------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Greens sue Britain over nuclear fuel plant
Depleted uranium: devastation at home and abroad
'India Has the Resolve ... to Resist This Terrorism'
Terrorism in India
Briefing Book: Secret History of the ABM Treaty
IBM to Build Second Blue Gene Supercomputer
LAWMAKERS PROD ENERGY DEPARTMENT ON ROCKY FLATS PLUTONIUM SHIPMENT
INEEL DECLARED A NATIONAL USER FACILITY
Tunnel fire cited as cause for nuke waste changes
Groups Warn of Calamity if A-Plants Are Attacked
Coalition Demands Shutdown of Indian Point Reactors
$1.67 Billion For Pentagon Counterterrorism Bid
White House, Hollywood elite to meet
Nuclear waste expert to be nominee to lead DOE branch

MILITARY
Experts See F.B.I. Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry
Past Lessons Guide Transit Planning for Attack
Splits open in UK-US alliance
Northrop Seals Deal to Buy Newport News
German government faces collapse over war row
North Korean missile
N. Korea Said Trying to Sell Missiles
A Long Road West for Russia
50 US cluster bombs found in Pak
Pakistan Tries to Split Army From Mullahs
Shackles Off, Russia's Muslims Are Still Chafing
Putin Rules Out Possibility of Sending Russian Troops to Afghanistan
Bush Seeks New Volunteer Force for Civil Defense
Commando audits
U.S. Commander, Saying Rebels Need Help, Hints More Troops
Shadowy U.S. Military Presence in an Afghan Town
A Homeland Pep Talk

ENERGY AND OTHER
GREENPEACE SAYS SOLAR ENERGY MEANS INDEPENDENCE
Land-Based Ecosystems Won't Head Off Global Warming
Carbon Dioxide Emissions Up 3.1 Percent in 2000
Cold War Research Baby Teeth Found
The Humanitarian Front

POLICE / PRISONERS
Ashcroft Plan Would Recast Justice Dept. in a War Mode
Lawmakers Debate Sending in the Troops -- at Home
As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms

ACTIVISTS
Mexico frees two jailed environmentalists
Nader's Party Is in the Green
Homes not Bombs Shuts Down Space Warfare Facility
Does Anybody In This Country Get It?
curse the WTO


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

Greens sue Britain over nuclear fuel plant

by Matthew Jones,
Reuters:
9/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13203

LONDON - Two environmental groups began a legal challenge in London's High Court yesterday against Britain's decision to give the go-ahead for a controversial plant to begin manufacturing nuclear fuel.

A six-metre (20 ft) high model of a nuclear missile accompanied Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as their lawyers argued that the government had acted unlawfully in October when it decided to allow state-owned British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) to launch the Sellafield MOX Plant in Cumbria, northwest England.

"The MOX plant is not only an environmental threat and a potential terrorist target, but simply does not make business sense," Greenpeace executive director Stephen Tiddle told reporters outside the court.

The green lawyers said the government had not showed sufficient economic justification for the plant, as required by tEU law, because its 470 million pound ($690 million) cost was not taken into account when assessing its commercial viability.

It was also argued there was insufficient evidence there would be enough customers for the fuel - a mixture of highly-toxic plutonium and uranium oxides.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth say launching the plant would lead to more plutonium production at Sellafield.

Some nuclear experts believe it would be relatively easy to extract plutonium, which could be used in a nuclear device, from MOX fuel rods.

BNFL said it was awaiting the outcome of the judicial review before the plant.

BENEFITS V COSTS

A government-commissioned study, conducted by consulting firm Arthur D. Little and published in July, said the plant would deliver net financial benefits of 216 million pounds.

The report also said the cost of not opening the plant could run into hundreds of millions of pounds largely due to potential loss of future contracts for THORP, BNFL's nuclear reprocessing plant.

The Sellafield MOX Plant has lain idle since 1996 because regulatory approval to start-up was repeatedly withheld over fears it would not make any money.

BNFL says the MOX plant can be profitable and that it already boasts a healthy order book from overseas customers. The group also dismisses suggestions it would be easy to extract plutonium from MOX to make a nuclear device.

More legal battles face BNFL, which had its partial privatisation shelved in 2000 after a scandal erupted when it was discovered staff had falsified data on pilot batches of MOX fuel sent to customers.

On Friday, the Irish government will ask the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, to order an immediate suspension of the MOX's plant's authorisation and to stop the international movement of radioactive material associated with the plant in and around the Irish Sea.


-------- depleted uranium

Depleted uranium: devastation at home and abroad

Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001 01:17:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Roger Herried <rogerh@energy-net.org>

Radiation Bulletin (part II)

"The little fox is still. The dogs of war have made their kill." These are the words of famous Black poet and writer Langston Hughes, commenting on war. He couldn't have said it better.

Few communities have felt the impact of war more than Hunters Point. The impact of war is not felt just overseas, in a distant country. It is right here in our own backyards: death and illness from radiation exposure, chemical exposure, and the economic devastation that ensues when the military moves on and leaves the mess behind.

The bombing of Afghanistan by U.S. government forces has direct ties to Hunters Point. It was at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard that a radioactive material called depleted uranium (DU), currently being used in the bombing of Afghanistan, was first tested by the Navy.

The United States now has hundreds of thousands of tons of depleted uranium piled in heaps outdoors at DOE facilities. It is 99.5 percent of what is left when the most fissionable isotope (one of three) is extracted from naturally occurring uranium. The extracted uranium is used in nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel for nuclear reactors. The 99.5 percent that is discarded cannot be put back into the mines it came out of because, after crushing and processing, the volume is greater than before it was removed from the mines. "Depleted uranium" does not mean it is not radioactive - it is very radioactive and very dangerous to all living things.

The Department of Defense got the bright idea of using depleted uranium in weapons because: it is very dense, which gives it greater penetrating power to destroy tanks, etc.; it is "pyrophoric," which means that upon impact, it explodes into fire and smoke, creating submicroscopic radioactive particles which travel great distances and can remain suspended until it is "rained out" of the atmosphere; it is cheap, and passes the responsibility for disposal from DOE on to civilians (that means us) and the environment.

Since depleted uranium is so radioactive, it will continue acting internally on living things long after the battlefield has been cleared - with delayed effects, which impact soldiers and civilians for the rest of their lives. The half life of uranium is 4.5 billion years - in ten half-lives radioactivity becomes an insignificant amount. In 45 billion years it will no longer be a danger. In other words, it's "fun" for the DOD, it's "cheap" for the arms manufacturers (who reap good profits by making it), and "good riddance" says DOE (with 480,000 tons on hand).

The Navy first tested depleted uranium munitions in 1977 at Hunters Point. From the USS Bigelow, the Phalanx Weapons System fired 3,000 rounds of depleted uranium penetrators per minute. The tests exceeded expectations and production started in 1978 to fill orders for 23 U.S. Navy and 14 foreign military systems.

The Army A-10 Thunderbolt II, nicknamed "the Warthog," fired most of the depleted uranium munitions in the Gulf War, between 300 to 800 tons. The Abrams Tank, the Marines M-60, the U.S. F-16 and U.S. Apache helicopters have been fitted to fire DU munitions. Many cruise missiles contain DU balance weights.

The use of DU is not being covered up, but the health hazards have been. Gulf War Syndrome not only killed, maimed, and made soldiers sick, they brought it home. In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans' families in Mississippi, 67 percent of their children were born without eyes, ears or a brain, had fused fingers, blood infections, respiratory problems or thyroid and other organ malformations.

The U.S. has manufactured and tested depleted uranium in 39 states. The cleanup bill - just for the depleted uranium - at the Jefferson Proving Ground in Indiana would be $7.8 billion. The DU has not been cleaned up, but DOD has closed the area. Communities living near these test ranges will continue to be exposed and suffer health problems.

For 40 years, the Sierra Army Depot in Northern California has burned millions of tons of old munitions - including 20 times more DU than was used in the entire Gulf War. The radioactive smoke and ash, full of heavy metals, phosgene gas and dioxins, contaminated local communities as well as that of many Native Americans living downwind - especially the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation.

The health problems in those communities have been horrendous. The Sierra Army depot burned old munitions in open pits - and was the single largest contributor to air pollution in California - 17-23 percent. Norman Harry, former Pyramid Lake Tribal Chairman, and Nevada Senator Harry Reid, worked with others to shut it down. A month ago, Lassen County refused to renew the burn permit for the Sierra Army Depot - finally.

The United States has used DU weaponry in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Serbia, Vieques Island, and Torishima Island near Okinawa, Japan; and sold DU to at least 23 countries at great profits. As mentioned earlier, DU is part of the arsenal the U.S. and British military forces are using against Afghanistan.

The depleted uranium that has contaminated the Gulf States since the Gulf War can be detected on gamma meters in Greece and Bulgaria on windy days. It's the weapon that "keeps giving"... and keeps killing.

DU is also used as ballast in commercial and military planes. On Sept. 11, a hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. Dr. Janette Sherman, research associate with the Radiation and Public Health Project, had spoken a few days earlier at a Sept. 6 press conference in Hunters Point. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Sherman notified the Nuclear Information and Resource Service that she detected elevated levels of radiation in her home, located seven miles from the Pentagon. Dr. Sherman still had a gamma meter she had borrowed for her visit to Hunter's Point. The EPA, the FBI, and other federal agencies, including HMRU (Hazardous Materials Response Units), USAR teams, the local fire department and the Virginia HAZMAT were notified, and an investigation began at the Pentagon.

A pile of rubble from the crash was found to be radioactive, but EPA official Bill Bellinger of the agency's Region III Environmental Radiation Monitoring Office was unconcerned when contacted by Diane D'Arrigo from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. Bellinger indicated that it was probably depleted uranium and mentioned that americium 241could also be scattered around the crash site. He was convinced that depleted uranium is not radiologically toxic, but commented that it is more of a hazard when aerosolized.

Firefighters, Pentagon personnel, and communities nearby did breathe the smoke and ash from the fire. The agencies that are supposed to be protecting us are not. There was no follow-up investigation.

And what about the World Trade Center in New York? Radiation issues almost never get coverage from mainstream media. It is a taboo subject, a silent killer, as Hunter's Point residents know too well.

The true patriots in this country are two women: Barbara Lee for saying "no" to needless further devastation of an already war-torn country, and Dona Spring, who brought the issue to the table in the Berkeley City Council. Berkeley is the only city in the United States to pass a resolution calling for an end to the bombing of Afghanistan.

Whether or not we agree with the military action in Afghanistan, our soldiers have fought for hundreds of years to give us the right to say yes ... or no. War is how our "leaders" bleed us, too. It is economically, radiologically and chemically devastating at home as well as abroad.

Leuren Moret, an environmental geologist and independent scientist, is president of Scientists for Indigenous People. Moret wrote the foreword to Akira Tashiro's new book, "Discounted Casualties, The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium." Tashiro, a Japanese journalist from Hiroshima, includes in this work over 40 interviews and color photos depicting the devastation caused by uranium in the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Persian Gulf, Kosovo, and Japan. The interviews can be read in English online, or you can request to receive copies via email by visiting www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/uran/index_e.html. Leuren Moret can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com.

Useful links: For an article about how DU is currently being used to bomb Afghanistan, visit www.zolatimes.com/V5.44/afghan_uranium.html.

For information about the testing of DU in Hunters Point Shipyard via the USS Bigelow and the Phalanx Weapons System, visit www.spar.navy.mil/ships/ddg995/wep-phal.html.

To read an article about the use of DU as ballast in commercial as well as military planes, www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/dhap997.html.

The Radiation and Public Health Project website is located at www.radiation.org.

Visit the Nuclear Information and Resource Service at www.nirs.org.

-------- india / pakistan

'India Has the Resolve ... to Resist This Terrorism'
Interview with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee

Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, November 9, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64626-2001Nov8?language=printer

Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee responded to written questions submitted to him by Washington Post editors.

Q: What concerns do you have about the American-led war against terrorism? Has the U.S. campaign been defined too narrowly, not taking fully into account India's concerns about terrorism?

Vajpayee: The ongoing campaign in Afghanistan is against the perpetrators of the brutal terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, the al-Qaeda network and its supporters and hosts in Afghanistan, the Taliban. They are a major, but not the only, source of terrorism in the world. I see this -- and President Bush has also said this -- as the beginning of the war against the global terror network. The war against terrorism will have to be fought on a global scale, against terrorist groups everywhere. Safe haven offered by some countries with shelter, resources, training camps and arms have helped terrorist groups to build up a worldwide web of terror networks, with its hub in our western neighborhood. There is a strong, almost seamless, link between the terrorist groups operating against India and the United States. Therefore, if the aims of the war are to be achieved in full, the entire network will have to be destroyed.

Q: What specific steps have you seen the United States take since Sept. 11 to address India's concerns on terrorism? Do you consider them adequate? What further steps should the U.S. take soon?

Vajpayee: We appreciated the U.S.A.'s categorical confirmation, after the brutal terrorist attacks on Oct. 1 on the Jammu and Kashmir State Assembly [parliament], that terrorism everywhere would be condemned equally forcefully. I welcome the U.S. decision to proscribe the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and Lashkar-e-Toiba. This would have a salutary effect on other terrorist organizations targetting India.

We also hope that, in the context of our collective campaign against terrorism, the United States would succeed in persuading Pakistan to stop sponsoring terrorism against India.

Q: Last month, American aircraft struck a dormitory in Kabul used by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Was this attack based on information from India or conducted at India's request? Have there been other attacks on Afghanistan-based militants that India has sought from the United States?

Vajpayee: The killing in Kabul, of terrorists belonging to the Pakistani-based Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), comes as no surprise to us. We have known for a long time that groups such as the HuM which have been created by Pakistan's intelligence agencies for terrorism in India, also have close links with the Taliban. Pakistan has been using the Taliban-controlled territories of Afghanistan for training and other support to terrorism, directed against India. The recent killing is merely one additional piece of evidence that highlights the close nexus between Pakistan, Pakistan-based terrorist groups and the Taliban.

Q: What concerns do you have about the Bush administration's policy pronouncements on Kashmir? Do you worry that the Bush administration shares Pakistan's view that the Kashmir issue is central to the Indo-Pakistani relationship and that the popular sentiments of Kashmiris must be taken more into account in addressing the issues?

Vajpayee: All U.S. administrations, past and present, have been aware of India's position on Jammu and Kashmir. They have also been aware of the fact that the state has had elections regularly to elect the people's representatives. The people of the State have suffered over the years from terrorist attacks which have claimed thousands of innocent lives. Thus, if there is a central issue in the India-Pakistan relationship, concerning Jammu and Kashmir, it is the cross-border terrorism, which we have had to counter.

Q: What role would you like to see the United States play in seeking a solution to the issue of Kashmir? What role would you like to see the United States play in settling the border dispute between India and Pakistan?

Vajpayee: The Shimla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration are bilateral agreements that have been freely entered into by India and Pakistan. These are the cornerstones of our bilateral relations, and commit both countries to address all outstanding issues peacefully, through direct bilateral dialogue. There can be no place whatsoever for any third party involvement, in any aspect of our bilateral relations. When two people can speak the same language, why should either side suddenly seek an interpreter?

Q: Bush administration officials said they have told both India and Pakistan to avoid escalating tension over Kashmir. What have you been told in this regard and what steps have you taken in response?

Vajpayee: The events of the recent years speak for themselves. We have always exercised restraint in the most difficult situations, just as we have taken every initiative for dialogue with Pakistan. When Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control in Kargil in 1999, we did not respond through attacks on their territory. When calls for jihad against India are made from Pakistan, we do not respond with similar offensive rhetoric. We have already conveyed to the United States that we have no intention of complicating the current agenda and the operations in Afghanistan. We do, however, have a legitimate right to take whatever action we can in our country to thwart and respond to terrorism. This is what I had written to President Bush. Restraint, like dialogue, has to be a two-way process.

Q: India's apparent decision to open fire on Pakistani military positions across the line of control on the eve of Secretary Powell's visit to New Delhi was seen in Washington as an attempt by India to send a message to the U.S.? Was a message intended in this event, and if so, what was it?

Vajpayee: There is sufficient mutual confidence, openness and candour in India-U.S. relations today. There is no need for either of us to use any means other than speech or written texts to send messages to each other! A large group of terrorists were making a bid to cross our border from the Pakistani side. We took action to stop them. We have had to resort to this step from time to time to prevent large scale infiltration into India by terrorists from Pakistan.

Q: What concerns do you have that [Pakistan] President Musharraf is allowing greater latitude for the activities of anti-Indian militants to compensate for this participation in the anti-Taliban effort?

Vajpayee: Pakistan has not ended its sponsorship of cross-border terrorism in India. On Oct. 1, terrorists attacked the State Assembly in Srinagar. The leaders of a Pakistan-based terrorist group openly claimed responsibility for these attacks. This does seem to beat out what you have said. Pakistan must realize that it cannot support the campaign against international terrorism on one hand while sponsoring terrorist groups in India on the other.

India has the resolve, strength and stamina to resist this terrorism.

Q: Within a broad-based future government to replace the Taliban regime, how large a role must the Northern Alliance have? Many American analysts in Washington assert that the Northern Alliance alone does not have enough support in the south to win allegiance from Pashtuns and thus guarantee a stable long-term government. Do you agree?

Vajpayee: For peace and stability to be restored in Afghanistan, it is essential that a broad-based, representative multi-ethnic government is established, free from outside interference. The last decade of civil strife in Afghanistan was mainly on account of military foisting the Taliban regime on the people of Afghanistan.

As an important ethnic group, Pashtuns will naturally have to find adequate representation in any future multi-ethnic government in Afghanistan. However, the nature and structure of this future government will have to be decided by the Afghan people themselves. India have always had close historical ties with the Pashtuns of Afghanistan. Several Pushtun families, who escaped the conflict in Afganistan, have in fact sought refuge in India for the past 20 years.

Q: Would you accept a dominant role for Pashtun elements in the future Afghan government and could Pashtun commanders and tribal leaders who have supported the Taliban play a prominent role in this future government?

Vajpayee: There is a very strong consensus amongst the Afghan people for the establishment of a broad-based, multi-ethnic government, with adequate representation for all ethnic groups. As I have stated before, the exact nature and structure of this government will have to be determined by the Afghan people themselves. The Afghans are far too proud a people, to accept a government imposed from outside.

It would be a grave mistake to include any element of the Taliban in a future Afghanistan government. The international community cannot afford to live with an Afghanistan that continues to export terrorism and violent ideologies to the rest of the world.

Q: In your opinion, what are the main themes of Indian popular reaction to the war in Afghanistan? Are you concerned that opposition to the war domestically may constrain your own ability to act in alliance with the U.S. as the crisis unfolds?

Vajpayee: The Indian people have been victims of international terrorism for over two decades. We all understand that only strong measures are needed to root out the scourge of terrorism. The Indian people are acutely aware that the campaign in Afghanistan can at best be only one phase in a much longer and more difficult campaign that has to be joined if terrorism is to be defeated. Terrorism could not have acquired its current proportions without the active aid and abetment by countries who sponsor terrorism as instruments of foreign policy.

Q: Where is the BJP in its evolution? What steps must it take to become a clear majority party at the national level in India? Can that status be achieved, and how long will it take?

Vajpayee: The BJP is a political party in India with a distinct agenda. The popular appeal of this agenda can be gauged from the fact that the party won the largest number of seats in Parliament in the last two general elections in our country. We have joined together with other parties to form a coalition government. In doing so, each of the coalition partners has had to give up some part of its agenda. Such compromises are expected in a democracy.

I think the BJP has a dynamic agenda and will, in course of time, succeed in gaining an absolute majority of seats in our Parliament.

Q: President Musharraf has himself acknowledged that the American-led military actions in Afghanistan are generally unpopular with the Pakistani people but has continued to provide a range of support for the effort. How concerned are you about the stability of Musharraf's government?

Vajpayee: As a neighbor of Pakistan, we have always been concerned at the direction in which Pakistan's society has been moving. This is the direct consequence of the shortsighted policies pursued by Pakistan's military-dominated establishment ever since its creation in 1947. Pakistan must realize that the sponsorship of groups practicing terrorism and propagating extremist ideologies, eventually poses a threat to Pakistan's own long-term stability.

Q: How confident are you about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons? What steps would you encourage either Pakistan or the United States to take to secure these weapons? What preparations should be taken for the eventuality that the weapons could fall into militant hands?

Vajpayee: The question about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons should be addressed to the Pakistan government. It is not for us to answer for them. India has for years voiced serious concern about their nuclear weapon programme, its clandestine ways, their aims and ambitions, and the frightening identification of extremists and jihadis with those nuclear weapons. It is to be hoped that the official Pakistani claims about the safety and security of their nuclear weapons would be backed by actions on the ground and safeguards against unauthorised access.

Q: How would you describe for Americans India's nuclear weapons doctrine? How does that doctrine apply to this crisis? Does the possibility of an unstable Pakistani government raise new questions or concerns for India's nuclear policies?

Vajpayee: India's nuclear doctrine is purely defensive. Our minimum credible deterrent is based on no-first-use of nuclear weapons. We do not wish to get into any arms race and are fully committed to a unilateral moratorium on nuclear test explosions. Instability in Pakistan leading to unauthorized access to their weapons would certainly be a matter of grave concern. It is for this reason that India had suggested in Lahore in 1999 a set of nuclear C8Ms to begin with. We re-emphasized this at the Agra summit in July this year. However, we have not received any indication of Pakistan's willingness to respond.

----

Terrorism in India

November 9, 2001
Washington Post
Embassy Row,
James Morrison
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011109-39834448.htm

U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill is trying to reassure India that the Bush administration considers terrorism against Indian civilians as serious as terrorism against Americans.

Mr. Blackwill also wants India to understand that U.S. cooperation with India's archrival Pakistan in the war in Afghanistan will have no negative impact on the growing U.S. relationship between Washington and New Delhi.

The new U.S. ambassador explained American interests in the subcontinent in an interview in this week's edition of the Indian-American newspaper India Abroad. His interview helped set the tone for today's meeting between President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Washington.

Mr. Blackwill said the war against Osama bin Laden's Afghan-based al Qaeda terrorist network is not confined to Afghanistan.

