------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Osama claims he has nukes
Bin Laden says he has nuclear weapons
Al-Qaeda nukes may have reached US shores
White House dismisses bin Laden nuclear threat
Bush Says Nations May Face Nuclear Terror Threat
Muslim Nuclear Plant Worker Sues
Pakistan Seeks Gestures From U.S., Says Musharraf
Musharraf: Nuclear Arsenal Safe
Radiation Leaks at Japan Nuke Plant
Russia's Putin Optimistic on Missile Defense Deal
Putin Confident of ABM Compromise
Rocket in Alaska Launch Destroyed
An Easy Bargain With Russia
U.S. Mulls Russia's Iraq Commitment
Cause of Sub's Sinking Still Unknown
SWITZERLAND: PRACTICING FOR NUCLEAR DISASTER
Stuck in the Cold War
FIRST CHAPTER 'Hit to Kill'
Warren E. Henry, Physicist and Educator, Dead at 92
Officials don't want cleanup delayed
In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda

MILITARY
Bush Chides Some in Coalition for Inaction
Northern Alliance Reports More Advances
Taliban loses Mazar-e-Sharif
ARGENTINA: NO AMNESTY FOR MILITARY
U.S. Bombs Suspected Bio-Weapons
Loner Likely Sent Anthrax, FBI Says
Anthrax Teamwork Is a Struggle
FBI fleshes out likely anthrax sender
Blair: Coalition Has Momentum
Khatami condemns attacks on U.S. as 'anti-Islamic'
Bush Affirms Commitment to Mideast Peace
KOREAS: NEW TALKS, OLD WORDS
Bush, Musharaff Text
Pakistan Fears Lack of Afghan Political Plan
STAR WARS TEST ROCKET DESTROYED OVER ALASKA
Text of Bush's Speech at U.N.
Bush to tell U.N. 'time for action' is now
Air Force gets use of airfield in Tajikistan
Attacks Alter Course at War College

ENERGY AND OTHER
U.S. Isolated as World Moves on Climate Treaty
Climate treaty set to be ratified
Climate conference reaches deal
Countries Approve Kyoto Rules
BRITAIN: FOOT-AND-MOUTH CONTROLS LIFTED
China officially joins WTO
China admitted to WTO
Trade Ministers Approve China's Entry Into WTO

POLICE / PRISONERS
Spy Plane Crew Member Speaks of Heroes
Why Trade Center Towers Stood, Then Fell
Developments in Terror Investigation
After Asking for Volunteers, Government Tries to Determine What They Will Do

ACTIVISTS
Germans Protest Nuclear Waste
World Briefing



-------- NUCLEAR

Osama claims he has nukes:
If US uses N-arms it will get same response

DAWN
10 November 2001 Saturday 23 Shaban 1422
By Hamid Mir
http://www.dawn.com/2001/11/10/top1.htm

KABUL, Nov 9: Osama bin Laden has said that "we have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent and if America used them against us we reserve the right to use them".

He said this in a special interview with Hamid Mir, the editor of Ausaf, for Dawn and Ausaf, at an undisclosed location near Kabul.

This was the first interview given by Osama to any journalist after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

The correspondent was taken blindfolded in a jeep from Kabul on the night of Nov 7 to a place where it was extremely cold and one could hear the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing away. After a wait of some time, Osama arrived with about a dozen bodyguards and Dr Ayman Al-Zuwahiri and answered questions.

Hamid Mir: After American bombing on Afghanistan on Oct 7, you told the Al-Jazeera TV that the Sept 11 attacks had been carried out by some Muslims. How did you know they were Muslims ?

Osama bin Laden: The Americans themselves released a list of the suspects of the Sept 11 attacks, saying that the persons named were involved in the attacks. They were all Muslims, of whom 15 belonged to Saudi Arabia, two were from the UAE and one from Egypt. According to the information I have, they were all passengers. Fateha was held for them in their homes. But America said they were hijackers.

HM: In your statement of Oct 7, you expressed satisfaction over the Sept 11 attacks, although a large number of innocent people perished in them, hundreds among them were Muslims. Can you justify the killing of innocent men in the light of Islamic teachings?

OBL: This is a major point in jurisprudence. In my view, if an enemy occupies a Muslim territory and uses common people as human shield, then it is permitted to attack that enemy. For instance, if bandits barge into a home and hold a child hostage, then the child's father can attack the bandits and in that attack even the child may get hurt.

America and its allies are massacring us in Palestine, Chechenya, Kashmir and Iraq. The Muslims have the right to attack America in reprisal. The Islamic Shariat says Muslims should not live in the land of the infidel for long. The Sept 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children. The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power.

The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) was against killing women and children. When he saw a dead woman during a war, he asked why was she killed? If a child is above 13 and wields a weapon against Muslims, then it is permitted to kill him.

The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians. The American Congress endorses all government measures and this proves that the entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims. The entire America, because they elect the Congress.

I ask the American people to force their government to give up anti-Muslim policies. The American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today. The American people should stop the massacre of Muslims by their government.

HM: Can it be said that you are against the American government, not the American people?

OSB: Yes! We are carrying on the mission of our Prophet, Muhammad (peace be upon him). The mission is to spread the word of God, not to indulge massacring people. We ourselves are the target of killings, destruction and atrocities. We are only defending ourselves. This is defensive Jihad. We want to defend our people and our land. That is why I say that if we don't get security, the Americans, too would not get security.

This is a simple formula that even an American child can understand. This is the formula of live and let live.

HM: The head of Egypt's Jamia Al-Azhar has issued a fatwa (edict) against you, saying that the views and beliefs of Osama bin Laden have nothing to do with Islam. What do you have to say about that?

OSB: The fatwa of any official Aalim has no value for me. History is full of such Ulema who justify Riba, who justify the occupation of Palestine by the Jews, who justify the presence of American troops around Harmain Sharifain. These people support the infidels for their personal gain. The true Ulema support the Jihad against America. Tell me if Indian forces invaded Pakistan what would you do? The Israeli forces occupy our land and the American troops are on our territory. We have no other option but to launch Jihad.

HM: Some Western media claim that you are trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons. How much truth is there in such reports?

OSB: I heard the speech of American President Bush yesterday (Oct 7). He was scaring the European countries that Osama wanted to attack with weapons of mass destruction. I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent.

HM: Where did you get these weapons from?

OSB: Go to the next question.

HM: Demonstrations are being held in many European countries against American attacks on Afghanistan. Thousands of the protesters were non-Muslims. What is your opinion about those non-Muslim protesters?

OSB: There are many innocent and good-hearted people in the West. American media instigates them against Muslims. However, some good-hearted people are protesting against American attacks because human nature abhors injustice.

The Muslims were massacred under the UN patronage in Bosnia. I am ware that some officers of the State Department had resigned in protest. Many years ago the US ambassador in Egypt had resigned in protest against the policies of President Jimmy Carter. Nice and civilized are everywhere. The Jewish lobby has taken America and the West hostage.

HM: Some people say that war is no solution to any issue. Do you think that some political formula could be found to stop the present war?

OSB: You should put this question to those who have started this war. We are only defending ourselves.

HM: If America got out of Saudi Arabia and the Al-Aqsa mosque was liberated, would you then present yourself for trial in some Muslim country?

OSB: Only Afghanistan is an Islamic country. Pakistan follows the English law. I don't consider Saudi Arabia an Islamic country. If the Americans have charges against me, we too have a charge sheet against them.

HM: Pakistan government decided to cooperate with America after Sept 11, which you don't consider right. What do you think Pakistan should have done but to cooperate with America?

OSB: The government of Pakistan should have the wishes of the people in view. It should not have surrendered to the unjustified demands of America. America does not have solid proof against us. It just has some surmises. It is unjust to start bombing on the basis of those surmises.

HM: Had America decided to attack Pakistan with the help of India and Israel, what would have we done?

OSB: What has America achieved by attacking Afghanistan? We will not leave the Pakistani people and the Pakistani territory at anybody's mercy.

We will defend Pakistan. But we have been disappointed by Gen Pervez Musharraf. He says that the majority is with him. I say the majority is against him.

Bush has used the word crusade. This is a crusade declared by Bush. It is no wisdom to barter off blood of Afghan brethren to improve Pakistan's economy. He will be punished by the Pakistani people and Allah.

Right now a great war of Islamic history is being fought in Afghanistan. All the big powers are united against Muslims. It is 'sawab' to participate in this war.

HM: A French newspaper has claimed that you had kidney problem and had secretly gone to Dubai for treatment last year. Is that correct?

OSB: My kidneys are all right. I did not go to Dubai last year. One British newspaper has published an imaginary interview with Islamabad dateline with one of my sons who lives in Saudi Arabia. All this is false.

HM: Is it correct that a daughter of Mulla Omar is your wife or your daughter is Mulla Omar's wife?

OSB: (Laughs). All my wives are Arabs (and all my daughters are married to Arab Mujahideen). I have spiritual relationship with Mulla Omar. He is a great and brave Muslim of this age. He does not fear anyone but Allah. He is not under any personal relationship or obligation to me. He is only discharging his religious duty. I, too, have not chosen this life out of any personal consideration.

---

Bin Laden says he has nuclear weapons in interview with Pakistani newspaper

Montreal Gazette
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Canadian Press
Saturday, November 10, 2001
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={4BB7D1C2-A650-4239-8BB6-8E5F032035CF}

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Terror suspect Osama bin Laden says he has nuclear and chemical weapons and will unleash them if the United States uses similar weapons against him. Bin Laden's comments were published Saturday in one of Pakistan's largest newspapers.

"I wish to declare that if America used chemical and nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent," the Dawn newspaper quoted bin Laden as saying in an interview near the Afghan capital Kabul on Wednesday night.

The United States, which is bombing positions of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaida network, says it has no evidence that bin Laden possesses nuclear weapons. Intelligence experts, however, believe his fighters have experimented with crude chemical weapons at a training camp in Afghanistan.

"They're seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons," President Bush said in Washington on Friday. "Given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself."

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States had "no credible evidence at this point of a specific threat of that kind."

In London, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office also said bin Laden has sought chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capability but that Britain does not believe he has it.

Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist sympathetic to the Taliban and a bin Laden biographer, conducted the Dawn interview. He said he asked bin Laden where he allegedly got the weapons. "Go to the next question," bin Laden replied.

Mir said the interview was conducted at an "undisclosed location" near Kabul.

Mir said he was blindfolded and driven in a jeep from Kabul on Wednesday night to a very cold place where he could hear the sound of anti-aircraft fire.

Bin Laden eventually arrived, accompanied by a dozen bodyguards and his deputy, Ayman el-Zawahri.

The Dawn published a photograph of Mir sitting with bin Laden on cushions on the floor against a brown backdrop. Bin Laden wore a white turban and scarf with a camouflage jacket. A Kalashnikov rifle lay at his side.

The story was also published Saturday in Ausaf, a Pakistani Urdu-language newspaper that Mir edits.

In the interview, Bin Laden did not admit responsibility for the attacks in which terrorists steered passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

But he said they were justified because Washington had been arming Israel, and was conducting "atrocities" against Muslims in Iraq, the dispute region of Kashmir and elsewhere.

"The Sept. 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children," bin Laden said. "The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power."

Bin Laden denied reports that he was suffering a kidney illness and praised Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader.

"He is not under any personal relationship or obligation to me," he said. "He is only discharging his religious duty. I, too, have not chosen this life out of any personal consideration."

The United States believes bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington that killed about 4,500 people. It launched air strikes Oct. 7 against the Taliban after it refused to hand over the suspect.

---

[Here's a chilling thought. Wonder if it's true. et]

Al-Qaeda nukes may have reached US shores
UNGA session possible terror target

Naveed Miraj
11/10/2001
The Frontier Post (Pakistan)
http://frontierpost.com.pk/main.asp?id=3&date1=11/10/2001

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani and American investigators converge that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network may have successfully transported several nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction to the United States, The Frontier Post learnt Friday.

Already on high alert, United States security officials are having sleepless nights that Al Qaeda can strike in New York again on the occasion of United Nations General Assembly session.

Investigators from Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and American FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) are jointly probing into the possibilities of Al Qaeda possessing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

They have reached a conclusion that at least two briefcase nuclear weapons may have reached the US shores, sources close to these investigators revealed to this scribe.

The investigators have been able to identify at least one briefcase weapon acquired by Al Qaeda from Central Asian rogue groups.

The weapon identified is small 8-kilogram device that carries at least 2 kg of fissionable plutonium and uranium.

The device, of Russian make, carries a serial number 9999 and manufacturing date October 1988.

The design of the device is simple.

The radioactive materials consist of Uranium and Plutonium both kept in separate compartments.

At the top of the two compartments is placed the charging mechanism.

The charging mechanism can be activated through a timer or even through a cell phone command.

Besides nuclear devices, a chemical and a biological weapon have also been identified to be in the hands of Al Qaeda activists.

They are said to be in possession of at least 70 capsules, also of Russian origin, containing a very lethal biological agent.

Broken in a crowded place, this capsule can cause deaths on a huge scale.

It melts human body meat to the bone.

Another chemical agent in the hands of Al Qaeda operators is called Vipera Lebentina Venema.

A derivative of snake poisons, this venom developed in USSR attacks through skin.

Most probable way of using this agent is through mail as with Anthrax.

US security agencies are already on high alert and realise that Al Qaeda can strike in New York again on the occasion of UN General Assembly.

Analysis of the recent statements released by Osama bin Laden carried out by US agencies has shown that the terrorist network can pick up an important occasion like the UN General Assembly session to retaliate against US strikes on Afghanistan.


