.

Fear surrounds us at the moment. It's being wafted to us every night from our T.V. screens; it falls out of the pages of our newspapers, an invisible powder more deadly than anthrax. We can't blame each other for being afraid, but we can lovingly challenge each other to move past the fear to a place of courage: that ability to stare possible losses in the face and act anyway.

For fear does not lead to good decisions. Fear cuts us off from information, from choices, from vision and hope. It inflates the power of the authorities, narrows our possibilities and leaves us easily controlled.

The WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are not pausing for reflection. They are continuing to meet, and are pushing as hard as they possibly can to implement their entire corporate agenda. The Bush Administration isn't thoughtfully slowing down-it's moving full speed ahead with a campaign of gratuitous violence that now threatens millions of Afghanis with starvation.

If we pull back now, we won't later find a more favorable moment to act. Every piece of their agenda that gets locked into place becomes that much harder to dislodge. Every political space we relinquish will become that much harder to regain.

We could act stupidly, and provoke a backlash that we'll be struggling against for decades. We could act timidly, or not act, and lose the political ground we have gained. Or we can act with courage, vision, humor and creativity, and continue to challenge the system with new possibilities, new analyses, new voices. We can be a model for all those whose real feelings are far more complex and ambiguous than the polls show.

Yes, public opinion seems against us. But public opinion was never changed by silence. We don't change opinions by deferring to them, but by challenging them. Challenge does not have to be strident or doctrinaire. New forms of dialogue may be called for. But people are hungry to talk about these issues. If we are willing to listen as well as speechify, our actions can become forums for breakthroughs and openings.

It's likely our actions will be met with a hailstorm of vitriol and name-calling from the Right. What's new about that? The Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the feminist and les/bi/trans/gay rights movements and virtually every movement for social justice all faced virulent hatred, and many still do.

All were originally seen as too radical, too provocative, as likely to detract from the achievement of some agenda or another. Yet all of them weathered the storm and went on to make major changes in the public consciousness.

And fear can make our opponents seem much stronger than they are. Since 911, I've been in many, many marches, rallies, and vigils. I've sung the old songs of the sixties with the most peaceful of pacifists; I've listened to angry speeches over bad sound systems; I've been trapped by riot cops in front of the World Bank with the black masked anarchists. At times we've been met by counterdemonstrators, but never more than a handful. At times the police have tried to provoke us or repress us-but they were doing that before 911.

In fact, we received signs of support from most people we passed. Construction workers flashed peace signs, and office workers waved. Passersby joined us. People thanked us for speaking out. If we don't let fear stop us, if we act from vision, we have opportunities immediately ahead of us to build our movement to a new level.

And even if our worst fears are true-no, especially if they are true, if we are witnessing Act II of last year's coup, our best chance of forestalling martial law and overt fascist control is to fill the streets now, again and again, as a visible sign that a strong and growing movement will resist the consolidation of their illegitimate power.

The WTO meets in Qatar November 9-13. Local and regional actions are planned all over the country. They are a chance to take the global issues and ground them in local struggles, to make new alliances and question why, when we claim to be fighting for democracy, we have relinquished control over our environmental and labor policies to a secret tribunal that can override our laws.

The School of the Americas Watch is organizing mass protests for the same weekend of November 17 and 18. Their nonviolent action demands the closure of America's own terrorist training school, where the death squads and military of Latin America have been taught the finer points of torture and assassination for decades.

The IMF and World Bank have moved their annual meeting to Ottawa on the weekend of November 17 and 18. A mobilization has begun, on very short notice. It is a chance to again contest the policies that create the climate of despair that breeds terrorism, to link the issues of the war with world economic issues, to revitalize the movement for global justice.

If there's any possibility you can come to Ottawa, come! A strong showing there would make a huge difference. And everywhere, peace vigils, marches, rallies, and speak outs continue to be organized. Show up. Bring your friends.

Organize your own. Even a simple act can be powerful. One friend went out with her kids and a simple peace banner two days after 911 and hung it over the freeway. Another went downtown with signs that said simply, "Love One Another." Both were thanked by people who said they had been afraid to speak out because they felt they were alone.

What we do in the next weeks is crucial. If we do nothing, the agenda of corporate control will move further ahead and be harder to challenge. Millions of lives will be lost this winter. If we take action, we still have a chance to preserve our freedoms, change the destructive path laid out for us, and chart a new course.

Overall information on upcoming actions: www.indymedia.org (check the page for your local area)

WTO actions: www.wtoaction.org/cfwto (International) www.globalizethis.org (Local actions I'm involved in)

----

70's Radical Reaffirms Guilty Plea

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/national/07OLSO.html

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 6 - In a high-pressure drama in which her future turned on her willingness to utter a single word, the onetime radical Sara Jane Olson jousted verbally with a judge today but finally, if reluctantly, said in court that she stood by her guilty plea to charges that she had plotted to bomb two police cruisers here 26 years ago.

The tense scene offered a bitter conclusion to a case that demonstrated how the long-ago actions of a generation steeped in radicalism and dissent can still excite deep passions, and defiance.

The State Superior Court judge in the case, Larry Paul Fidler, said he had called today's hearing because of his concern over Ms. Olson's actions last week, when she pleaded guilty to two felony counts as part of a surprise deal with the prosecutors, then in a hallway minutes later announced that she was innocent.

Ms. Olson insisted that she had been forced to accept a plea she had vowed to fight because the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 meant that someone accused of engaging in antigovernment acts, even decades ago, could never receive a fair trial.

Many lawyers here said they had never heard of a plea deal being rescinded after it was entered, but Judge Fidler said that "the integrity of the criminal justice system is at stake," and he lectured Ms. Olson, "A guilty plea is not a way-station on the way to a press conference."

Sara Jane Olson on Tuesday after reaffirming her guilt on felony counts of attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to murder.

He added, "She cannot have it both ways," pleading guilty in court and then disavowing it outside.

He read Ms. Olson the statute under which she had been accused, and she then took a recess to discuss it with her lawyers. Ms. Olson, 54, re- entered the court and in response to the judge's questions stated that "I want to make it clear, Your Honor, that I did not make the bomb, I did not plant the bomb, I did not hold the bomb," but that she was guilty as a conspirator under a strict reading of the law.

One of her lawyers, Tony Serra, explained that she was acknowledging that "there was a factual basis" for her guilty plea to charges that she had aided and abetted the bombing, which failed. Then came the decisive moments.

"Do you wish your plea to stand?" the judge asked her.

Ms. Olson, who had smiled amiably when entering her plea in the same courtroom last week, looked tense and cross, and paused for about 15 seconds in the suddenly quiet courtroom.

"All right," she mumbled.

"Is that yes?" the judge asked.

"Yes," she concluded.

Ms. Olson, who had been known as Kathleen Soliah, was a fugitive for more than two decades after having been accused of being a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army and having participated in the failed bombing conspiracy. Prosecutors charged that the bombing plot was in retaliation for a shootout a year earlier in which six members of the radical group had been killed.