"The president has said the war on terrorism has to deal with terrorism against India," he said.

India yesterday suffered another terrorist attack when 10 persons, including a year-old child, were killed in explosions and shootouts in the disputed Kashmir region, where India accused Pakistan of sponsoring militant separatists.

"Dealing with terrorism in India must be part of the global war against terrorism," Mr. Blackwill said.

He also expressed understanding for India's concern about U.S. cooperation with Pakistan.

"We have assured the government of India frequently that we will take no steps with Pakistan that endanger India," he said.

Mr. Blackwill added that the United States can have good relations with both countries.

"We do not believe this is a zero-sum game," he said.

The ambassador also reiterated U.S. policy toward Kashmir, saying India and Pakistan must resolve the issue themselves.

"We do not see a role for an intermediary evolution in American policy toward Kashmir. We are not going to get diplomatically involved in Kashmir," he said.

Mr. Blackwill said Mr. Bush and Mr. Vajpayee, in their first face-to-face meeting, also will discuss India's nuclear-weapons program. The United States recently lifted sanctions imposed on India and Pakistan after each country conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

"We continue to be interested in the future of India's nuclear-weapons arsenal just as India is interested in the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal," he said.

-------- treaties

Briefing Book: Secret History of the ABM Treaty

National Security Archive Update,
9 November 2001
From: Michael Evans <mevans@GWU.EDU>

Electronic Briefing Book No. 60:
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ABM TREATY, 1969-1972

Declassified Documents Show How the U.S. and USSR Reached Agreement on the Controversial Treaty that Is At the Center of Next Week's Bush-Putin Summit

http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB60/

Washington, D.C., 8 November 2001 - The most difficult topic to be discussed by Presidents Bush and Putin at the Crawford, Texas, summit next week, now that Russia is an ally in anti-terrorism operations, will be the Bush administration's intention to withdraw from, abrogate or rewrite (depending on what is negotiable) the ABM Treaty of 1972. Newly declassified documents posted on the Web today by George Washington University's National Security Archive reveal the previously secret inside story of the ABM negotiations, explaining why the U.S. and the USSR agreed that the Treaty was in their best interest, and how it specifically restricts what the Bush administration can do on missile defense. The documents, edited by Archive senior analyst William Burr, are entitled "The Secret History of the ABM Treaty, 1969-1972" and are available at http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB60/

Other U.S. administrations have chafed at the ABM Treaty but the Bush White House is the first to consider withdrawal. As national security adviser Condoleeza Rice has explained, the "treaty is so restrictive that anything you do that isn't ground-based that you use in an ABM mode, so to speak, is a violation of the treaty" (Los Angeles Times, 7/27/2001). New documents from the Nixon administration, including a never-before published record of one of national security adviser Henry Kissinger's back-channel telephone conversations with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, show how the ABM Treaty took the form and content it has, and why its architects found it useful to negotiate such a restrictive agreement. The documents reveal that:

-Nixon and Kissinger initially opposed strict limits on ABMs in order to strengthen U.S. retaliatory capability against a Soviet nuclear attack;

- The Soviets shocked Nixon and Kissinger by accepting a U.S. proposal to limit ABMs to defense of national capitals [national command authority/NCA], thereby undermining U.S. ABM plans presented to Congress;

- Kissinger would later profess to be puzzled by the initial U.S. offer: "I can't understand how it happened that we accepted NCA ... I often make mistakes but usually I know why afterward";

-One of thorniest negotiating issues was a U.S. initiative for a ban on space-based and advanced laser-type ABM systems, which the Soviet military was reluctant to accept; later the Reagan administration tried to reinterpret treaty language on "future" weapons systems in order to allow SDI development

- Nixon's negotiators accepted limitations on future U.S. freedom of action as a necessary trade-off to prevent Soviet development of Ms and reduce incentives for both sides to ratchet up nuclear arsenals

According to Ambassador Raymond L. Garthoff, a member of the original SALT negotiating team and an historian of detente associated with the Brookings Institution, "these well-chosen documents give valuable insight into the SALT negotiating process, not only the Kissinger back channel to the Soviet leadership but also the front channel that produced the ABM treaty."

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals support its budget.

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

-------- california

IBM to Build Second Blue Gene Supercomputer

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-ibm-supercomputer.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW YORK - IBM Corp.said on Friday it will build a supercomputer that is smaller and 15 times speedier than the current fastest computer, enabling users to solve complex questions more quickly and opening the door for its commercial use.

The new computer is expected to be used for everything from weather modeling to studying genomics data and running commercial database applications, IBM said.

It is the second computer planned as part of an expanding five-year, $100 million project called Blue Gene which IBM began in 1999 with the intention of studying proteins. ``Our initial exploration made us realize we can expand our Blue Gene project to deliver more commercially viable architectures for a broad customer set and still accomplish our original goal of protein science simulations,'' Mark Dean, vice president of systems for IBM Research said in a statement.

IBM is working on the new computer, which is called Blue Gene/L, with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Livermore, California research lab that is part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency.

Blue Gene/L is expected to be completed in 2004, about 1-1/2 years before the other Blue Gene computer, called Blue Gene/C. That is in part because it will be smaller and slower than the Blue Gene/C.

But it will be more than fast enough to expand beyond the scientific and technical applications that it is working on with Livermore, IBM said. The company is looking for a partner to work on commercial applications, like Web serving and hosting, financial modeling, and data searching.

FASTER, CHEAPER, SMALLER

Blue Gene/L will have a processing speed of 200 teraflops, or 200 trillion calculations per second. That's slower than Blue Gene/C's anticipated 1,000 trillion calculations per second, but about 15 times faster than the world's current fastest computer, which is called ASCI White.

ASCI White is located at the Livermore lab and was made for the Department of Energy's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, or ASCI, and unveiled in June of 2000. ASCI White runs at 12 trillion calculations per second, or 12 teraflops.

In addition to being faster than ASCI White, the Blue Gene/L will consume 15 times less power than ASCI White and teraflop for teraflop, is up to 50 times smaller.

``We get the same amount of computation at roughly one-tenth to one-fiftieth of the space required,'' said Bill Pulleyblank, director of exploratory server systems at IBM.

Computing power aside, ASCI White is still several times larger than the Blue Gene/L will be. It's about the size of two basketball courts, while Blue Gene/L could fit into one-half of a tennis court, IBM said.

In addition, he said, Blue Gene/L will be able to solve some problems in days rather than weeks, which can be important for commercial applications.

``If it takes us three or four days of computation to help an airline build its crew schedule for next month, that's fine as a planning tool,'' Pulleyblank said. ``But if we're trying to run that to respond to a snow storm which just hit LaGaurdia (airport), coming back three or four days later to tell how the people are going to be rerouted is not satisfactory.''

The Blue Gene computers would run on chips that contain cells, or processors with both memory and communications circuits. The ASCI White uses off-the-shelf processors with a souped-up version of IBM's commercial operating system.

-------- colorado

LAWMAKERS PROD ENERGY DEPARTMENT ON ROCKY FLATS PLUTONIUM SHIPMENT

Congressman Mark Udall's Newsletter
From: <ima_co02iq@mail.house.gov>
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001

In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Gov. Bill Owens, Senator Wayne Allard and Congressman Udall urge him to resolve a conflict over the plutonium shipment schedule from Rocky Flats to DOE's Savannah River Site in South Carolina. They also asked him to outline how any solution with South Carolina may impact the plutonium shipment schedule and ultimate cleanup and closure of Rocky Flats.

In order for DOE to accomplish the cleanup and closure of Rocky Flats, the surplus plutonium at the site must be safely removed and disposed of at the Savannah River facility. Due to budgetary decisions by the DOE, South Carolina officials have expressed opposition to receiving surplus plutonium from Rocky Flats. This situation has created concerns about the removal and shipment of plutonium from Rocky Flats-especially about the schedule to cleanup and close Rocky Flats by the year 2006. DOE officials have indicated that they are working to resolve this issue so as not to place the plutonium shipments at risk.

"We in Colorado need to make sure that whatever happens between DOE and Savannah River will not result in impacts top our cleanup and closure efforts at Rocky Flats. This letter indicates that we are united in Colorado in seeing this resolved and that we want to make sure that the continued cleanup of Rocky Flats is not harmed," said Udall.

-------- idaho

INEEL DECLARED A NATIONAL USER FACILITY

November 9, 2001
ENS
http://www.ens-news.com/ens/nov2001/2001L-11-09-09.html

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho, The Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) facility at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Lab (INEEL) has been declared a "national user facility," opening the facility's resources to increased scientific research from around the world.

"By designating STAR a national user facility, the department is increasing accessing to this important research facility for scientists and researchers across the world," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "INEEL has a reputation of being an outstanding research facility in the area of fusion safety and I am pleased to open this facility to new and different research. Supporting fusion safety research is another example of the way the INEEL applies technical expertise to support DOE's major missions in science, energy and environment."

The STAR facility houses specialized systems for investigating the consequences of accidents in fusion reactors. Scientists believe fusion can be an almost infinite source of energy, but learning to safely harness the reaction is a tremendous challenge.

The facility is designed to host a number of experiments to determine how tritium, the fuel in a fusion reaction, interacts with other materials used to produce a fusion reaction. The STAR facility is now hosting a collaboration between the United States and Japan to explore a number of fusion safety research initiatives.

In addition, Abraham said that the department's Environmental Management Science Program has awarded INEEL $1.5 million in grant funding over the next three years for research to support the department's Environmental Management cleanup program.

The grants, to fund research initiatives to develop new approaches to dealing with the disposition of high level waste and the deactivation and decontamination of facilities, are part of 45 research grants totaling $39 million.

-------- nevada

Tunnel fire cited as cause for nuke waste changes

Las Vegas SUN
November 02, 2001
By Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2001/nov/02/512568174.html

Gov. Kenny Guinn and state attorneys have asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to immediately amend rules that apply to the shipment of radioactive waste.

Guinn's request came after the release of a study that factored in the presence of nuclear waste in a July 18 accident in Baltimore, where a train hauling toxic materials derailed in a tunnel. The accident led to a fire that shut down a portion of the city for more than a week.

State officials have asked for a formal hearing concerning the report.

If Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is approved by the Department of Energy to store 77,000 tons of the nation's high-level radioactive waste, the nuclear waste would be shipped to the site from locations throughout the county.

The report, "Radiological Consequences of Severe Rail Accidents Involving Spent Nuclear Fuel Shipments to Yucca Mountain: Hypothetical Baltimore Rail Tunnel Fire Involving SNF (spent nuclear fuel)," was released to the public Thursday.

The report analyzes the hypothetical release of radiation that subsequently blows 43 miles from a leaking nuclear waste container. Radioactive waste from the Calvert Cliffs reactor in Maryland would pass through the Baltimore tunnel en route to Yucca Mountain.

The analysis relied on weather and environmental conditions that were present during the five-day fire.

A "worst case" blaze could cause seals on either end of a metal container to crack, subsequently releasing enough radiation to expose 345,493 people and cause eight to 50 cases of cancer, the report says.

Total cleanup costs were estimated at $13.7 billion.

"In order to reduce a longterm dose, significant decontamination of the affected areas would be required, along with the likely relocation of a large number of households and businesses most affected," wrote the study's authors, Matthew Lamb and Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates.

If an appropriate evacution and decontamination plan was in place, exposures could be "significantly" reduced, the report said, although the warning system must improve. Although Civil Defense sirens were activated as a result of the fire, residents became confused and did not immediately turn on televisions or radios, the report said.

"Regardless, the scenario involving a spent nuclear fuel cask in a situation similar to the Baltimore tunnel fire would be disastrous," the 20-page report concluded.

Guinn sent a copy of the report to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"As you will see from the report, the consequences of such an accident involving spent fuel would be disastrous," Guinn wrote in a separate memo.

"It's definitely another arrow in our arsenal," Reid spokesman Nathan Naylor said.

Two years ago Nevada asked the NRC to review rules -- adopted in 1983 -- that outline how nuclear facilities would be protected against terrorism. The NRC has not responded to the state's request.

NRC Chairman Richard Meserve has ordered such a review, which is ongoing, an NRC spokesman said Thursday.

On Oct. 16, a Washington-based law firm that is working for the state in its fight against Yucca, asked Meserve for a formal hearing on the transportation of nuclear waste and security measures in place at DOE facilities throughout the country.

"The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, D.C., have, unfortunately, proven the state of Nevada's petition to be prophetic," wrote Washington attorney William Briggs Jr. of Ross, Dixon & Bell L.L.P., to Meserve.

------- new york

INDIAN POINT
Groups Warn of Calamity if A-Plants Are Attacked

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By ROBERT WORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/nyregion/09NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

Environmentalists and public officials, including three members of Congress and nine members of the State Legislature, presented a petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday, warning that the Indian Point nuclear plants, 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan on the Hudson River, are vulnerable to terrorist attack and should be shut down until they can be made safe.

A group of those who signed the petition, including Andrew M. Cuomo, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, an environmental group in Garrison, N.Y., gathered on the steps of New York's City Hall to stress their position.

"If the American Airlines Flight 11 that flew down the Hudson River had, instead of hitting the twin towers in New York, banked left and hit the twin towers of Indian Point, we would have a much more dire situation than we're facing now," Mr. Kennedy said.

Security has been high at the plants since Sept. 11, with National Guard troops standing guard and Coast Guard cutters running round- the-clock patrols on the Hudson River. Federal officials say that there is no need to close the plants and that safety improvements have been made since Sept. 11.

But the petitioners, who included two members of the City Council and more than two dozen state and local officials from the area around the plants, said those measures were not enough. They said a terrorist attack could cause a disastrous release of radiation at Indian Point, whose two reactors are in the most densely populated area around any nuclear plant in the country. About 20 million people live within a 50-mile radius of the plants.

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy, the company that owns the plant, said that closing it would accomplish nothing, and that it would be far harder for a jet to hit the plants than a large target like the World Trade Center. He added that even a direct hit would not necessarily cause a meltdown that would result in a wide release of radiation.

"The evacuation plan does consider a worst-case scenario, and even then you would have 8 to 10 hours to evacuate," Mr. Steets said.

The evacuation plan, which is reviewed every two years by the federal government and is based on the removal of people within a 10-mile radius of the plants, has come under fire in recent weeks, with many local officials saying publicly that they do not believe it is practical.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in reviewing safety measures after the Sept. 11 attack, is trying to determine what would happen if a large aircraft were to hit a nuclear plant like Indian Point, said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the agency.

But Mr. Kennedy and others said yesterday that federal regulators had never tested the security of the spent fuel at the plant, which contains far more radioactive material than the reactors themselves but is not protected by a containment structure, as the reactors are.

Those concerns have been echoed at plants elsewhere in the country in recent weeks. On Nov. 1, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to require the N.R.C. to review the potential for attacks on nuclear plants.

Several speakers at City Hall yesterday emphasized that although safety was a concern at all of the nation's nuclear plants, it made sense to shut down Indian Point because of its proximity to the New York metropolitan area and because use of the plants is less necessary during the winter, when energy is not as likely to be in short supply.

---

Coalition Demands Shutdown of Indian Point Reactors

By Cat Lazaroff
November 9, 2001
ENS
http://www.ens-news.com/ens/nov2001/2001L-11-09-06.html

WASHINGTON, DC, The nuclear reactors of the Indian Point power plant should be closed indefinitely, a coalition of environmental and civic groups and elected officials said Thursday. The coalition told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the plant, located just 40 miles north of New York City, poses far too great a risk to the nation's largest city in the event of a terrorist attack.

With a petition filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the coalition called on the agency to order an immediate shutdown of the Indian Point facility and to keep it closed until a full review of the plant's vulnerabilities and safety systems is conducted. Indian Point's two functioning nuclear reactors are located on the Hudson River about 40 miles north of mid-town Manhattan.

Indian Point includes three reactors - Unit 2 (left), Unit 3 (right) and Unit 1 (center, now shut down) (Photo courtesy Entergy)

Citing catastrophic risks to public health and safety and to the world's financial center, the coalition stated that the events of September 11 "clearly demonstrate that the plant's status needs to be reexamined."

While not calling for a permanent shutdown at this stage, the coalition argued that the enormous safety risks Indian Point poses to the region cannot be justified by the plant's limited economic benefit - namely providing a cheap source of power in the summer months when electricity demand is high. The coalition pointed out that with summer over, now might be the best time to close down both Units 2 and 3 and take the opportunity to study the plant's ability to operate safely.

"In light of the September 11th suicide bombing and Indian Point's proximity to the country's most densely populated metropolis, prudence dictates that the plant be shut down until Entergy demonstrates that it can protect the public from a terrorist attack," said Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper, one of the groups leading the campaign.

Entergy Corporation purchased the Indian Point 1 and 2 reactors from Consolidated Edison in September. Indian Point 1 has been shut down and in storage since the early 1970s. Entergy purchased Indian Point 3 from Con Edison in November 2000.

The petitioners are asking the NRC to assess the vulnerability of Indian Point to terrorist attacks, review the adequacy of existing security systems and evacuation plans, and to make recommendations on how to minimize the facility's risks to public safety.

One NRC study found that a catastrophic meltdown of the Indian Point 3 reactor could lead to more than 200,000 deaths (Photo courtesy New York Power Authority)

The coalition also asked the NRC to order an immediate transfer of the plant's highly radioactive spent fuel rods from a wet cooling pool system, where they are now, to a dry cask system - a technology that could significantly increase the security of the spent fuel.

"The plant's vulnerability to a major terrorist attack has never been studied," noted Matthiessen. "Yet we do know the risks are real and grave. Some 20 million Americans live within Indian Point's 50 mile fall out zone that could be irradiated following a meltdown or spent fuel fire. At the time Indian Point 2 was licensed in 1974, one of the Atomic Energy Commission's own officials said that siting a plant so close to New York was 'insane.'"

On September 11, when two hijacked airplanes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, some experts immediately wondered what the effect would have been if the terrorists had targeted a nuclear power plant. While the NRC at first said the heavily shielded containment towers around all reactors would protect against the release of nuclear radioactivity, the agency later changed its tune.

The NRC admitted last month that it "did not specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s or 767s" - the types of planes used to destroy the World Trade Center towers and heavily damage the recently fortified Pentagon.

While the containment buildings that shelter nuclear reactors are able to withstand severe events including hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes, "nuclear power plants were not designed to withstand such crashes," the agency said in a statement. "Detailed engineering analyses of a large airliner crash have not yet been performed."

Entergy spokesperson Jim Steets said closing the Indian Point plant would not make it safer, and noted that the plant is a far smaller target than the massive, 110 story tall World Trade Center towers. Even a direct hit by a plane would not necessarily lead to a meltdown of the reactors' nuclear fuel, or a widespread release of radiation, Streets said.

If a meltdown did result, the plant has an evacuation plan, as required by the NRC, and that plan accounts for even the worst case scenarios, Streets argued. The federal government reviews such plans every two years, and requires that they include the complete evacuation of all people within a 10 mile radius of the plant within eight to 10 hours after an accident - a proposal not everyone believes is feasible.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who works with Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to revitalizing the Hudson River (Photo courtesy New Hampshire College)

"If the United Airlines jet that traveled down the Hudson Valley en route to the twin towers had instead banked a left turn into one of Indian Point's twin reactors, the resulting disaster would have been even more horrific than the World Trade Center catastrophe," said Robert Kennedy, Jr., chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper. "Given the southerly direction of prevailing winds in the Hudson Valley, a meltdown or major radioactive release at Indian Point could result in death and chronic radiation sickness for thousands if not tens of thousands of the region's citizens and render much of the New York metropolitan area permanently uninhabitable."

Paul Leventhal, president of the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), noted that simply shutting down the reactors would not substantially reduce the consequences of a radioactive release, were terrorists to successfully penetrate the plants and destroy their essential safety systems. But during a shutdown of just 20 days, Leventhal argued, officials could take steps that would reduce the number of people who might die immediately after a core meltdown and containment breach by 80 percent.

The number of potential long term cancer deaths could be slashed by 50 percent during a brief shutdown, according to a preliminary analysis by NCI.

Leventhal pointed out that removing the fuel from the reactors - something than can be done between six and eight days after shutdown - would allow security forces to focus their protection on the spent fuel pools where this highly radioactive fuel, as well as all fuel previously removed from the reactors, is now stored.

Most of the radiation at Indian Point is stored in spent fuel pools designed as only a temporary repository for the nuclear waste. Spent fuel pools are particularly vulnerable because they lie outside the containment domes and tend to be poorly protected in cement or metal buildings.

In 1982, Congress directed the federal government to identify a centralized site to safely store the nation's spent fuel. A controversial site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is currently the only site under consideration as a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel, but the facility is years away from being ready to accept nuclear wastes.

Paul Leventhal, president of the Washington DC based Nuclear Control Institute (NCI) (Photo courtesy NCI)

"Taking the straightforward step of a temporary reactor shut down to reduce the risks and consequences of a successful terrorist assault will help the 20 million people who live and work in the New York metropolitan area sleep a little easier," said NCI's Leventhal. "It will also allow the plant operator and public officials at all levels to develop and to test defensive measures for the reactor and the spent fuel pool that are sufficient to repel the new terrorist threat."

"That threat, made manifest on September 11, is at least 19 suicidal and sophisticated terrorists attacking from four different directions," noted Leventhal. "Until Indian Point can be protected against that threat, it should not be allowed to operate. Unless Indian Point is shut down, there will not be the financial and political imperative to get the job done right."

Indian Point's two reactors supply 1800 megawatts of power to New York City and Westchester County, enough to power 1.8 million homes. The Pace University Energy Project contends that because there are numerous sources of power around the region, removing Indian Point from the grid would not affect energy reliability, even in the peak summer months.

As to the price of electricity, "During the non-summer months of September through May, an absence of Indian Point power would have a negligible effect on the region's electricity prices," said Dick Ottinger, dean emeritus and professor of law at the Pace Energy Project.

"With the new circumstances we face, there's absolutely no justification for not shutting the reactors down, at least until next summer, and using the time to get a better handle on the risks," Ottinger said.