---

White House dismisses bin Laden nuclear threat
Osama bin Laden says he will use nuclear and chemical weapons if attacked by America

CNN
November 10, 2001
Bin Laden
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/11/10/ret.binladen.nuclear/index.html

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Bush administration dismissed claims reported Saturday in a Pakistani English-language newspaper that suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden has nuclear and chemical weapons and will use them against the United States if attacked.

In an interview with bin Laden published in Dawn -- said to have taken place November 7 -- the newspaper quoted bin Laden as saying: "I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent."

While citing "credible indications" bin Laden has sought to obtain such weapons, Bush administration officials said they do not believe the al Qaeda leader has weapons of mass destruction or the means to deliver them.

"He has said for a long time he wants to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we have no choice but to take him seriously," National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said. "And we will do everything we can to prevent his acquiring these weapons or the materials for these weapons."

These remarks came shortly after President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he discussed the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, America's response and future terrorist threats.

While he did not mention bin Laden by name, Bush said, "These same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so." Bin Laden: Attacks part of 'defensive Jihad'

The interview, conducted by Pakistani newspaper editor and official bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir, was bin Laden's first since the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Mir wrote that he was blindfolded and taken in a jeep from Kabul "to a place where it was extremely cold and one could hear the sound of anti-aircraft guns firing away." After a time, bin Laden arrived with a dozen bodyguards and Ayman el-Zawahri, his top lieutenant, and began answering questions.

While never explicitly taking or denying responsibility, bin Laden repeats several times that the September 11 attacks were part of a "defensive Jihad." He says Muslims are defending themselves against American attacks on the Muslims around the world, including on Palestinians, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq, and Bosnia.

"This is a simple formula that even an American child can understand," he says. "This is the formula of live and let live."

Bin Laden also discounts criticism issued by other Muslims against him, saying they hold no meaning for him because true Muslims support the jihad against the United States.

When asked where the nuclear weapons came from, bin Laden retorted, "Go to the next question."

Bush had warned of bin Laden's threats to use weapons of mass destruction earlier in the week, saying, "This is an evil man that we're dealing with, and I wouldn't put it past him to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilization as we know it."

When the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan was asked about nuclear weapons this week, he replied, "We can't even make glass, so how can we make nuclear weapons?"

---

Bush Says Nations May Face Nuclear Terror Threat

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-attack-bush-un.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President Bush on Saturday warned nations that the threat of global terrorism may soon include nuclear weapons and urged them to intensify their support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Bush told the U.N. General Assembly those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were planning more strikes, which could hit any country. He said they were seeking nuclear, chemical and biological arms and would use them.

``All the world faces the most horrifying prospect of all: these same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into a holocaust. They can be expected to use chemical biological an nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so,'' Bush said.

Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed more than 4,600 people, was quoted in a Pakistani newspaper on Saturday as saying he had nuclear and chemical weapons and reserved the right to use them if the United States did first.

Bush told a news conference on Saturday evening he did not know whether bin Laden already had such weapons. ``The only thing I know certain about him is that he's evil,'' he said.

The U.S. president urged the global leaders to step up their participation in the anti-terrorism war. He called for a ''comprehensive commitment'' to defeat terror.

``Every nation has a stake in this cause. As we meet, the terrorists are planning more murder, perhaps in my country or perhaps in yours,'' Bush told 48 presidents and prime ministers and 114 foreign ministers at the annual gathering in New York.

He spoke with animation and punctuated his comments with a clenched fist. ``In this war of terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone,'' he said

The speech was Bush's first to the U.N. General Assembly. The session was postponed from its original start date after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The attacks triggered a military campaign against Afghanistan's Taliban leadership, which Bush accuses of harboring bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

Civilian deaths in the bombing campaign and the approach of the Muslim observance of Ramadan have caused some members of the international coalition to urge restraint on Washington, and Bush's speech on Saturday capped a week of efforts to rally domestic and international support for the anti-terror effort.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, also speaking to the General Assembly, said violence could not be justified to counter terrorism. He said a definition of terrorism should include Israeli practices against Palestinians, such as occupying Arab territory, expelling people from their homes and killing civilians.

Musharraf urged a quick end to the bombing. He said at the news conference that Pakistan remained committed to the anti-terrorism campaign, despite concerns expressed to Bush over potential ``fallout'' from instability in Afghanistan.

He and Bush agreed that Afghanistan's Northern Alliance opposition should not seize the capital Kabul. Bush said it was important to the goal of a multiethnic Afghan government that the predominantly Uzbek and Tajik Northern Alliance not seize Kabul, which is traditionally dominated by ethnic Pashtuns.

Musharraf said he feared atrocities if Northern Alliance took the capital.

STEPPING UP FIGHT ON TERROR

Bush said countries helping to fight terrorism must go beyond what he called urgent and binding steps already outlined by a post-attack United Nations resolution, such as cracking down on terrorist financing and sharing intelligence.

He said he appreciated a global outpouring of sympathy for the United States. But he added: ``The time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived.''

Battling global terrorism will require effort and, for some nations, ``great courage,'' Bush said. But the price of inaction would be ``a nightmare world, where every city is a potential killing field.''

Countries tolerating terrorists would pay, Bush said. ``Some governments still turn a blind eye to terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken.''

He did not identify countries he believed were failing to carry their weight, nor did he go beyond Afghanistan in accusing countries of harboring terrorists.

The coalition must step its efforts by fighting terrorism in any form, he said. ``There is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration nor remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent.''

In the audience while Bush spoke was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom Bush has refused to meet while Israeli-Palestinian violence rages. The two failed to come into contact during the day, despite eating lunch in the same room.

In his speech, however, Bush reiterated his commitment to establishment of a Palestinian state. Arafat described the speech to reporters as important, positive and ``constructive.''

Israeli seats sat empty during the Bush speech. An Israeli spokesman cited observance of the Jewish Sabbath.

``GOOD RIDDANCE' TO TALIBAN

Bush said the United States was seeking to minimize the loss of innocent lives as it bombs the Taliban, which he said was ``virtually indistinguishable'' from al Qaeda.

``I make this promise to all the victims of that regime. The Taliban's days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close,'' he said.

``And when that regime is gone the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, 'good riddance.'''

Along with the blunt warnings, Bush also sounded subtle notes. He mentioned individuals from Gambia, Mexico and Pakistan who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, reminding his audience of the broad impact of the violence.

He alluded to a common root of Islam and Judeo-Christian faiths in condemning those who commit terrorism in the name of Islam. ``They dare to ask God's blessing as they set out to kill innocent men, women and children. But the God of Isaac and Ishmael would never answer such a prayer,'' he said.

Bush also denounced ``outrageous conspiracy theories,'' an apparent reference to rumors in the Arab world and among some Muslims that blamed the attacks on a global Jewish plot.

-------- canada

Muslim Nuclear Plant Worker Sues

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-Muslim-Suit.html?searchpv=aponline

TORONTO (AP) -- A Muslim man who lost his job at a Canadian nuclear power plant after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States has filed a lawsuit claiming he was unfairly labeled a security risk.

Mohamed Attiah, 54, an Egyptian-born engineer who gained Canadian citizenship in the 1970s, is seeking $3.4 million from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. on grounds of ethnic and religious discrimination.

The lawsuit filed Friday claims Attiah was questioned for 90 minutes by the RCMP and CSIS after being stopped Sept. 20 in the parking lot of the Chalk River, Ontario, nuclear power plant where he worked. The same day, his security pass was revoked and he was escorted out and told he no longer had a job because he was a security risk, the lawsuit claims.

Officials of the RCMP and CSIS would neither confirm nor deny that an interview took place. Atomic Energy of Canada referred calls to the RCMP.

``I just want my job back,'' Attiah told The Toronto Star newspaper in a story published Saturday. ``The fact is that they've destroyed my life and my family's life. They are burying everything under the mark of security and this way, nobody can question them.''

Attiah was working under a contract that was due to expire and says he was told he would receive a permanent position before his dismissal.

Attiah said the federal agents questioned him about his connection with Ali Hindy, the imam of a Toronto mosque.

Hindy was a character reference for Mahmoud Jaballah, a Toronto schoolteacher who is now facing deportation as a national security threat. Canadian authorities say Jaballah was part of the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group that merged in 1998 with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. He was arrested in August in a case unrelated to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Attiah said he and Hindy worked together in the 1980s and that his wife once called Hindy to mediate their marital problems.

According to media reports, Attiah also complained that his name made people suspicious that he might be related to Mohamed Atta, identified as one of the suicide hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

-------- india / pakistan

Pakistan Seeks Gestures From U.S., Says Musharraf

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-musharraf.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistan's leader said in an interview published on Saturday that he needs visible U.S. gestures, such as the release of American F-16 fighters sold to his country over a decade ago, to help blunt domestic criticism of his decision to support the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan.

President Pervez Musharraf, in an interview with the New York Times, said he would ask President Bush for such concrete steps when they meet on Saturday. The two leaders are in New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

The Times said Musharraf put a particular emphasis on the release of the F-16s because their arrival would be a strong signal that the United States was restoring Pakistan to the stature of a genuine ally.

Pakistan bought the 28 F-16s in the 1980s, but the U.S. Congress cut off all aid and military sales to Islamabad in 1990 due to Pakistan's secret nuclear weapons development program.

Delivery of the airplanes was blocked, even though they already had been paid for. Musharraf told the Times that Pakistan even had received a bill for the storage of the aircraft while they are being held in Arizona.

Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, is a key ally in the United States' war against the al Qaeda network of Islamic militants and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden, thought to be behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Afghanistan's Taliban regime has housed bin Laden and the group and refused to hand him over to the United States.

People in Pakistan, a U.S. Cold War ally, feel the United States abandoned the country after 1989, when the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, he told the paper.

The United States then imposed economic sanctions when Pakistan developed nuclear weapons in response to India's nuclear program and the two countries conducted tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998.

Major debt relief, military assistance and understanding on the subject of Pakistan's nuclear capabilities would go a long way toward alleviating those wrongs, the paper quoted Musharraf as saying.

Pakistan's president also said he was worried that there was no broad-based coalition waiting in the wings in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban, the Times reported.

The Northern Alliance, the leading opposition force now in Afghanistan, is made up largely of non-Pashtuns. Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

---

Musharraf: Nuclear Arsenal Safe

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-Pakistan.html?searchpv=aponline

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf assured the world Saturday that his country's nuclear arsenal was in ``safe hands.''

``Pakistan is fully alive to the responsibilities of its nuclear status,'' Musharraf said on the opening day of the annual General Assembly debate.

``Let me assure you all that our strategic assets are well guarded and in safe hands,'' he said.

Musharraf, whose Muslim country shares a long and porous border with Afghanistan, is a key partner in President Bush's campaign to capture Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect behind the Sept. 11 attacks who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan.

Musharraf, the military chief who seized power in a 1999 coup, was an early backer of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism. But since the bombing campaign began on Oct. 7, growing protests by Islamic groups have sparked concerns about the stability of Musharraf's government.

International observers also are concerned about the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons because of fears that some elements in the military remain sympathetic to the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban.

Musharraf, when asked about bin Laden's claim that he possesses nuclear and chemical weapons, said he did not believe he did.

``I have no such information. Purely on judgment, I can't imagine he could be having nuclear weapons'' and the delivery systems that go with them, Musharraf said.

Last month, two Pakistani scientists questioned about their links with the Taliban regime were released after authorities determined that they were not involved in Afghanistan's weapons program.

Musharraf also said Saturday that he was willing to discuss with neighboring India ways to reduce nuclear tensions in South Asia, which has the world's newest and, according to some experts, riskiest nuclear arsenal. Pakistan conducted unannounced nuclear tests in 1998 following similar tests by India.

``Pakistan is opposed to an arms race in South Asia, be it nuclear or conventional,'' he said.

Musharraf called for more international help for Pakistan, which earlier bore the fallout of the 10-year Muslim holy war against the Soviet forces that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, a war that sent 3 million Afghan refugees to Pakistan.

``Our economy again faces a crisis of a fallout of the operations in Afghanistan,'' Musharraf said.

Later, at a joint news conference with Musharraf, Bush announced a $1 billion aid package for Pakistan, on top of the lifting of sanctions, which were lifted soon after Pakistan joined the U.S.-led campaign.

Musharraf said the European Union also has offered Pakistan greater market access and that he was negotiating with lending agencies to relax debt repayments.

Musharraf also called for an end to what many Muslims see as an unfolding campaign against their beliefs.

``The religion of Islam, and Muslims in various parts of the world, are being held responsible for the trials the world is facing,'' Musharraf said.

Frustration among Muslims was high because of the number of Muslim victims in many of the world's prominent conflicts including, Bosnia, the Middle East and Kashmir.

-------- japan

Radiation Leaks at Japan Nuke Plant

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

TOKYO (AP) -- For the second time in three days inspectors found a radioactive leak inside a nuclear plant in central Japan, but officials said Saturday that neither posed danger to humans or the environment.

The latest leak was discovered at about 3:30 p.m. Friday as inspectors were looking into Wednesday's incident at Chubu Electric Power Co.'s plant in Hamaoka, 120 miles southwest of Tokyo, said a company spokesman on condition that his name not be used.

A small quantity of radioactive water dripped inside the reactor vessel from a gap between it and a mechanism called the control rod drive, said Koji Yamashita, an official at the Trade Ministry's nuclear disaster prevention division.

The vessel contains nuclear fuel and the control ride drive regulates the reactor's output, Yamashita said.

On Wednesday, a small amount of radioactive steam was found leaking from a pipe that ruptured during a routine test of a pressure injection system during which fire alarms went off, forcing Chubu Electric to shut down the reactor, the company spokesman said. There was no fire, he said.

Neither leak posed any danger to the outside environment or the 32 inspectors who were at the facility at the time, the Chubu Electric spokesman said.