After she was arrested two years ago, Ms. Olson, now an upper-middle- class housewife and mother of three in St. Paul, vowed to fight the charges.

But last week she stunned many supporters by agreeing to a deal in which she pleaded guilty to two felony counts of attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to murder. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop three other charges. Although the counts carry a possible life sentence, she is expected to receive five years and four months at her sentencing next month.

Even after she reaffirmed her plea, Ms. Olson's lawyers contested the stand the prosecutors have taken regarding her possible parole. Under the sentencing laws, the state parole board has the right to review her sentence and possibly lengthen it if they believe she remains a threat.

Shawn Chapman, one of Ms. Olson's lawyers, has said that she felt she had the prosecutors' word that they would not seek to extend her sentence. But in court last week the prosecutors said they reserved the right to try to influence the board.

Judge Fidler said the issue had to be resolved by Ms. Olson, by agreeing to the plea deal or not. She affirmed her decision.

"The plea is a valid plea," the judge said.

Ms. Olson made no statements outside the courtroom today.

---

Relief Effort Races Winter to Save Millions

New York Times
November 7, 2001
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/07/international/asia/07RELI.html

NOWSHERA, Pakistan, Nov. 6 - Sixty Afghan refugees worked in a dusty warehouse this morning, bent under backbreaking sacks of wheat, toiling like men building a levee against a flood, racing to keep two million fellow Afghans alive.

Every man was paid a nickel a sack. Every sack held 110 pounds of wheat. Every man loaded a truck by day's end. Each truck held up to 700 sacks, enough to get 400 people through the five-month winter.

Each trucker was off for a week or more, the time needed to travel up over the Khyber Pass and down 350 miles or more of the world's worst roads, keeping "one eye on the sky for the bombs and one eye on the road for the holes," said Ishaq Khan, just returned from a run.

This is the other half of the battle for Afghanistan: the international effort to save as many as six million people on the brink of starvation after a generation of war, four years of drought and a month of American airstrikes.

"The world is mobilizing to deal with this," said Kenneth H. Bacon, the president of Refugees International in Washington and a former Pentagon spokesman. The wheat, nearly a quarter of a billion pounds of it, may mean survival for millions in the mountains north and west of Kabul, said Mike Huggins, a 34-year-old Australian who helps organize the shipments for the United Nations World Food Program.

This month, Mr. Huggins said, his goal is to ship more than 30,000 tons of wheat to the mountain villages in the heart of Afghanistan.

The World Food Program supports the air drops of ready-to-eat rations by the American military, Mr. Huggins said, but few other international aid organizations do. They say the wheat deliveries are far more effective - and more likely to be eaten - than the air-drop food.

"We are now getting food to about two million people," he said, riding shotgun in a Land Cruiser to the wheat warehouse in Nowshera, outside the frontier city Peshawar, close to the foot of the Khyber Pass. "We need to be getting food to about six million. And people need to understand that this is not a refugee story. It's a food crisis in Afghanistan.

"There are regions, like the central highlands, where we are absolutely desperate to get food in, desperately trying to get people enough food to last the winter. The real race against the clock is that the snow is starting to fall."

This effort faces obstacles far deeper than the refrigerator-sized ruts in Afghanistan's most-traveled highways, trickier than the death-defying curves of mountain roads better suited for goats than overloaded trucks in low gear.

First, the Taliban seized the World Food Program's warehouse in Kabul, then demanded more help from the United Nations, like the son who killed his parents and asked the judge for mercy as an orphan. Then there are the occasional bombs from American warplanes along the wheat trucker's roadways, the soaring cost of fuel, and the scarcity of small flatbed trucks and intrepid drivers to negotiate the snowy mountain passes.

The logistics inside Afghanistan are made even more maddening by the lack of reliable communications. Every lost day might mean many lost lives.

But then there are the means to overcome them: the kindness of strangers.

The World Food Program gratefully accepted the donation of a fleet of sturdy trucks once used to haul weapons to the Afghan rebels when they were fighting Soviet invaders in the 1980's. The donor was the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said.

Pakistan, which has problems feeding its own people, much less sustaining more than two million Afghan refugees, most of whom arrived during the Soviet invasion, loaned the wheat, 110,000 tons of it, and the United States vowed to replace it.

The Soviet war against Afghanistan sent some six million Afghans into exile, mostly to Pakistan and Iran. But Western diplomats say the real refugee problem today, after a month of bombing, is inside the country, not at its borders.

They believe that somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people are refugees in northern and western Afghanistan, in and around the cities of Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, on the run from the war and the other scourges of life that have befallen them, and that the number could double by year's end.

Officials of the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, say that in Afghanistan, which had the world's fourth-highest infant mortality rate last year, 100,000 children may die this winter from hunger, disease and the rigors of migration.

Mr. Bacon of Refugees International said there may already be one million internal refugees in Afghanistan.

Pakistan and Iran, to the east and west of Afghanistan, have all but closed their borders to most of those fleeing the war. Pakistan is now negotiating with the United Nations over its demand that any new refugee camps for Afghans be built inside Afghanistan, war or no war.

At the Jalozai refugee camp outside Peshawar, hundreds of Afghan refugee families, mostly women and children, have arrived in the last month; the Pakistani authorities have permitted their entry but consider them invisible, aid workers say.

Nasir Kakar, himself a refugee from the Soviet war, said that "the food problem is the worst problem" that the refugees have faced.

"When the bombing started from America, people started arriving here, mostly women and their children, and they have nothing, nothing," said Mr. Kakar, who works at the Jalozai camp for the French organization Doctors Without Borders. "They are one week, two weeks on the way, their babies get sick and die on the way."

But the ones who reach Jalozai, wretched as it is, might be considered lucky, since the World Food Program can feed them and the doctors in the camp can treat them.

For despite all the wheat going in to Afghanistan, precious little hard information about the people who receive it is coming out.

Assaults by the Taliban and the threat of American bombs have cut the World Food Program's staff inside Afghanistan to 120, from 330; communication with them, difficult in the best of times, is next to nonexistent.

Today, at the Nowshera wheat warehouse, Mr. Huggins was yearning to talk to drivers who had made it to the remotest reaches of central Afghanistan, the Hazarajat, long one of the nation's poorest regions. But no word came.

"I need to hear from them," he told his warehouse manager, Tauheedullah Babar. "Do you understand? I need to know what they've seen."

----

Protests look muted, stymied at Qatar and Ottawa

Wednesday, November 07, 2001
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11072001/reu_45499.asp

OTTAWA - The roving forces of antiglobalization protesters, subdued by the Sept. 11 attacks and stymied by logistics, look likely to be less disruptive at international meetings this month than in the past.

In the past few years, from World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Seattle to the annual G8 summits of leading industrialized countries, activists have increasingly hampered discussions on world trade and finance.