The coalition believes that a successful attack on the spent fuel pools could lead to a catastrophic fire and a widespread release of radiation. Depending on the size of the fire and wind direction, New York City could be cloaked in radioactive material.

Coalition members pointed to a 1982 NRC study that attempted to estimate the "peak" number of deaths and casualties that would result from a meltdown at Indian Point. Under a meltdown scenario at Indian Point 3 alone, the agency predicted up to 50,000 non-cancer radiation sickness deaths within a year of an accident, up to 14,000 additional deaths over time due to cancer, and up to 167,000 cases of ongoing radiation related health problems.

The group also pointed to another 1982 NRC study on the economic impacts on Westchester County. According to the study, a meltdown at Indian Point 3 would result in a loss of $314 billion, in 1982 dollars, to Westchester's property and commercial interests. Adjusted for inflation and a quadrupling of real estate prices since 1982, the figure could be closer to $2.3 trillion, in 2000 dollars, the coalition said.

Including the effect on New York City and other surrounding counties would result in a figure in the tens of trillions of dollars in economic losses.

The petition to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is available at:
http://www.nci.org/01NCI/11/NRCPetition.htm

-------- us nuc politics

House Panel Allocates $1.67 Billion For Pentagon Counterterrorism Bid
$50 Million Is Earmarked To Test Equipment to Detect Portable Nuclear Weapons

By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 9, 2001; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64799-2001Nov8?language=printer

In the first attempt by Congress to adjust the defense budget to new security threats, a key House committee has added $1.67 billion for Pentagon counterterrorism efforts, including $50 million to test equipment that could detect small, smuggled nuclear devices.

Under a plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee -- and strongly recommended in an unclassified report by the independent Defense Science Board -- Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld would have 180 days to select four military sites for the tests, which would involve trying to pinpoint the presence of nuclear materials or even a warhead, sources said.

Advanced detection devices exist at several of the nation's nuclear laboratories and have been used by the Energy Department's Nuclear Emergency Search Team.

But scientists and congressional officials said this week that they have never been brought together in a way that would enable local law enforcement agencies to ferret out suitcase-size weapons smuggled into U.S. ports or past border guards.

The broader test of the equipment is ordered in a new counterterrorism title added to a $317.4 billion defense appropriations bill for 2002 that could reach the House floor next week. Although the test had not been requested by the Pentagon, congressional officials noted that President Bush has voiced concern about the threat from a small nuclear device.

Speaking by phone Nov. 6 to a Warsaw conference on terrorism, Bush warned that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization was "seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," making it a "threat to civilization itself."

The defense bill, which was revised after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, reflects heightened concerns over the nation's vulnerability to unconventional warfare. It allocates $11.8 billion to the counterterrorism account, with increases for defense against weapons of mass destruction, chemical-biological warfare and cyber-attacks, as well as for nonproliferation programs in Russia.

"We spent a lot of energy designing and rearranging our bill after September 11th in a way that would reflect other challenges, whether cyberwar or briefcase bombs," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), who chairs the committee's defense panel.

The bulk of the funds in the new counterterrorism account -- $7.8 billion -- still go to Bush's top priority of ballistic missile defense, a priority that could run into criticism as the defense measure works its way through Congress.

Although the Appropriations Committee cut nearly $500 million from the administration request for missile defense, some senior members express concern that the huge commitment drains funds that could be used to confront more immediate threats.

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), ranking member on the defense appropriations subcommittee, this week stressed the need to beef up funding of human intelligence-gathering and training and organizing state National Guard units within the national effort.

"There's a war going on," Murtha said. "We think more money is needed for counterterrorism."

According to a White House budget analysis done earlier this year, the administration's counterterrorism budget for national security agencies grew by 3 percent. That compared with a 59 percent increase for missile defense.

At the same time, the defense spending bill, following the president's recommendation, imposes a 10 percent cut in the funding of "threat reduction programs" aimed at preventing the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union from falling into the hands of terrorists.

According to Roger L. Hagengruber, a Sandia National Laboratory scientist who directed an advisory task force for the Pentagon on unconventional nuclear defense, advanced capabilities exist that could guard against the threat to the country from a small nuclear bomb.

These include unmanned sensors, radiation detectors and imaging tools emitting gamma rays and neutrons that can penetrate shields to locate highly enriched uranium, Hagengruber said.

The challenge, he added, will be to integrate them in a permanently deployable system that could be operated relatively cheaply by law enforcement personnel to check ships and trucks in busy harbors or border crossing points.

The House committee called on the Pentagon to run the tests at diverse military sites that might include a port, an air base and installations with heavy traffic. "There's no question this has to be done," Murtha said. "These are the kind of things we want to be prepared for."

The report produced for the Pentagon and the Defense Science Board by Hagengruber's advisory group estimated that 1,500 tons of "weapons capable" nuclear materials exist in Russia. It said that a weapon could be made from around four pounds of such material and that it could weigh as little as 20 pounds for a device delivered by an artillery piece.

Worldwide, about 5,000 tons of weapons-capable material is available. Short of a nuclear weapon, the Science Board report said, terrorists might be able to produce a "radiological dispersal device" that would use a conventional explosive to spread toxic plutonium or strontium-90 over a wide area.

--------

[It's really hard to visualize Hollywood as being "liberal" -- other than with sex and violence. et]

White House, Hollywood elite to meet

November 9, 2001
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011109-12951586.htm

Slow change may be afoot in big media as New York and Hollywood attempt to shed their old traditional liberal skins for the sake of the national interest.

With Osama bin Laden appearing on prime-time and news coverage often tainted by misinformation, disinformation and flippant journalists, the need for a one-two punch from America's mighty news and entertainment complex has become more compelling - and realistic. Terrorism takes an intangible toll on the public psyche, warranting reprisal from the broadcast and film arsenal.

A formidable group of media heavies has received an invitation from the White House, and not for a chance to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. Tuesday afternoon, 40 top executives got a simple fax, asking them to convene Sunday with President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.

"The anticipated outcome of the meeting would be an initial plan encompassing several substantive ways we can lend support to our nation's cause," the single-page announcement advised. "We assure you that this will be a private, confidential, working meeting of the most senior administration officials and entertainment industry principals only. No press or elected officials will be present."

The acceptance list now includes News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Viacom chiefs Sumner Redstone and Jonathan Dolgen, Motion Picture Association of America's Jack Valenti and Sherry Lansing, chairman of Paramount Pictures.

Will we return to the Hollywood of World War II, when John Wayne made patriotic features and Army Air Corps Capt. Ronald Reagan appeared in some 400 motivational films? Maybe.

Mr. Valenti was reserved. "It has nothing to do with the kind of movies we make," he told the Hollywood Reporter yesterday. "But there are other ways to help."

Documentary films, public service announcements, trailers in movie theaters and messages broadcast to Afghanistan are among the possibilities, he said.

There was a dress rehearsal for all this Oct. 17 when White House aides met informally with Hollywood creatives, seeking suggestions for a possible media role in the war on terrorism. Organizers have upped the ante: sending a senior White house official like Mr. Rove to Hollywood, Mr. Valenti said, was a savvy move.

The agenda remains shrouded in mystery. Washington and Tinseltown are mum, though some critics already fret that "propaganda" will result.

White House spokeswoman Ari Fleischer assured reporters yesterday that his office "has great respect for the creativity of the industry and recognizes its ability to educate at home and abroad." The invitation itself stressed the need to "communicate, educate and inspire."

Some insiders have faith. "Hollywood can contribute in positive ways without becoming a propaganda organ" one top executive told Variety.

But all is not idyllic in broadcast relationships. In the December Talk magazine, ABC's "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher announced he expects to lose his job next year because of inopportune comments he made after the September 11 attacks. Mr. Maher had called recent U.S. military actions "cowardly."

The Radio-Television News Directors Association took the Defense Department to task for renewing an exclusive contract with Space Imaging Inc., which the group says denies "media access" to satellite imagery over Afghanistan.

"Taxpayer dollars are being used to preclude the media from adequately informing the public," wrote President Barbara Cochran to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Meanwhile, MSNBC President Erik Sorenson complained that fingerpointing "patriotism police" plague news coverage, while actor George Clooney called Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilley "Joseph McCarthy" after the conservative host said Hollywood "weasels" were merely seeking publicity during a recent telethon fund-raiser for terrorism victims.

It was CBS' Dan Rather and ABC's Peter Jennings, Mr. Clooney said, who were the real "journalists."

• Contact Jennifer Harper at jharper@washingtontimes.com or 202/636-3085.

-------- us nuc waste

Nuclear waste expert to be nominee to lead DOE branch
Position requires oversight of proposal for Yucca Mountain repository

Las Vegas Review-Journal
Friday, November 09, 2001
By STEVE TETREAULT
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Nov-09-Fri-2001/news/17413129.html

WASHINGTON -- A national laboratory program manager who has worked for more than 20 years on nuclear waste issues is being tapped by President Bush to head the office that is considering Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for spent nuclear fuel.

The White House announced Thursday that the president intends to nominate Margaret S.Y. Chu to head the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, a branch of the Department of Energy.

Les Shephard, a spokesman for Sandia National Laboratories, said Chu until recently was director of the Nuclear Waste Management Program Center at the Albuquerque, N.M., labs. She presently is on assignment in Washington for Sandia, he said.

Sandia's nuclear waste management program is a 160-person office that has conducted research on Yucca Mountain; the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico; nuclear waste programs at the Hanford reservation in Washington; and repository programs in Japan, Korea, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland.

Chu, who has a doctorate in physical chemistry, has worked at Sandia since 1980, the White House said. Her jobs have included deputy manager of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, and manager of the Environmental Risk Assessment and Waste Management Department. She was involved in the certification of WIPP, and development of various nuclear waste disposal regulations.

Efforts to reach Chu Thursday night were not successful.

Once Bush follows through with a nomination, Chu will be considered by the Senate for the job. The post has been vacant since Bush took office in January. The office's most recent director was Ivan Itkin, a Clinton appointee. Lake Barrett, a veteran DOE manager, has been serving as acting director.

If confirmed, Chu will take over what is viewed as one of the most challenging projects in the government: exploring the development of an underground repository that could contain radioactivity from 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel for 10,000 years. Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied.

Chu would oversee 160 federal employees in Washington and Nevada, and 1,500 government contract workers. The budget for the program is $375 million, some $70 million less than the Energy Department requested from Congress.

Nevada officials said they know little about Chu.

"Her big job is going to be how to deal with a restricted budget and to try to get all the work done that they've committed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It will be a big balancing act," said Steve Frishman, technical policy coordinator for the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency.


-------- MILITARY

-------- biological weapons

THE INQUIRY
Experts See F.B.I. Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry

November 9, 2001
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/national/09INQU.html

This article was reported and written by William J. Broad, David Johnston, Judith Miller and Paul Zielbauer.

The federal inquiry into the anthrax attacks has stumbled in several areas and may have missed opportunities to gather valuable evidence as criminal investigators have been unable to fully grasp the scientific complexities of the case.

Government officials, scientists and investigators said the Federal Bureau of Investigation's initial unfamiliarity with the intricacies of anthrax had contributed to a series of missteps and other possible errors.

The F.B.I. came under withering criticism this week in Congress for the lack of progress in the investigation, and bureau officials acknowledged in interviews that they had been forced to turn to outside experts for advice on how to investigate the most serious bioterrorism attack in the nation's history. But they said the inquiry was following a logical strategy.

In a plan announced yesterday by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the bureau, and other parts of the Justice Department, would be revamped to better prevent terror attacks, and the government would use new powers to tap lawyer-client conversations with defendants in terrorist cases.

Several experts, including some on whom the F.B.I. has relied, said the anthrax investigation had taken some wrong turns.

Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the F.B.I. said it had no objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.

Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies, laboratories and academic institutions with the equipment or capability to make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit new evidence, several laboratory directors said.

Just this week, more than a month after the first death from inhalation anthrax, the F.B.I. issued a subpoena asking laboratories for the names of all workers and researchers who had been vaccinated against anthrax. And the F.B.I. is only now establishing electronic bulletin boards to allow members of scientific groups to interact with criminal investigators working the case.

"The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events," said Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who worked for the F.B.I. crime laboratory in Washington. "It's just unrealistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American populace."

There is no reason to believe that any of the investigators' actions contributed to their inability to identify clear leads in the anthrax attacks that have killed four people and led to the treatment of thousands of others.

John Collingwood, the F.B.I.'s spokesman, said last night: "We have a plan and are proceeding based in large part on what the people we are consulting with told us would be the most productive places to begin. We reached out to scientists and public health officials on the best way to proceed."

Asked about the course of the bureau's investigation, a senior F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said: "This is a learning curve for everybody. Every single day, if not hourly, we're all learning something about this. If you take several weeks back, the learning curve, we were all behind it."

Evidence Disappears Last month, after consulting with the F.B.I., Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the university was nervous about security.

Now, a dispute has arisen, with scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent to Congress and the news media.

If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when that bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators important clues to the killer's identity.

Martin E. Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University who is aiding the federal investigation, said the mystery is likely to persist. "If those cultures were still alive," he said, they could have helped in "clearing up the muddy history."

Ronald M. Atlas, president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of germ professionals, based in Washington, said the legal implications could be large. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the criminal investigation.

The F.B.I. says it never explicitly approved the destruction of the cultures, but never objected either.

A law enforcement official said that when approached by the Ames laboratory about the destruction of its anthrax inventory, the Omaha F.B.I. office consulted with the Miami F.B.I. office, which was responsible for the initial anthrax case in Florida. He said Miami investigators, after consulting with scientists, had advised the Omaha office that the Ames strain was so widespread that it had no investigative or evidentiary value. "Based on that there were no objections," to the destruction of the material by the Iowa laboratory, the official said.

Several experts said the episode underscored how the bureau traditionally has had trouble understanding the language, and the demands, of science.

"There's a chasm between what's going on in the courtroom and forensic arena," said Mr. Tobin, the former F.B.I. scientist, who has criticized the bureau's investigative methods. The flow of scientific data, he said, "just doesn't seem to make it" into criminal investigations.

And a senior federal scientist familiar with the germ investigation added: "You're still dealing with the mentality that says anthrax is anthrax is anthrax, and doesn't realize that there are deeper signatures."

Intertwined with the mystery of the Ames strain's history is the question of whether it was used in America's abandoned effort to develop anthrax as a weapon from 1943 to 1969, when President Richard M. Nixon renounced germ warfare.

The scientific literature is contradictory. A 1986 paper by Army researchers said the strain did not arise until 1980. But a paper in 2000 by Dr. Hugh-Jones, Paul J. Jackson of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University and five other anthrax researchers asserted that the Ames strain had played a central role in the biological warfare program in the United States.

If true, that could raise the question of whether the perpetrators of the current crimes had learned of the American recipe or even found and exploited lost anthrax stockpiles.

Caree Vander Linden, spokeswoman for the Army's germ defense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., said officials there had not investigated whether the Ames strain was used in the old weapons program.

The Iowa State archive was destroyed on Oct. 10 and 11, after relatively brief deliberations with the F.B.I., said Julie Johnson, an official in environmental and safety at Iowa State.

It is unclear if the F.B.I. understood that Iowa State had destroyed many strains of anthrax or that the origins of the Ames strain were cloudy. Larry Holmquist, a spokesman for the F.B.I. in Omaha, which runs the bureau's Iowa operations, said the rationale for the destruction was that the strain had been "sent out to numerous places" around the globe in the past "40 or 50 years."

Tom Ridge, the White House director of homeland security, confirmed publicly that the tainted letters contained the Ames strain on Oct. 25, two weeks after the destruction.

Iowa State says it won destruction approval not only from the F.B.I. but also from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are involved in the federal investigation.

James A. Roth, a microbiologist at the College of Veterinary Medicine who presided over the destruction, said the university's records on its anthrax strains were extremely limited and that the labeling on the vials themselves was often cryptic, leaving officials unsure exactly how many strains the university had.

Even so, "we think they had all the strains already," he said of the F.B.I. and the C.D.C.

The oldest strain in the collection dated to 1928. If the Ames strain was similarly old, experts said, it is conceivable that the potent germs were distributed far more widely than conventional wisdom holds.

Since the destruction, Dr. Roth said, the university has heard nothing from the bureau about anthrax. As for whether the destroyed strains might have clarified the origins of Ames, he said, "now we'll never know."

Questioning Scientists

The F.B.I. has been pressing its investigation in New Jersey, where the letters originated.

When two men from the F.B.I. and the New Jersey State Police arrived last month at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, scientists there saw it as a natural step in the anthrax investigation.

Staffed with microbiologists familiar with how the deadly bacteria grow and filled with the sophisticated laboratory equipment involved, the institute, just 38 miles from the Trenton post offices where the letters were postmarked, was a natural place for investigators to ask detailed questions.

But the two investigators, escorted by the university's head of security, asked the the laboratory's director, Dr. Joachim Messing, only a few general questions about growing bacteria and never mentioned specifically what they were looking for. Finally, Dr. Messing said, he felt obligated to volunteer that his laboratory did not handle anthrax.

"I couldn't give you a clue what they were after," Dr. Messing said in an interview this week. "I asked the person from the F.B.I. if he knows anything about bacteria, some very simple questions, and it was very clear that he didn't have the background to make evaluations."

Tracking the F.B.I.'s investigation near Trenton, and beyond, shows that agents seemed to have passed over some potential opportunities for developing leads.

Though investigators are consulting some members of professional organizations like the American Society for Microbiology and the American College of Veterinary Microbiologists, the F.B.I. is only now establishing an Internet bulletin board to permit members of those groups to pass information to the bureau's leadership, a senior F.B.I. official said.

"That's in the works," he said.

Top bureau officials also appeared to be unaware of last month's international chemical and pharmaceutical convention, ChemShow, in New York City, which attracted hundreds of chemical and pharmaceutical equipment manufacturers, engineers and technicians.

"If they weren't crawling around that show, they should have been," said Richard Barbini, a chemical engineer and salesman for Arde Barinco Inc., in Norwood, N.J., a pharmaceutical equipment maker. "There's all kinds of people there from many different countries, a lot of people who know a lot" about what it takes to make anthrax.

The senior F.B.I. official said he was not sure if any agents had attended the show, and a bureau spokeswoman said the agency would not comment on the matter.

In New Jersey, the F.B.I. has been in regular contact with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, which works with infectious bacteria, but special agents have yet to call bacteria experts at the university's Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, said Michael A. Gallo, a professor of environmental community medicine.

F.B.I. officials say that their investigation is proceeding methodically in an uncharted area and that questions will eventually be asked in all appropriate places.

Several microbiologists suggested that agents should focus on companies that sell new and used laboratory equipment that could reduce anthrax to the micron-size particles found in the letter sent to Mr. Daschle's office last month. That equipment would include either a jet mill or a spray dryer, each of which can be used to reduce bacteria into ultrafine, inhalable powder.

Some companies that deal in that equipment said F.B.I. agents had called seeking detailed information, while others said they had been asked only general questions. Others said they had not been called at all.

A sales official at Spray Drying Systems Inc., of Randallstown, Md., a company that sells spray dryers, said the company had not heard from investigators.

But agents from the Boston F.B.I. office visited some companies, including Sturtevant Inc. in Hanover, Mass., which manufactures jet mills, said a company executive who asked that his name not be used.

"He was asking very good questions," the executive said of the agent.

Eventually, the executive said, he gave the agent lists of his customers and competitors. "There's dozens and dozens and dozens of used equipment dealers out there," he said. "Even the F.B.I. doesn't have enough people to track down the number of machines that are in commerce in the world."

Though they are still compiling a complete list of places anthrax is stored in this country, federal investigators have already visited a number of laboratories, germ warehouses, universities, government agencies and even veterinarians in their search for clues in the anthrax attacks, one federal investigator involved in the inquiry said.

So far, he said, a range of government agencies that maintain anthrax, including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, have been asked to account for their specimens in detail, and to provide samples to compare with those used in the bioterror attacks.

In addition, organizations like the New Jersey Veterinary Medical Association and the New Jersey Pharmacists Association, which has set up a hotline to the F.B.I. to report large orders for anthrax vaccines, said that at least one of their members had been contacted by the F.B.I.

And at the American Type Culture Collection, a vast bioresource center that sells germs, based in Virginia, Nancy Wysocki, a vice president, said the center had "a very close working relationship with many of the federal agencies, including the F.B.I."

F.B.I. agents have also spoken to some pharmaceutical companies, including some based in New Jersey, company executives said. Some have been open with the bureau, others have asked, for legal reasons, for agents to present a subpoena before they would grant access to their files.

"We want to know what you have for anthrax, we want to see the documentation, we want to know who has access to it, where it's shipped from, who works with it, we want to know the protocols," said a senior F.B.I. official. "We're not going to leave these facilities until every question is answered."

Many university laboratories in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York have not been contacted in the investigation.

"I haven't seen neither hide nor hair of them," said Dr. John E. Lennox, a professor at Penn State University's microbiology department, though anyone interested in producing anthrax could find what they need in his laboratory. "There isn't anything they would require that isn't in my lab," he said.

But Dr. Sulie Chang, chairwoman of the biology department at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, said F.B.I. agents called her several weeks ago, saying that they were contacting biology departments throughout the state.

Dr. Chang said they wanted to know if any students had shown a sudden interest in anthrax. In fact, she said, a student there had given a 15-minute presentation on the topic recently and she gave the agents his name. She said she did not know whether they followed up.

Dispute Over Daschle Letter

The F.B.I. was confronted with differing assessments of the anthrax found in the letter to Senator Daschle, a dispute among experts that illustrates the government's slowly evolving understanding of how to investigate an anthrax attack.

An initial analysis by the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, which specializes in biodefense, found that the material was very pure, very concentrated and highly dangerous. The Fort Detrick laboratory began studying the Daschle letter on Oct. 15 and delivered its first assessment to the bureau that night, a spokesman said.

Two days later, the F.B.I. sent a sample for additional testing to Battelle, a military contractor in Ohio that does secret work for the Pentagon and other government agencies.

Officials said the Army laboratory had irradiated part of the anthrax spores before studying them, a safety technique that leaves their aerodynamic and other characteristics undisturbed.