Japanese have become increasingly wary of nuclear power since a radiation leak at a fuel-reprocessing plant in Tokaimura two years ago killed two workers and affected hundreds of others. Tokaimura is 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.

Japan relies on nuclear power to supply 30 percent of its electricity.

-------- missile defense

Russia's Putin Optimistic on Missile Defense Deal

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-russia-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A buoyant President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday he was ``very optimistic'' that Moscow could reach a compromise with Washington over U.S. plans for a missile defense shield against ``rogue'' rockets.

``I am very optimistic in this regard,'' the Interfax news agency quoted him as telling U.S. journalists ahead of next week's U.S. summit with President Bush.

Putin also said he believed the two sides were headed in the ``right direction'' on deep cuts in their respective nuclear arsenals, which he said was ``the flip side of the same coin.''

Russia wants to lower the number of deployed warheads to 1,500 each, but U.S. defense planners are reluctant to go below 2,250-1,800.

Russia says international terrorism poses more of a global security threat than rogue missiles, a view it believes the September 11 attacks on the United States vindicated.

In a broad-ranging interview in the Kremlin, Putin said he thought it ``unlikely'' that Osama bin Laden, accused by Washington of masterminding those attacks, had the nuclear bomb or other weapons of mass destruction.

``At any rate, these weapons cannot be Russian or Soviet. I am confident of this,'' Putin was quoted as saying. But threats to use such weapons ``must not be ignored,'' he said.

``We know about Bin Laden's links with certain radical circles in Pakistan, and Pakistan is a nuclear power,'' he said.

A leading Pakistani paper said on Saturday that bin Laden had claimed in a recent interview to possess nuclear and chemical weapons, and might use them to respond to U.S. strikes against Afghanistan, which shelters the Saudi-born militant.

MISSILE DEFENSE DIFFERENCES

Russia and the United States have been jousting over missile defense for years, but the two leaders nudged the dialogue forward in July, when they agreed to link talks on the issue with deep cuts in their respective nuclear missile arsenals.

Bush says the United States needs a missile shield to ward off attacks by so-called rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Libya. Russia says the threat is exaggerated and that missile defense would upset the strategic balance.

It has to date refused to change the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which bans the sort of missile defense envisaged by Bush, but in recent weeks signs of a compromise have emerged.

``The question is, what kind of compromises are they expecting from us? We have to see concrete proposals from our colleagues,'' Putin told U.S. reporters in the Kremlin.

After experts had come up with specific proposals it would be for political leaders to take decisions, he said.

``As for what sort of options could be found, I am optimistic,'' Itar-Tass quoted him as saying.

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Putin spoke warmly of his ``good relations'' with Bush, adding that their main task was to ensure the two countries became reliable, predictable partners.

He renewed a pledge to use Russian forces in search and rescue missions should U.S. troops get into difficulty on the ground in Afghanistan. As the de facto air traffic controller for some former Soviet states in the region, Russian help would be vital in such a situation.

Putin again linked Russia's two-year crackdown in its rebel Chechnya province, once a source of tension between Moscow and Washington, to the global war on terrorism launched by Bush after the September 11 attacks on his country.

Up to 700 fighters from Islamic countries were fighting alongside Chechen rebels, and were drawing up plans to go to Afghanistan ``to kill Americans there,'' Putin said.

He urged the global coalition to learn from Moscow's ill-fated intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The Soviet pullout after nine years was not a military defeat but the result of ``unpardonable political mistakes,'' he said.

The Soviet-backed Najibullah government ``did not have support among different ethnic groups and political forces inside Afghanistan. Nor was it supported by the international community.'' The main asset of the anti-terrorist coalition was the absence of the ideological divisions of yesteryear.

---

Putin Confident of ABM Compromise

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Putin.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that he was ``very optimistic'' that a compromise could be found with the United States on missile defense and that he was bringing new proposals to his meetings with President Bush next week.

``We see the capability to negotiate on the U.S. side and we have the same capability, but we want to know what we'll be negotiating about, in military and technological terms,'' Putin told a group of American journalists at an evening interview in the Kremlin.

Putin declined to elaborate on the initiatives he planned to raise at the meetings in Washington and Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, saying he wanted to present them to Bush directly, not through the media. And he praised Bush for agreeing to tie negotiations on missile defense and nuclear weapons cuts.

``We know the president's view that strategic offensive weapons can and must be reduced. This is a compromise in the right direction,'' Putin said.

Russia has proposed new limits on U.S. and Russian stockpiles of no more than 2,000 long-range warheads for each country, down from a current total of about 6,000 each. The Bush administration was said to be considering 1,750 to 2,250 warheads apiece.

Putin said that while Russia was ready to discuss a compromise on U.S. missile defense plans, it must know specifically what in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty stands in the way of Washington's proposed missile shield.

``We are also ready for a compromise. We should see what specific compromise proposals our American partners have,'' Putin said. He said it would be up to experts to set specific parameters for both offensive and defensive weapons.

On the eve of his first trip to the United States, Putin expressed confidence that U.S.-Russian relations had taken an irreversible turn for the better.

He said that Cold War rivalries and the fears they generated were partly to blame for allowing the growth of extremism -- including in Afghanistan, where international terrorist training bases were established. The United States ``did nothing to prevent the creation of the Taliban,'' and the Soviet Union responded by supporting U.S. foes.

``I think we should end this vicious circle, and I feel that together with President Bush, we are in a position to do that,'' Putin said, indicating that Russia would accept a U.S. role in Central Asia, a region it considers its own sphere of influence.

Asked about the claim by Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, that he has nuclear and chemical weapons, Putin said the threat could be a bluff but nevertheless should be taken seriously.

``I wouldn't overestimate the danger but it would also be wrong to downplay it,'' Putin said. ``We know about bin Laden's links with radical circles in Pakistan, and Pakistan is a nuclear power.''

``In that respect, we must support Gen. Musharraf in his efforts to consolidate his country,'' Putin said. He flatly denied that any Russian or former Soviet weapons of mass destruction could get into the hands of terrorists.

Putin said he wasn't looking for any particular payback from the United States in exchange for Russia's support of the U.S.-led action against terror. ``In the first place, we would like our joint struggle against terrorism to lead to positive results, that terrorism not only in Afghanistan but the entire world be destroyed, uprooted, liquidated.''

Gaining the United States as a ``reliable and predictable partner'' is more important, he said, than any quick material advantages.

However, he indicated that Russia was also looking for an end to what it considers discriminatory economic treatment by the United States, and for a more substantive, decision-making role in its partnership with NATO.

If Russia is ``not included in making decisions, it's obvious that Russia will not be as interested in implementing them,'' Putin said.

Putin said he would continue cultivating relations with countries such as North Korea and Iraq that the West considers possible proliferators of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

``The biggest mistake would be to isolate any country from the international community,'' he said.

Speaking about Russian assistance to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Putin said that along with air corridors and ``very valuable intelligence information,'' Russia also had supplied ``tens of millions dollars worth of military-technical assistance'' to Afghan opposition forces fighting the Taliban. Russia has also offered its assistance in search-and-rescue operations to retrieve Americans from Afghanistan.

Putin also claimed that Russia was fighting radical Arab mercenaries in Chechnya who would otherwise go to fight against Americans.

---

Rocket in Alaska Launch Destroyed

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Rocket-Destroyed.html?searchpv=aponline

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- A rocket fired from Alaska's Kodiak Launch Complex had to be destroyed seconds after liftoff Friday when trackers lost communication with it.

It was the first time a rocket used in testing for the missile defense program had to be destroyed after launch, said Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the missile defense program in Washington.

The rocket was launched from the complex, operated by the Alaska Aerospace Development Corp., at 9:12 a.m. It was destroyed 52 seconds later when launch officials lost telemetry data and data transmission, Lehner said.

``It seems to be a telemetry problem and safety rules dictate that, if you lose that type of data transmission, you have to destroy the missile,'' Lehner said.

Despite the loss of data, the rocket remained on course until it was destroyed. Lehner said a board would investigate.

``It could take weeks to figure out what caused the problem,'' he said.

The missile's pieces dropped into the ocean and were spread over an area 17 to 45 miles from the island, Lehner said.

The military had announced Wednesday that it planned to launch the rocket sometime between Friday and Nov. 21, but would not give the exact time and date, citing security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Coast Guard had warned mariners to stay out of the launch clearance area due to the possibility of falling debris, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Douglas Green.

The rocket was launched to learn more about how ground-based radar systems in California would pick up the characteristics of a warhead and decoys in space, Lehner said.

---

An Easy Bargain With Russia

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By BURTON RICHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/opinion/10RICT.html?searchpv=nytToday

STANFORD, Calif. -- When President Bush and Vladimir Putin meet next week, one aim will be to resolve differences about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. With much at stake in the war against terror and in Russia's hopes to be seen as a part of the West, no one wants the developing closeness of the United States and Russia to be held back by the old argument about an American missile shield.

Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration was saying bluntly that the ABM treaty, banning most missile defense, was anachronistic and that the United States might simply break it. Now the need for Russian support in the Afghanistan war makes cooperation more attractive than unilateral pronouncements. But this issue is not as difficult as it seems. The treaty could be modified fairly easily to allow what we need to do.

The emphasis in missile-defense now is on a "hit to kill" system to intercept and destroy hostile missiles; deployment is proposed for Alaska. Early tests have been disappointing, and it may be impossible to cope with the decoys that would accompany any armed incoming missile. The greater threat now appears to be nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists who wouldn't have missiles. But since the administration is determined to pursue the system anyway, it should negotiate a treaty amendment that would let us proceed.

The ABM treaty doesn't completely ban missile defense: it allows each side one ABM site. Many years ago the Russians chose Moscow and built a rudimentary defense, which is probably now in bad shape. We chose the missile field around Grand Forks, N.D., but abandoned construction there as not worth the effort. All we need now is an amendment substituting Alaska for Grand Forks.

The Bush planners also seem to want a new testing range - in another location in Alaska - and this needn't violate the treaty, either. Testing ranges must be declared, but there can be changes by mutual agreement.

The administration is also interested in pursuing a "boost-phase" defense, in which the attacking missile would be destroyed while its launch rocket was still burning. This would solve the decoy problem, since the rocket plume is unmistakable. But because the boost-phase system must respond within a couple of minutes after the enemy missile is launched, it must be automatic and located close to the launch point. The ABM treaty bans systems based at sea, in the air or in space, or moving about on land, so it is impossible to reconcile with a boost-phase system. But here, too, a new agreement is possible.

President Putin has suggested a discussion of a mobile boost-phase system that in a time of tension could be deployed close to the borders of a "state of concern." If the concern were with Iran, for example, the defense would have to be in the territory of the old Soviet Union. President Bush should pursue this idea.

Space-based defense, with hundreds or thousands of interceptors circling the globe, waiting for a satellite signal to launch them, is also being discussed again, though we spent billions in the 1980's and failed to find a way to do it. If we wish to pursue this fantasy again, the treaty allows the research.

What the Russians seem to want most as Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin meet has nothing to do with missile defense. They are arguing for a mutual agreement to reduce the number of long-range nuclear weapons. Russia, which can barely afford to maintain its missiles, suggests that 1,500 per side would be enough. Our military doesn't want to go below 2,500, but since each of today's warheads is more than 10 times as powerful as those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is hard to see why we need so many.

America's enemies have changed, and our nuclear strategies must change, too. We can make a sensible deal with Russia: Lower strategic bomb inventories in return for the amendments in the ABM treaty that would let the Bush administration work toward something it believes we really need - missile defense.

Burton Richter, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976.

-------- russia

U.S. Mulls Russia's Iraq Commitment

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Russia-Iraq.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has surprised and pleased the United States by showing flexibility on several important international security issues. On sanctions against Iraq, however, Putin has dug in his heels.

U.S. officials still hope for a Russian change of heart and expect to learn more about Russian thinking during a series of meetings in the coming days, including next week's three-day summit meeting between Putin and President Bush.

At issue is Secretary of State Colin Powell's effort, begun nine months ago, to orchestrate major revisions in U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

Powell wants to facilitate the flow of consumer goods into Iraq while cracking down on Iraqi importation of illegal military goods and cutting off the smuggling of Iraqi oil.

The Bush administration contends the proposal would benefit the Iraqi people while making it more difficult for Iraq to obtain weapons of mass destruction, which the United Nations has barred for more than a decade. Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, is believed to be working on development of chemical and biological weapons. U.S. officials are less certain about his plans for nuclear weapons.

All permanent members of the U.N. Security Council support the Powell plan except Russia, a steadfast ally of Iraq during the Cold War. Iraqis oppose the plan, presumably because added curbs would make it more difficult to push ahead with banned weapons programs.

Russia has benefited enormously from the status quo. It has earned millions of dollars from the sale to Iraq of equipment for infrastructure development, oil refinery construction and other such goods, which are permitted under sanctions ground rules.

Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iraq could turn its back on Russia and take its business elsewhere if Moscow should decide to accept the Powell proposal. Iraq might also refuse to pay the multibillion dollar debt it owes Russia.

An angered Iraq would be a setback for Moscow, but U.S. officials see an upside as well: closer Russian ties with the United States and other industrialized countries and the economic benefits that would mean.

Bush and Putin will meet in Washington on Tuesday, then travel to Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, for additional talks. How high on the agenda Iraq sanctions will be is not clear.

The issue is being discussed Saturday when Powell meets with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in New York at the U.N. General Assembly session.

There will be lower-level discussions between the two sides as well.

The issue has festered most of the year and now faces a Dec. 3 deadline. The Security Council could extend the current oil-for-food program for another six months. Alternatively, it could vote on the Powell proposal, with Russia exercising its permanent-member veto prerogative or rethinking its current position and accepting the resolution.