But this month activists must divide their attention between the Nov. 9-13 WTO meetings in remote and tightly controlled Qatar and the hastily arranged talks in Ottawa just a few days later of the G20, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

Added to the geographical difficulties, dissenters realize that in the battle for public opinion, they need to be cautious about just how hard-hitting they are after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "We have to be much more careful in the words we use," said Ken Georgetti, president of the 2.5-million-strong Canadian Labor Congress, a strong opponent of what it calls "the corporate-driven globalization process." He said, "We'll be probably blaming the Americans less than we normally would for trade problems."

His labor group swelled the numbers of protesters at a trade summit in fence-ringed Quebec City last April, but where and how it will protest this month exemplifies the dilemma facing the anticorporate movement.

Georgetti will call his members to an anti-WTO protest in Ottawa on Nov. 9, coordinated with similar protests around the world. But these events pose no threat to the meeting in Qatar, half a world away, bordering the even-more-closed Saudi Arabia. He said the group did not plan any activities for the Nov. 16-18 weekend in Ottawa.

It is not to say there will be no demonstrations that weekend. Anti-war protests had already been planned for Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 18, before Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin decided late last month to switch the G20/IMF meetings to Ottawa after New Delhi backed out.

And a few calls have gone out on the Internet to converge on Ottawa. One is from a shadowy group calling itself the Black Touta and advocating a shut-down of the talks. Black Touta posted a message that starts by urging "all anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and militant revolutionaries to protest the IMF, World Bank, G20 and the 'war on terrorism' in Ottawa from Nov. 16 to 18."

"Now everyone is too shy or too scared to voice personal opinion in (out of) fear of offending American patriotism," it said. "Don't let the 'war' discourage you from coming to Ottawa."

But other groups, for example, the Council of Canadians, which took a prominent role in Quebec City, are focusing for now on Nov. 9 and still have not decided what to do about the following weekend in Ottawa.

The demonstrators who attend such meetings represent a wide array of dissent but the overarching theme is that the poor countries as well as the poor in the rich countries get left behind as trade barriers fall and capitalism advances.

Martin and other financial leaders counter that the very raison d'etre of groups like the G20, representing both developed and developing countries, is to look after the interests of the poorer nations.

The advocacy groups also call for more democracy and openness in the negotiations, to which governments reply that most ministers attending such meetings in fact are elected or represent elected figures.

Police are busily preparing both for demonstrators and for protection against any attacks related to Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 strikes. Early indications are they may not have to mount the massive security operation required in Quebec City or at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, in July.

"Since Sept. 11 security has been tight, and it will remain tight, and you have to understand it's a major meeting," one police officer said. But the officer added, "We hope it's not going to be like Quebec City. We don't think it will be."

----

Environmental radical groups haven't been slowed by Sept. 11 terrorist attacks

Wednesday, November 07, 2001
By Christy Karras,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11072001/ap_45496.asp

PORTLAND, Ore. - Environmental radicals have claimed responsibility for at least five acts of sabotage over the past two months, showing they are not going to let the nation's terrorism scare stand in their way.

Since Sept. 11, they've set fire to a maintenance building at a primate research facility in New Mexico, released minks from an Iowa fur farm twice within a week, and firebombed a federal corral for wild horses in Nevada.

The current spree started on Sept. 8, when militants torched a McDonald's restaurant in Tucson, Ariz. Four of the five actions have been claimed by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and one by its sister organization, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

Beth Anne Steele, an FBI spokeswoman in Portland, said it's "pretty unbelievable" that the groups, considered terrorists themselves by the agency, have continued their sabotage during the nation's terrorism crisis. "We believe that their methods of intimidation and violence have crossed the line into unacceptable for law enforcement, and they've crossed the line for the majority of Americans," she said.

But the spokesman for ALF and ELF, David Barbarash, said Americans' fear of more possible attacks by followers of Osama bin Laden are no reason for the ALF and the ELF to put their own campaign on hold. "I don't think underground activists have changed the way they think about what they're doing," said Barbarash, a former ALF activist who now acts as their spokesman from his home in Vancouver, British Columbia. "The Sept. 11 attacks were horrific acts, but we also have to remember that the atrocities against the Earth continue unabated," said Barbarash.

The ALF first surfaced in 1987 and the ELF nine years later. They have claimed responsibility for dozens of acts of sabotage against companies and agencies they say are harming animals and the environment - including fur farms, research facilities, fast-food restaurants, and logging operations. One of the most notorious operations carried out by the ELF was an October 1998 fire that swept through part of the Vail ski resort in Colorado. The group said it was protesting the resort's expansion into lynx habitat.

The FBI defines terrorism as "the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce" the government or the civilian population. Steele said that definition fits the acts for which the ELF and the ALF have claimed responsibility over the years.

But Barbarash argues that militant environmentalists are not terrorists because their aim is not to harm people but to protect animals and the environment. ELF and ALF "are acting out of compassion for all life, including human life," and can't be likened to terrorists who crash hijacked planes into buildings or spread disease as a weapon, he said.

That doesn't wash with the FBI, or with antiterrorism expert Gary Perlstein. "Even if it's a cause you believe in, if you resort to violence, then it is terrorism," Perlstein said.

The FBI has an active investigation into the ELF and the ALF. Congress also wants to know more about the two groups. Former ELF spokesman Craig Rosebraugh of Portland has been subpoenaed by a House subcommittee to testify on eco-terrorism. Rosebraugh said he won't cooperate. Rosebraugh stepped down as spokesman for the ELF about two months ago. His role has been taken over by Barbarash, who previously was spokesman only for the ALF.

Barbarash said the two groups send him anonymous communiques when they want to announce they've carried out an illegal act. Barbarash then relays the information to the news media. The communiques can come by fax, email, or phone, he said.

Barbarash served four months in jail for taking part in an ALF action - the release of cats used in medical research at a Canadian university in 1992. He said he ceased taking part in ALF actions because he lost his anonymity when he was arrested. But that hasn't stopped him from relaying the communiques or from speaking out in favor of their acts.

Barbarash concedes the ALF and the ELF run the risk of losing any sympathy for their cause by carrying out illegal acts during the nation's terrorism scare. But he said they don't care. "Sympathy isn't a factor high on the agenda of ALF and ELF," Barbarash said.

----

HUNDREDS OF EVENTS AGAINST THE WTO MINISTERIAL MEETING

From: "enric duran" <eduran@vvirtual.es>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 16:04:48 +0100

Podeis obtener el mensaje en español en el link: http://barcelona.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=8613&group=webcast
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=85212&group=webcast

Worldwide Events Around the 4th WTO Ministerial in Qatar

Hundreds of events are planned in national capitals and other cities around the world to coincide with the 4th Ministerial of the World trade Organization (WTO).

We have counted actions in 36 countries and probably lots will be added.

This recopilation is possible Thanks to the work of lots of people, specially around:

www.tradewatch.org
www.agp.org (see the list in http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/qatar/ )
www.attac.org (see the list in http://www.attac.org/nonewround/mob/index.html )
www.canadians.org
www.wtoaction.org
www.indymedia.org
www.protest.net
and much more.....