Apparently unaware that the Army laboratory had irradiated the material, Battelle used a different method, officials said, placing the anthrax in an autoclave and killing the spores with intense pressure and steam. Two officials said that this produced a far lower estimate of the concentration level and prompted Battelle scientists to conclude that the material was more likely to clump together, and thus less likely to waft through the air, than the Army scientists had estimated.

Both laboratories delivered reports to the F.B.I. on Oct. 22. One administration official said Fort Detrick found that the Daschle anthrax contained as much as one trillion spores per gram, much more than had been detected by Battelle.

Scientists quickly recognized that the tests had been conducted differently and agreed that Battelle should do a second study using irradiated material. A shipment was sent to Battelle on Oct. 25, one official said, which subsequently produced estimates similar to those of the Army scientists.

While the different findings created intense controversy in scientific circles, senior law enforcement officials said they had had virtually no effect on their conclusion that the material was very dangerous or on what they had told senior officials.

But officials said senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services were sufficiently curious about the disagreement that they had asked the Army scientists to discuss their findings in person on Oct. 23. Officials said this week that the incident reflected how unaccustomed the bureau was to managing a complicated investigation that turned on scientific analysis.

---

THE SUBWAYS
Past Lessons Guide Transit Planning for Attack

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ and RANDY KENNEDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/nyregion/09SUBW.html?searchpv=nytToday

http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/2001/11/09/nyregion/09subw.1.jpg
James Estrin/The New York Times

The difficulty of quickly escaping the subway and the ease with which biological agents can spread have long worried transit officials.

Yesterday morning was the kind that has come to be considered normal in the subway.

A "suspicious substance" on a stairway at the 59th Street station, disrupting service on the A, B, C and D lines for an hour during the rush. "Suspicious powder" at the 205th Street station, snarling D service in the Bronx, and more powder at 34th Street, suspending service on part of the B, D and F lines. All of the reports turned out to be false alarms.

For the last month, as the specter of anthrax attacks has grown, every morning's descent into the subway has become a journey into uncertainty and overcrowding for thousands of passengers, who wonder when the system will return to normal.

Transit officials warn that it could be a very long time. They, along with federal agencies and research scientists, are now operating the system as if a nearly unthinkable prospect could occur: a biological or chemical attack in the confined spaces of the subway.

Still, this is not the first time scientists and transit officials have considered that prospect and tried to gauge the vulnerability.

In June 1966, Army scientists smashed light bulbs filled with bacteria believed to be harmless in the New York subway and found that the agent was carried for miles, confirming their worry that a deadly agent could be spread widely and quickly through the subway.

And in the last several years, computer models have been produced to simulate how something like anthrax might move through the subway system. Again, the results were disturbing.

For health and law enforcement officials, though, there has been an upside to the disquieting research, for they have used the lessons learned to consider how best to respond. For instance, new technologies include a recently developed foam to destroy chemical and biological agents.

Officials are extremely reluctant to divulge details of any new response plans that have been put in place in many cities or to describe work on technologies that could make subways safer.

But the officials say they have made progress in improving their emergency planning and in laboratory research efforts.

Some of those new possibilities have already emerged from labs and are being tested in subways, said Jonathan Kiell, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which has a program to finance research and testing of new technologies for countering biological and chemical threats.

Cheryl Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, said officials planned to use some of the new technologies, including chemical sensors and computerized alert systems, in a simulated subway attack that may happen sometime this year. "The intent, of course, is to share the results of the program with transit agencies in this country and around the world," Ms. Johnson said yesterday.

The difficulty of quickly escaping from a subway, combined with the way in which the drafts created by moving trains could spread chemicals or biological agents, has long worried transportation officials.

"The subway is a problem, let's just put it that way," said Dr. William Dunn, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who works with the Energy Department program, called Protect, an acronym for Program for Response Options and Technology Enhancement for Chemical/Biological Terrorism. "And we're trying to address it."

On the most practical level, those efforts involve making detailed emergency plans and testing them. "We continue to review emergency plans, and at this point feel as comfortable as you can in this environment," said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.

Mr. Kelly refused to divulge more details, but people involved with Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union say they have been reassured by the precautions that the transportation authority has taken so far to deal with the possibility of a biological attack.

When suspicious substances are reported, they said, police officers and transit workers immediately begin a procedure of evacuating the station, stopping train service, closing the doors of the trains in the station and turning off their motors, to minimize the possibility that powders or gases could be swirled or spread by the trains.

Transit officials have apparently also been vigilant about ensuring that no workers untrained in dealing with hazardous materials go near suspicious substances or try to clean them up, actions that could also serve to spread the substance.

As officials review and practice those measures, said Allen Morrison, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, "there's a great reluctance to go into a lot of details on security plans." But he said that officials at the Port Authority, which controls the PATH trains, the three major local airports and several bridges and tunnels, were eager to let riders know that chemical and biological terrorism had been considered in those plans.

New ways of coping with those worries are also beginning to arrive from research laboratories. In an article published in Tunnel Management International in April, J. Greg Sanchez, project engineer in capital program management for New York City Transit, a unit of the transportation authority, described the development of a computer program that can simulate biological and chemical attacks in a subway and assess the effectiveness of specific emergency plans.

The research, which Mr. Sanchez and two scientists at Argonne National Laboratory performed as part of the Protect program, is meant to help develop guidelines for saving lives in a real attack. "We are trying to develop intelligence as to what mitigations are out there," Mr. Sanchez said.

In other research sponsored by the program, Sandia National Laboratories has developed a foam that can destroy both chemical and biological agents and prevent them from spreading through the air. The foam has become available commercially in the last year, said Dr. Larry Bustard, a technical manager at Sandia.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said that the foam was used in the cleanup of mailrooms on Capitol Hill that were contaminated with anthrax. But subway officials are guarded about whether they have obtained it.

"One way that it could get deployed is in devices similar to fire extinguishers," Dr. Bustard said. "You could have a situation where a subway car or a train could be carrying some of these things."

-------- britain

Splits open in UK-US alliance

Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday November 9, 2001
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,590474,00.html

British ministers privately expressed frustration yesterday with the US prosecution of the war against terrorism, the first sign of serious differences between London and Washington since the attacks on September 11.

Although Tony Blair saw his quick trip to Washington this week as an opportunity to cement Britain's position as the No 1 ally of the US, unease is growing in Whitehall.

There is concern on both the military and diplomatic fronts over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the bombing strategy; perceived lack of US consultation with its allies; and insufficient US focus on the humanitarian crisis.

The British government is also intent on opposing the expansion of the war beyond Afghanistan and is horrified at elements within the Pentagon pushing for an all-out assault on Iraq.

The handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main source of dispute, with Downing Street and the Foreign Office worried that dithering in Washington in its handling of the peace process risks alienating Arab opinion, which is seen as crucial in the coalition against terrorism.

Mr Blair, who experienced at first hand last week during a trip to the Middle East the extent of Arab anger, pressed President George Bush in Washington on Wednesday to apply pressure on Israel to return to peace talks.

But Mr Blair suffered a rebuff yesterday when it emerged that Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, will not be making a long-heralded speech at the UN general assembly this weekend in support of the creation of a Palestinian state. The speech had been flagged as a historic shift in US policy towards Israel, representing a significant move towards the Palestinian position.

It has been expected for two months. Even on Wednesday, as Mr Blair was on his way to Washington, Downing Street was briefing that Mr Powell was poised to take a firm line with Israel.

One British minister said that the content of Mr Powell's speech was not in doubt, just the timing. The minister said the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had acted abominably in recent weeks.

Mr Bush is to make a speech to the general assembly tomorrow, but Foreign Office sources said he was unlikely to use the opportunity to make the historic statement.

There is also rising anxiety within Whitehall that after Afghanistan the Bush administration may turn its sights on Iraq.

Mr Bush said on Wednesday that the bombing of Afghanistan was just the start of the war on terrorism.

One British minister said that bombing Iraq would be catastrophic because women and children would be killed and the consequences for the US and Britain in the Arab world would be unimaginably dangerous.

He warned that US and British embassies in the Arab world would have to close and British civilians would have to be advised to leave the area. He feared that moderate Arab regimes would be swept away.

The sense of frustration also applies to defence and military circles. British defence officials recognise that Washington is calling the shots. But there is growing impatience about US delays in deploying and giving tasks to ground troops, including some 100 SAS troops believed to be in Afghanistan or nearby.

One senior minister even spoke disparagingly about General Tommy Franks, the US commander of Operation Enduring Freedom, describing him as an "artillery man" reluctant to commit infantry.

British military planners made it clear they are extremely concerned about the failed raid by US rangers on targets near Kandahar on October 20 and the decision to release a video of it for propaganda reasons.

There are some 70 British military officers assigned to the Florida headquarters of Gen Franks. They are said to be providing valuable advice, yet there is a growing feeling in London that it is not being publicly recognised, defence sources say.

"You're not the only ones," one well-placed source said yesterday, referring to Washington's failure to acknowledge publicly Britain's contribution.

British defence sources point to what they say is the valuable task carried out by RAF pilots refuelling American aircraft and undertaking reconnaissance over Afghanistan.

The sense of frustration in Britain is echoed in Germany where a row has erupted over whether the US had requested the 3,900 troops Berlin has earmarked for operations in Afghanistan.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, initially denied having made the request for German troops.

-------- business

Northrop Seals Deal to Buy Newport News
$2.6 Billion Accord Creates Biggest Warship Builder

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 9, 2001; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64957-2001Nov8?language=printer

Northrop Grumman Corp. yesterday agreed to buy Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. in a deal worth $2.6 billion that will create the world's largest builder of warships.

The deal ends six months of wrangling for Newport News, the nation's only builder of nuclear aircraft carriers. The 115-year-old company had agreed to be purchased by Falls Church-based General Dynamics Corp., which builds nuclear-powered submarines, but ran into resistance from antitrust regulators.

If approved by shareholders, the deal ends a wave of consolidation in the military-shipbuilding industry that began in the early 1990s. "At this point there are no large properties that aren't spoken for," said Loren Thompson, a defense consultant who works at the Lexington Institute, a think tank.

Northrop Grumman said that there would be no "significant" layoffs but that there were some obvious redundancies in the companies' headquarters.

Newport News at first will be run as a subsidiary and eventually will be combined with Northrop's other shipbuilding operations, company spokesman Randy Belote said. The company estimated that it will take a little more than a year to complete the integration.

Northrop Grumman already is the largest publicly traded employer in the Washington region, with about 16,000 employees. The acquisition of Newport News adds 17,800 Virginia-based employees.

The new Northrop subsidiary will be run by Thomas Schievelbein, Newport News's executive vice president and chief operating officer. William Fricks, Newport News chairman and chief executive, will retire when the deal is complete.

The Newport News and Northrop Grumman boards have approved the deal, but Newport News stockholders still must tender their shares for it to become final. Northrop Grumman officials said they expect to close the deal by the end of the month.

Newport News stockholders will receive $67.50 in either stock or cash. The stock-and-cash aspect of the deal is worth $2.1 billion. Northrop Grumman also agreed to assume $500 million of Newport News's debt.

Northrop Grumman is one of the leading U.S. defense contractors, with a long history of building warplanes, such as the B-2 bomber and much of the Navy's Super Hornet fighter jet. The company entered shipbuilding this year when it bought Litton Industries Inc., the leading builder of conventionally powered ships for the Navy. That acquisition gave Northrop large shipyards in Mississippi and Louisiana.

In 1999, General Dynamics and Litton each tried to buy Newport News but were rebuffed by antitrust regulators. In April 2001, General Dynamics agreed with Newport News to acquire the company for $2.1 billion in cash. Two weeks later, Northrop, which had just completed its acquisition of Litton, made its bid.

Northrop Grumman argued that a Newport News-General Dynamics merger would create a monopoly among nuclear-ship builders.

The Justice and Defense departments recently endorsed Northrop Grumman's proposal, and the Justice Department sued to block the deal with General Dynamics. That prompted General Dynamics and Newport News to abandon their merger agreement.

Northrop Grumman shares yesterday closed up 1.9 percent at $97.95. Newport News shares closed up 0.7 percent at $67.75.

-------- germany

German government faces collapse over war row
War on Terrorism: Coalition

By Imre Karacs in Berlin
09 November 2001
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/europe/story.jsp?story=104017

The German government came to the brink of collapse yesterday when Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister, threatened to resign over his Green party's reluctance to support the country's first combat mission since the Second World War.

A stormy meeting of the Greens was adjourned for a second time, with 15 MPs still refusing to endorse their government's decision to dispatch up to 3,900 troops to the war zone. At least two Social Democrat MPs belonging to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's party are also planning to vote against the deployment next week.

The bill authorising the deployment is almost certain to go through because two of the three opposition parties have pledged their support. But the government may not muster the necessary majority from its own ranks for what is regarded in Germany is the most important decision for a generation. Failure to whip in line its own MPs would damage its prestige at home and Germany's standing abroad.

"The contribution we want to make is also an expression of our readiness to take account of Germany's increased responsibility in the world," Mr Schröder told the Bundestag.

Mr Fischer is reported to have told colleagues that he will step down if he does not get the Greens' wholehearted support. That would probably be the end of the "Red-Green" coalition, which keeps Mr Schröder in power. Leaving the government could spell political suicide for the Greens, who are struggling in opinion polls at about five percent, the threshold for parties to achieve parliamentary representation.

Aware that the majority of Germans oppose the deployment of their troops in Afghan-istan, the Chancellor and his Foreign Minister used yesterday's parliamentary debate to try to sweeten the pill. Mr Schröder insisted: "We are not talking about German participation in air strikes or the mobilisation of combat troops." Reports probably leaked by the government suggest that German troops would be based in Uzbekistan, far from the real action. What is increasingly clear is that this will be a token engagement - "an expression", in Mr Schröder's words, "of our readiness to take account of Germany's increased responsibility in the world".

The Chancellor and his Foreign Minister stressed that Germany had no choice in the matter. Mr Fischer said: "You can discuss a lot - even criticise a lot, for all I care - about the strategy pursued by the United States. But the core question is whether we want to leave the US, our ally that is responding to this attack, standing alone."

Frantic efforts were under way last night to ease the conscience of defectors. The Greens are proposing an amendment that stresses Germany's humanitarian aid for the Afghan people. The new version also calls for diplomatic and political solution for the Middle East. Mr Fischer hopes such a formula will allow a few pacifist MPs to sign up for the full package, bombs and all.

However, those on the left wing of the Greens, as well as some in the Social Democrat party, already feel that Germany went beyond the constitution by participating in international peace-keeping efforts in the Balkans.

The vote to allow German troops to go to Kosovo led to fury in the Green party, resulting in a physical assault on Mr Fischer at one point. Attitudes have hardly softened since then, and some on the left wing intend to make a stand for the sake of what they believe is the spirit of the original Green movement.

-------- korea

North Korean missile

November 9, 2001
Inside the Ring, Notes from the Pentagon.
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011109-29655144.htm

North Korea is developing a new cruise missile that will provide a major boost in firepower for the reclusive communist government, U.S. intelligence officials said. The new missile's engine was tested in September at a development facility in North Korea and the marks from the rocket exhaust were detected by U.S. reconnaissance equipment. At first, the missile was difficult to identify by intelligence analysts because its air frame was wider than most of rockets in the North Korean arsenal. The arsenal includes short-range Scuds, medium-range Nodongs and long-range Taepodongs. One official told us the solid-fueled missile is either a new surface-to-surface missile or a surface-to-air missile. A second official said the missile appears to be a new anti-ship cruise missile. Analysts believe China may have provided assistance - either know-how or parts - for the new missile.

----

N. Korea Said Trying to Sell Missiles

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-North-Korea.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- North Korea, rebuffing U.S. nonproliferation efforts, is trying to sell missiles to three or four countries in Asia and the Middle East, a Bush administration official says.

The official refused to identify the countries but said Thursday they are concentrated in an area west of China to the Mediterranean Sea. There was no confirmation, but North Korea and Egypt were said to have reached final agreement on a missile sale.

A decade of crisis in North Korea's economy has brought widespread hunger and starvation. Missile sales have been among the country's few reliable sources of foreign currency.

North Korea has a long-range missile capability, but the official, briefing an Associated Press reporter on condition of anonymity, did not discuss the range of the missiles Pyongyang has on the sales block.

Unease over the North Korean missile program has provided impetus for the Bush administration's insistence that a national missile defense system be built.

North Korea has abided by a moratorium on missile flight tests that began in 1998, but the official said Pyongyang is thought to be working on rocket motors or other aspects of missile development.

In previous years, North Korean missile sales to countries such as Iran and Syria have been a sore point for the United States.

During its final months in office a year ago, the Clinton administration engaged in serious negotiations with North Korea aimed at weaning Pyongyang from its missile program in exchange for economic benefits.

After President Clinton left office, President Bush ordered a review of North Korea policy, then offered in June to reopen negotiations. The North Koreans have yet to respond.

North Korea is believed to have engaged in hundreds of transactions over the years related to missile sales. During negotiations with the Clinton administration, North Korean officials at one point said they would abandon their missile export program only if the United States would compensate for lost sales.

The Bush administration has offered to resume negotiations at any time or place. Pyongyang has shown no interest and halted a promising start toward accommodation with South Korea that began last year. Nonetheless, North-South reconciliation talks were resuming Friday in North Korea.

The Bush administration remains skeptical about North Korea's intentions. Gen. Thomas Schwartz, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, testified in March that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il ``stubbornly adheres to his `military first' policy, pouring huge amounts of his budget resources into the military at the expense of the civilian sector.''

He said a North Korean chemical and biological weapons capability threatens the 37,000 U.S. forces in South Korea and the country's civilian population centers.

``They could deploy both chemical and biological weapons on missiles,'' Schwartz said.

In his offer last June to resume talks, President Bush said he wants the discussions to include North Korea's extensive military deployments north of the demilitarized zone.

In an address to businessmen last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the domestic situation in North Korea in bleak terms.

``It is no coincidence that one of the poorest, most distressed countries on the face of the earth, North Korea, is known as the Hermit Kingdom,'' Powell said.

``They don't let anyone come in except under the most controlled circumstances. They will not let ideas come in. They will not let their people know what is going on in the rest of the world. And as a result, they cannot even feed their own people and have little hope for the future until they do start to open up.''

On the Net: Library of Congress page on North Korea: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/kptoc.html

-------- nato

A Long Road West for Russia
Despite Warming Relations, Integration Is a Distant Prospect

By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 9, 2001; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64568-2001Nov8?language=printer

MOSCOW, Nov. 8 -- For all the ambitious talk about Russia's historic opportunity to integrate into the West, the effort to open a small NATO information office in Moscow illustrates how difficult it will be to achieve that goal.

To set up an outpost of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization here took years of wrangling over matters of protocol large and small. After the ribbon had been cut in February, it took another six months to actually open the office. Even today, a long-promised military liaison mission has yet to open.

The delays, caused by mutual distrust, bureaucratic inertia and a failure of the two sides to communicate with each other, suggest that Russia has a long way to go before it can claim a seat in Western institutions and integrate into the global economy.

"Our standards are totally different," said Viktor Kuvaldin, a political analyst at the Gorbachev Foundation, a research center founded by the former Soviet leader who struggled to westernize his country. In any practical sense, Kuvaldin said, the hope of melding Russia into the West "is not an issue of today or tomorrow."

As Russian President Vladimir Putin prepares to fly to the United States next week for a summit with President Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the relationship between the two countries has undergone a profound shift, rekindling hopes that Russia could become a partner of the West.

Bush and Putin appear likely to seal a landmark deal that would deeply cut strategic nuclear arsenals while allowing the United States to pursue testing of a missile defense system without abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

Putin has expressed a desire for deeper ties to the West in other spheres as well. "It is also in our best interest to integrate Russia in the contemporary international community in every sense of the word, in defense, political, security," he told ABC's "20/20" this week.

But that desire may be frustrated by hurdles to joining international organizations -- including the World Trade Organization, NATO and the European Union -- any time soon. At the moment, policymakers do not expect Russia to become a member of the WTO until 2004 at the earliest; membership in NATO and the EU could be a decade away, even if both Russia and the organizations pursue it.

Even something as straightforward as granting Russia permanent normal trading status with the United States has proved beyond Bush's ability to deliver by next week's summit in Washington and Crawford, Tex. Under the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, Russia must undergo an annual review of its emigration policies to renew its trade privileges, a formality by now, but one Moscow considers demeaning. Bush hoped to lift that requirement in time for the summit, only to discover he could not gain congressional approval until the spring.

"There is much talk about a new alliance, but very little systematic work has been done within the administration in either country as to what kind of changes one needs," said Sergei Karaganov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a private group with close ties to the government. "There's a need for a bigger process, and very quickly, or the momentum will be lost."

"We have to change not only Russia's attitude toward the West but Western and particularly American attitudes toward Russia," former acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar said in an interview. "It's not easy, but I hope the American political elite will have the imagination to do this."

Russia's relationship with NATO suggests how difficult this could be. The issue will be one of several major items on the agenda at the Bush-Putin summit, but it's unlikely that "concrete down-to-earth plans that can be implemented will come out of it," said a NATO official familiar with the talks. Instead, the two leaders are likely to "confirm and re-stress that we should go down the road of cooperation, while leaving it up to creative thinkers on both sides to push through ideas which are still in the development stage."

In effect, both Russia and the West have already acknowledged that "the present relationship is unsatisfactory for both of them," the official said, but are not even close to producing a plan to change it. Indeed, the most promising development since Sept. 11 has simply been new interest by Putin and NATO in creating "an informal circuit" of communication to bypass the bureaucracy.

The prospect of Russian membership in NATO presents a host of hard questions, from the philosophical, such as redefining the mission of an alliance born out of the Cold War, to the practical, such as identifying what either side would be willing to give up. For instance, would Russia abandon lucrative arms deals with such countries as Iran, Iraq and China? And would the West make up the considerable funds that cash-strapped Russia would lose from its $4 billion-a-year arms trade?

Most officials and analysts agree Russia does not come close to meeting current NATO membership criteria, which require among other things a transparent military budget, firm civilian control over the armed forces and strong guarantees of democratic freedoms. While Russia might want an exemption, NATO would be hard-pressed to justify creating a different standard.