Putin's flexibility on a number of security issues has been a foreign policy high point for the administration this year. He has softened his perception of NATO as a hostile alliance and his opposition to Bush's plan for a missile defense system. He has been a stalwart partner of the administration's global anti-terrorism coalition.

Administration officials point out that Putin was strongly opposed just a year ago to the U.S. desire to establish a presence in former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

That changed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Just how much Russian attitudes have changed was evident last week with the scenes of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wandering around Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and talking about strengthening cooperation in the war in Afghanistan.

The situation, a U.S. official noted, is quite different from last year.

-------

Cause of Sub's Sinking Still Unknown

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Kursks-Mystery.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- A month after the charred and mangled Kursk nuclear submarine was hoisted from an Arctic seabed, investigators still cannot pinpoint the cause of the catastrophe but say new evidence shows the crew struggled for life, donning oxygen masks and unrolling fire hoses to fight a blaze that reached more than 14,000 degrees.

The submarine's hulk was hoisted from the Barents Sea floor Oct. 8 and brought to a dry dock near Murmansk more than a year after it exploded and sank during naval maneuvers, killing all 118 aboard. Investigators have pulled 56 bodies from the vessel since it was raised. Twelve others were removed by divers last year.

Investigators discovered more bodies in the stern sections than expected, indicating some sailors from the forward compartments managed to race backward in the two minutes and 15 seconds that separated two blasts that crippled and sank the Kursk.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the second explosion sent a huge fireball through the Kursk's hull, raising the temperature inside to 14,432 degrees and pulverizing all crew in the forward sections.

``What happened inside these compartments was hell,'' Ustinov said.

At least 23 sailors survived the explosions, according to letters found in the wreck, which described their agony in the pitch-dark, near-freezing sections of the stricken craft.

Investigators who retrieved the bodies said some seamen put on oxygen masks and unfolded fire hoses in a desperate attempt to fight the blaze ignited by the explosions.

Ustinov said that within eight hours of the blasts, the entire submarine was flooded by water seeping in through cracks in the hull. However, most men in the stern died earlier of carbon monoxide fumes from the fire.

The main ship log and any notes left by Capt. Gennady Lyachin and other senior officers in the control room disappeared in the fireball.

``We see absolutely nothing new inside the submarine now,'' said Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who is in charge of the Kursk probe in the Russian Cabinet. He said everything inside the submarine was simulated early last year.

Officials have said for months that the Aug. 12, 2000, disaster was triggered by the explosion of a practice torpedo that led to the detonation of combat torpedoes in the bow.

But they are still unable to settle on one of three possible causes of the initial explosion -- an internal flaw in the practice torpedo or perhaps a collision with another vessel or a World War II mine.

``There is no answer today,'' Klebanov said in the interview posted on Russia's official Web site about the Kursk.

The Kursk's twin nuclear reactors have remained safely shut down and no radiation leaks have been reported. Specialists have retrieved 16 of the submarine's 22 Granit supersonic cruise missiles, and the navy is planning to cut out the remaining six.

The disfigured torpedo section, which could contain a key to the cause of the disaster, was sawed off and left on the seabed out of fear it could break off during the salvage operation and destabilize the lifting. The navy plans to raise some of its fragments next year.

Immediately after the disaster, Russian admirals insisted that the most likely cause was a collision with a Western submarine, which allegedly was stalking the Kursk in a Cold War-style cat-and-mouse game. Both the United States and Britain had their submarines in the Barents Sea, but both countries have denied any involvement in the catastrophe.

The collision theory was ridiculed by many specialists, who pointed out that a foreign submarine wouldn't have been able to limp away from a collision with the much heavier, 18,000-ton Kursk, one of the world's largest submarines.

When Russian television first showed the Kursk remains in dock, much attention was focused on a dent clearly visible on its forward part. But prosecutors quickly ruled out that it was a mark left by a collision. Klebanov said it could have been caused by the vacuum effect from explosions inside.

Most experts agree that a torpedo malfunction was the most plausible cause of the disaster. The torpedo was propelled by highly volatile hydrogen peroxide, which in case of a leak could have caused a powerful explosion of the kind that shattered the Kursk.

A leak of hydrogen peroxide from a burst pipe caused the 1955 sinking of the British submarine HMS Sidon, in which 13 men died. Britain stopped using the chemical after the accident, but Russia continued to use it.

-------- switzerland

SWITZERLAND: PRACTICING FOR NUCLEAR DISASTER

New York Times
November 10, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

The government said it would conduct mock exercises next week to test how its civil defense system would cope with a simulated nuclear accident that contaminated a wide area of the country and forced millions of people into bomb shelters. Although the drill has been in preparation for a year, it coincides with new concerns about how the country would respond if confronted with biological, chemical or nuclear terrorism or accidents. Elizabeth Olson (NYT)

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

Stuck in the Cold War

Saturday, November 10, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5323-2001Nov9.html

According to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [op-ed, Nov. 1], "Instead of focusing on who our next adversary might be or where a war might occur, we must focus on how an adversary might fight -- and develop new capabilities to deter and defeat that adversary.

"We must plan for a world of new and different adversaries who will rely on surprise, deception and asymmetric weapons (such as civilian airliners turned into missiles) to achieve their objectives."

Exactly so.

So why is the biggest item in the defense budget an attempt to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles? These were the primary weapons of the Cold War and the Soviet threat, neither of which now exist.

I hope Mr. Rumsfeld will heed his own counsel and move his department into the real post-Cold War world.

ROBERT SHERMAN
Gaithersburg

The writer is director of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

----

FIRST CHAPTER 'Hit to Kill'

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By BRADLEY GRAHAM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/books/chapters/11-1st-graha.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

In the autumn of 1944, the terror and destruction of German V-2 rockets, traveling faster than the speed of sound and slamming one-ton-explosive loads into British neighborhoods, marked the dawn of the missile age. At the end of the war, the Allies learned of Nazi plans to build a larger, two-stage rocket that might have been able to span the Atlantic Ocean, enabling Germany to make good on its intention of striking the United States. This revelation prompted Americans to question whether they could ever feel secure from missile attack.

Several U.S. military studies recommended the immediate development of an antimissile system, but a General Electric report in 1945 concluded that such a defense was beyond the scope of contemporary technology. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an early missile defense skeptic, scoffed at the idea of shooting down missiles, comparing the challenge to "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Then, in 1957, the United States observed the test of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Two months later, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. Together, these events showed that the Soviets could build missiles with enough range to cripple U.S. bomber fleets in a surprise attack. Intelligence estimates at the time predicted that the Soviets would deploy more than five hundred such missiles by the end of 1962.

Antimissile programs then took on a new urgency. The Army seized the lead, developing the Nike-Zeus project as an expansion of its Nike surface-to-air missiles-an anti-aircraft system initiated in 1945. Entirely ground-based, the plan involved dish-type radars for detecting enemy warheads and guiding interceptor missiles to them. The interceptors, armed with atomic devices, were to get close enough to the targets to destroy them in space with nuclear explosions.

No sooner had the Army introduced its concept than others started picking the plan apart, finding technical and operational faults. Some of the concerns were unique to the proposed use of nuclear missiles to shoot at other nuclear missiles. For instance, government review groups argued that nuclear blasts from interceptors could destroy the system's own radars and warned that the Soviets might even choose to explode nuclear weapons high in the atmosphere to blind the radars. Other concerns included doubts about the system's ability to guide the interceptors close enough to destroy their targets and worries that the Soviets could easily overwhelm the system by firing many missiles or confuse it by employing decoys along with active warheads.

Service rivalries came into play as well. While the Army had based its concept on shooting down missiles in their last minutes of flight, providing a point defense of military facilities, the Air Force favored an alternative concept centered on intercepting enemy missiles shortly after launch in their boost phase. The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was exploring futuristic technologies for just such an approach under a program called BAMBI (Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). It came up with a number of concepts for defenses in space, one of which involved housing interceptor missiles in large vehicles that would be stationed in orbit over ICBM sites. Critical of the Army's approach, the Air Force urged the Joint Chiefs not to deploy Nike-Zeus because it could be easily deceived, would cost too much, and might create a false sense of security. Besides, the Air Force argued, offensive retaliation-an Air Force mission-was a better defense.

The Army stood alone in its insistence that Nike-Zeus was effective and had growth potential; the reservations and doubts of higher authorities prevented the Army from proceeding with production. Even though funding for research and development continued to flow into work on antimissile systems, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations withheld any decision on deployment.

Subsequent designs modified Nike-Zeus in important ways to correct some of its shortcomings. The follow-on Nike-X system, initiated in 1963, used a layered defense of two missiles to address the risk of being overwhelmed. Under the revised plan, Spartan, an extended-range Zeus missile for interceptions in space, would take the first shots, and Sprint, a short-range missile for low-altitude intercepts, would attack any warheads that had penetrated the first layer.

This system also introduced phased array radar, a new kind of radar that was meant to reduce the vulnerability of earlier radars to direct attack. In contrast to previous mechanically steered, fragile, dish-type radars, the new versions used electronically steered radars housed in structures designed to withstand nuclear blasts. In addition, these radars could scan a much wider area of the sky and handle a larger number of targets than the Nike-Zeus models.

The technical superiority of the Nike-X system strengthened the Army's case for deployment. So did developments in the Soviet Union. In 1964 the United States detected initial construction of an antimissile system around Moscow. The same year the Soviets paraded what they claimed were antimissile interceptors through Red Square during the celebration of the October Revolution.

The intensity of the Soviet antimissile effort helped the U.S. Army rally the other military services to support a U.S. deployment. In 1965 the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara request funds for some initial Nike-X components. But just as the military chiefs appeared to be moving toward embracing missile defense, McNamara and the Pentagon's civilian leadership found themselves moving away from the concept as part of a rethinking of U.S. nuclear strategy. The Pentagon's missile defense efforts thus became enmeshed in an emerging body of thought about strategic nuclear deterrence.

McNamara had initially focused strategic planning on destroying Soviet nuclear forces in the event of war, but by the mid-1960s he had come around to the idea that no attainable level of force was sufficient to strike the Soviets and preclude a devastating retaliatory blow, particularly since the Soviets kept building more weapons. His central concern became finding a way to deter the Soviets from nuclear war. To figure out how much force was enough-and impose some fiscal constraint on service requirements-McNamara adopted a new standard for procurement, based on what he called the capability of "assured destruction." He defined this as the capability to destroy a certain percentage of the enemy's population and industrial capacity. This shift in strategic doctrine drew criticism from conservatives who viewed it as capitulation to the Soviets. But a growing and increasingly vocal group of private experts-mostly scientists and former government officials-also was contending that mutual deterrence could be maintained if each side developed a secure, second-strike force and simply left its population vulnerable to annihilation. Missile defense had no place in such a strategy because, so the reasoning went, it would spark a new arms race as each superpower sought to compensate for the other's defense.

McNamara thus joined the argument against missile defense. But President Lyndon Johnson was being lobbied to support an antimissile system, not only by the Joint Chiefs but also by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Johnson was concerned as well that the Republicans would pound him about an "ABM gap" in the 1968 elections. In December 1966, McNamara offered Johnson a compromise: seek funds for long-lead items on missile defense but delay a deployment decision while querying the Soviets about negotiations to limit such systems.

Johnson spent the first part of 1967 playing for time, hoping to work out a deal with Moscow that might make missile defense unnecessary. But the Soviets were not interested. When Johnson met Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, in June, McNamara took the opportunity to argue that missile defense threatened strategic stability and must therefore be limited. Kosygin disagreed with the notion that missile defense was destabilizing and said to McNamara, "When I have trouble sleeping nights, it's because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles." The Soviets would not agree to further discussions. With a three-to-one disadvantage in strategic offensive arms, the Soviets had little incentive to bargain over missile defense.

At the same time, the Chinese were beginning to loom as a new threat, having fired their first nuclear-armed missile in 1966. A week before the Glassboro summit, they surprised both the United States and the Soviet Union by announcing the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. If the notion of defending against massive Soviet attack still seemed too much of a reach for U.S. technology, the prospect of a limited defense against the small number of Chinese missiles held some promise.

This is the direction McNamara ultimately took. In September 1967, in a speech in San Francisco, the Defense secretary moved the United States for the first time toward deploying a national missile defense. But it was a heavily hedged and ambivalent step. In the speech, McNamara began by actually making an impassioned case against missile defense, emphasizing that attempts to defend against a large-scale Soviet strike would just fuel the arms race. At the end, however, he announced the decision to proceed with a "thin" system called Sentinel to protect U.S. cities not from Soviet attack but from a much smaller Chinese threat.

Sentinel, an outgrowth of the Nike-X program, envisioned a layered defense using the Spartan and Sprint missiles, ground-based radars, and a multiple site command-and-control system. The plan called for deploying seven hundred interceptors to defend a handful of U.S. population centers around the country.

The Sentinel decision represented a political compromise-an attempt to balance conflicting strategic, technical, and diplomatic considerations. With China beginning to test nuclear devices and missiles, the threat was real and clearly a major motivating factor to do something. Experts were convinced that an antimissile weapon could be built to defend against a limited and relatively unsophisticated attack. Congress went along initially with the Pentagon's technical judgments.

But the anti-Chinese rationale was less a coherent strategic approach than an attempt to appease the pro-missile defense forces while minimizing any provocation to the Soviet Union. If McNamara could not prevent missile defense outright, he could at least keep it limited. Johnson too saw in the Sentinel plan a way of mollifying critics with something while still trying to entice the Soviets into an arms control deal.