Choosing Doha, Qatar as the site for the Ministerial in part was designed to avoid public participation and scrutiny. Civil society is severely restricted in terms of access to the Ministerial. The anti-corporate globalization movement that started in Seattle has only grown in depth, diversity and size since then. This movement cannot be silenced. More and more people around the world are living with the negative consequences of a cynical globalization agenda: lack of adequate healthcare; no access to schools; loss of livelihood and jobs; a deteriorating environment; elimination of family farms and weakening of food security and safety. If the proponents of the status-quo globalization model thought that locating the WTO Ministerial in Qatar could silence civil society they were wrong. Instead we have brought our voices and our WTO critique home to communities all over the world.

Country & City
Event Description
Contact information

Australia
Australian Events for WTO Ministerial

The Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (www.aftinet.org.au) a network of over 50 unions and community groups, is sponsoring a seminar, band night and public rally in Sydney, November 11-13.

The rally coincides with the conference of the International Metalworkers Federation which is to be held in Sydney at that time, attended by 1000 union activists from around the world. We expect the rally to attract thousands of people from both unions and community organizations.

Sydney seminar on the WTO and Fair Trade alternatives 11.30 am Sunday November 11, Tom Mann Theatre, Chalmers St, Surrry Hills.

Fair Trade band night with popular bands 7.30 PM Sunday Nov 11 Sydney , Metro theatre, George St.

Sydney Fair Trade Rally 12 noon, Darling Harbour Sydney, march through the city to Martin Place. The rally will be reported on the Indymedia website with pictures www.sydney.indymedia.org

Patricia Ranald pranald@piac.asn.au

Austria
ATTAC Austria is organizing an alternative event *The world is not for sale* to the WTO Ministerial meeting in Qatar on 10th of November in LINZ/Austria. It will last the whole day and consists of lectures from different perspectives (agriculture, agriculture and genetic engineering, women, service industry,) in combination with workshops; a press conferences is planned together with Greenpeace and WWF as well as press releases and position papers. Maybe additional actions are planned.

Vienna: rally on the the 10th of november
Christian Mayr (for ATTAC), infos@attac-austria.org
http://austria.indymedia.org

Bangladesh
Bangladesh Mukto Sramik Federation (BMSF) - Dhaka Meeting & demonstration from November 9-11

10 & 11 November, demonstrations will be organized in Chittagong, Khulna and Sylhet.

Belgium
6 November, Press Conference in Brussels organized by FoE Europe, Oxfam Solidarity and CPE

Alexandra Wandel (alexandra.wandel@foeeurope.org) or Raoul Jennar (Raoul.Jennar@oxfamsol.be)

Bolivia
For the 6th of november the 5 Federaciones del Tròpico announced to start again with blockades of roads and military bases in Chapare to protest against the neo liberal policies of the government and armed repression (there were more people killed during the last weeks)

Brazil
Sao Paolo 9th of november
"City tour in São Paulo"

Rio de Janeiro, 9 noviembre
" Street circus at 15h00"
http://www.midiaindependente.org

Canada
ATLANTIC CANADA
Halifax, Nova Scotia
NOV. 8- Public Forum
NOV. 9- Carnival with many creative actions throughout the day.
CONTACT: Fred Furlong, Canadian Union of Postal Workers ffurlong@cupw-sttp.org

St. John, New Brunswick
NOV. 9- March city to City Hall for a noon Rally with speakers, music (Raging

Grannies, local hiphop artists, among others), and street theatre.
CONTACT: Sean Benjamin q21n9@unb.ca

QUEBEC
Quebec City
NOV. 9- Protest Rally in Old Quebec City.
CONTACT: Sebastian Bouchard, OQP appui@oqp2001.com

ONTARIO
Ottawa
NOV. 9- CARAVAN CONVERGENCE and march to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Noon Rally with Speakers, banners and street theatre.

Evening Event: "A Better World is Possible" at 7:00pm City Hall Council Chambers with National Spokespeople and special guest, Oronto Douglas, Nigerian Human Rights Lawyer (sponsored by Sierra Club of Canada)

CONTACT: David Robbins, Council of Canadians and Betrand Begin, Canadian Labour Congress
drobbins@canadians.org and bbegin@clc-ctc

Toronto
NOV. 9- Noon Rally outside City Hall. Flyering at public places throughout the day. Creative direct actions throught the afternoon.

CONTACT: Toronto Mobilization for Global Justice and Kim Philips, Council of Canadians
mob4glob@tao.ca and kphilips@acea.ca

Kingston
NOV. 9- Evening Workshop "WTO and Other Corporate Bullies", 7pm at the Steelworkers Hall.- 8:30 Wine & Cheese Reception for International Guests.

NOV. 10 - 9:30 - 10:30 Caravan Joins Local Activists caravan for trip through city with stops at 2 Corporate targets.

Town Hall Meeting "A Better World IS Possible", 11am at City Hall- International Speakers - Raging Grannies to perform.
CONTACT: Peter Boyle, Kingson and District Labour Council pboyle@kos.net

Sudbury
NOV. 9- Protest at local MPs Riding Office and Anti-War Teach-In at Laurentian University
CONTACT: Aurele Bertrand, Sudbury Global Justice bertrand@cyberbeach.net

North Bay
NOV. 8- Public Forum, 1-3pm, Fedeli Business Centre, Nipissing University
CONTACT: Barbara Anella, DAWN Ontario dawn@thot.net

Thunder Bay
NOV. 9- Vegetariana 2001and Evening of food, music and conversation- "There are always alternatives"
NOV. 10- Sustainable Solutions 2001 focus on fair trade and locally owned and operated businesses
CONTACT: Bob Ewing, Thunder Bay Coalition Against Poverty sixdegrees@baynet.net

WESTERN CANADA
Vancouver, British Columbia
NOV. 9- Evening Public Forum time and location?
NOV. 10- Teach-In on the WTO with Panels, workshops and street theatre, time and location?
CONTACT: Tara Scurr, Trading Strategies tscurr@canadians.org

Edmonton, Alberta
NOV. 9- What is the WTO? Part of Global Visions Film Festival
CONTACT: Marika Schwantt, Global Visions Festival Society marika@dojo.tao.ca

Regina, Saskatchewan
NOV. 9- Protest against WTO
CONTACT: Loretta Gerlach, Trade and Democracy Now! And Barb Byers, Saskatchewan Fed. of Labour
lgerlach@canadians.org and sfl.byers@sk.sympatico.ca
Annahid Dashtgard, Organizer for the Common Front on the WTO (CFWTO)
Phone: 416-53-cfwto (532-3986)
Fax: 416-532-6191
Email: cfwto@sympatico.ca
Website: www.wtoaction.org/cfwto

Czech Republic
November 9: CMKOS - Mass media campaign to inform how trade unions perceive the current process of globalization, the role of the WTO and other international institutions in this process.
http://www.cmkos.ck/

Denmark
November 9: LO Denmark - Launch of publication on the impact of Globalization
Launch will be accompanied by media awareness-raising (eg. newspaper advertisements)
November 10: Street action in Aalbourg y Copenhagen
http://www.lo.dk/
danmark@attac.org

Finland
Several NGOs invited by ATTAC Finland are organizing a joint demonstration "Not all is for sale" against current WTO system and for "Another world is possible" on 9.11. in Helsinki leaving from Railway square at 18.00. During the day several groups are organizing decentralized mosaic actions around the town.