"We are in a deadlock right now," said the NATO official. "Russia doesn't want to [have to] apply to become a member, and NATO cannot hand them an open invitation without upsetting the nine other countries currently going through the application process."

As a result, instead of membership, most policymakers in Moscow and Washington and at NATO headquarters in Brussels are focused simply on reinventing Russia's ties to the alliance. But even with that, the cultural and political barriers remain formidable.

"On the one hand, people have recognized that the NATO-Russia relationship needs to be fixed, and there are a lot of ideas out there as to how to do that," said Robert Nurick, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center. "But institutionally, these wheels grind slowly. If left up to the bureaucracy to do it, it would take forever."

Formally, Russia works with NATO through a body called the Joint Permanent Council, set up in 1997 to assuage Moscow when the alliance admitted former Soviet satellites such as Poland. However, many in Moscow view it as a figurehead, as Karaganov put it. Instead of being "19 plus one," as it was dubbed, Russians consider it "19 against one."

Vladimir Lukin, the deputy speaker of the lower house of parliament, said he favors a program under which Russia, while not necessarily becoming a member, "would have stature to participate in military and political planning a priori, before decisions are made. Discussions are no longer enough; we need to find a way to prepare common positions."

Russia may be closer to strengthening its economic ties with the West, as foreign investors begin trickling back after the 1998 financial crisis, and the WTO works to craft a membership deal in negotiations scheduled to begin next year. Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Putin had impressed many foreign economists by pushing market reforms that eluded his predecessor, including a new land code allowing the sale and purchase of urban property and a flat-rate tax code for personal and corporate income.

The newfound friendship between Russia and the West has helped cement foreign business leaders' confidence that Putin is headed in the right direction. Just last week, ExxonMobil officials announced they would proceed with long-stalled plans to develop oil fields near Sakhalin Island off Russia's eastern coast, declaring themselves finally satisfied not only with regulatory and tax reforms but also with the improved spirit between Washington and Moscow. The oil giant intends to spend $4 billion over five years, the largest single investment in Russia's history and more than the $2.5 billion in total direct foreign investment in the first half of this year.

Yet the big deals have not overshadowed the continuing difficulties of other Western firms trying to operate in an environment without a reliable court system or corporate governance.

Sawyer Research Products, an Ohio-based crystal quartz producer, offers a cautionary tale. In the 1990s, Sawyer invested in a plant in Vladimir, not far from Moscow, but in recent months has seen its factory and $8.2 million investment seized by a partner allied with local government officials and local courts.

Gary Johnson, president and chief executive of Sawyer, said he supports greater Russian integration into the world economy. "However, we have to make sure there's a dose of reality that's brought to this," he said. "Saying that something's this way doesn't make it so."

Economists say they believe much unfinished business remains to bring Russia close to Western standards. A major problem is the country's primitive banking system; by and large, Russians cannot obtain mortgages, cannot withdraw money from a branch in a different city and do not trust banks enough to keep their savings there.

"They're not trying," said Tetsuya Uchida, chief Moscow representative of the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. "They're not making any effort to modernize the financial sector. So I think in order to integrate the Russian economy into the world economy, they have to make a lot more effort."

Russia's lack of a modern financial system would be a major issue for the WTO before admitting Russia. Others would be restructuring customs valuation, import licensing, value-added and excise taxes, industrial subsidies, technical trade barriers and regulation of anti-dumping measures.

"Despite the fact that the Cold War is already in the distant past and we have been political partners for some time, real barriers still remain in the economy," said Alexei Likhachev, who has helped lead the Russian parliamentary group on WTO. "Our hope is that the events of September 11 will break down many barriers, including these."

While Likhachev said he was preparing WTO-related proposals for Putin to take to the summit, he made clear that it is unrealistic for Russia to join before 2004, even with U.S. support. And joining the European Union is even more unrealistic. "They have much higher requirements," Likhachev said. "It's better for us to test our strength by trying to join WTO first."

But the international business community appears increasingly bullish on Russia. "We now know where Russia is heading, which is a very, very good signal and a strong signal," said Thierry Malleret of the World Economic Forum, the business group that usually meets in Davos, Switzerland. "Everybody knows it's going to take a long time. You don't put into motion such a radical shift overnight."

-------- pakistan

50 US cluster bombs found in Pak

The Times of India Online
Friday, November 9, 2001
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=763635550

The bombs were found in a remote area 70 km east of Kharan, in Pakistan's southern province of Baluchistan.

The site is 100 km south of the Afghan border and is in the vicinity of two Pakistani airbases that have been made available to the United States for their assault on Afghanistan -- Dalbandin and Shamsi.

A rural police official said the shepherd, identified as Eshar, found the bombs on Tuesday as he herded his sheep. He hit one and it exploded, injuring him in the legs, hands and torso.

A companion took him to Kharan hospital where local police were alerted.

The official said that with no bomb disposal experts on hand, special officers were sent to the site on Wednesday and destroyed the bombs, which carried US markings, by firing on them.

Cluster bombs are made up of hundreds of small bombs which scatter over a large area when the bomb is dropped.

They are meant to explode as they touch the ground, but experts say that on average 10 percent of the small bombs do not do so and can lie undetected for years, putting anyone who goes near them at risk.

The United States has being dropping cluster bombs on Afghanistan despite protests from human rights groups that they have the same effect as landmines and pose long term dangers to civilian populations. ( AFP )

----

Pakistan Tries to Split Army From Mullahs

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/international/asia/09STAN.html?searchpv=nytToday

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 8 -- It was called the mullah-military nexus, Pakistan's alliance of Muslim clerics and soldiers born out of the war that began next door, in Afghanistan, in 1979.

Over two decades, this alliance proved mutually beneficial. The army grew increasingly Islamized, producing officers sympathetic to the religious parties and their causes, like supporting the Taliban.

The army also backed the parties' militant wings, like the Movement of the Mujahedeen, allowing Pakistan to wage a proxy war in Kashmir, the issue behind two wars between Pakistan and India.

But today, in yet another sign of how Afghanistan has once again changed Pakistan's internal politics, the military government arrested Maulana Fazlur Rehman, a leader of a major Islamic party, the Society of Islamic Clerics.

Several days before, the government arrested Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the head of the country's most important religious party, the Islamic Party. He had called on the army to overthrow President Pervez Musharraf for backing the American bombing of Aghanistan.

"It is the weakest government we have had in our history," Syed Munawar Hasan, the secretary general of the Islamic Party, said in a telephone interview from Lahore. "They don't have any roots in the masses or in the parties. The only support they have is from America. They are frightened people, and frightened people do silly things."

Since siding with the United States after the attacks on Sept. 11, the military government has cracked down on religious parties, whose activities it had tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged. Meanwhile, it has taken only tentative steps in talking with the two mainstream parties, which have atrophied under military repression and whose leaders, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, both accused of massive corruption, remain in exile abroad.

As the West's indispensable ally, President Musharraf can expect only warm greetings during his current six-day foreign tour. The warmest of all could be in the United States, where until recently Mr. Musharraf, a general who seized power in a coup in 1999, had been a pariah.

But his departure Wednesday from his own country could only be described as hasty. The national mobile phone system was switched off briefly as his plane left here a few hours earlier than announced -- security measures, it appeared, for the head of a government that many describe as increasingly, and dangerously, isolated.

During a stop in Paris today, Mr. Musharraf described the religious groups as "a very small minority of religious extremists."

In an earlier speech, he said: "Some elements are trying to take unfair advantage of the situation and promote their personal agenda and advance the interests of their parties. They are poised to create dissensions and damage the country."

The words were a departure for the head of a military that has long had an important relationship with the mullahs. In the early 1980's, inspired by the religious overtones of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan and a need to legitimize his power, seized in a coup, Gen. Mohammed Zia ul Haq allied himself with this country's religious leaders. Islam was emphasized in everyday life, including in the military, until the general -- and several other senior officers, and the American ambassador -- died in a still unexplained plane crash over southern Pakistan in 1988.

But in recent weeks, in addition to arresting several religious leaders, the government has banned political groups from staging rallies and mosques from using loudspeakers to transmit political messages. General Musharraf, who is considered a moderate, has retired or sidelined officers who resisted the alliance or who were too closely tied with the religious parties.

Among them were Lieut. Gen. Aziz Khan, a so-called jihadi general who is said to have been one of the leaders in the military operation in Kargil, Kashmir, which caused a major confrontation with India in 1999, a year after the two countries first tested nuclear arms.

Despite the reshuffle, it is unclear whether Mr. Musharraf would have the full support of the military if America's war against Afghanistan goes on indefinitely.

"I think he's trying to play down the tensions, to say everything is hunky-dory," said Hamid Gul, a retired lieutenant general who is very close to the religious groups and supports the Taliban. "It's too much tightrope walking."

Mr. Gul, who was also the chief of the powerful military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, in the late 1980's, said he did not know whether the army and intelligence agency would support Mr. Musharraf if he ordered them to eliminate the armed groups allied with the religious parties.

"It will be seen only when there is a face to face," he said. "It will be a critical and dangerous situation.

"The past record of the army is that whenever there has been a conflict between it and the country's ruler, the ruler has fallen. It would be the first conflict when the president of the country is also the head of the army. I don't know how the army will respond to that situation."

The religious parties have never won significantly at the polls, remaining stuck in the single digits. But their influence lies in their ability to deploy thousands of supporters onto the streets, and the potential power of the armed groups allied to them can be measured in the millions of weapons that have washed into Pakistan from Afghanistan -- and from outsiders supporting various causes in Afghanistan -- over the decades.

Although support for the religious parties often comes from Pakistan's millions and millions of impoverished, individuals inside and outside the country, as well as the military, are believed to have financed them.

"As far as creating a problem for the government, they have the potential," Fazal ur Rahman, a senior researcher at the Institute of Strategic Studies, said of the religious parties.

General Musharraf's crackdown has therefore likely deepened the isolation of the military government. It lacks a base in the political mainstream, and has now allied itself with the United States, a move that many Pakistanis look at warily. Polls have shown support for that alliance has diminished steadily in the last two months.

Aziz Khan, the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said Mr. Musharraf has consulted widely with all segments of society, from religious to political leaders to intellectuals.

"The government has to look at the popular support it has," he said. "What is more important is whether the broad masses of the country are angry with the government or are they in favor with the government?"

"I don't think there is any truth in the statement that it has become isolated," he added.

The military took power in 1999 amid popular discontent over a decade of corrupt and ineffective civilian rule by first Ms. Bhutto and then Mr. Sharif. The military government banned political rallies and earlier this year, arrested hundreds of members of both those politicians' parties before a planned event.

The Pakistan Muslim League, the country's founding party, split in two after its leader, Mr. Sharif, went into exile in Saudi Arabia after the 1999 coup. One faction is said to be close to the government; Javed Hashmi, the leader of the faction loyal to Mr. Sharif, was arrested recently for criticizing the government.

Ms. Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People's Party, went into exile to Dubai after she and her husband were found guilty of corruption in 1999. This week, she said she had asked the government to guarantee her safe return, saying she could not get a fair trial here. But the government has said that she will have to face trial.

The party's leaders, analysts here say, are now hoping to return to the political stage after the military government reduces the power of the religious groups. At the same time, Mr. Musharraf may want to keep the leaders out and try to inherit their political base.

The mainstream political parties "are his natural allies because they have been meaning to do exactly the kind of thing Musharraf has done" by curtailing the religious groups, said Rifaat Hussain, the chairman of defense and strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University here. "But out of political consideration, they never found the political courage to do so. Now that Musharraf has done it, it is in his larger interest to carry these people with him."

But so far, Mr. Musharraf, who had promised general elections by next October, has not made any serious attempts to win them over.

-------- russia

FORCE OF ISLAM
Shackles Off, Russia's Muslims Are Still Chafing

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/international/europe/09RUSS.html

KAZAN, Russia, Nov. 5 -- Summoned by a familiar, plaintive call, young men dazed from studying stumble from their dorm rooms with slippers on their feet and prayer on their minds.

From 20 regions of Russia and bordering nations, they have made their way to an institution whose very name was unthinkable a decade ago: the Russian Islamic University.

Founded in 1998, the university already has 148 students in its newly refurbished building. It also has the support of the former Communist who rules Tatarstan, the semiautonomous republic centered around this urbane city on the Volga River.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union ended constraints on religious observance, the university seems to suggest a state-sanctioned Islamic revival. Though most Russian Muslims, numbering from 13 million to 20 million, are secular after decades of religious repression, young people are becoming more observant.

Now there are ever more places to pray: in Tatarstan, where there were about 18 mosques under Soviet rule, there are now more than 1,000, including one rising, on a grand scale, inside the white walls of this city's government fortress.

But in Russia, and even in tolerant Tatarstan, the state reaction to Islam seems to depend very much on what form of Islam it is.

Less than 200 miles from the Russian Islamic University, another Islamic religious institution, the Yoldyz madrassa, set in the bleak industrial city of Naberezhnye Chelny, feels itself to be under state siege.

After reports emerged of madrassa graduates going to fight against Russia in Chechnya, the Tatarstan government sent the school's Arab teachers back to their home countries and revoked the school's license. To seem less threatening, Yoldyz transformed itself into a girls' madrassa. Still no license. The state wants the school closed.

The rise in Islamic fundamentalism has concerned Russian officials, many of whom are wary of any religion that is not Russian Orthodoxy. The ongoing battle in Chechnya, whose rebels increasingly identify with Muslim extremists, has fueled anti-Islamic attitudes. Much of the concern has focused on the influence, in Chechnya and beyond, of money and ideology from Islamic countries.

Islamic revivalism may pose no immediate threat to the Russian federation, but it does present a challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin and his successors.

In seven republics of Russia, including Chechnya and, just barely, Tatarstan, Muslims are already a majority. They are not immigrants whose visas can be revoked. Their history here extends back more than a thousand years.

The madrassa reflects a younger generation's view that Russian Islam, shaped by accommodation to Czarist, and later Soviet, rule, is not worth preserving. The school's director, Malik Ibragimov, 36, who studied in Saudi Arabia for four years, says fundamentalist Islam is the only Islam. He calls the notion of a Russian Islam "rubbish."

The university, by contrast, reflects an effort to contain radical Islam by promoting Russian Islam -- defined as a centuries-old tradition of coexistence with other faiths and deference to the state.

But that deference is sure to be tested, and indeed already has been. Opposition is growing among Russia's Muslims to the American bombing of Afghanistan, and moderates say its continuation will radicalize their ranks. Some religious leaders are openly critical not only of America's policy but also of Russia's support for it. One said this week that Russian Muslims could justifiably take up arms to support the Taliban.

In the coming months, President Putin's favorable reception in the West may be countered by rising discontent at home among Muslims, not to mention Russian nationalists.

The president has met with Muslim leaders, and speaks about Russia's rich history of religious coexistence. But Muslims say he has done too little to control local authorities who, sometimes in collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church, have blocked the building of new mosques.

They say that by feeding fears of Islamic terrorism, Mr. Putin has encouraged antipathy toward Islam itself. The government blamed a series of unsolved bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people on Chechen Muslim terrorists. The estimated one million Muslims in Moscow, many dark-featured refugees from Chechnya and other republics in the northern Caucasus, are accustomed to police harassment.

Such measures are necessary, Russian leaders insist, lest other separatists draw inspiration from Islamic fundamentalism.

"If extremist forces manage to get a hold in the Caucasus," Mr. Putin said last year, "this infection may spread up the Volga River, spread to other republics, and we either face the full Islamization of Russia, or we will have to agree to Russia's division into several independent states."

Wahhabism, the puritanical Islamic sect that is strong in Saudi Arabia and is followed by Osama bin Laden, has long been an obsession of the Russian state and news media. Some Caucasus rebels studied in Saudi Arabia and identify with the Wahhabi branch. "Wahhabism" is now a Russian code word for extremism, and is banned by several republics.

But some believe that repressive measures aimed at Islamic fundamentalism will only help it spread. At Friday Prayers, the mosques are packed with young people who say that feeling persecuted by their own government only drives them deeper into Islam's embrace.

"When you go out from the mosque, you feel yourself stronger," said Rasim Zagirov, 25, a student from Dagestan living in Moscow.

Young Muslims are picking up where their grandparents left off when Communists executed thousands of Islamic teachers and closed most of the country's mosques and religious schools. Unable to look to parents for instruction on anything but the most basic rituals, some young people have turned to preachers and teachers who studied in Arab countries beginning in the 1980's.

Their education abroad, coupled with an influx of Arab emissaries offering spiritual guidance and financial support after the Soviet collapse, helped forge a generation of ardent believers.

Orkhan Djemal, the press secretary for the Eurazes Party, a Muslim-led group that controls a small faction in Parliament, said that for Russians like him, in their 20's or 30's, Islam is "not just some cultural code," not folklore. "It's a certain system of justice, freedom, honest life." He says that in majority Muslim areas, Islamic law should apply.

Fearful that young radicals could help fill the growing need for Islamic teachers, conservative Muslim leaders have encouraged President Putin to pay more attention to Islamic education. So has Tatarstan's president, Mintimer Shaimiyev.

Mr. Shaimiyev, a wily politician who survived the Soviet Union's fall, has formed strong economic relations with Arab and Muslim countries. But when it comes to religious education, even his prized Islamic university, President Shaimiyev no longer wants the help of Islamic countries. "We think it's better to render that support ourselves," he said.

A few years ago, concerned that Arab teachers were spreading Wahhabism, President Shaimiyev engineered the election of a moderate, Gousman G. Iskhakov, to head Tatarstan's Muslim Spiritual Board. Mr. Iskhakov, who is also rector of the Islamic university, quickly took religious schools in hand.

Those who advocate an Islamic state in Russia, or preach intolerance for other faiths, he said, threaten to disrupt the harmony between Muslims and Christians that has held for centuries in Tatarstan.

"The ideas proclaimed in Saudi Arabia don't fit here," he said.

Mr. Ibragimov, of the Yoldyz madrassa, hardly seems hopeful that his fellow Tatars, who he said prefer drinking to scripture, are ready for Islamic rule. Rather, he says he believes that the state fears that observant Muslims will start applying Islamic notions of justice to the corruption they see around them.

Indeed, the madrassa's message seems as much at odds with the go- go capitalism that now governs Russia as the Communism that once did. A drawing on a wall shows an unhealthy heart infected by the trappings of Western success -- a car, a cell phone, a bag of money.

During his four years in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Ibragimov noted, "there were no drug addicts, no theft, no alcoholism, no killings like in Russia, and if they call that Wahhabism, then I am for Wahhabism like that."

-------- russia

Putin Rules Out Possibility of Sending Russian Troops to Afghanistan

11/8/2001,
Afghan News Network
http://www.myafghan.com/news.asp?id=1006240711

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ruled out the possibility of sending Russian ground troops to Afghanistan to take part in the ongoing US-led anti-terrorist campaign.

"For us, sending troops to Afghanistan is what returning troops to Vietnam would be for you (the U.S.), and even more difficult because the Afghan war ended not as long ago as the war in Vietnam," Putin said in an interview with the U.S. TV company ABC, excerpts from which have been published on the Kremlin's official web site.

At the same time, he said that the Russian army is already helping the United States, primarily by sharing intelligence "of the best quality."

Based on its knowledge of Afghan realities, Russia is also assisting the Afghan opposition Northern Alliance by having supplied weapons worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars.

Putin also ruled out a leakage of nuclear technologies or materials from Russia. "True, one can speculate that somebody has tried to sell some nuclear secrets, but we have no documentary confirmation of such cases," he said.

Putin refuted reports that terrorist groups might have obtained anthrax or smallpox pores from Russia. He noted that the analysis of the material available in the U.S. "makes it quite obvious that it could not be made in the Soviet Union, let alone in Russia." Besides, "such materials were always heavily guarded in the Soviet Union and are now in Russia," he added.

On Russia's support for the U.S. in the fight against international terrorism, Putin stressed that Russia is not waiting for any preferences or any payment for its support, as it is "our common goal to fight against terrorism and defeat it, and we have a common enemy -- international terrorism." (Peoples Daily - China)

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

THE PRESIDENT
Bush Seeks New Volunteer Force for Civil Defense

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/national/09BUSH.html

ATLANTA, Nov. 8 -- President Bush called tonight for the creation of a volunteer civil defense service and told the American people that the specter of a long war against terrorism within the United States would force the country to confront "new responsibilities, both for the government and for our people."

In a speech here before an invited crowd of police officers, firefighters and postal workers and many of his political supporters. Mr. Bush tried for the first time to describe at length how he believes ordinary life must change in a country that is not accustomed to facing a serious threat of foreign-sponsored violence on its shores.

He said the volunteer civil defense service would help police and fire departments, as well as public health agencies, in times of emergency. Mr. Bush said participants in AmeriCorps, a national service program created by the Clinton administration, and the Senior Corps, would be asked to participate. The White House said it envisioned using 20,000 or more volunteers next year, to perform routine tasks so that emergency workers can pursue more urgent duties.

A similar proposal was introduced this week by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana.

On Friday, Mr. Bush is expected to ask governors to call up more members of the National Guard to help with airport security in the holiday season. He also created a task force to examine ways citizens could better prepare for terrorism and asked it to report back in 40 days.

Tonight, the president drew a picture of a country that must keep going to soccer and baseball games, to churches, mosques and synagogues but that must also put citizens on the street, much as Londoners stepped out of their homes in World War II to stand up against nightly bombing. But he also called for Americans to trust that their government was up to the task of protecting them and was expanding its legal powers to do just that.

Those words contrasted sharply with the ones Mr. Bush used a year ago, when in the last days of his presidential campaign he complained that his opponent, Al Gore, "trusts government, which stands in stark contrast to our view."

But most of Mr. Bush's talk tonight was meant to be inspirational and help Americans adjust to a new era when normal life goes on against a background of the threat of catastrophic terrorism.

"Life in America is going forward," he said, calling that "the ultimate repudiation of terrorism."

After two weeks of debate in Washington over when and how the government should declare special alerts, Mr. Bush tried to end the argument with a call for vigilant normalcy.