By the time action had to be taken to implement the Sentinel deployment, public opposition to missile defense was becoming a factor for the first time. Critics were coalescing into an organized movement of academics, scientists, and former government officials, publishing articles in science and foreign policy journals and pressing their arguments at arms control conferences, in the corridors of power, and in the halls of universities and laboratories. Antimissile systems were portrayed as more complex, less reliable, and considerably more expensive than the missiles they were designed to defeat. Even a limited system, it was noted, would have to provide a nearly perfect defense, since penetration by just one warhead would be a disaster. Enhancing America's offensive capabilities, it was argued, would be cheaper than erecting a defense. In a 1962 article in Scientific American, Herbert York, a former Pentagon director of research and engineering, and Jerome Wiesner, President John Kennedy's science adviser, argued that developing defenses would merely spur the Soviets to a new cycle of weapons building and thus intensify the arms race.

The role of scientists is particularly noteworthy. As early as 1964, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a nationwide organization of about twenty-five hundred scientists and engineers concerned about the impact of science on national and international affairs, opposed any missile defense deployment. A 1968 article in Scientific American by Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate professor of physics at Cornell University and member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, and Richard Garwin, a research scientist at IBM, outlined in public for the first time the technical vulnerabilities of ballistic missile defenses. Their article cited concerns about high-altitude detonations blinding radars on the ground and the prospect of decoys or multiple warheads overwhelming the system.

Members of Congress began to seek the advice of the scientific community, and by the spring of 1969 scientists opposed to missile defense were testifying before congressional committees. This was a new phenomenon; previously, only administration witnesses had testified on defense matters. It was during this period that the core arguments against missile defense solidified and began to take root throughout the military establishment and on Capitol Hill. But the scientific community was itself split. A number of respected experts also made the case for proceeding with a limited antimissile system-among them, Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study and Alvin Weinberg of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They argued that a strong defense could undercut the value of ICBMs and end the arms race. Even in the absence of a 100 percent effective defense, Dyson wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, some benefit would come from saving most of a population. Another prominent supporter was Albert Wohlstetter, a researcher at the RAND Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute, who insisted that defensive systems were necessary to ensure that enough offensive missiles would survive a Soviet first strike to retaliate. He accused opponents of distorting operations research and data; they responded with accusations of contradictory statements, changing rationales, and selective use of intelligence information by members of the administration.

The technical debate left the impression that for every expert declaring that missile defense would not work, another was ready to argue that it would. What finally aroused the general public, though, was the Army's move in the final year of the Johnson administration to start buying land for the missile defense sites. Opponents warned that cities near defensive missile sites would become "megaton magnets" for the Soviet Union. They also fanned fears by saying that the nuclear warheads of the Spartan and Sprint interceptors might detonate at low altitude during an attack, or accidentally in peacetime, thereby destroying the very cities they were intended to protect. In the face of such heightened public concern, congressional backers began to rethink their commitment. Compounding matters, the Sentinel controversy was occurring against the backdrop of growing opposition to the Vietnam War, which cast clouds of general suspicion across all military programs.

Soon after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon decided to deploy Sentinel equipment in a new configuration, relocating defensive sites out of metropolitan areas and basing them around offensive U.S. strategic missile silos. He called the reoriented system Safeguard. With this shift from population defense to silo defense, the Nixon administration hoped to dampen public opposition. At the time, U.S. officials were also increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of U.S. missiles to attack as a result of moves by the Soviet Union to put multiple, independently targetable warheads atop its huge SS-9 missiles.

Still, the Safeguard system proved as controversial as its predecessor, and the debate churned on. In August 1969, Congress narrowly approved funding to begin production of Safeguard, with Vice President Spiro Agnew breaking a fifty-fifty tie vote in the Senate. Over the next two years, the program retained its precarious grip on survival on the strength of its perceived value as a bargaining chip in the talks with the Soviet Union on limiting offensive nuclear weapons that began in November 1969. Already by the early 1970s, contemporary chroniclers were referring to national missile defense as "the most costly, complex and controversial weapon system ever developed by the United States."

In 1972, through negotiations known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the United States and Soviet Union agreed to a five-year freeze on strategic launchers and concluded the ABM Treaty restricting each superpower to two antimissile system complexes. In 1974 a protocol was added reducing the number of permitted sites to one each and a maximum of one hundred interceptors. Consistent with their respective antimissile programs at the time, the United States chose to protect a missile base near Grand Forks, North Dakota, while the Soviets retained the Galosh system they had built around Moscow in the 1960s.

The provisions of the ABM Treaty were tailored to prevent either country from deploying a full territorial defense or laying the groundwork for such a defense. To that end, the treaty placed tight restrictions on the development of new types of antimissile weapons, forbidding the testing or deployment of antimissile systems-or even components-that were mobile and land-based, or based in space, at sea, or in the air. The treaty marked a conceptual turning point in the nuclear relationship between the two superpowers. It signified an acknowledgment of deterrence based on mutual vulnerability. By entering into the treaty, the Americans and Soviets seemed to agree that the best way to avoid a massive nuclear attack by the other side was to remain defenseless against one. Understandably, missile defense enthusiasts found such reasoning absurd. Donald Brennan, a Hudson Institute analyst who had been working on missile defense issues, bitterly attacked the notion. He took McNamara's term "assured destruction" and the phrase "mutual deterrence" and combined them into what he called "the concept of mutual assured destruction," thus coining the enduring acronym MAD, which he said appropriately described the official U.S. posture.

It did not take long after the ABM Treaty process reduced the number of allowable sites down to one for even the single U.S. Safeguard facility in North Dakota to start looking expendable. From its inception, Safeguard had faced the same technical criticisms as Sentinel-chiefly that the system was extremely vulnerable to countermeasures and a determined Soviet first strike. Such limitations might have been acceptable in the short term while Safeguard served as a bargaining chip to persuade the Soviets to accept reductions in strategic forces. But after the ABM Treaty and the SALT I accord, there was less justification for keeping Safeguard at all.

Shortly after Safeguard started operating in October 1975, Congress canceled funding for the system, citing its expense and likely ineffectiveness. Operations were halted in February 1976. From start to finish, the program absorbed $5.5 billion, excluding the cost of developing and building the nuclear warheads. By the end, nuclear-tipped interceptors had lost favor as the way to defend against missile attack because of their technical and political liabilities. For one thing, nuclear explosions interfered with the operation of the radar systems that were supposed to control the battle between defending missiles and incoming warheads. For another, the prospect of nuclear blasts even high overhead unnerved populations on the ground.

So the Army shifted its research and development to an alternative approach that avoided explosive devices and relied instead on the kinetic energy of a direct collision to obliterate a target. Such an approach would require significant advances in two main areas. One was optical sensors to overcome the problems that radars had with distinguishing among decoys, boosters, warheads, and debris. The other area was parallel processing by computers at speeds fast enough to interpret the sensor data, incorporate it with radar tracking information, and compute targeting instructions for an interceptor.

By combining the improved capabilities of infrared sensors with small, high-capacity computers, the Army produced interceptors that worked on the principle of kinetic kill. Dubbed "hit-to-kill" vehicles, they represented the first major revolution in ballistic missile defense since the United States began research in the 1940s. This technology was ready for demonstration in 1982, when the Army began what it called its Homing Overlay Experiment, or HOE. In these tests, an experimental vehicle was launched from the Kwajalein missile range in the Marshall Islands using a modified Minuteman rocket. Once in space, the vehicle separated from its booster and homed in on a target missile that had been fired from an Air Force base in California. HOE succeeded in scoring a hit after three failures, but the credibility of the test was called into question years later when investigators at the Congressional General Accounting Office reported that the chances of intercepting the target warhead had been increased by heating it before launch and instructing it to fly sideways, thereby exposing a greater surface area to the interceptor's sensors. In any case, HOE was far too heavy and expensive for operational purposes.

Major advances in the development of lasers also occurred in the 1970s as the Pentagon explored ways of using this technology to shoot down aircraft or missiles. By the early 1980s, these efforts had focused on high-energy lasers based in space in order to overcome the scattering and spread of laser beams caused by the atmosphere. The construction of large mirrors posed a challenge for the evolution of laser systems, as did pointing and tracking with high precision. But of all the technical advances during this period, the promise of directed-energy weapons contributed most to generating renewed interest in deploying an antimissile system.

At the end of the 1970s, a precipitous change in U.S.-Soviet relations resulting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the failure of the United States to ratify a SALT II agreement set the conditions for reigniting the missile defense debate. The election of Ronald Reagan provided the spark. But it did not come immediately. While Reagan wasted little time launching the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, the strategic modernization program that he presented in October 1981 contained no provision for an antimissile system. A Defense Science Board panel had reviewed the status of various missile defense technologies earlier in the year and concluded that none was on the horizon.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from HIT TO KILL by Bradley Graham.

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

Warren E. Henry, Physicist and Educator, Dead at 92

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By WOLFGANG SAXON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/obituaries/10HENR.html?searchpv=nytToday

Dr. Warren Elliott Henry, a scientist who in a long career in government and academia made significant contributions to the fields of radar technology, physical properties of materials and physics education, died on Oct. 31 in Washington.

He was 92 and lived in Washington, where he was an emeritus professor at Howard University.

Born in rural Evergreen, Ala., Dr. Henry graduated in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, and never lost touch with it or the African-American airmen who trained in town in World War II. He received a master's degree in organic chemistry from Atlanta University in 1937 and a doctorate in physics and physical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1941.

He began his teaching career at Tuskegee, where a physics class for the institute's aspiring pilots was part of his course load.

In 1943, he was recruited by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory for a project undertaken for the Navy.

At M.I.T., Dr. Isidor Rabi was preparing the theoretical underpinning for more potent radar systems that would detect and track targets like German submarines. Dr. Henry contributed to the systems' design and construction.

With no other job offers, he returned to teaching, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and became the acting chairman of the physics department. In 1948, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington hired him as a physicist and, later, supervisory physicist exploring magnetic properties of materials at extremely low temperatures, a field known as cryomagnetism.

From 1960 to 1969, Dr. Henry worked for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Among other things, he investigated the superconductivity properties of materials for space and aeronautical equipment.

Dr. Henry left Lockheed in 1969 as senior staff engineer and senior staff scientist in the advanced concepts division and joined the faculty at Howard, where he had taught courses in solid state physics. He was credited with strengthening the university's physics department and retired with emeritus status in 1977.

He published more than 100 articles and scientific papers, often presenting his findings at national and international conferences and at meetings of the American Physical Society. He frequently lectured at industrial research laboratories and elsewhere, and he contributed chapters to textbooks.

He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Henry's wife, Jeanne Pearlson Henry, died about 25 years ago. He is survived by a daughter, Eva Ruth Henry, of Florida; and five siblings, Nelson, Emmett and Alfred Henry and Celestine Ruskin, all of Montgomery, Ala., and Mamie Clemons of Pittsburgh.

Over the years, Dr. Henry studied under a number of Nobel Prize winners: Dr. Arthur H. Compton, the 1927 winner in physics, taught him quantum mechanics; Dr. Wolfgang Pauli, the 1945 winner, taught him the theory of nuclear forces; Dr. Robert A. Millikan, the 1923 winner, taught him molecular spectra. In addition, he played tennis with Dr. Enrico Fermi, a 1938 laureate.

In 1997, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory honored Dr. Henry with a W. E. Henry Symposium, "The Importance of Magnetism in Physics and Material Science." Among those present was Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, another Nobelist and the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

-------- washington

Officials don't want cleanup delayed

Hanford News
Sat, Nov 10, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1110.html

Mid-Columbia government officials tried this week to pop a trial balloon floated a couple of weeks ago about possibly delaying Hanford nuclear waste cleanup.

The issue revolves around local governments trying to predict what impact about 3,000 new Hanford workers would have on Mid-Columbia schools, roads, utilities and public services over the next four years.

Those workers, who are to build Hanford's tank waste glassification complex, would translate to about 7,000 new Tri-City residents. Construction is to be mostly finished in 2006, when the glassification work force would rapidly shrink.

In late October, Pam Brown, Richland's Hanford analyst, attended a national conference in Florida on cleaning up Department of Energy sites. There, Energy Undersecretary Bob Card, DOE's No. 3 leader, told Brown the federal agency had been wondering if it should delay building the glassification complex because it might strain the Mid-Columbia's schools and roads.

Brown told Card Mid-Columbia leaders want the glassification construction to proceed on schedule, and that any studies on community impacts should not stall the project.

On Tuesday, the Hanford Communities sent a letter to Card repeating what Brown told him. Hanford Communities is a Hanford-related coalition of the governments of Richland, Kennewick, Pasco, West Richland, Benton County and the Port of Benton.

The letter said the work on the glassification complex -- Hanford's top priority -- appears to be going well with good contracts in place and adequate funding likely through the end of fiscal 2002. The complex is legally required to convert its first wastes into glass in 2007.

"We want to make it very clear that anticipated municipal impacts should not be used as a reason to slow down this project," the letter said. "The highly radioactive waste in Hanford's tanks has already been there too long. Each day that goes by without tank waste treatment increases the environmental risk to ground water and the Columbia River."

The letter added: "Ultimately our communities will have to accommodate all of the people needed to build the facilities. Slowing down the project will not diminish the impact to the region but could very well have a negative impact on our communities."

On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham took his first tour of Hanford, which included a 40-minute meeting with DOE employees and community leaders. Richland Mayor Bob Thompson, talked briefly with Abraham at that meeting and reiterated the letter's position.

-------- us nuc politics

In the War on Terrorism, New Life for Propaganda
The Bush administration is creating a 21st-century version of the 1940's propaganda war.

Saturday November 10
By ELIZABETH BECKER
The New York Times
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nyt/20011110/ts/in_the_war_on_terrorism_new_life_for_propaganda_1.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 Late last month, Karen P. Hughes, the White House communications director, met with her British counterpart to join forces in what may be the most ambitious wartime communications effort since World War II.