On Saturday 10th NGOs and labor movement are organizing together a Doha-seminar "Are there alternatives for free trade" between 12-18 with prominent speakers and 8 workshops on different themes like Democracy in Doha, GATS and threat to public services, WTO and development countries, visions and alternatives.

Mika Rönkkö, Attac Finland mronkko@kaapeli.fi
http:/www.attac.kaapeli.fi

France
November 3, Ales (south east of France) Festive funeral of the WTO: Let*s bury WTO before it buries all of us!

Film : "The whole world is watching" , work shops on : water, waste, education. Parade, minute of silence for the victims of economic war, and other symbolic actions, theater, musical bands from Toulouse , Paris ... rally, street party,

Events (manifestations and public events) are planned on 10 November all over France in Nimes, Reims, Gap, Foix, Marseille, Nimes, Grenoble; Metz, Lille, Collmar etc see http://www.attac.org/nonewround/mob/index.html

Paris.
2:00 PM. Global manifestation supported by the following organizations: AEC, Agir Ici, AITEC, AMF, Les Amis de la Terre, Architecture & Développement, Association des Tunisiens de France (ATF), ATMF, ATTAC, CADAC, CADTM-France, Comité catholique contre la faim et le développement (CCFD), CCC-OMC, CEDETIM, CETIM - Centre Europe Tiers Monde, Club du 21 septembre, Collectif Droits des femmes, Collectif Total-Fina-Elf ne fera pas la loi, Confédération Paysanne, CRID, DECIL de Mantes-la-Jolie, Droits Devant !, Droit Solidarité, Ecologie Sociale, FFMJC (Fédération Française des Maisons des Jeunes et de la Culture), Forum de Delphes, FGTE-CFDT, Forum pour un autre monde, France Libertés Fondation Danielle Mitterrand, FSU, FTCR, Greenpeace, GRET, Institut Reclus, LDH, Marches Européennes, Les Pénélopes, Solagral, Survie, UNEF, Union syndicale G10 Solidaires, URI-CFDT Auvergne. Appel soutenu par: Les Alternatifs, Alternative libertaire, LCR, MDC, PCF, Les Verts, La Souris Verte

Jean-philippe Joseph : 33 4 66 30 52 81, jeanphi@altern.org
Agnès Bertrand : 33 4 66 77 07 04, ab.ire@wanadoo.fr
http://www.attac.org/nonewround/mob/index.html
http://www.attac.org/nonewround/mob/index.html

Germany
International Action Days *Our world is not for sale* actions will take place in more than 23 cities on 10 November in in Aachen, Berlin, Bielfeld, Cottbus, Dortmund, Frankfurt/Main, Frankfurt/Oder, Friedburg, Hamburg, Hannover, Kassel, Rostock, Leipzig, Marburg, München, Münster, Nürnberg, Oldenburg, Regensburg, Rostock, Schwerin, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden

Contact: schaffert@attac-netzwerk.de
http://www.attac-netzwerk.de/wto/index.html
www.wto-kritik.de
http://www.gipfelsturm.net/
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/qatar/aufrufffm.htm

Hong Kong
HKCTU - "Coalition on Anti-Globalization of Poverty": Making globalization work for people, November 9-11, 2001

Leafletting in the workplace on November 9, followed by open march and petition to the Central government Office. The main demands will be on job security & workers rights.
http://www.hkctu.org.hk/

India
New Delhi, November 6

Massive protest rally titled, "Indian People's Campaign against WTO" purpose and key message: The rally will give a call for a sustained mass movement to stop the government from surrendering India's economic sovereignty and destroying the Indian economy and people's livelihoods.

The above is expected to be the largest form of coordinated protest in the Indian context given that all the major people's movements, trade unions, left parties, socialist movements & parties, urban poor movements, farmers groups, groups representing interests of the unorganized sector, development groups, environment groups, would be participating in this rally. Even local leaders from different states are expected to participate in this rally. Focus - India Programme would also be participating in the rally.

Elsewhere:

Besides this Narmada Bachoa Andolan and National Alliance for Peoples' Movements have planned to organize events in various states where ever their local groups are active. For example in Mandleshwar, Madhya Pradesh, there is a plan to observe a 'anti-WTO week' (from November 03, to November 09, 2001) with the same motive as discussed above. Besides this, this particular rally would also be campaigning against globalization, liberalization and privatization and against the ways in which WTO aids such processes. One can get more information on this from:

Mr. S. P. Shukla, spshukla@id.eth.net
Alok Agarwal <nobigdam@vsnl.com>

Italy
National days of mobilization on 8,9,10 November everywhere in Italy (organized by Italian Social Forum (umbrella group of hundreds of Italian association)

5-10 November: week of local mobilization: actions in 100 town squares, organized by Rete Lilliput (Italian network) - In each local mobilization 50 to 100 activists will participate. information at segreteria@retelilliput.org.

Campagna Stop Millennium Round - Rete di Lilliput Contact: meregalli.roberto@enel.it, www.retelilliput.org

Japan
JTUC-RENGO - Tokyo street campaign

Venue: Shinjuku station in Tokyo Participants from RENGO*s affiliates will organize a street campaign in front of the Shinjuku station to protest against poverty, oppression of human rights, inequality, child labor, terrorism, discrimination etc which have been caused by the rapid pace of globalization and to enlighten society to work toward the establishment of society where people can live with a sense of security, safety and stability.
http://www.jtuc-rengo.org/

Lebanon
World Forum on the WTO, November 5 * 8

Join Labor Unions, Women's Groups, Environmentalists, Youth Activists, and Civil Society Organizations in Beirut for 3 days of meetings, workshops, teach-ins, and cultural events organized by: The Arab NGO Network for Development and The Lebanese Platform on the WTO
http://www.worldforumbeirut2001.org or annd@cyberia.net.lb

Netherlands
November 8: FNV * Conference on Globalization and Identity
Thursday, November 08, 2001 - Friday, November 09, 2001

The national Centres FNV and CNV, together with Churches, Islamic and Humanist organizations will take part in the Conference. They will meet to create a better understanding of each others views, opinions and activities concerning the theme of the Conference and to improve the quality of their policies this area.
http://www.fnv.nl/

Nigeria
November 9: NLC - Protests, rallies and industrial action related to WTO

Norway
On 9 November there will be a demonstration in Oslo, arranged by a coalition of more than 30 organizations, including trade unions, the environmental movement, development organizations, peasants' association, ATTAC Norway, political parties, youth organizations and others. Speakers will be the Vice President of the Norwegian Union of Municipal Employees, the President of ATTAC Norway and the previous President of Friends of the Earth, Norway, currently MP for the Socialist Left Party.