"A terrorism alert is not a signal to stop your life," he said in a large auditorium in the heart of Atlanta, the South's most economically vibrant city. "It is a call to be vigilant, to know that your government is on high alert and to add your eyes and ears to our efforts to find and stop those who want to do us harm."

But Mr. Bush also warned, "There is a difference between being alert and being intimidated, and this nation will not be intimidated."

Speaking before a giant screen that carried the words "United We Stand" and images of police officers and rescue workers, Mr. Bush concluded by invoking the last known words of Todd Beamer, one of the passengers who is believed to have moved against the hijackers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania on the morning of Sept. 11. "My fellow Americans," Mr. Bush said, "Let's roll!"

Mr. Bush faced a difficult political task tonight, because he had to argue that the United States was winning the war at home, even while acknowledging that investigators were no closer to solving the mystery of who sent at least three envelopes of anthrax through the postal system.

So far, 4 people have died and 13 others are known to have contracted the disease. And the Bush administration has been forced to fend off criticism that the government's initial response was disorganized, particularly the miscalculations by the Postal Service and health officials about how easily the anthrax could seep out of sealed envelopes.

In private, White House officials have conceded that they sent out contradictory, and sometimes wrong, messages about the precautions Americans should take, and Mr. Bush's talk tonight was partly intended to soothe a nervous country, while urging Americans to keep up their guard.

Mr. Bush did not offer the kind of stark warning his vice president, Dick Cheney, gave two weeks ago when he said that this might be the first foreign war in American history in which casualties at home outnumber those abroad. But the president did liken the battle to World War II, saying, "We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill all Americans, kill all Jews, and kill all Christians."

He noted, "We have seen that type of hate before."

Recounting his recent visit to a high school in Maryland, the president said he "realized that for the first time ever, these seniors will graduate in the midst of a war in our own country."

He stopped well short of making the kinds of claims of early victories in the war against terror that some cabinet members had made in recent days.

Just today, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the United States had "emerged victorious in the opening battle in the war against terrorism" because "two periods of extremely high threat have passed" without additional attacks. That was the first indication from an American official that the high alert declared last week, amid considerable debate about whether the evidence warranted it, has now been dialed down.

Mr. Ashcroft also said Americans had "endured the videotaped tauntings of Osama bin Laden," a name Mr. Bush never mentioned tonight, and he celebrated the fact that "we have not suffered another major terrorist attack."

Earlier this afternoon, touring the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention here, Mr. Bush said for the first time that he was "looking at different options" about how to protect Americans against an outbreak of smallpox. Terrorism experts have warned that it is possible for that disease to be spread through American cities.

But Mr. Bush said he was hesitant to back universal vaccination of the American public because of the likelihood that a small percentage of those receiving the vaccine would die.

"I would be deeply concerned about a vaccination program that would cause people to lose their life," he said.

While estimates of mortality from the vaccine vary, roughly one in a million people inoculated could die from the vaccine.

That would mean about 280 deaths in the United States or 70 times more than the four deaths attributed so far to the anthrax attacks. An additional 1,500 could suffer brain damage.

Some of what Mr. Bush said in his speech tonight he has said before, in bits and pieces, as the White House has moved to a war footing. He urged Congress to end a deadlock and send him legislation on airport security and an economic stimulus.

But some was new. The president acknowledged that the image America has abroad needs a lot of improvement.

"Too many have the wrong idea of Americans as shallow, materialistic consumers who care only about getting rich and getting ahead," Mr. Bush said. "But this isn't the America that I know."

He recounted the acts of kindness and faith he has witnessed around the nation in the last two months and argued that from the tragedy of Sept. 11, a better country was emerging.

"The moment the second plane hit the second building, when we knew it was a terrorist attack, many felt that our lives would never be the same," said Mr. Bush, whose own realization came as he was informed of the attack in a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Fla.

"What we couldn't be sure of then and what the terrorists never expected," Mr. Bush said, "was that America would emerge stronger, with a renewed spirit of pride and patriotism."

---

Commando audits

Inside the Ring
Notes from the Pentagon
November 9, 2001,
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011109-29655144.htm

At a time when commandos are busy preparing for war, U.S. Special Operations Command has sent out a warning: Watch what you spend out of the Pentagon's $20 billion in emergency money to fight the war on terrorism.

"It is incumbent on all SOF [special operation forces] financial managers to ensure the funds for these resources are fully accounted for and used for the intended purposes," states an internal memo, a copy of which we obtained. "All SOF activities are advised they should prepare for high levels of scrutiny and external audits of these operations."

Some Army special forces soldiers are viewing the memo as "poor timing." They note that their units are gearing up for extremely risky operations inside Afghanistan.

"No one advocates fraud, waste or abuse just because we are at war," said one soldier. "At the same time, if a commander is getting ready to send his men off to a potential firefight, he deserves the benefit of the doubt."

Sy Hersh

The highest levels of the Pentagon have rebutted Seymour Hersh's contention in the New Yorker that the first U.S. commando ground attack was a disaster. They specifically dispute the investigative reporter's contention that the Taliban seriously injured Delta Force soldiers in a fierce firefight.

The U.S. special operations community tells us there are other problems with the story.

For example, Mr. Hersh wrote that 16 AC-130 gunships backed the commandos in a raid in Kandahar. But there are only 21 of the aircraft in the entire Air Force inventory.

Military sources said the Pentagon would never send nearly the entire fleet to one war theater. And, the sources said, it would never use that many of the lumbering flying battleships over one target area.

Mr. Hersh also quotes a Delta Force member as saying, "Next time, we're going to lose a company."

Said an Army officer, "That unit works in troops and squadrons, not companies and battalions. It sounded like something based on an overheard conversation based on a rumor. Those guys don't talk to reporters about operations. It just doesn't happen. There aren't that many of them."

AC-130 gunships?

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones says the amphibious service might deploy high-powered AC-130 gunships now being used by special operations forces in Afghanistan.

Gen. Jones said he got the idea for a Marine version of the gunship, which is equipped with artillery and rapid-fire cannon, from its recent use over Taliban and al Qaeda targets.

The Marines already have C-130s that could be armed for airborne fire support for troops on the ground. Converting some existing Marine transports is a matter of finding the funds and integrating the gunships into the Marine inventory, he said.

Gen. Jones also said an AC-130 was part of a fire support package that saved his life during a battle in Vietnam. "I am probably here today because of one," Gen. Jones told a breakfast with defense reporters.

"I was a rifle company commander and we were out near a fire base near Khe Sahn, a very, very depleted rifle company, I might add, about 110 people, in May of 1968," he said. "And we were assaulted by, as they say in the old days, 'a numerically superior force,' probably a battalion strength, a fresh battalion that had just come over the Laotian border. And it took every firing battery that we could call in, which is artillery, and what we used to call the Spooky gunship on station for most of the night to be able to get to where the sun came up. It was a long night but that was my first conversion."

Short takes

•The Washington Times reported this week that Gen. Tommy Franks wants a fourth carrier to participate in strikes on Afghanistan. The USS John Stennis is due to leave San Diego well ahead of its scheduled January deployment.

One naval aviator told us it's not just about firepower. Pilots and planes are wearing down.

Two Navy carriers, the Carl Vinson and the Theodore Roosevelt, are launching the bulk of tactical strikes in near 24-hour-a-day operations. The Air Force has not yet won basing rights around Afghanistan for its strike fighters.

"Pilots in one squadron on the TR flew 75 hours last month," the pilot said. "The sorties are long and take a pretty good toll on the jets. Besides, it may be worthwhile to get as many new guys their first taste of combat as possible."

•The CIA, long a whipping boy of the left and blamed by some for failing to detect the September 11 attack, is gaining points with the public.

The agency, which President Bush has tasked to eliminate Osama bin Laden, reports it has received more than 20,000 e-mail messages since the attack, the vast majority of which offered support.

Langley normally receives about 600 job resumes a week. It has logged more than 21,000 the past six weeks. A few people have even mailed checks, which the CIA promptly appreciated, but returned.

"It's inspiring to the people who work here knowing the American people are behind us," said spokesman Mark Mansfield.

Said one e-mail, "Keep up the great work you all are doing! The American people know you have a difficult job, appreciate your efforts and sacrifices, and rely on your vital contributions to our nation's security. God bless you all and the work you do."

•Some active and retired naval officers are questioning Gen. Richard B. Myers' attempt at humor - at the expense of a subordinate.

"You don't do that as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," said one retired officer.

The wisecrack came when Gen. Myers was asked on "Meet the Press" last Sunday if the Taliban military power had been "eviscerated" as a Pentagon briefer claimed. The briefer, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, has not briefed the press since making the assertion.

"I think if you'd ask General Newbold today, he would probably choose another term," Gen. Myers said, before resorting to some time-honored military chain yanks.

"In fact, we were surprised that a Marine even knew what 'eviscerated' meant. Sorry - a lot of Air Force officers don't know what it means, either, I will assure you. No, I think that was a misstatement on General Newbold's terms, and I think we do have substantial fights ahead of us."

That seemed to be the start - and end - of a superior making fun of Gen. Newbold. But then came yesterday's Pentagon briefing.

When Gen. Tommy Franks was asked to assess the Taliban's combat power, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld interjected. "He does not believe they've been eviscerated," he said, to press corps laughter.

------

THE STRATEGY
U.S. Commander, Saying Rebels Need Help, Hints More Troops

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By THOM SHANKER with DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/international/09MILI.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 -- In his first Pentagon briefing since the war began, the American commander of combat operations in Afghanistan said today that the United States was continuing to build its war-fighting ability in the region, and hinted that larger deployments were still to come.

Even as he rejected criticism of the current war plan's heavy reliance on militias backed by the United States to oust the Taliban regime, the commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, said he could not be certain that those militias would prevail without the help of significant numbers of foreign troops, including Americans.

"As we stand where we are now, we want to keep all the options open," said General Franks, who is head of the United States Central Command. "We want to continue planning, so that we can continue to do what I described initially, which is provide our national command authority, provide the secretary, provide the president of the United States with credible military options, irrespective of what we hope or what we wish may happen."

Senior Defense Department officials and military officers declined to give details of potential new deployments, except to express doubts that sizable numbers of fresh troops would be moving into the region in coming days.

As General Franks made the rounds in Washington and briefed reporters at the Pentagon, rebel fighters of the Northern Alliance said that they had advanced to the gates of the vital northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and that they had delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban soldiers there to surrender or perish.

An aide to Ostad Atta Muhammad, a Northern Alliance commander, said his forces, in two elements, had marched to within five miles of the airport on the eastern edge of the city and to within 10 miles on the south.

Today was the third consecutive day that the Northern Alliance has claimed to have moved closer to Mazar-i-Sharif. The claim to be within easy reach of the city was not confirmed by the Pentagon, and General Franks said only that there was "a big fight that's going on in the vicinity."

The general described capture of Mazar-i-Sharif as important to American war planners. It would provide a land bridge to Uzbekistan, where the United States has positioned troops from the 10th Mountain Division, search-and-rescue helicopters for Special Operations and an unknown number of reconnaissance teams. Securing Mazar-i-Sharif would also allow the flow of military and relief supplies out of other Central Asia countries into Afghanistan.

Of the Northern Alliance claims, however, he said, "It's a bit early for us to characterize this as the success that will enable our establishment of the land bridge."

Even as they contemplated committing more forces inside Afghanistan, officials said today that concerns about security at a World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar that is to begin on Friday had prompted them to send the amphibious assault ship Peleliu from the Arabian Sea toward the Persian Gulf. The ship carries the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a 2000- member unit that specializes in rapid reaction missions, including extracting hostages.

Pentagon officials said the Peleliu, with its contingent of about 20 transport helicopters and 6 Harrier jets capable of vertical landings, would cruise within helicopter range of the city of Doha, where the trade meeting will be held.

General Franks traveled to Washington from his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., today to brief Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He will brief President Bush on Friday. He said that at the war's one-month mark, attacks would continue despite winter weather, and that a buildup would continue at the same time.

"What you see is that frequently we will undertake military operations at the same time we build capacity," said General Franks, whose command oversees military operations stretching from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Officials hope to increase the number of land-based attack jets operating in Afghanistan. But that is dependent on an assessment of three airstrips in Tajikistan, the former Soviet republic that borders Afghanistan to the northeast. Basing fighters there would greatly increase the number of daily strike missions, the vast majority of which are now assigned to Navy jets flying greater distances from carrier decks in the Arabian Sea.

Some military officers suggested that with fighters in Tajikistan, the number of daily missions could be increased three-fold.

A Pentagon official said that while the advent of winter was expected to hinder the efforts of both the Taliban and opposition groups in the north, military operations in the south could accelerate. The Taliban's political capital, Kandahar, is in the south.

A Defense Department official familiar with the war planning said: "Most of what needs to be done right now is in the south. The Taliban headquarters is based in the south."

If the Northern Alliance's claims prove true, the advance toward Mazar-i-Sharif sets the stage for a climactic battle that could determine the fate of northern Afghanistan. The city, a few miles from the Uzbek border to the north, has direct road access to most of the country's major cities, including Kabul in the south, Herat to the west and Taliqan in the east. If the city fell to the alliance, supplies could pour across the border from Uzbekistan, where American troops are stationed.

American military planners also envision the city and its airport as a possible base for operations inside Afghanistan.

Still in search of a victory since the start of American-led bombing and missile strikes on Oct. 7, the Northern Alliance also showed signs today that it was preparing for another offensive in northeastern Afghanistan, where they face the Taliban along a 50-mile front.

In an interview by satellite telephone, a Northern Alliance spokesman, Qudratullah Hurmat, said General Muhammad's forces and those of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum had advanced to the town of Chashma-i- Shafa, about 10 miles southwest of Mazar-i-Sharif. He said today's advance, like those before, had been accomplished with the help of an American aerial bombardment directed by United States military advisers on the ground. Mr. Hurmat put the number of American advisers in the area at 18.

"We should be able to move on Mazar-i-Sharif tomorrow or the day after tomorrow," Mr. Hurmat said from his post at Shulgareh, about 25 miles southwest of Mazar-i-Sharif. "The Taliban can no longer resist."

The Northern Alliance's march toward Mazar-i-Sharif seems halting at best, and one that could be reversed at any time. Today's advances, if true, would put the army back to where it was about a month ago, when its leaders announced, as they did today, that they would be entering the city soon. Then the Taliban counterattacked and threw the Northern Alliance back several miles.

Leaders of the Northern Alliance say that this time, the direct intervention of Americans has turned the tide in their favor. Mr. Hurmat said the American advisers had involved themselves in virtually every aspect of the campaign except the actual fighting, helping to plan attacks and direct the troops.

Mr. Hurmat said the biggest difference was American air power. Today alone, he said, American jets hit Taliban positions in three separate waves.

"The presence of the American officials is very essential to us," Mr. Hurmat said. "They are coordinating all of the tactical aircraft that are supporting us."

---

AMERICANS
Shadowy U.S. Military Presence in an Afghan Town

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/international/asia/09AMER.html

JABUL-SERAJ, Afghanistan, Nov. 8 -- Just after 7 this morning, two seemingly ordinary vehicles drove quietly through the center of this bustling market town and headed south. A green, four-seat Russian jeep followed a silver Nissan pickup truck loaded with backpacks, dark plastic containers and a box labeled "battery charger" in English.

At first glance, the two vehicles appeared to be a television crew out for a shoot. But just outside the village, the two cars turned onto a military base here and drove through the front gate without stopping. They sped up a large hill that overlooks the strategic Shamali plain and disappeared.

When reporters who had been following the vehicles tried to enter the base, soldiers blocked them.

The early morning encounter was one of several sightings of groups of men believed to be American Special Forces soldiers here guiding American airstrikes. A senior Northern Alliance official confirmed today that 12 American soldiers are here, but the Americans themselves and alliance security officials playing host to them are taking extraordinary steps to keep their activities hidden.

Even so, a local soldier associated with the Americans' security detail here described the daily routine of the Special Forces. He said they left a tightly guarded government compound each morning at 7 with large amounts of equipment in their truck. They then spend their days guiding bombing strikes from different front- line positions, which are closed off each day to the news media. At dusk, they usually return home. The next day, the cycle begins again.

The movement of the two vehicles this morning demonstrated the great efforts being made to hide the American presence here. The two vehicles that passed through the market appeared ordinary at first; scores of Japanese-made pickups and Russian-made jeeps are driven by local commanders and foreign journalists here. But the truck used this morning belonged to the security detail of Bismillah Khan, the commanding general of the region for the anti- Taliban Northern Alliance.

The drivers of the two vehicles and a young armed man seated in the back of the truck were soldiers assigned to the general's personal security team. The man sitting in the passenger seat of the jeep was one of a handful of Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry officials here who speaks English. The passengers in the jeep could not be seen because its windows, like many here, were tinted.

About 45 minutes after the two vehicles entered the base, the truck drove out empty. The truck's driver became angry when a photographer took pictures. Guards at the base then ordered the reporters to leave. Thirty minutes later, the jeep left the base. Only the driver and Foreign Ministry official were in it.

The senior alliance official who confirmed today that the 12 Americans were operating in the area said that he did not know their exact activities, but that they rotated in and out of the area. One group arrived on Sunday in a white, twin- engine airplane that landed on a new dirt airstrip in the town of Golbahar, he said.

Whether secret or not, the American team here does appear to be having an effect on helping the United States focus its airstrikes against the Taliban. Front-line alliance soldiers reported a sharp increase in bombing beginning on Tuesday, two days after the white plane arrived. American jets also appear to be focusing on a distinct part of the front line for the first time. Several days of heavy bombing have focused on Taliban positions in the villages of Khalazai, Khalal Nasroo, Rabat, Kharabak and Esterqich, all on the western edge of the front.

----

A Homeland Pep Talk

New York Times
November 9, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/opinion/09FRI1.html?searchpv=nytToday

President Bush sought last night to bolster the confidence of Americans in his administration's efforts to protect their safety at home. It was a rather muted performance, less inspiring than his address to Congress in September. But his call on the nation to "live in a spirit of courage and optimism" was well taken.

Mr. Bush had undoubtedly hoped by this point to have some positive news to convey about the war on terrorism, at home or abroad. But instead he had to acknowledge that the government has no idea yet who is responsible for the bioterrorism at home, and to repeat his previous assertion that the American cause in Afghanistan is righteous. It was a more difficult message to deliver than his original declaration of war against the terrorists. The president stressed his own optimism not only that America would prevail, but that the events of "two of the most difficult and most inspiring months in our nation's history" had made the nation stronger and better.

One of Mr. Bush's major points was that Americans could help win the war against terrorism by volunteering for community service at home. The public has shown itself eager to do something positive in the wake of Sept. 11, and Mr. Bush is right in trying to help channel that desire.

The president would have been more reassuring if he had offered new evidence of concrete steps being taken to keep the nation safe, including greater powers for Tom Ridge's homeland security office and more spending to help hospitals, health departments and public safety agencies cope with the new and uneasy world he described.

Mr. Bush's address, to cheering firefighters, police and postal workers in Atlanta, was part of a series of appearances that the White House has designed to provide coherence to the confused messages relating to homeland defense in the last several weeks. On that front he was less successful. He called on Congress to pass legislation on airport security and economic stimulation. But he gave no indication that he was prepared to help break the partisan impasse on Capitol Hill.

This week, for instance, the president told a closed-door meeting of Republican leaders that he would veto any attempt to spend more than the $7.7 billion that his budget aides say has been set aside for homeland security. He reportedly cited budgetary constraints. But Democrats have won some Republican support in Congress for worthy spending programs to increase production of vaccinations for smallpox, help local public safety agencies and improve security at borders, transit systems, nuclear facilities, dams and other sensitive parts of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, they have also loaded up their "emergency" spending with pork-barrel items like crop subsidies for apples, blueberries and pumpkins. That only makes it possible for the White House to ridicule what otherwise should be taken seriously as genuine efforts to strengthen the fight against terrorism. Mr. Bush should be using his prestige to push for a pork-free spending plan and an airport security bill that mirrors the bipartisan Senate approach rather than the more ideological Republican House version.

Mr. Bush did display the sense of positive determination that has become the hallmark of his approach to the war on terrorism. A primary responsibility of a president in a time of crisis is to give Americans confidence in themselves and their ability to defeat the enemy. So far Mr. Bush has performed that job well, and the nation has responded by giving him overwhelming support for the fight both at home and abroad. But Americans would have more reason to be sanguine if there were more of an aggressive effort to bring coherence to the management of homeland issues and not just to the discussion of them.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

GREENPEACE SAYS SOLAR ENERGY MEANS INDEPENDENCE

November 9, 2001
ENS
http://www.ens-news.com/ens/nov2001/2001L-11-09-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, Solar energy should be a key component of any U.S. plan aimed at creating energy independence and jump starting the economy, suggests a new study by the conservation group Greenpeace.

The study, titled "Solar Promise," illustrates the job creation and pollution cutting potential of solar energy by describing the benefits that states could realize if they install a small solar array on just one of every 100 houses.

"A small investment in solar power would light the way to energy independence, new jobs and reduced pollution for every state in the nation," said Kert Davies, Greenpeace global warming and energy campaign coordinator. "Solar power is safe, practical and clean. And best of all, you don't have to import it or plunder precious wilderness to get it."

Voters in San Francisco handed the solar industry a endorsement Tuesday by passing two ballot measures that provide funding for developing up to 50 megawatts (MW) of solar energy in the city - enough power for 10,000 average homes.

"With today's vote, San Francisco has jumped ahead of the nation in starting to build an energy future independent of the whims of the big fossil fuel companies or the utilities," said Danny Kennedy, of Greenpeace's Clean Energy Now! campaign. "California's strong step forward with renewable energy won't mean much if other states don't follow its lead."

A recent Greenpeace report shows the United States is in danger of losing the solar race to other countries in Europe and Asia where governments have taken an active roll in promoting solar energy. In the United States, Greenpeace found major differences between states in terms of the incentives they offer consumers for investing in solar power.

States in the Sunbelt were not always the most solar intensive states. For example, New York has more installed solar power than Florida; and Nevada, low on the solar power list now, has major projects planned in the near future.