The two officials agreed that there was an urgent need to combat the Taliban's daily denunciations of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, vitriol that was going unchallenged across the Islamic world. Soon they had set up a round-the- clock war news bureau in Pakistan and a network of war offices linking Washington, London and Islamabad that help develop a "message of the day."

The highly orchestrated communications effort is a first step in a broader campaign to create a 21st- century version of the muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940's. Matching old-fashioned patriotism to the frantic pace of modern communications, the Bush administration is trying to persuade audiences here and abroad to support the war. At the same time, it is trying just as hard to reveal as little as possible about it.

To reach foreign audiences, especially in the Islamic world, the State Department brought in Charlotte Beers, a former advertising executive, who is using her marketing skills to try to make American values as much a brand name as McDonald's hamburgers or Ivory soap. The department's efforts are also meant to counter the propaganda of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

The foreign message crafted in Ms. Beers's new shop at Foggy Bottom dovetails with the domestic news management led by Ms. Hughes at the White House. From a nerve center set up two weeks ago in the Old Executive Office Building, the top communications directors of the administration including veterans who ran war rooms for presidential campaigns talk every morning to keep one step ahead of the news from the enemy.

"Before the war room it was like spitting in the ocean," said Mary Matalin, chief political adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and a participant in the communications effort. "Now we can collect all the utterances, proclamations from around the world that will buttress our arguments this week that the Taliban has hijacked a peaceful religion and get them out, get them noticed in real time."

The effort to cobble together a new global approach is a backhanded acknowledgement that Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban are formidable propaganda foes, having spent years winning the hearts and minds of much of the Muslim world. It is also an acknowledgment that propaganda is back in fashion after the Clinton administration and Congress tried to cash in on the end of the cold war by cutting back public diplomacy overseas, especially government radio broadcasts into former communist countries, to balance the budget.

The other side of this propaganda war is the equally traditional military role of suppressing information while running psychological operations in the war zone.

The Pentagon has imposed a tight lid on sensitive military news, particularly about special operations, trying to walk the fine line of saying enough to reassure the public that the war is on target but keeping the news media at bay.

Veteran communicators of other wars are amazed at the limited information and limited access to the battlefield. Barry Zorthian, the chief spokesman for the American war effort in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, said this conflict is "much tighter than Vietnam."

"Saigon was almost wide open compared to this," Mr. Zorthian said. "We gave out much more information, and we had no real problems with the media giving away information that would harm the troops."

On the battlefield, the military has also heated up its psychological operations. Air Force planes drop propaganda leaflets that describe the United States as a friend of the Afghan people, and then drop food packets to try to drive home the point. Planes act as airborne radio stations, broadcasting warnings to civilians to stay out of the way.

Even aspects of the Pentagon briefings can be part of the psychological warfare. At one briefing, officials showed night-vision video of an Army Ranger raid in Afghanistan, in part to show the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden's terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, that the United States military could land and carry out operations on the ground.

In this new effort to bridge the classic tension between controlling information while promoting the message to a diverse audience, the administration is reaching back to the icons of the "greatest generation" of World War II. The Bush administration is revving up foreign-language radio broadcasts behind the amorphous enemy lines and asking Hollywood to pitch in.

On Sunday, Karl Rove, a senior political adviser to President Bush, will visit Hollywood, where he is expected to receive a warm welcome from producers and directors eager to show their patriotism.

Sean Daniel, a former studio executive and producer of "The Mummy," said he expected Hollywood to help.

"We'll contribute in a modern way what was done in the Second World War," Mr. Daniel said. "There has to be a way for the most popular culture on earth to help spread or help focus on our commonly shared beliefs, like the fact that what we're doing is right."

But the World War II propaganda effort put Hitler front and center, effectively using radio, film and even cartoons to depict the dictator as the personification of the enemy.

The Bush administration, by contrast, has shied away from making Mr. bin Laden the most prominent image in its propaganda war, airbrushing him out, at least for now. Given the pace of propaganda in the 21st century, that may change.

Tools of the Trade Finding a New Life

In the summer of 1994, Karl Rove flew to Prague on a mission to save Radio Free Europe. Then a member of the board overseeing the government stations that once broadcast into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Mr. Rove was fighting both President Bill Clinton, who considered Radio Free Europe a relic of the cold war, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers who wanted to close it down.

"Karl Rove saw for himself how powerful that radio had been, bringing in the news about those communist countries to their own people in their own language, and it made it crystal clear to him that it had to be saved," said Kevin Klose, who was the head of Radio Free Europe then and is now president of National Public Radio.

Radio Free Europe was saved, but only after cutting $125 million from its $200 million budget.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Rove, now the central political adviser to President Bush in today's propaganda campaign, is trying to put foreign language broadcasts back at the center of the war effort.

"It's time to bring back the idea of an Edward R. Murrow in Arabic, modernized of course, using satellites and shortwave, and Karl Rove understands all this perfectly," Mr. Klose said.

Foreign-language broadcasts are just one of the old ideas being dusted off and given a new life in an effort to recreate the kind of propaganda campaigns that were waged against the Axis powers in World War II and against communism in the cold war.

Like the old Office of War Information in World War II, the administration has sought to harmonize the daily message about the progress of the war through the creation of the White House war room. Representatives of various agencies work together there, including officials from the Pentagon, Health and Human Services and the new Office of Homeland Security.

In addition to enlisting the help of Hollywood, another old idea being recast is enlarging the propaganda message overseas through American diplomacy. This was once the domain of the United States Information Agency, but that agency was reduced and folded into the State Department in the Clinton administration.

Ms. Beers became under secretary of state last month to help sell the American war to the Islamic world. She quickly put Christopher Ross, a former ambassador fluent in Arabic, on the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera to counter a videotaped message from Mr. bin Laden, and has put Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Egyptian television to defend the American bombing campaign and Egypt's role in the war on terrorism. Vice President Cheney gave an interview on Friday to the British tabloid newspaper The Sun in that same effort to get the message past the elite.

This week Ms. Beers sent a "catalog of lies" through the State Department to Pakistani newspapers to dispute Taliban allegations, including the claim that the United States was purposefully targeting civilians.

And Ms. Beers has begun addressing groups of foreign journalists in Washington, many from Muslim nations. Those sessions are closed to American journalists.

"We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State Department.

This new concerted information campaign, with messages crafted jointly by American and British government communications directors in the war offices, called coalition information centers, in Washington, London and Islamabad, is trying to counter enemy propaganda about civilian casualties and the progress of the war.

Among some people who have played a spokesman's role before, there are doubts about whether journalists here and abroad will accept these new messages.

"I'd tone this down. This is not the Second World War, it's something different," said Frank Mankiewicz, a former Democratic spokesman now with the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton. "It's trying to fit one kind of struggle into another form and it's not working. It's too obvious."

There are also doubts about how well the propaganda campaign is working in the Islamic world. One challenge has been reaching across the cultural divide.

As part of its psychological operations, the military has been dropping leaflets over Afghanistan and broadcasting radio programs from aircraft meant to encourage the defections of Taliban soldiers by showing the cruelty and tyranny of the regime.

Originally, some leaflets were designed with a more direct message telling Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to surrender or risk certain death. But culture experts working on the military's psychological operations team balked, saying an Afghan soldier would read a demand to surrender as an invitation to become a coward and lose his honor. The wording was changed.

Keeping Tight Control On Information and Expectations

Even before the bombing began on Oct. 7, news organizations had begun pushing for access to information and troops. But in the days and weeks since, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, while paying lip service to Persian Gulf war guidelines for news media coverage of combat, has enforced policies ensuring that journalists have little or no access to independent information about military strategies, successes and failures.

Pentagon correspondents say their usual sources have taken Secretary Rumsfeld's warnings about leaks to heart and are reticent where they had once been forthcoming in giving guidance to reporters.

In addition, after-action access to the troops engaged in bombing or other combat missions has been almost nonexistent. While there are hundreds of reporters in countries like Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states, Uzbekistan and the northern areas of Afghanistan all places where United States troops have been deployed the Central Command has yet to allow reporters to have any contact with troops.

It is not just information that the Pentagon leadership is keeping under tight control. It is also expectations. At a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, the commander in chief of the Central Command, was asked, "At the end of a month, now, what can we show that says, `Hey, we're winning?' "

General Franks rejected the premise, choosing instead to outline his objectives in the broadest terms: "Our job has to do with terrorist organizations, networks and global reach, and it has to do with the command and control of the Taliban."

The desire to keep information and expectations at a minimum stems directly from the experience of the Vietnam War, longtime military reporters and military historians say. The Johnson administration "oversold greatly the degree of success" of the war before the Tet offensive in 1968, said Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic and military correspondent for The Washington Post. The unrealistic expectations turned the Tet battles arguably a United States military victory into a massive public relations defeat.

"A whole generation of military officers grew up believing that the press was the problem, if not the enemy," Mr. Oberdorfer said.

And with public support of the Afghan action and trust of the Bush administration high, news organizations have little leverage. As the Army's senior historian, William Hammond, said, "History tells us that in a very popular war the government doesn't have to justify a whole lot."

Nonetheless, on Oct. 18, Mr. Rumsfeld said he "had no problem" with the nine- year-old "Principles of Coverage" Vice President Cheney agreed to when he was defense secretary. Among other things, the principles state that the military, as quickly as practicable, provide reporters with independent access to combat operations under the stricture that reporting would never compromise missions or endanger troops or intelligence-gathering operations.

But leading journalists say Mr. Rumsfeld's acceptance of the guidelines is in name only. Reporters have been allowed aboard three aircraft carriers and, briefly, on one Marine vessel in the Arabian Sea. But, said Sandy Johnson, the Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press: "Pilots won't tell us where they've been, what they dropped, what their target was. Nothing has changed."

Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, who helped draft the 1992 guidelines, said last week that they "have been accepted but aren't being lived up to." Mr. Hoyt added, "American forces are engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out."

Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Friday that the guidelines had been communicated to commanders in the field as "broad policy guidance," adding, "We leave it to them at the local level to know best how to implement that."

Thus far, news organizations' only response has been increasingly frustrated questioning of the policy in weekly meetings with Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman. No unified challenge has been made by news executives.

Some executives, in fact, are as worried about public opinion as they are about the government's lid on information. Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, recently issued a memorandum saying that reports about civilian casualties in the bombing campaign must be balanced with mention of the Sept. 11 attacks.

An International Audience Grows Increasingly Skeptical

Perhaps the clearest sign of rising German and European skepticism toward the United States' declared war on terrorism is the warning to readers that the Frankfurter Rundschau, a leading liberal newspaper, has run every day since the bombing began.

"Substantial amounts of information about current military actions and their consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the conflict," the warning says. "In many cases, an independent confirmation of such information is not possible."

Germany is one of the United States's strongest supporters in the battle against terrorism. But as in other European countries, the initial outpouring of grief and solidarity is giving way to pointed questions about American strategy and dissatisfaction with many of the answers.

If the United States has a public relations problem among its allies, it boils down to this: many Europeans feel they have precious little information they can trust. They rely on conflicting and equally unverifiable claims from Pentagon briefings and Taliban news conferences, and are increasingly unwilling to believe either side.

"We are experiencing the same problem that we had in the gulf war no pictures," said Ulrich Deppendorf, Berlin bureau chief for Germany's ARD television network. "We have to rely on what the U.S. government claims, or on what the Taliban via Al Jazeera claims, or on information from the Pakistani news agency."

The United States has paid little attention so far to shoring up its message in Europe. The government initially rebuffed offers of military help, but that view has changed sharply in the last week. The British made the case that European involvement might bolster political support and the United States sought and received pledges of military aid from Italy, Germany and Turkey.

But Europeans, especially Germans, have been baffled by the way Americans have made their requests or explained their objectives.

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany pushed Parliament to agree to make 3,900 soldiers available for missions in or around Afghanistan potentially the first use of German troops outside Europe since World War II. Germans were then flummoxed when Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that the United States had never specifically asked for German troops but rather the country's "broad support."

European popular support for the United States's campaign has waned noticeably, while newspapers have given quite prominent play to pictures of bombing damage and accounts of civilian casualties.

British support for military action has declined to about two-thirds from three- quarters, while French support has dropped to about half, from two-thirds shortly after Sept. 11.

"The public sees continuous bombing of buildings and they see pictures from Al Jazeera of small villages that have been destroyed, and that has made things immensely difficult," said Helmut Lippelt, a Green Party legislator who supports continued military action.

But Mr. Lippelt said the United States had hurt its own cause by being too murky about its plans. "The big danger in all this is the impression that bombs will keep up endlessly and that we will be dealing with a 10-year quagmire," he said. "One has to be clear about what this is about, and be clear that one understands those worries."

European news media get most of their information directly from Washington, and it is Washington that is frustrating them.

"Our greatest pressure is that we have no images," said Auberi Edler, a foreign news editor at France 2. "The only interesting images we get are from Al Jazeera. It's bad for everybody."

European journalists have also become suspicious that American news media have been co-opted by the government, or at least swept up by patriotism. "The journalists and the media directors suffer, in my opinion, from a `post Vietnam patriotic syndrome,' " wrote Freimut Duve, a German who heads the office on free speech at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna.

Mr. Duve argued that it was a mistake for the United States to declare a war on "terrorism," and that a clear focus on Osama bin Laden would have made the endgame easier to understand.

Hungry for News, Blanketed in Leaflets

When one nation is bombing another, it is difficult to convince the bombed of the virtue of the bombers. In Afghanistan, this has been America's challenge. Planes have been dropping leaflets as well as explosives.

One flier offers justification: "On September 11th, the United States was the target of terrorist attacks, leaving no choice but to seek justice for these horrible crimes."