Slogans are
- OUR WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE!
- Stop the market forces - No new round in the WTO!
- The GATS Agreement: A threat against public services!
- Services for people - not for profit!
- Health and Education out of the WTO!
- WTO: Where protection of the environment is a barrier to trade!
- Human rights before patent rights - Cheap medicine for the developing countries!
- Agriculture out of the WTO!
- Globalize the struggle - Globalize the hope - Another world is possible!

There are also plans for a smaller more "visual" action from midday up to the evening march, with ATTAC at the university, small farmers and transport workers together. It is planned to have a caravan of tractors, trucks, carts and people that will go around town and stop at specific places to have performances or street theatre, give out leaflets and show effects related to the topic (like giving out day rations of rice to the people of trade buildings).

ATTAC Norway is initiating demonstrations in some other cities in Norway.
Reidun Heiene: reidun.heiene@veths.no
Asbjørn Wahl: asbjorn.wahl@nkf.no
Christoffer Klyve: attac@attac.no
Philippines

The anti-WTO campaign in the Philippines kicked off with a caravan organized by the peasants under Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas last Oct 18-19 and culminated in a demonstration at the presidential palace. The call was "WTO out of agriculture."

This week, Metro Manila is all plastered with KMP posters with the slogan "Junk WTO!"

On November 8 the International Migrants Conference organized by Migrante International and International League of Peoples' Struggle will culminate in a march rally to the US embassy on the issue of neo-liberal globalization and the WTO. The plaza Ferguson in front of the Embassy will be occupied the whole afternoon by representatives from peasants, workers, students and other sectors joining the migrants from various countries in a "street conference" on the WTO and against a new round at Doha.

This street conference will continue on vigil camp-out with cultural performances dubbed "Kultura ng Kanayunan" at Plaza Ferguson to welcome the bigger demonstration the next day.

November 9 - Anti-WTO Mobilization at the US Embassy. At 10 a.m. there will be a Human Chain in front of the US Embassy organized by KMP and a march and rally in the afternoon organized by Bayan or New Patriotic Alliance in conjunction with several multi-sectoral organizations.

Tony Tujan - IBON Foundation - atujan@info.com.ph

South Korea
2 Umbrella platforms 'Korea People's Action against WTO and BIT (KoPA)' and Korean People's Solidarity call for a rally on the 9th of november

1500 workers, students and activists march to the War Memorial Museum near the Seoul Station
http://picis.jinbo.net
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/qatar/n9korea.htm

Portugal
10 de noviembre, Acción de calle Contra la OMC

Además se presentará en una reuda de premsa una resolución contra la Conferencia de la OMC firmada pro un listado de organizaciones
Portugal@attac.org

Qatar - Doha
www.icftu.org

November 8: ICFTU Public Conference: Making Globalization work for People: Development and Workers' Rights at the 4th WTO.

Location: Qatar International Exhibition Centre
www.icftu.org

Russia
http://www.vkt.org.ru/

Conference on Globalization in Moscow

Russian anti-globalization campaigners have called for nationwide protests on November 9, the day a World Trade Organization conference opens in the Gulf state of Qatar, organizers said Tuesday in the sidelines of a World Economic Forum meeting in Moscow.

Demonstrations are to be staged in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and several other cities throughout European Russia and Siberia, a spokesman said.
http://www.vkt.org.ru/

Slovakia
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/qatar/n9slovak.htm
9novrevol@centrum.sk

Bratislava: Young workers and students have formed the "Revolukny Kolectiv 9 novembre"

"They concentrated on public education. 8th of november they organise the projection of videos (Seattle, Prague, Genua) and they distribute info on WTO, TNCs and global capitalism. This meeting will also serve to plan actions on the 9-13th of november.

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/qatar/n9slovak.htm
9novrevol@centrum.sk

Slovenia
www.ljudmila.org/globala
khalidraa@hotmail.com

On the 9th of November we are to hold a big manifestation, a big street party in downtown Ljubljana (the capital). It is going to be organized by an

umbrella coalition of almost 20 formal or unformal associations
www.ljudmila.org/globala
khalidraa@hotmail.com

Spain
galicia@attac.org

In Vigo (Galicia, Spain), ATTAC-Galicia with RCADE-Vigo are going to camp in a public square from 2nd to 10th of November with the aim of inform to every people about the OMC round and carry out some events in collaboration with other organizations. Moreover, we want to finish it with a demonstration on 10th November.

In Basque country on the 9/11:
Campanyaomc@hotmail.com
www.rosadefoc.org

During the day a debate organized by a broad coalition of organizations with as speakers Patxi Zabalo, Francois Hourtart, Isabel Bermejo (Ecologistas en Acción) Patentes y Propiedad Intelectual, Paul Nicholson (Via Campesina). A colorful evening street action with the title "Our world is not for sale: WTO Shrink or Sink"

Barcelona: During the week 6, 7 and 8 of november:
Talks on effects of WTO, environment, education and health

Saturday 10th of november:
In the morning decentralized actions with symbolic privatisations of public spaces (University,Metro, Park,...)

At 14.00 popular meal occupying the Canaletes street

At 16.00 Party in the streets against WTO and the war, the world is not for sale. Tour through the city with music, prjections and actions.

At 20.00 Final Party in the Ciutadella Park

Organisation: campaign against the WTO
galicia@attac.org Campanyaomc@hotmail.com
www.rosadefoc.org

Sweden
Lars-Olof Karlsson: larsolof.karlsson@telia.com

Gothenburg: 8/11: Discussion between representatives from the Labor union, Swedish branch of FoE and ATTAC on where we respectively stand in WTO-issues.

9/11: Manifestation in central Gothenburg - ATTAC and FoE.

10/11 Manifestation with street theater in central Gothenburg, ATTAC.

Malmö:* 10/11 Manifestation in central Malmö with book stand, slide-show, lightning of candles in remembrance of all the people who die of starvation, etc.

Uppsala:* 6/11 Lecture on TRIPS* 7/11 or 8/11 Discussion with local politicians. 10/11 Mobile theater: street theater on a lorry in different parts of the town. 10/11 night: party with theater, music, poetry, etc.

Umeå: Activities in collaboration with a range of other organization under the umbrella "Umeå network for Fair Trade". Articles in local papers. Participation in programs in a regional radio station. 9/11 Minor manifestation to make people aware that the WTO ministerial is begun. 10/11 Manifestation with street theater and other activities in central Umeå. Later in the afternoon seminars and debates.

Lars-Olof Karlsson: larsolof.karlsson@telia.com

Switzerland
Para más detalles póngase en contacto con: alice.carl@world-psi.org.