The "Solar Promise" study is available at: http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/energy/solar

-------- energy

Land-Based Ecosystems Won't Head Off Global Warming

UniSci
09-Nov-2001
http://unisci.com/stories/20014/1109012.htm

The earth's land-based ecosystems absorbed all of the carbon released by deforestation plus another 1.4 billion tons emitted by fossil fuel burning during the 1990s, but we can't rely on this convenient uptake to head off global warming in the future.

This is the conclusion of a new study published this week in the journal Nature. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere from human activities.

"We could easily see this robust transfer of carbon out of the atmosphere and into land-based ecosystems that occurred in the 1990s slow down in the future," says the paper's lead author, David Schimel, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Fossil-fuel burning, cement manufacture, and deforestation gave off about 7 billion tons of carbon per year during the 1980s and 8 billion tons annually during the 1990s, about half of it ending up in the earth's atmosphere, according to the study.

In the 1980s, the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere from deforestation about equaled that taken up by land ecosystems into various "sinks."

During the 1990s, the balance tipped, and 1.4 billion tons more carbon ended up in the land-based biosphere than in the atmosphere, despite continuing deforestation.

Land-use changes in the Northern Hemisphere have been partly responsible for carbon uptake during the 1990s. In the United States, trees and other growth expanded on abandoned agricultural land, while a reduction in fires allowed forests to spread. Enhanced plant growth spurred by increasing carbon dioxide and nitrogen deposits -- a process more noticeable in Europe and Asia--also helped clear the air of CO2 buildup.

"Forests can only replace farms for so long," explains Schimel. "Eventually new trees and grasses reach maturity and soak up less carbon dioxide. Similarly, there's a limit to how much forests can fill in and spread, even with successful fire suppression."

The boost in CO2 and nitrogen fertilization will peak as well, though at high levels. Over time, the effects of climate change on ecosystems will probably reduce sinks globally, write the authors. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide emissions are expected to continue to rise because of human activities.

An unusually large uptake of atmospheric carbon in the early 1990s was due to the climate's natural variability, researchers suspect. Globally there appears to be a net release of carbon into the atmosphere during warm, dry years and a net uptake during cooler years.

Recently, evidence has grown linking changing levels of atmospheric CO2 to the El Niņo/Southern Oscillation and its widespread impacts.

For the tropics, scientists expected computer models to show a large increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide released by deforestation during recent decades. In fact, no such increase emerged, indicating a potentially large sink in the low latitudes. Local-scale studies show carbon absorption by a range of mature tropical forest types, but the authors warn that such processes may not be true of the entire region, since tropical ecosystems vary widely.

The lack of data, both atmospheric and ecological, combined with a complex meteorology, make estimates of tropical fluxes highly uncertain, they caution.

Previous attempts to evaluate carbon uptake in North America compared to that occurring in Europe and Asia have been controversial. In this paper, the authors conclude that the 1990s sink was roughly split between Eurasia and North America, with Eurasia slightly leading.

Because they used only atmospheric data in their analyses, the authors caution that the resulting distribution pattern is highly uncertain. Even so, it appears consistent with independent analyses of satellite vegetation data. The uptake patterns across the continents also make sense physically: they appear to be driven by broad climate patterns interacting with historic human management of ecosystems.

Carbon accumulates at higher rates in intensively managed ecosystems and those recovering from disturbance, the researchers note. For example, Chinese inventory studies of continental plant growth show a major carbon sink resulting from extensive programs in foresting and reforesting.

David Schimel's portion of this research was funded by NASA and by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's primary sponsor.

Contact: David Schimel, Anatta
schimel@ucar.edu
anatta@ucar.edu

---

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Up 3.1 Percent in 2000

Yahoo
Science - Reuters
Nov 10 Friday November 9 News
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011109/sc/energy_emissions_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Carbon dioxide emissions spewed by the United States and its territories jumped 3.1 percent last year, one of the biggest annual increases in a decade, a government report said on Friday.

Carbon dioxide emissions, which accounts for more than 80 percent to total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, reached 1,583 million metric tons of carbon equivalent, according to the Energy Department's analytical arm.

The report comes as officials from more than 160 countries met in Morocco to try to finalize a global warming agreement to cut greenhouse gases that are blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere.

The Bush administration has said the United States, the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, will not take part in the accord, because it would hurt U.S. companies and the American economy.

The 3.1 percent growth last year in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions was the second highest annual increase during the 1990-2000 period, and was well above the average annual 1.6 percent growth rate for the period, said the department's Energy Information Administration. Only the 3.4 percent increase in emissions during 1996 was higher.

``The high growth in carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to a return to more normal weather, decreased hydroelectric power generation that was replaced by fossil-fuel power generation, and strong economic growth,'' EIA said.

Carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants were up 4.7 percent last year to 642 million metric tons, almost double the 1990-2000 average annual increase of 2.4 percent.

``Contributing to the relatively large increase in 2000 was a 4.2 percent increase in (fuel oil) use for electricity generation, as well as an 11 percent reduction in electricity generation from renewable fuels, including a 14 percent drop in hydroelectric generation,'' EIA said.

Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased by 2.5 percent last year to 1,906 million metric tons, well above the 1.3 annual growth rate of the last decade, the agency said

-------- health

Cold War Research Baby Teeth Found

The Associated Press
Friday, November 9, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1295-2001Nov9?language=printer

ST. LOUIS -- About 85,000 baby teeth collected from 1959 to 1970 and only discovered recently could help pinpoint whether fallout from Cold War nuclear bomb tests caused cancer and other health problems years later, researchers say.

The teeth from the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey determined that children were absorbing radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests by the United States and the Soviet Union. The study received international attention and helped persuade the nation to adopt a 1963 treaty banning atmospheric bomb tests.

The teeth were found in May in hundreds of boxes by Washington University officials cleaning out a school bunker where they'd been stored since the 1970s. They were in small envelopes fastened by rusty paper clips to cards with details about the children who gave the teeth to science instead of the tooth fairy.

"We flipped out when we heard about the 85,000 teeth," Joseph Mangano, national coordinator with the independent, nonprofit Radiation and Public Health Project research group, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story Friday. "It was like an early Christmas present."

Now, researchers in New York are hoping to find the owners of the teeth and determine whether they've experienced health problems, such as thyroid cancer, in the decades since.

Mangano wants anyone born and living in St. Louis from the late 1940s through the 1960s - especially if they believe they submitted teeth - to contact his group. If matched with any of the baby teeth, the person would be mailed a health questionnaire.

"I see no reason not to join in a study like that, to be part of history," said Eric Pickles, given that his is include among the baby teeth. Pickles, 43, said he hasn't had health problems.

After World War II, the U.S. government set off about 100 nuclear bombs in aboveground tests in the West. Public concern about radioactive fallout rose as scientists began to find it in the environment and milk supply downwind from the explosions.

The survey, which began in late 1958, became so well-known that letters addressed simply "Tooth Fairy, St. Louis" got to the committee's office. By the time it ended in 1970, the project had collected nearly 300,000 baby teeth, mostly within a 150-mile radius of St. Louis.

All seemed forgotten until this spring, when the teeth were found.

The new study has no funding. The study's results will be published in peer-reviewed medical journals, Mangano said.

-------- human rights

The Humanitarian Front

Christian Science Monitor
November 09, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1109/p10s2-comv.html

Money to fund relief efforts to help millions of displaced Afghans, for now, isn't a severe problem. It has poured in to relief agencies from around the world.

But life for Afghan refugees amassed at Afghanistan's borders and unable to cross, as well as those already eking out existence in overcrowded camps just over the border in Pakistan, remains tremendously difficult. Some 3.5 million Afghan refugees already are in Pakistan and Iran as a result of the Taliban regime's repression, a severe drought, and the most recent military campaign.

But a new - and even more immediate - problem is the plight of at least several hundred thousand Afghans now internally displaced, largely as a result of the US bombing campaign over the past month. Getting assistance to these individuals is proving far more difficult.

The European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Poul Nielson, says some 2 million Afghans are on the move inside the country, leaving towns for more rural areas. Racing against a rapidly ticking weather clock, air drops (already less effective than trucked-in supplies) will be even less useful when the snows arrive. Aid workers have criticized the air-dropped packets, since there's no supervision of distribution, they could land in the mined areas, or they could wind up in enemy hands.

The US has begun to augment drops of food packets with plastic sheeting and wool blankets. Those supplies, plus more food, are moving to Turkmenistan from Italy in anticipation of a large movement of refugees northward away from Taliban-held territory. This aid is part of the $320 million package for Afghanistan the Bush administration announced last month.

As the US continues to struggle with the inherent problems of rooting terrorists out of caves while sending in massive relief, it will have to find ways to reach these internally displaced refugees, as well as step up efforts to convince Afghan civilians that its military campaign is directed solely at terrorists and their backers.

European Parliament President Nicole Fontaine called for "humanitarian corridors" in Afghanistan through which aid could safely be transported. The US could provide military escorts to aid workers through such corridors, but that would require significant reductions in Taliban control. The prospect of humanitarian disaster strongly argues for a more flexible strategy in pursuing an end to the military component of this "new war."

-------- police / prisoners

THE REORGANIZING
Ashcroft Plan Would Recast Justice Dept. in a War Mode

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/national/09BURE.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 -- Attorney General John Ashcroft announced today that he had ordered the Justice Department to assume a wartime footing and had begun to revamp the agency's priorities under a plan that would send thousands of employees from Washington to offices around the country where they would work to prevent terror attacks.

The plan envisions a reorganization of the Justice Department and important component agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, each of which would be overhauled to take a more aggressive stance in the effort to ward off terrorism.

"Today, I am announcing a wartime reorganization and mobilization of the nation's justice and law enforcement resources to meet the mission of the Department of Justice," Mr. Ashcroft said in a speech to managers at the Justice Department.

He offered only a few specifics, but outlined a fundamental shift in priorities that would occur in the next five years under a plan to be submitted to Congress. The changes could require Congressional approval -- if, for example, the F.B.I. ceded its authority over drug trafficking to the Drug Enforcement Administration, as some law enforcement officials have suggested.

Some changes Mr. Ashcroft discussed today have been discussed in news reports. Some are new, like the proposal to redirect 10 percent of the Justice Department's budget, about $2.5 billion, to counterterrorism efforts, mainly for upgrading technology.

Among the new initiatives disclosed today was an order by the attorney general to allow federal prison authorities to eavesdrop on attorney-client conversations involving people suspected of posing a direct threat to national security.

Mindy Tucker, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said the order, published in the Federal Register on Oct. 31, would apply to about 100 federal prisoners. The authorities would not be allowed to use information overheard in criminal cases against the suspects, she said.

"The team that listens is not involved in the criminal proceedings," Ms. Tucker said. "There's a firewall there."

The order drew criticism from civil libertarians, who said it impinged on constitutional protections of attorney-client confidentiality.

In recent days, the F.B.I. has been criticized for its inability to track down the source of anthrax mailings and for issuing vague terrorism alerts that offered no idea of the potential targets or weapons. Although the time period of the warnings has lapsed, officials said the country should remain on alert. The Congressional response to Mr. Ashcroft's plan seemed positive, if less than fully enthusiastic. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which would review the proposals, said he agreed with realigning the bureau to focus on terrorism.

But Mr. Leahy seemed unwilling to allow Mr. Ashcroft complete control of the reorganization. He recommended that the bureau's counterterrorism program be reviewed by an existing commission led by William H. Webster, a former F.B.I. director. Mr. Webster is examining the bureau's counterintelligence operations as a result of the unmasking of a senior agent, Robert P. Hanssen, as a Russian spy.

"You cannot plan for the future effectively without knowing what went wrong in the past," Mr. Leahy said.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who has long been an F.B.I. critic, said the changes at the bureau should redefine its institutional attitudes. "As with any reorganization, the devil will be in the details," Mr. Grassley said. "I hope for new accountability measures, not just structural changes."

Mr. Ashcroft said that the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, who has been conducting a review of the bureau since taking office in September, plans to present preliminary reorganization plans to the Justice Department by the end of the year. So far, the bureau's top national security official and deputy director have announced their retirements, and Mr. Mueller is expected to shake up the entire managerial ranks.

The immigration service will also be given a new mission. "In the war on terrorism, the restructured Immigration and Naturalization Service will focus on preventing aliens who engage in or support terrorist activity from entering our country," Mr. Ashcroft said. "It will lead the campaign to detain, prosecute or deport the terrorist aliens who are already inside the nation's borders."

Mr. Ashcroft said that James W. Ziglar, the immigration commissioner, was planning to close some of the gaps in immigration procedures that made it relatively easy for the hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks to enter the country. The plan includes stricter enforcement of existing regulations and reducing the backlog of visa and immigration applications.

Mr. Ashcroft also said he intends to break up the immigration service, separating border enforcement and immigrant-service functions, an idea raised early in the Bush administration that had languished until now.

Mr. Ashcroft's announcement was the latest step in his aggressive stewardship of the Justice Department since the Sept. 11 attacks. It was also a forceful assertion of his dominance of the government's legal and law enforcement establishment, a position of power all of his predecessors have sought, but few ever obtained.

Some senior career officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have privately complained that Mr. Ashcroft, in his insistence on cracking down on terrorists, may go too far to weaken rules that bar investigations of people and groups based solely on their political leanings.

Mr. Ashcroft has said he would defend the rights of all Americans, but legal rights groups say he has shown little concern about the erosion of civil liberties.

"Defending our nation and defending the citizens of America against terrorist attacks is now our first and overriding priority," Mr. Ashcroft said. "To fulfill this mission, we are devoting all the resources necessary to eliminate terrorist networks, to prevent terrorist attacks, and to bring to justice all those who kill Americans in the name of murderous ideologies."

--------

Lawmakers Debate Sending in the Troops -- at Home

Friday, November 9, 2001,
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,38416,00.html

WASHINGTON - For Americans, it's a jarring sight: Uniformed soldiers, armed and dangerous, patrolling the train stations of New York, the bridges of San Francisco Bay and the streets of dozens of cities in between.

It's a sight common in much of the rest of the world, but one that American leaders as far back as the Founding Fathers have scrupulously tried to avoid except in disaster areas and desolate stretches of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Now, it could become even more common.

A handful of U.S. senators and some in the Bush administration are calling for changes in a 150-year-old statute, known as the Posse Comitatus Act, that keeps the military out of the business of domestic law enforcement.

"We've got to figure out a new Posse Comitatus that allows the Department of Defense to step forward and defend America," insists Georgia Democrat Max Cleland.

The talk is pricking the ears of civil libertarians everywhere.

"We don't want the militarization of civilian life," said Todd Gaziano of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"There are obvious needs in a natural disaster or other emergencies that might necessitate some temporary assistance, but otherwise local police control is important," he added.

Posse Comitatus

Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 to end military occupation of the Reconstruction-era South. As originally written, it prohibits the armed forces from enforcing civil laws "except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress." The language was intended to echo the Founding Fathers' distaste for a standing federal army watching over Americans at home.

Since its passage, courts have interpreted the law to allow the military to provide equipment, training and facilities to local, state and federal law enforcement. To go beyond that, though, the president must declare a national emergency - a bio-terror attack, for example, or an insurrection or natural disaster.

Presidents have set aside the act several times, most recently in 1986 when the National Security Decision Directive authorized soldiers to patrol the borders for drugs. In 1992, 4,000 members of the Army and Marine Corps joined National Guardsman in Los Angeles to quell the riots that followed the acquittal of police accused of beating Rodney King.

It is when these police actions end in violence - and they did in 1997, when Marine drug patrols on the southern border shot and killed a young goatherd - that questions arise about whether soldiers are better suited to war than civil service.

"The danger is they are not trained properly in confronting civilians," noted Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice for the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

"Military people are not known to be thinking about the Constitutional rights of the people across from them on the battlefield - that's the position you'd be putting them into if you had them enforce the law in American cities," he said.

Re-Examining Military Doctrine

The notion of amending the act first surfaced last month, when Sen. John Warner, R-Va., wrote the secretary of defense asking his department to "re-examine military doctrines," including Posse, to "enable our active duty military to more fully join other domestic assets in the war against terrorism."

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before the Armed Services committee, said he "strongly agrees" with Warner on the issue. As of now, however, there is little more than talk on the issue.

"Certainly the Department of Defense is looking at all the ways to defeat terrorism and provide homeland security for our nation - but I'm not aware of any single situation right now where we are in a need of pursuing an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act," said Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking, a Defense Department spokesman. "I haven't heard of any concrete recommendation for any changes."

Besides, experts say, the Posse act as it stands does not preclude the U.S. from using soldiers to patrol nuclear facilities, enforce quarantines in the event of another bio-attack or even to restore domestic order, whatever that takes.

In fact, the military is already on the case. The Marines recently formed three counter-terrorism units charged with deterring, detecting and defending against terrorist activity on domestic soil.

Under normal circumstances, such moves might not be necessary, says Paul Schott Stevens, an attorney and former legal adviser to the National Security Council for President Ronald Reagan. "But we are facing circumstances that aren't normal," he says. "If we had a bio-attack tomorrow in the United States it might be necessary to impose and enforce quarantines. It isn't something that anyone predicted would happen, but the DOD needs to be thinking about expanding its role."

J. Kelly McCann, a Marine and special operations expert who runs his own training facility out of Virginia, says there is a role for the military in homeland defense, but perhaps not in law enforcement.

"That would be a mistake. No one wants big numbers of domestic military patrols," he said. The Military should be there to augment law enforcement and only when it is clearly out of the authority of local, state and federal enforcement agencies, he said.

Others argue that new times call for new attitudes about law enforcement.

"Before, homeland security was viewed as a law enforcement issue and a criminal justice matter," Stevens offered. "Now it isn't simply a crime, but an act of war against the U.S. and if that is the case, the (Department of Defense) must of course be involved."

-------- terrorism

MESSAGE
As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms

New York Times
November 9, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER and ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/international/09TERR.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 8 -- As scores of world leaders converge on New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, Osama bin Laden's latest message to the world has provoked profound new security concerns for the United Nations and its global work force.

How to respond to Mr. bin Laden's perceived threats is far from clear. In his message, he singled out not only the United Nations, but various world leaders -- either implicitly or by name, as was the case with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Analysts say that his oratory is further proof of his shrewdness in assessing the mood of both the West and the Muslim world, as well as his ability to take advantage of both.

In the videotaped message broadcast last weekend by the Arab language television network Al Jazeera, Mr. bin Laden said, "The United Nations is nothing but a tool of crime," and he called Secretary General Kofi Annan a "criminal." Mr. bin Laden then listed a series of conflicts in which he charged that the United Nations was siding with the "crusader" interests of the West and against Muslims.

"The U.N. is now a target," said Toby T. Gati, the State Department's senior intelligence official during the Clinton administration and someone with long experience in United Nations issues. "That does not necessarily mean that nice building in New York is the only target, it means U.N. workers who are all over in every country -- they are really the people in danger."

In Manhattan, United Nations officials are taking no chances as they prepare the East River headquarters for a week of speeches and meetings in which terrorism and Afghanistan will dominate the agenda. President Bush will deliver an address on Saturday. "We are on high alert," said Shashi Tharoor, a senior aide to Mr. Annan. "We are taking extremely advanced security measures."

As the accused mastermind of the worst terrorist attack on the United States, Mr. bin Laden continues to cast himself as a populist holy warrior who has not only eluded the military campaign thus far, but has also kept an open channel to his followers by smuggling videotapes that reach a restive Muslim population around the world.

"President Bush contends that this is a war against terrorism and not against Islam, and Osama bin Laden is taking the exact opposite approach -- saying it is not a war against me, it is against Islam and he shows how the `oppressors' are conducting their crusade," observed J. Stapleton Roy, who also headed the State Department's intelligence bureau.

Some experts see Mr. bin Laden's denunciation of the United Nations and of some world leaders, like Mr. Putin, as a warning to them, since both the United Nations and Russia are emerging as crucial participants in the political maneuvering intended to undermine the ruling Taliban and destroy Mr. bin Laden along with his Al Qaeda network.

United Nations officials and other experts were struck by the vehemence directed at the world body as it tries to play a vital role in forming a new Afghan government to displace the Taliban. A senior United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, was just returning from meetings with Afghan leaders in Pakistan and elsewhere when Mr. bin Laden issued his attack against the organization, causing some alarm about Mr. Brahimi's security.

"I think bin Laden wants to preempt the work of the United Nations and undercut Brahimi's efforts," said Phyllis E. Oakley, a veteran diplomat who also served as the State Department's intelligence chief.

In Bosnia, Mr. bin Laden charged, "our brothers have been killed, our women have been raped and our children have been massacred in the safe havens of the United Nations and with its knowledge and cooperation."

Notwithstanding reports that Mr. bin Laden is hiding in a cave with poor communications, he seems keenly aware that the Bush administration is working more closely with Russia to try to marshal an effective military campaign on Afghanistan's northern flank. He railed at the "Russian bear" for its war in Chechnya, where Mr. Putin has asserted that he has been fighting terrorists trained in Mr. bin Laden's camps and financed with Al Qaeda money.

"Russians have annihilated the Chechen people in their entirety and forced them to flee to the mountains where they were assaulted by the snow and poverty and diseases," Mr. bin Laden said in the video.

Mr. bin Laden's videotaped message was largely ignored by many Western media organizations, especially television networks that had been urged by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to handle such messages with extreme care since they might be used to pass coded messages to terrorists.

Since that warning, neither Ms. Rice, nor any other Bush administration official, has made public any government assessment of whether any such messages have been detected in Mr. bin Laden's statements. A White House spokesman said tonight that he had no knowledge of any follow-up by Ms. Rice. A State Department official said he was not aware of any analysis that had been done by the government to determine whether Mr. bin Laden's messages contained any coded signals.

The overall effect of Ms. Rice's actions has been to get Mr. bin Laden's statements off American television and off the front pages of most newspapers. Ms. Gati said this may be a mistake, since Americans needed to understand that they were dealing with an implacable enemy.

"This is an important speech," she said of the 2,600-word statement. "It tells you that you cannot bargain with someone like this, you cannot reconcile. This reinforces my belief that we are doing the right thing in bombing him because if we don't want this to be a war of civilizations, we have really got to get rid of a person who is intent on making it that way."