Another provides an advisory: "We have no wish to hurt you, the innocent people of Afghanistan. Stay away from military installations, government buildings, terrorist camps, roads, factories or bridges. If you are near these places, then you must move away from them. Seek a safe place, and stay well away from anything that might be a target."

Another is soul-searching: "Do you enjoy being ruled by the Taliban? Are you proud to live a life of fear? Are you happy to see the place your family has owned for generations a terrorist training site?"

It is hard to assess the effect of the leafletting. From the testimony of recent refugees, most Afghans are more focused on their own fight for survival than the war against terrorism. As bombs hit the cities, people flee to the villages. As bombs hit the villages, people flee to the borders. They are destitute and frightened and hungry.

People are eager for news but information is scarce. Television has been banned by the Taliban; there are no newspapers to speak of. Radio has been people's primary link to the world. The Taliban's Radio Shariat was quickly silenced by the air raids.

The United States would like to provide its own substitute. Last week, Congress voted to create Radio Free Afghanistan, a station that would beam Afghan versions of entertainment and American versions of the news. In the meantime, a special aircraft occasionally broadcasts from the sky.

Many Afghans are accustomed to listening to the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Voice of America, which offer news in the local languages. While the reporting is generally considered unbiased, editorials may not be regarded as similarly so. Recent Voice of America editorials have had much the same tone as the leaflets.

On Wednesday, the Voice of America warned hungry Afghans that food had been stolen from United Nations warehouses and that the Taliban may have poisoned it.

"It is hard to believe that anyone even those as evil as the Taliban leaders would ever poison food intended for starving people," the editorial said. "But then, who believed before Sept. 11 that anyone would hijack civilian airliners and deliberately crash them into buildings to kill thousands of innocent people?"

In Pakistan, the battle for the headlines largely seems to have been won by Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's ambassador in Islamabad. Virtually every weekday, he has hosted a news conference from the embassy's veranda, making allegations about American "atrocities" to a huge audience of foreign journalists desperate for news.

A few days ago, the government of Pakistan, America's frontline ally against the Taliban, told Mullah Zaeef that his barrage of vitriol was outside the norms of diplomatic conduct. He was asked to curb his hospitality to the press.

The allies announced their own effort to counter the Taliban spin, opening the war office in Islamabad in an effort to immediately respond to accusations. Islamabad is 10 hours ahead of Washington. By the time the Pentagon has issued its rebuttals, the newspapers in many countries have already gone to press.

A Place for bin Laden In Propaganda History

Turning civilian passenger planes into missiles will not be the only benchmark set by Mr. bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization. In the annals of propaganda, Mr. bin Laden will be remembered, too, for the audacity he showed by leaping onto the television screens of the world only hours after American bombs started falling on Afghanistan.

This was a man wanted by the most powerful nation on earth, a nation whose leader had been assuring the world that, for Mr. bin Laden, there would be nowhere to escape American justice. And there Mr. bin Laden was, suddenly, on videotape, sitting calmly before a rocky outcrop, his only weapon a Kalashnikov rifle. He delivered a statement about Allah having struck America in its highest places, wished the killer pilots godspeed to paradise and vowed that this was just the start of an apocalypse.

"You have to choose your side," he told the world's one billion Muslims, and leaned back contentedly for a sip of water.

With that astonishing videotape, Mr. bin Laden showed, again, that America was at war with a formidable enemy. Just as his zeal to stab America's heart had been underestimated, so too had he been lightly regarded as an ideological foe. By arranging that his address to the Islamic world become available as soon as the bombing began, he showed that he understood that this war, like other modern conflicts, would be fought on the leveling terrain of world opinion as much as on the battlefield.

From that instant the propaganda war was joined, and it is far from clear in the Muslim world that Mr. bin Laden is losing it.

Although American networks have been persuaded not to run Mr. bin Laden's tapes unedited, the Islamic audience he cares about can still see and hear him.

For this audience, there is Al Jazeera, the CNN of the Arab world, chosen as the recipient of his tapes. The text of his latest tape, in which he attacked moderate Arab leaders and the United Nations, was on the front page in newspapers across the Muslim world, and on scores of Arab Internet sites. Beyond that, the message has been broadcast, and rebroadcast, from the pulpits of myriad mosques.

Racks in the bookstores of cities across the Islamic world are filled with books about Mr. bin Laden, and with magazines that carry his photograph on their covers.

The evidence from the Muslim world is that Mr. bin Laden's hatred for America and his call for a holy war has a vast, receptive audience. Opinion polls show it, and anecdotal evidence confirms it.

In Pakistan, America's reluctant partner in the war on terrorism, it is hard to find anybody who does not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks. But in slum sections of Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, people with almost nothing line up to buy bin Laden T-shirts. And in the salons of the elite, it is hard to find anybody who does not find a way of signaling a sneaking admiration, if only because Mr. bin Laden has, many in the Muslim world seem to believe, brought humility to the United States.


-------- MILITARY

THE PRESIDENT
Bush Chides Some in Coalition for Inaction

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10PREX.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - President Bush expressed impatience today with nations that he said had done little in the war against terrorism beyond offering condolences, and said he would use an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday to make the case that "the time for sympathy is over."

Speaking at the White House during a joint news conference with the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Mr. Bush said that "we appreciate the condolences" but that "now is the time for action, now is the time for coalition members to respond in their own way."

A senior administration official said Mr. Bush's speech would be a fleshing out of what the White House calls the Bush Doctrine - the assertion that nations that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves.

Mr. Bush will not name names in the speech, the official said, even though some American officials have singled out Saudi Arabia for what they say is a lack of cooperation in the war against terrorism. But Mr. Bush said almost as much himself at the White House today after calling for active assistance from coalition members.

"The Saudi Arabian government understands that, and they are responding as well," he said.

At the same time, Mr. Bush's news conference and meeting with Mr. Vajpayee opened a delicate new phase of diplomacy in a potentially explosive conflict by reassuring the Indian leader of Washington's long- term commitment, even as the president was preparing for a meeting in New York Saturday with Mr. Vajpayee's bitter rival, Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.

"My administration is committed to developing a fundamentally different relationship with India," Mr. Bush declared. He said the United States and India "will fight terrorism together," adding, "India has got a fantastic ability to grow, because her greatest export is intelligence and brain power."

The language of friendship was underscored by the setting of today's event, the Cross Hall on the state floor of the White House, a place that offered the same pageantry bestowed this week on another ally, the British prime minister, Tony Blair.

Mr. Bush brushed aside statements earlier this week by Mr. Vajpayee that the military campaign in Afghanistan was not "fully satisfactory" and that the United States suffered from a lack of intelligence data from the region. In an interview that appeared in The Washington Post today, Mr. Vajpayee also said the opposition Northern Alliance, which is supported by India, had not received enough military support from Washington.

After the talks, Mr. Bush said: "The prime minister and I had a very good discussion about the progress we're making on this particular part of the war on terror." The coalition against terrorism, he said, "has never been stronger."

Mr. Vajpayee, his head down as he read from prepared remarks, said, "We admire the decisive leadership of President Bush."

Underneath the decorous language of diplomacy were serious concerns from India, which remains irritated and nervous about America's sudden wartime alliance with Pakistan.

India and Pakistan have been enemies since they were carved out of the British Empire a half-century ago, and have fought three bitter wars. India now regards Pakistan as the prime sponsor of terrorism in India, chiefly in the disputed northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

"Pakistan cannot be on one border saying `We are against terrorism' and on the other border saying that `We support terrorism,' " a senior Indian diplomat said. "There cannot be good terrorists and bad terrorists."

Jaswant Singh, the Indian foreign minister, who today called Afghanistan "a factory for terrorists that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year," said the war there had in one way benefited India, because some terrorist camps that had shifted from Pakistan to Afghanistan had now been destroyed in the bombing. White House officials said that Mr. Bush and Mr. Vajpayee touched on the issue of Kashmir, but would not specifically say that the president urged Mr. Vajpayee to use restraint in that area, where India has amassed 600,000 troops. That point was already made by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during a visit to New Delhi last month.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said after the meeting that "in all the conversations the president has had and that he will have, including tomorrow at the United Nations with President Musharraf, the president will discuss the need for stability in the region and for a peaceful resolution between India and Pakistan over any other disputes."

Nonetheless, Mr. Singh reacted with disdain at a news briefing this afternoon when asked if Mr. Bush had asked India to act with restraint.

"If India exercises restraint," Mr. Singh said, "it exercises restraint out of sovereign will." He also warned that if terrorist attacks in India continue, "India will certainly respond adequately and in an appropriate fashion."

Both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and American officials have worried that the tensions could escalate to full-scale war if there should be a major terrorist attack on India by an Islamic militant group based in Pakistan. Mr. Bush has been loath to mire himself and the United States in the Kashmir dispute, but has been forced by the events of Sept. 11 to try to be a stabilizing voice in the region.

Mr. Bush is to meet with Mr. Musharraf after addressing the United Nations, and on Sunday is scheduled to attend a memorial service with other world leaders at the World Trade Center, marking the two- month anniversary of the attacks.

-------- afghanistan

Northern Alliance Reports More Advances

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Afghanistan.html?searchpv=aponline

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- After abandoning a key northern city, Taliban forces retreated south Saturday toward the capital, Kabul, where the opposition threatened to launch a major attack within days. Opposition forces claimed to have seized three provincial capitals in what may signal the collapse of Islamic militia's rule in the north.

American B-52 bombers and other warplanes were in action Saturday over the front north of Kabul, and huge clouds of smoke billowed skyward as bombs exploded over Taliban positions.

The fast-moving events marked a major shift in the fortunes of the fractious northern-based opposition, which relied on American airpower to seize Mazar-e-Sharif and give the U.S.-led coalition its first major victory since the start of the bombing campaign Oct. 7.

If the three provincial capitals have fallen -- the opposition claims could not be independently verified -- the Taliban may have decided to abandon large swaths of territory populated by ethnic minorities in the north and redeploy their forces southward to defend Kabul and other strongholds of the dominant Pashtun ethnic group.

Anti-Taliban troops who were massed at the front about 30 miles north of Kabul cheered at reports of Mazar-e-Sharif's fall, with villagers crowding around radios to head the news.

``This is the beginning of the collapse of the Taliban,'' said Nur Agha, a 22-year-old fighter.

Alim Khan, a northern alliance commander there, said anti-Taliban forces would launch a major attack on the capital within three days. He said that 1,000 opposition troops would assemble Sunday at Bagram, site of an opposition-controlled air base near the front line.

Mohammad Afzal Amon, the commander of the opposition's elite Zarbati troops north of Kabul, said 600 fighters had been sent to his area since the victory in Mazar-e-Sharif.

But the opposition would likely face a much tougher battle for Kabul, a city of about 1 million people, than they it did at Mazar-e-Sharif. Taliban forces are more numerous and the terrain more mountainous. And the United States -- whose warplanes would be vital to any advance -- has expressed reservations about the alliance taking the capital.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Kabul should become neutral territory if anti-Taliban forces oust the ruling militia, saying the capital's residents -- many of them Pashtuns -- fear and mistrust the opposition.

In Kabul, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia confirmed losing Mazar-e-Sharif and said their forces withdrew rather than risk the destruction of the city of about 200,000.

``We did not want to risk our soldiers or have the city destroyed, so we left,'' Abdul Hanan Hemat, chief of the Taliban-controlled Bakhtar News Agency said. ``But our morale is high. Losing Mazar-e-Sharif has not damaged our spirit.''

He said the opposition would have been unable to take the city had it not been for a week of relentless bombing by U.S. jets.

The capture of Mazar-e-Sharif was the biggest success since President Bush launched airstrikes to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

In other developments:

-- Diplomats from the United States, Russia and six other nations working at the United Nations to find a political solution in Afghanistan welcomed a general amnesty that opposition forces offered to Taliban supporters in Mazar-e-Sharif when they took control of the city.

-- Bush told the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Saturday that all countries share an urgent obligation to battle terrorism. ``For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid and it will be paid,'' Bush said. ``The time for action has now arrived.''

-- Bin Laden claims he has nuclear and chemical weapons and will unleash them if the United States uses similar weapons against him, according to an interview published Saturday in Dawn, one of Pakistan's largest newspapers.

-- Suspected terrorist Mohammed Atta contacted an Iraqi agent with plans to blow up the Radio Free Europe building in Prague several months before the terrorist attacks in the United States, Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman told CNN. Czech officials say Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent working as a diplomat in Prague in April.

It was not clear how many Taliban fighters were pulling back toward Kabul from Mazar-e-Sharif. American bombers were pursuing any Taliban troops they could find in the open, whether they were retreating, advancing or standing still, the Pentagon said Saturday.

Most of the Taliban fighters were believed to be moving along the main road between Mazar-e-Sharif and the capital -- about 250 miles long. An opposition commander, Mohammed Mohaqik, said Saturday that anti-Taliban forces had seized Aybak, a provincial capital located on that road about 75 miles southeast of Mazar-e-Sharif. The claim could not be immediately confirmed, but if true it could block an escape route for some of the Taliban troops.

Aybak was one of three provincial capitals that Mohaqik said opposition forces seized a day after Mazar-e-Sharif's fall. The other two were Shibarghan, in Jozjan province, and Maimana, in Faryab province -- both to the west of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Opposition forces seized Taliban mountaintop positions overlooking the northern city of Taloqan, the headquarters of the northern alliance until it fell to Taliban troops in September 2000, said an alliance spokesman, Mohammed Abil. Anti-Taliban troops also took control of Hairatan on the border with Uzbekistan, Abil said,

There was no comment from the Taliban on the opposition claims, which could not be verified because no foreign reporters or international observers were in the area.