Ver además la página web PSI www.world-psi.org (haga click en campaign en la primera página) y suisse@attac.org - schweiz@attac.org

On 29 October there will be a press conference in Geneva of Swiss NGOs ( a coalition of 30 Organizations, among them Berne Declaration, Development and Environmental Organizations and the Trade Unions) criticize the Swiss mandate for Doha.

Geneva - 10 November, 14 h 00, Place Neuve * National Manifestation against the WTO and *free trade at Qatar* with the Swiss Trade Union of Public Services, Union of Swiss Producers, Comité de l'Appel de Bangkok, Berne Declaration, la Communauté de Travail des Oeuvres d'Entreaide, l'Action Populaire contre la Mondialisation, Solidarités.etc. Contact:

Bern, action against the WTO on the 8th of november

Lausanne, 9th of november 18.00 Conference on GATS and education
bern@attac.org
jeunesvd@attac.org

Para más detalles póngase en contacto con: alice.carl@world-psi.org.

Ver además la página web PSI www.world-psi.org (haga click en campaign en la primera página) y suisse@attac.org - schweiz@attac.org

bern@attac.org
jeunesvd@attac.org

Thailand - Bangkok
The contact person for the event is Pongtip Samranjit,
representative of the Globalization Working Group,
rrafa@loxinfo.co.th

November 9 event in Bangkok, Thailand:

Several grassroots groups including farmers, women workers, HIV positive people are planning to hold an all- day rally in Bangkok on November 9 under a general theme "WTO out of our life".

The general purpose will be to inform the public of their positions on the Agreement on Agriculture (WTO out of Agriculture) and TRIPs (No patent on life & rice and on drugs) which was delivered to the Prime Minister on October 22. A more specific objective is to raise awareness about US role and interests concerning intellectual property rights and agriculture trade.

The marchers will stop in front of the US Embassy to protest the US position on TRIPs and the recent biopiracy of Thai jasmine rice. The marchers will then congregate in a public park nearby where there will a panel discussion on who benefits from the WTO mixed with concerts and cultural events to promote local knowledge and way of life.

Rallies in three cities and conferences organised by unions in more than 100.
The contact person for the event is Pongtip Samranjit, representative of the Globalization Working Group, rrafa@loxinfo.co.th

Tunisia
http://www.ugtt.org.tn/
November 9: UGTT * Teach-ins and special issue of journal

Workplace teach-ins in over 100 of the largest workplaces in the country on globalization /special Day of Action issue of trade union journal "Echaab" released
http://www.ugtt.org.tn/

Turkey
Gaye Yilmaz,
Working Group Against MAI and Globalization * TURKEY
sykimdaksi@superonline.com

DISK-Confederation of Progressive workers' Trade Unions and KESK-Confederation of Public Servants' Unions is organizing a joint caravan initiative. Caravan will start on 4th November from Istanbul by buses with participation of 400 workers, unemployed and public servants and will finish on 9th November in Ankara (capital city). This event was planned on the line of global action day of the ICFTU. It's therefore their demands are the same with the demands of the ICFTU.

Gaye Yilmaz,
Working Group Against MAI and Globalization * TURKEY
sykimdaksi@superonline.com

UK
Call 020 7566 1696 or find out more at www.tradejusticemovement.org.uk
Trade Justice Parade in the Streets of London, 3 November 2001

The Trade Justice Parade sets out from the Imperial War Museum and ends in Trafalgar Square, led by a Trade Justice 'Time to Redress the Balance' float, followed by music, puppets, fat cats, a trade dragon, dodgy traders, a pirate ship, loaded dice and much much more!

In Trafalgar Square:

- One-minute silence for victims of injustice everywhere

- Speakers including Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, Sergio Cobo, of Fomento, a Mexican organisation for small farmers and indigenous rights, Ed Sweeney, UNIFI General Secretary and Chair of TUC International Development Group

- Unfurling of giant Trade Justice banner (with your help!)

Other Trade Justice events:
5pm Ecumenical service (Christian Aid and CAFOD)
St Paul's Church, Bedford St, Covent Garden

6pm Free Trade: Trick or Treat for the World's Poor? (WDM) Westminster Central Hall debate with Naomi Klein and other speakers

The Trade Justice Movement is a group of organizations working together for fundamental change of the unjust rules and institutions that govern international trade. We want world trade to work for the whole world.

9th of november Reclaim the Streets in London
• a free paper on the current war and its relation to WTO
• Posters on privatisations
• Inauguration of the Resources centre for action in London and divers actions and parties.
• a free paper with an anticapitalist perspective on WTO and the war against Afganistan

A campaign with posters that make the real agenda of the WTO public.
Call 020 7566 1696 or find out more at www.tradejusticemovement.org.uk
www.reclaimthestreets.net
rts@gn.apc.org

U.S.
Asia Russell 215-474-.9329 / cell:267-475-2645

Washington DC
November 1: From anthrax to AIDS drugs: AIDS activists to protest U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick for championing drug company patent abuse with "send-off" demonstration one week before Qatar WTO meeting

Poor countries' plan for WTO Agreement on health, patents and drug access sabotaged by Zoellick and Big Pharma

Who: ACT UP and Health GAP, with allies from health rights, fair trade, and anti-poverty organizations.

When & Where: Demonstration at USTR, 600 17th St NW Washington DC at 4:30 PM. Location of step-off point for march to USTR office at 4:15 PM to be announced.

What: One week before the start of the WTO meeting in Qatar, hundreds of protesters will demonstrate at U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's office, demanding an end to Zoellick's obstruction of a critical poor country WTO declaration about patents, public heath, and access to affordable drugs prepared for the WTO meeting.

Washington DC
November 8: AFL-CIO, CWA, Jobs with Justice - Vigil at the office of the United States Trade Representative. The AFL-CIO, in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America, Jobs with Justice, and other unions and civil society partners, will co-sponsor a peaceful vigil at the office of the United States Trade Representative in the late afternoon of Thursday, November 8th.

Boston
Press conference on Nov. 9 to highlight range of issues of concern to WTO protestors.
http://www.aflcio.org/home.htm or Carrie Biggs Adams (CWA) - Cbiggs-adams@cwa-union.org

Chicago
WTO Protest Nov. 9 at 3:30 PM in front of Boeing Corporation's world headquarters. "Globalize Justice, Not War!" Will feature public funeral for victims of military and corporate power and a celebration of resistance.

Harrisburg
Join us in Harrisburg outside the Federal Building, 228 Walnut St. at noon on Friday, November 9. This is the first day of the WTO meetings in Qatar, and the first of a series of Stop the WTO actions in PA.
Mike Prokosch: 617-423-2148x24 /mprokosch@ufenet.org

Madison
November 10th: Rally at WMC and march down to library mall (11:00). Teach-in sponsored by Mad at the Bank in the afternoon.
November 14th: Panel: Future of the Global Justice Movement

New York City
JOIN US ON NOVEMBER 9TH TO PARADE AND PROTEST

AS WE TAKE A TOUR OF THE OFFICES OF VARIOUS GLOBAL OFFENDERS AND CALL FOR A WORLD BASED ON ECONOMIC JUSTICE AND PEACE.
Also, join us Nov 10 for an evening of ART AND RESISTANCE
(for info email:nov10action@yahoo.com)

USA STRATEGY SUMMIT, November 8,9,10.
stopWTO-HBG@pcan.org

Philadelphia
The World Trade Organization is meeting in Doha, Qatar November 9-13. They haven't changed their anti-democracy tune, as evidenced by the location of their meetings.