After several days of analysis, experts say they are struck that Mr. bin Laden shows that he is well informed about the the military campaign that seeks to destroy him. He is aware of opinion polls that show "more than 80 percent of Westerners" have been "saddened by the strikes that hit the United States." And, he is equally certain, as he asserts, that "the vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes" because they "were in reaction to the huge criminality practiced by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries."

As with his earlier messages, the core of Mr. bin Laden's evangelism is a clash of religions -- not just Muslim against Christian, or Muslim against Jew, but Muslims against everyone else, the "infidels." In his first taped message of Oct. 7, Mr. bin Laden declared that "these events have divided the world into two camps" -- Muslims and "infidels." Now, he said, "The entire West, with the exception of a few countries, supports this unfair, barbaric campaign, although there is no evidence of the involvement of the people of Afghanistan in what happened in America."

Like President Bush and the Pentagon, Mr. bin Laden said he regretted the death of civilians in Afghanistan, but expressed no sympathy for the thousands of lives lost on Sept. 11. He called the attacks the "great strikes that hit the United States in its most important locations.

"The people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with this matter," he said. "The campaign, however, continues to unjustly annihilate the villagers and civilians, children, women, and innocent people."


-------- activists

Mexico frees two jailed environmentalists

Story by Kieran Murray
9/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13210

MEXICO CITY - Mexican President Vicente Fox freed two prominent environmentalists from prison yesterday amid widespread allegations that they had been tortured into signing false confessions on bogus charges.

Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera had led protests against illegal logging activities in the southern state of Guerrero before they were jailed in May 1999 on weapons and drugs offenses.

Both men say they only confessed after being tortured for several days and claim they were being punished for their attempts to defend the forests of the Sierra Madre mountain range from rapacious logging.

They were backed by international human rights groups and have been awarded a number of prestigious human rights and environmental awards.

Fox had been under intense pressure from rights groups to take action in their case, and his move yesterday immediately freed the two from prison in Iguala, Guerrero.

Fox said he had taken into account requests for their freedom, their medical condition and a report from a U.N. working group on arbitrary arrests.

"With these actions we demonstrate through deeds my government's commitment to the promotion and observance of human rights in our country," Fox said at a news conference, adding that their release was in line with international conventions on human rights and torture.

The case returned to the national spotlight last month when one of Mexico's most prominent human rights lawyers, Digna Ochoa, was shot dead in her office.

Ochoa had represented Montiel and Cabrera, and officials believe her murder was linked to the ongoing disputes between environmentalists and logging interests in Guerrero.

"The lines of inquiry are pointing toward the state of Guerrero, toward the conflicts of the peasant farmers with logging groups," Mexico City Prosecutor Bernardo Batiz said earlier this week.

Mexico's state news agency Notimex quoted Mariclaire Acosta, the government's top human rights official, as saying Montiel and Cabrera were released on humanitarian grounds because they both suffered from poor health.

Montiel was imprisoned for seven years on charges that he cultivated marijuana and was in possession of weapons, while Cabrera received a 10-year sentence on gun charges.

The sentences were upheld earlier this year by a state appeals court, but rights groups alleged corruption in Guerrero's courts and members of Fox's Cabinet were openly skeptical of the charges against Montiel and Cabrera.

----

Nader's Party Is in the Green

By Dana Milbank
Friday, November 9, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64965-2001Nov8?language=printer

Speaking of money, the ever-hopeful Green Party yesterday won a Federal Election Commission ruling awarding it "national committee" status, giving it the right to accept donations of as much as $20,000 from individuals and to funnel funds to state and local committees.

The party's new status is a potential boost to Ralph Nader, the party's 2000 nominee, who campaigned against large donations and the influence of fat cats in politics. Campaigning under stricter contribution limits, Nader won 3 percent of the popular vote last November.

Does the Green Party's bid for a higher money limit send a contradictory message?

"It's definitely not about the money," said party spokeswoman Nancy Allen. To prove that, the party has decided not to accept donations of more than $10,000.

The ruling places the Green Party in the rarefied company of the Republicans and Democrats and the not-so-rarefied company of the Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law and U.S. Taxpayers parties.

-------

Homes not Bombs Shuts Down Space Warfare Facility

From: Brian Burch <burch@tao.ca>
November 9, 2001

Two Arrested as Historic Demonstration Confronts the Myths of a Peaceful Canada at A Site that Produces Components for the Tools of Global Terror

On November 9, the cover was lifted on one of Canada's best kept and most dangerous secrets: the research and development of Space Warfare at the "Defence" Research Establishment Ottawa (DREO). The secret was revealed despite the presence of almost 100 police officers, RCMP and CSIS agents, riot squad backup, the full canine unit, a police airplane constantly flying back and forth overhead, tons of cop equipment, and the presence of two ambulances and one fire crew from the Kanata Fire Department.

DREO's involvement in solving mysteries such as "how do we fit 70 tons of lethality into a 20 ton package?" was the focus of Friday's nonviolent direct action by Homes not Bombs, at which two individuals were arrested and charged with trespassing for attempting to enter the facility with citizens' inspection forms along with a Pledge of Conscience to End Work for War.

Even with all of the state force on display, though, authorities were taking no chances, and the presence of the demonstrators closed space warfare work at DREO for a complete day. Before the demonstration even began, the 50 or so people who had gathered from Burlington, Ancaster, Hamilton, Peterborough, Ottawa, Toronto, and Aylmer learned that their intention to go to Ottawa had shut down the space warfare facility.

Indeed, a source who worked for one of the facilities inside the DREO compound-a collection of buildings including a branch of Industry Canada as well as the Canadian Forces Electronic Warfare Centre-called in confidence to inform us that all employees within the area had been told not to come in to work or, alternatively, to arrive before 7 am, for after that no one would be allowed in or out of the area (the latter choice an unlikely outcome for a crew that is fairly privileged and not too concerned with punching time clocks).

The source also informed us that in addition to riot police, the area would be thick with RCMP and CSIS agents. We were also told that an open letter written by Homes not Bombs to all employees of DREO had not been shared with employees; nevertheless, numerous employees curious about the growing "security" presence had checked out details of the action on a protest website, and were aware of its nonviolent intentions.

The morning of the 9th was quite surreal. DREO, located in a fairly rural section of Nepean, is fronted by a large grassy area and features a long, winding road to its gated entrance, where it sits behind a wide swath of barbed wire fence. As the peace bus pulled up to the intersection where folks turn in to go to DREO, we could see scores of police lined across an open field. Behind them, more police were scattered behind the fence, along with dozens of police vehicles, police wagons, and a Cecil B. DeMille-style camera wagon with a huge tripod and large, almost old-fashioned looking camera to film the day's activities for the secret service files of RCMP and CSIS (despite the fact that such filming was recently ruled to be unconstitutional by the Canadian Human Rights Commission).

Add to this "middle of nowhere" feel was the disembarking of the Wizard of Oz's lion (Brian Edgecombe), scarecrow (Matthew Behrens), tinman (Matthew Beatty), and Dorothy Gale (Kirsten Romaine, fresh from her recent role as the Tooth Fairy in the Oct. 31 peace demo); a series of detectives; people dressed in scientist lab coats, and a host of props and costumes for the demonstration ahead. Police attempts to "explain the rules" of the day were ignored by the whole group as they set up the day's scenario: the staging of The Wizard of DREO. The Peace Detectives and Raging Grannies immediately occupied a space on the grounds which police had told us was strictly forbidden but which we knew was perfectly within our rights to occupy.

Homes not Bombs then engaged in a farcical play in which on-the-spot reporter Mary Tart (aka Laurel Smith) from "Bombardment Tonight," on hand to celebrate the "accomplishments" of DREO scientists, instead runs into a group of peace detectives scouring the grounds for clues about space warfare work.

Sure enough, those clues were found and read out to the eager but still skeptical Tart. Meanwhile, as the Homes not Bombs crew moved about the grounds, the police had to continue shifting their line, eventually forced to place hundreds of feet of yellow crime scene tape across a broad swath of grassy area. This was appropriate, one peace detective pointed out, because DREO's work as a space warfare facility qualifies the area as a crime scene, and police were thanked for their ability to understand this, even if that had not been their intention. Some also thought this was a ribbon to be cut because the closure of DREO might signal we could cut the ribbon on what we really wanted to do with the site: the creation of a far more needed, and safer, Civil Society Research Institute.

Shortly thereafter, visitors from Venus were welcomed, visitors who had picked up the Wizard of Oz characters in a stray hot air balloon. All commenced to sing songs about why they were at DREO-to help scientists within use their hearts, brains, and courage to end work for war (see songs below) and help everyone find a home (because there's no place like it, as Dorothy learns). They started their journey to see the "Wizard of DREO" by following the Space Warfare Road (missiles and lasers and bombs, oh my!) and immediately ran into a thick line of police officers. Dorothy explained that they had come such a long way and really needed to see the Wizard, because we had to end the threat to humankind posed by space warfare and other research conducted at DREO.

Seeing this was a no go, the characters proceeded to join a scene in which scientists converted an affordable housing project into a giant missile (egged on by war criminals including George Bush, Bill Clinton, Jean Chretien). The missile was then used to crash into and destroy another housing project (a symbol of the fact Canada spends almost 800% more on war and armed enforcement of injustice than it does on affordable housing programs, and that any budget surplus which might have gone to housing this fall is instead going to blow up housing in Afghanistan).

With the help of the visitors from Venus and Oz characters, the scientists were eventually convinced to join the community in rebuilding the housing and dismantling the missile, a symbol which we hoped would not be lost on the real scientists within DREO.

After reading aloud the Pledge of Conscience (see below), dozens of people then moved forward to meet the police line face to face. All carried with them origami peace cranes, which were offered to the police in an attempt to open dialogue and open the door to DREO. When police did not accept these peace gifts, the cranes were placed at the officers' feet, and soon one could see a long line of cranes at the feet of a long line of police.

Attempts to enter the facility were physically blocked by police on occasion after occasion, forcing those attempting to get in to continue walking further out into the "countryside," followed by police walking almost sideways to keep up. Eventually, the Scarecrow (played by Behrens, of Toronto) was able to evade police and enter a more "secure zone", where he was immediately stopped. After sitting down and asking again to see the Wizard of DREO and offering the Pledge of Conscience, he was immediately arrested, placed in tight plastic handcuffs, and hauled off between the police dogs to an awaiting van to be photographed, losing a good deal of his straw stuffing in the process! He was shortly followed in custody by Andrew Loucks of Hamilton, who had attempted to enter with a similar pledge and who had been engaged in the choreography of police line evasion a bit longer. He had with him a copy of the excellent new Rosalie Bertell book Planet Earth: The Newest Weapon of War, which he was prepared to read out to the police even if it took all day and night. A third inspector was stopped and, when he sat on the ground, reading out international laws and covenants that DREO's work violates, police formed the new "security" line around him, refusing to make further arrests.

In the end, the two arrestees did make it inside the DREO compound, as the police van was driven inside the gates to a temporary holding facility that had been set up to process arrestees. Originally told we would be charged with trespassing, the charge was suddenly upped to the criminal obstruct police. After some interesting discussion between various police agencies, it seems the decision to downplay the demo was made, and the two were placed back in the van, driven out to the peace bus, and cut free from their tight handcuffs and issued trespass citations.

This first-ever demonstration at DREO was historically significant, in that, to the best of our knowledge, Canadians have never attempted to conduct a direct action at one of the five federally funded war research facilities (a situation we hope more Canadians will remedy in the coming months). The demonstration and the campaign of education around it were also interesting, as they showed how much Canadians like to cling to the myth of Canada as innocent, peacekeeping nation.

Indeed, the absence of most media (Bombardment Tonight notwithstanding!) from the demonstration, despite a well-documented five-page press release detailing Canada's involvement in Space Warfare, showed how little courage exists within the fifth estate. Canadian media prefer to focus on the big bad U.S., conveniently forgetting how difficult it would be for the U.S. to be big and bad without Canada's $5 billion a year war industry and security state apparatus. The lack of media coverage was consistent with the lack of response from many corners of Canadian society to the news that a self-proclaimed "peaceful" nation was involved in the development of the star wars system of the Bush administration as well as plans to help institute the US Space Command's infamous 2020 Vision document about conquering space in order to control earth.

The refusal to confront our own violence was reflected as well in the decision by the board of Bells Corners United Church not to house the demonstrators the night before; the political decision was based in large part on one member's refusal to believe that DREO was involved in such work (he used to work there), and neglected to take note of those sections of the Bible which call on us to be peacemakers, to do justice, to beat swords into ploughshares.

Furthermore, the continued stance of most "established" peace groups that we should lobby the federal government not to be involved in star wars when we already have made that commitment in physical terms speaks to the psychosis of a country which is like a bump-covered carpet: so much dirt has been swept underneath the rugs that you cannot walk across it anymore without falling over and then wondering why the ground wasn't level.

Thomas Merton seems to sum up Canada's hypocrisy best when he writes, "The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Our social structure is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions."

The "order" and "respectability" of quiet and ignored space warfare research was interrupted for a whole day at DREO on November 9; it will be interrupted at trial, and will continue to be interrupted. We hope the RCMP and CSIS have large budgets for the film crews that recorded our every move from the ground, from atop vehicles, from the skies-they'll certainly need it!

Pledge of Conscience to End Work for War Recognizing:

- the horrible toll war has taken during the 20th century, and to honour the 110 million-plus victims of warfare (a figure which surpasses one billion victims, according to leading radiation expert Sister Rosalie Bertell, when we consider the victims of the nuclear fuel cycle);

- the massive poverty which consumes the majority of the world's population because governments continue to devote over $800 billion annually to the planning and preparation for warfare instead of investing these funds in desperately needed social programs;

- the world's biggest polluter is war and the military;

- plans to further militarize space and wage war from the upper atmosphere represent what could be a final, fatal blow to the fragile planet we call home;

- the only way for us to stop war is to stop not only war but the political, social and economic causes of war;

I/we pledge never to participate in

1. the research, design, development, testing, production, maintenance, targeting, or use of any form of military weapons (be they nuclear, biological, chemical or so-called "conventional" weapons), their means of delivery, and their related components;

2. research or engineering that I/we/informed individuals and groups have reason to believe will be used by the military.

I/we further pledge to

- cut any and all ties to military contractors;

- seek out only that work which benefits the environment, humanity, and all life forms which inhabit the earth.

- place a restriction limiting to civilian uses only any technological advances and research which result from our work.

Homes not Bombs,
PO Box 73620,
509 St. Clair Avenue West,
Toronto, Ontario M6C 1C0 Canada
(416) 651-5800, tasc@web.ca

-------

Does Anybody In This Country Get It?

by Geov Parrish
Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2001
From: <mollypj@yahoo.com>

Does anybody in this country get it?

Does anybody understand what the United States is on the verge of doing?

Experienced, respected food aid organizations warn that even before the bombing of Afghanistan began on October 7, some 7,500,000 Afghans were -- through a gut-wrenching combination of poverty, drought, war, dislocation, and repression -- at risk of starving to death this winter. When the bombing began, almost all delivery of food from the outside world stopped. Now, roads and bridges are destroyed, millions more people are dislocated, and the snow is steadily approaching from higher elevations and from the north.

For weeks, aid organizations, along with voices from throughout the region, have been begging the United States to call off its bombing campaign, at least for long enough so that aid agencies can conduct the massive transfer of food into and throughout Afghanistan that is necessary to prevent death on a scale the world has not seen in a long, long time.

Seven and a half million people at risk of dying in a matter of months.

That's three times the number of people Pol Pot took years to kill. Thirty-five times the number that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. If 5,000 died on September 11, we're talking the equivalent number of deaths to ten World Trade Centers, every day, for 150 days.

Slow, painful deaths. Entirely avoidable deaths. Deaths whose sole cause is not the United States, but most of which can still be prevented -- except that the United States is refusing to allow them to be prevented.

It repulses me to say this, but I suspect a lot of Americans don't care. They'd rather see the United States "get" Osama bin Laden (though there's no actual evidence that we're any closer to that today than we were two months ago, and probably the task is harder as he becomes more popular and protected).

An apocalypse of this scale is simply unimaginable to most of us: no food, in a country with no roads left, no vehicles, displaced people, lost relatives, where the winters are too cold to walk or ride a donkey even to an adjoining village where there might be food.

It's a long way from driving to the nearest Safeway or drive-thru lane when you're hungry. But a lot of people in this country do not care that a staggering number of innocent people are on the verge of being condemned to death, or that most of the world will blame the United States, correctly.

We should care. If the object of this war was to thwart terrorism -- to bring existing terrorists to justice, and to isolate them politically and culturally so that others won't throw in their lot -- in less than a month, the United States already has perpetrated one of the most abject failures in military history.

It still does not know where any of Al-Qaeda's leadership even is. It is on the verge of succeeding in its goal of creating a unified Afghanistan government -- unfortunately, Afghans are uniting behind the Taliban, as warlord after warlord sets aside long-standing differences to stand shoulder to shoulder to fight the American invaders. Tens of thousands more young Muslim men are lining up to cross the borders into Afghanistan to join them. The ones that survive the experience will carry a lifetime of hate: living, breathing proof that within a month, America bombed a country but lost its war in spectacular fashion.

That's today. What will happen if millions of Afghans die this winter? How much future terrorism will the dunderheads of the Bush Administration have inspired then? If several million Islamic sisters and brothers starve to death, innocent civilians trapped between winter and the rage of America, how many of Islam's 1.2 billion adherents -- or the five billion other people on earth -- are going to take George Bush's proclamations about eradicating "terrorists" and "evildoers" to heart, and label him, and us, as the prime examples?

In less than two months, the United States government has gone from the moral high ground of being victimized by one of the most heinous crimes in world history, to being within a week or two of quite visibly committing a crime so much larger as to obliterate the world's memory of September 11.

Remarkably, almost nobody in the United States seems to have noticed, understood, or cared. While even progressives wring their hands over the ambiguity of a war fought under the auspices of America's legitimate right to defend itself, a situation is unfolding in which there is absolutely no moral ambiguity at all, and for which many people will want to hold each of us as accountable as the world held post-war Germans.

Where were you? What did you say? How could you allow this to happen? Or, a more likely reaction in the Islamic world: Why should millions of you not die as well?

America will have set out to isolate one man, and instead killed millions and isolated itself. And much of the world will not rest until we are brought to our knees. Seven and a half million people. The snowline is creeping down the mountainsides. The food is almost gone. The infrastructure is in shambles. There will be no "independent verification" of the body count. There wasn't in the Holocaust or Rwanda or Cambodia, either. The judgment of the world did not need one. The clock is ticking.

Where were you?

Molly Johnson - SLO CO Grandmothers for Peace 6290 Hawk Ridge Place, San Miguel, CA 93451 805/467-2431

--------

curse the WTO
The Thai approach seems rather brilliant on a couple of levels

Organization: Angelfire (http://email.angelfire.mailcity.lycos.com:80)
Fri, 09 Nov 2001
From: Gary Morton <command@interlog.com>

Tokyo - Hundreds of Thai farmers burned chillies in a protest against the World Trade Organization on Friday, but other anti-globalization protests were small in Asia and mixed with an anti-war message ahead of WTO talks in Qatar.

The sombre atmosphere created by the war in Afghanistan and September's attacks on the United States has helped prevent a repeat of the violence that hampered the 1999 WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle and other recent international gatherings.

It has also helped keep the number of protests in Asia small as delegates from 142 countries gather on Friday in the oil-rich Gulf state for the five-day meeting, where big powers hope to launch a new round of global trade talks.

India saw the biggest demonstration as thousands marched through the centre of New Delhi to protest against the WTO meeting and U.S.-led air strikes on Afghanistan in a demonstration organised by India's ultra-left Communist Party.

"Down with World Trade Organization. Indian government - leave the WTO," the protesters shouted. "Save agriculture, stop the WTO and save us from hunger," shouted one of its leaders.

"Down with American imperialism. Stop the bombing in Afghanistan. Take back American forces from Afghanistan," the protesters also shouted as thousands of red-flags fluttered under bright sunshine.

Police in riot gear put up barricades to stop protesters from marching towards parliament and water cannon were on standby.

About 500 protesters, including 400 from leftist South Korean trade unions and 100 unionists from 16 countries, marched in Seoul on Friday, scuffling briefly with riot police in an otherwise peaceful protest.

"We oppose the Fourth WTO ministerial meeting, which is trying to start a new round to uphold only the interests of the United States and countries of the centre," said a statement issued at the march.

"Trade liberalization and opening aggravates the gap between rich and poor worldwide and destroys the economic base of every country," it said.

In Thailand, about 1,000 protesters, mostly farmers, held a peaceful two kilometre march from Bangkok's World Trade Centre shopping mall to the U.S. Embassy on Friday to condemn Washington and its leading role in the WTO. Demonstrators blocked part of an eight-lane road in central Bangkok and shouted anti-globalization and anti-U.S. slogans on various issues - from expensive patented AIDS drugs to farm subsidy schemes.

The protest was highlighted by a traditional Thai "cursing ceremony" directed at the U.S. government where protesters burned chillies in a frying pan, filling the air with eye-stinging smoke.

Rain marred a protest in Tokyo's Shinjuku entertainment district where about 200 people handed out pamphlets reading "No to globalization that expands the gap between rich and poor!"

Another said: "Stop an expansion of gaps between rich and poor, oppression of human rights, child labour, terrorism."

Negotiators at the WTO ministerial conference, held under a blanket of tight security in Doha, the Qatari capital, hope to agree on a new round of global free trade talks to begin early next year, something they failed to do in Seattle in 1999.

On Saturday, Hong Kong's Confederation of Trade Unions plans to march to China's Foreign Ministry building when WTO ministers are due to approve China's entry into the WTO.

"We want to ask Beijing to be mindful to the needs of its workers and the poor," said a spokeswoman at the confederation.

A few representatives of the Solidarity and Resistance to Globalization, an alliance of 21 local Hong Kong groups, will join in, said Yuen Hoi-yan, spokeswoman for the alliance.



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