We need to send the WTO a strong message of opposition to their global corporatism. Join us in Philadelphia at a rally on Saturday, November 10 at 12:30. We will gather in front of the Liberty Bell on Market St., between 5th and 6th Sts.

Cynthia White cewhite_12@yahoo.com

Sacramento
Activists for Democratic Trade is planning on doing a protest on Nov. 10 from noon to 2:00 on the sidewalk next to Arden Blvd. At Arden Faire Mall in Sacramento. We will be emphasizing the connection between the WTO and sweatshop proliferation. If the meeting of the WTO is cancelled we will probably do a protest against Free Trade and sweatshops in general. The protest will be in conjunction with Sacramentans for International Labor Rights.

1.800.692.3269 or 212.247.1911 or go to www.nowto.org.

San Francisco
FESTIVAL OF ALTERNATIVES, MARCH TO PG&E
Friday November 9th, 12 noon, Justin Herman Plaza, SF Foot of Market St.

PEACEFUL MARCH FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE, NOT ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
Saturday November 10th, 12 noon
Richmond BART
2 PM: Festival at Chevron Refinery, Point Richmond

PG&E and Chevron epitomize the corporations that benefit from WTO "free trade" policies, devastating local communities and environments across the globe from San Francisco, to Richmond, to Nigeria and everywhere in between.

stopWTO-HBG@pcan.org

Asia Russell 215-474-.9329 / cell:267-475-2645
http://www.aflcio.org/home.htm or Carrie Biggs Adams (CWA) - Cbiggs-adams@cwa-union.org
Mike Prokosch: 617-423-2148x24 /mprokosch@ufenet.org
stopWTO-HBG@pcan.org
1.800.692.3269 or 212.247.1911 or go to www.nowto.org.
stopWTOPhilly@pcan.org
Heidi McLean mcleanheidi@aol.com (916) 456-9435
Antonia Juhasz, ajuhasz@ifg.org

This chart will be continuously updated on www.tradewatch.org


-------

Subject: CONFERENCE DU - PRAGUE - INVITATION - INFORMATION - DEADLINE
November 14, 2001

From: "Res publica" <du@publica.cz>
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 12:42:34 +0100

Res publica, association for information Prague, Czech Republic
Facts on Depleted Uranium On 24th and 25th November 2001

We are sending you last information and official invitation to the conference dedicated to the problems of Depleted Uranium.

A) WHERE IT WILL TAKE PLACE

Conference Facts on depleted Uranium is to take place in the rooms of Technicians Club (Klub techniku), Novotného lávka 5, Prague 1, several meters from the Charles bridge

B) CONFERENCE TIMES SCHEDULE

Conference is to proceed according to the following time schedule

Saturday 10.00 am presentation, information of accommodation, from 10.30 am a brief seeing of the Old City will be arranged in case of your interest 12.00 lunches

13.00 pm conference opening 13.15 - 18.00 pm contributions of participants and following discussions 16.15 coffee break 18.00 closing the first day, 18.30 pm dinner, r, possibility of social meeting, sightseeing Prague, in case of cultural program interest

Sunday

10.00 am opening of the second day of the conference, continuation of participants presentations and discussion

14.30 pm topics, appreciations and conclusions of the conference 15.30 lunch

C) TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION

This conference organizer will provide free of charget accommodation to participants from 24th to 25th November, in extraordinary cases from time reasons of the travel it is possible to book the accommodation from 23rd November. Participants of the Conference are expected to cover their own travel expenses. We beg you to send the application form and information on your arrival and departure, so that we would be able to organize you receival in Prague and accommodation.

D) PARTICIPATION

In this moment there are about 30 participants registered from abroad and we take into account the participation of about 10 persons from the Czech Republic. We anticipate still more registrations.

E) CONTRIBUTIONS

The conference is being conducted in English language. The scope of the contribution will take about 20 minutes. We would appreciate if the contribution would be sent to us prior the conference opening or handed over to us at the presentation before the conference opening. We would like to hand over all contributions still in this form to participants at this conference.

F) SUMMARY CONFERENCE VOLUME

Considering the facts that some of the participants have already notified their discussion contributions, eventually their themes or even sent already theses of contributions, we are already now firmly decided that the conference results are to be published in the form of a conference summary volume. Each of the attendants will receive for their needs gratis ten copies. As we have given in the first information, the conference results will be handed over also to the president Vaclav Havel.

G) EMERGENCY CALL

In case of emergency call no. +420+2+83850402 or +420+0723570859 (GSM) - Mr. Stanislav Patejdl.

Reply slip

I would like to participate in the Conference Facts on Depleted Uranium, Prague, Czech Republic, November 24.-25. 2001

Name .......................... Surname ..........................
Date of birth Sex (man, woman)
Address (City, State) ..........................
E-mail..............
Web site..............
Arrival ..........................
Departure ..........................
I would like to submit a paper on................................................

Deadline for registration: November 14, 2001

Please complete this slip and return it to the Res publica, association for information, Prague, Czech Republic: du@publica.cz, post@publica.cz

Invitation

Res publica, association for information and partners are organising an international conference on the theme

FACTS ON DEPLETED URANIUM

24th and 25th November 2001

Prague - Czech Republic Novotného lávka 5, Praha 1 Klub technikù (Technicians Club)

Saturday 24th November

10.00 am presentation, accommodation, touring the Old City of Prague, 12.00 lunches 13.00 pm conference opening - Prof Jiri Matousek from the Institute of Environmental Chemistry and Technology Faculty of Chemistry, Brno University of Technology from the Czech Republic, expert moderator at this Conference 13.15 - 18.00 pm coming up of conference participants in the discussion to individual appearances 18.30 pm dinner, afterwards the possibility of seeing the city, a visit to cultural program

Sunday 25th November

10.00 am opening of the second day of the conference, appearances of participants and continuations of the discussion 14.30 pm topics, appreciations and conclusions of the conference 15.30 lunch

By means of this conference we endeavour to contribute to an expert appreciation of the problem of the depleted uranium deployment. This necessity was pointed out by the Czech president V. Havel in his answer to letter of vice-chairman of the Res publica PhDr Jiri Horak, who directed the attention to the problematic nature in using arms with DU. Consequently all contributions presented at this conference will be provided to Mr. Vaclav Havel.

We believe that also you by your participation and contribution delivered at this conference will help to meet its purpose, to judge expertly the not negligible problem of depleted uranium deployment.

We are looking forward to meet you.

Stanislav Kliment Association chairman Jiri Horak, Ph. D. Association vice-chairman



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