With Mazar-e-Sharif in opposition hands, the U.S.-led coalition can open a land bridge to Uzbekistan, 45 miles to the north, to rush in humanitarian goods and military supplies to anti-Taliban forces. The city's large airport could also be refurbished for American and allied aircraft to conduct humanitarian missions and mount attacks against the Taliban from within Afghanistan.

Residents of the city -- most of whom are ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks like the opposition forces -- celebrated the victory by sacrificing sheep and giving thanks in the blue-tiled mosque which gives Mazar-e-Sharif its name, opposition commanders said.

Outside Mazar-e-Sharif, the opposition commander Mohaqik said his forces overran a school six miles to the west, where hundreds of pro-Taliban Arab and Pakistani volunteers fleeing the city had taken refuge. He said some 1,000 of the pro-Taliban fighters were killed and 50 others captured.

Hemat, chief of the Taliban's news agency, denied the report and said the bulk of Taliban forces had withdrawn to Samangan province east of Mazar-e-Sharif. Both sides have exaggerated casualty claims in the past.

In Khwaja Bahuaddin, the northern alliance's foreign minister, Abdullah, said the Taliban had left 20 tanks and many heavy weapons behind. At least 20 Taliban fighters were killed and hundreds were taken prisoner, he said.

------

Taliban loses Mazar-e-Sharif

November 10, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011110-11845764.htm

Afghan opposition forces captured the strategic northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif yesterday as U.S. airstrikes pounded nearby Taliban positions, Taliban Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund confirmed today.

"Yes, Mazar has gone," he told Reuters.

"The city and its airport are with the opposition. Our forces are in Tangi Tashgurghan," he said, referring to a town 40 miles east of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The opposition said today it also had taken the whole of Sar-i-Pol province to the south of Mazar-e-Sharif and the town of Hairatan on the Amu Darya River that marks Afghanistan's northern border.

"The border is still closed, but we hope to open it shortly," said opposition interior minister Yunis Qanuni. Hairatan lies just across the river from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.

The Pentagon yesterday had called the advances by the opposition "encouraging" but declined to declare the action a victory for the anti-Taliban alliance.

The fall of Mazar-e-Sharif is expected to be a major step forward in U.S. efforts to oust the Taliban regime. Numerous Taliban military forces are expected to defect to the alliance after the city falls to the opposition, a second U.S. official said.

The ancient city straddles major supply routes between Uzbekistan and the Afghan capital, Kabul, and its loss marks the first major blow to the Taliban in 35 days of U.S. attacks.

The Afghan Islamic Press stated that the move came amid "heavy American bombing" and that Taliban forces were regrouping outside the city.

The advance on Mazar-e-Sharif appeared to be part of a coordinated push by the Northern Alliance.

In the west, forces of warlord Ismail Khan, a veteran anti-Taliban leader, had moved to within 12 miles of the key western city of Heart, according to press reports from the region.

Other reports from Afghanistan said opposition forces, equipped with tanks and armored vehicles, were massing north of Kabul and were set to advance on the capital.

The second U.S. official said forces under the command of Gen. Rashid Dostum, a top Northern Alliance leader, were pursuing retreating Taliban forces in the direction of Sheberghan, northwest of Mazar-e-Sharif.

This official said U.S. Special Forces teams assisting the opposition forces by helping direct airstrikes played a key role in the successful advance on Mazar-e-Sharif. The teams were able to direct U.S. bombing strikes against Taliban forces in key locations.

Gen. Dostum said in a television interview yesterday that the alliance forces had overrun the city in a half-hour, Associated Press reported from Kabul.

"We have taken Mazar-i-Sharif. The Taliban troops have fled. The only Taliban left behind are the prisoners we have taken. We have full control of the town. The airport is in our hands, too," Gen. Dostum said in an interview with CNN Turk.

The battle for Mazar-e-Sharif was won with more than 1,000 opposition troops mounted on horseback, many of them armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, according to Philip Smith, a Washington spokesman for Gen. Dostum's Uzbek rebel militia.

Gen. Dostum's force of 9,000 regular and irregular troops, which included ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, met only "isolated sniping - no organized resistance" once they entered the city, Mr. Smith said the general told him in a satellite phone call.

Gen. Dostum aims to prevent the Taliban from regrouping and mounting a counterattack on the city, whose blue-domed mosque - a gem of Afghan architecture - had not been damaged, Mr. Smith said.

Meanwhile, a top al Qaeda commander said the terrorist network has not been destroyed.

"President Bush lies to his people when he claims to have destroyed the al Qaeda group and broken the ranks of the Taliban. The whole world laughs at his lies," Ayman Zawahri said in a television broadcast on the Qatari station Al Jazeera.

Mr. Bush said in a speech Thursday that U.S. airstrikes had destroyed al Qaeda terrorist training camps and disrupted communications. He did not say the group had been destroyed.

Zawahri, an Egyptian-born al Qaeda leader, said, "The Palestinian issue, or more precisely, the Israeli-American crime in Palestine, will remain the axis of the conflict in the Muslim heartland, and the motive behind the holy struggle of Muslims against America."

The terrorist commander appeared in the video with an assault rifle propped next to his shoulder and wearing white robes and a turban as he read from a paper.

Victoria Clarke, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, said the fall of the town to the Northern Alliance forces "could facilitate a land bridge to Uzbekistan" for humanitarian and military supplies.

"Until things settle and we see where forces are after a day or two, our inclination is to withhold comment. What we have seen is encouraging," she said.

"As we look at the battle or battles, as they're occurring right now, they're obviously in progress. And it's hard to tell what is the likely outcome, based on the battle as you see it for the moment," said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.

Similar battles are now taking place near the capital city of Kabul, another front between Northern Alliance and Taliban troops, Adm. Stufflebeem said.

The Pentagon is receiving conflicting reports of some Taliban forces retreating from Mazar-e-Sharif and of others putting up stiff resistance, Adm. Stufflebeem said.

Adm. Stufflebeem said bombing strikes Thursday were carried out primarily in support of opposition forces and were aimed at "preparing the battlefield for future offensive actions by these forces."

-------- argentina

ARGENTINA: NO AMNESTY FOR MILITARY

New York Times
November 10, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

A federal court upheld the revocation of amnesty laws that have protected some 1,200 members of the military from prosecution for crimes committed during the 1976-1983 period of military rule. The Buenos Aires federal court unanimously upheld a March 6 ruling that scrapped two laws, passed in 1986 and 1987 under intense pressure from the military. The laws had prevented prosecution of officers and soldiers accused of torture, kidnappings and the killing of up to 30,000 people. (Agence France-Presse)

-------- biological weapons

U.S. Bombs Suspected Bio-Weapons

By Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, November 11, 2001; 11:23 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10815-2001Nov11?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- U.S. forces have bombed some sites in Afghanistan that could have been involved in producing chemical, biological or radiological weapons, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday.

Other such sites have been left alone, and others likely have not been found, Rumsfeld said.

"If we had good information on a chemical or biological development area, we would do something about it," Rumsfeld said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It is not an easy thing to do. We have every desire in the world to prevent the terrorists from using these capabilities."

Getting information that a site may be producing weapons of mass destruction "faces you with a situation - are you best taking it out or are you best learning more about it?" Rumsfeld said earlier on "Fox News Sunday."

The New York Times reported Sunday that the United States had identified three possible chemical or biological weapons sites in Afghanistan used by bin Laden's al-Qaida network, and had avoided bombing them.

In a recent interview with a Pakistani journalist, bin Laden claimed to have nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction but said he would not use them unless the United States used such weapons first.

Rumsfeld said he is worried bin Laden's boast may be true, although it is unlikely the terrorist leader has nuclear weapons. He said al-Qaida is known to have links to terrorism-sponsoring countries that can make chemical, biological and radiological weapons.

"It does not take a leap of intelligence to know that if they have a relationship ... then he (bin Laden) either has them, will have them or wants to have them," Rumsfeld said. "I know a lot about it from intelligence. On the other hand, you have to know a lot more to know precisely whether you have these capabilities that are readily useable."

Radiological weapons are made with nuclear material, combined with conventional explosives, and spread radiation without creating a nuclear blast.

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said there is "no credible evidence" bin Laden had acquired nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he thought it unlikely the Saudi exile had such weapons.

She said America is doing everything possible to make sure al-Qaida does not get chemical or biological weapons, either.

"We believe that we have a very, very aggressive program under way to make certain that he does not acquire them," Rice said on ABC's "This Week."

"We have every intelligence operation practically in the world on the problem of al-Qaida and the Taliban and their weapons of mass destruction at this point."

The United States began bombing in Afghanistan on Oct. 7 to retaliate for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Bin Laden and his network are the chief suspects, and the United States is also trying to dislodge the Taliban militia that shelters bin Laden's group.

Anti-Taliban forces have control of the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but are facing pockets of resistance from Taliban and al-Qaida forces, as well as foreign Taliban supporters, Rumsfeld said. The city's main airport is not yet completely secured by the northern alliance, he said. Taliban convoys are streaming out of the city and are being attacked by the U.S. from the air and by the northern alliance from the ground, Rumsfeld said.

The northern alliance also is "putting pressure" on the cities of Herat in the northwest and Taloqan in the northeast, Rumsfeld said. Northern alliance forces said Sunday they had captured Taloqan, their former headquarters; the Taliban denied that claim.

The United States cannot stop the northern alliance from taking the Afghan capital of Kabul, Rumsfeld said. President Bush said Saturday he wants the anti-Taliban forces to stop short of entering Kabul so that a broad-based, post-Taliban government can be formed.

Rumsfeld said that was his goal, too, adding that Kabul has been so devastated by two decades of war that whoever took the city would need immediate help to feed its approximately 1 million residents.

Powell, on NBC's "Meet the Press," said: "We think it would be better if they would 'invest' the city, making it untenable for the Taliban to continue to occupy, and then we'll see."

----

THE ANTHRAX THREAT
Loner Likely Sent Anthrax, FBI Says

Los Angeles Times
November 10, 2001
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MEGAN GARVEY, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000089769nov10.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Da%5Fsection

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is increasingly convinced that the person behind the recent anthrax attacks is a lone wolf within the United States who has no links to terrorist groups but is an opportunist using the Sept. 11 hijackings to vent his rage, investigators said Friday.

Based on case studies, handwriting and linguistic analysis, forensic data and other evidence, authorities do not believe at this point in their five-week investigation that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network was behind the anthrax attacks, FBI officials said.

Instead, FBI investigators said at a news briefing that they are probably looking for an adult male with at least limited scientific expertise who was able to use laboratory equipment easily obtained for as little as $2,500 to produce high-quality anthrax. FBI officials, in offering their most expansive public assessment to date of their probe, are hoping that the rough profile they have developed of the anthrax culprit could produce a redux of their 1996 capture of the infamous Unabomber.

In that case, an 18-year rampage of bombings led authorities to Theodore Kaczynski only after his brother recognized his writing style in a lengthy manifesto that was released publicly.

In the anthrax case, the FBI is hoping its portrait of the perpetrator--as an antisocial loner with some peculiar mannerisms in his handwriting and phrasing--will help lead them to whoever mailed at least three anthrax-laced letters and killed four people.

Authorities have offered $1.25 million in reward money, and leads from the public "will play an integral role perhaps in identifying this individual," said James R. Fitzgerald, an FBI profiler who worked on the Unabomber case.

Even as authorities sought the public's help, Homeland Security Director Thomas J. Ridge acknowledged at the White House on Friday that progress in the probe has been frustratingly slow. "We're still no closer to identifying specifically the origin of the anthrax and / or the perpetrators of that challenge that's confronted America," he said.

FBI officials acknowledge that psychological profiling, the stuff of "Silence of the Lambs," is at best a rough science and it is not used often in soliciting tips from the public. But they insist they may have some telltale signs to follow by combining histories of serial bombers such as Kaczynski with handwriting and chemical evidence from three anthrax-laced letters sent in September and October to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and the New York Post.

Investigators suspect, for instance, that whoever mailed the anthrax has little contact with the public and carries deep-seated resentments but does not like direct confrontation.

The individual demonstrates the same tendencies as serial bombers, who "don't really enjoy face-to-face confrontation with someone to iron out a problem. They choose to do it long-distance," Fitzgerald said.

All three letters were postmarked from Trenton, N.J., but postal officials indicated Friday that they no longer believe the letters were mailed from a residential postal route in Ewing, N.J., just outside the Trenton city limits.

They have broadened their search to a wider region in the Trenton area, but FBI officials said there is no assurance that whoever mailed the anthrax letters had any direct connection to that area. Fitzgerald noted that Kaczynski traveled 1,500 miles by bus from Montana to San Francisco in order to send several explosive packages.

Investigators believe the anthrax attacker had at least a limited background in science, is perhaps someone with a doctorate, a lab technician "or somewhere in between," Fitzgerald said.

"He's shown us he knows anthrax," said an FBI supervisor who spoke on condition of anonymity. And forensic analysis indicates that the anthrax in the Oct. 9 letter sent to Daschle was much more highly refined than what was contained in the two letters sent to the media Sept. 18, officials said.

That refinement process would require only "basic laboratory equipment"--including a microscope, a centrifuge and a milling device. The equipment would be available in many labs or could be purchased for as little as $2,500, officials said. "You could do it on a shoestring," the FBI supervisor said.

FBI investigators said they are tracking recent purchases of milling and other equipment and are also curious about whether the mailing of the three letters on Tuesdays--Sept. 18 and Oct. 9--could indicate something about the attacker's work schedule or access to a lab. But investigators said the relative ease of getting the processing equipment--and the lack of information about what labs and research centers even possess anthrax--have hindered their efforts.

Although early speculation indicated the highly refined strain of anthrax could only have been produced by labs in the United States, Iraq or Russia, investigators now believe "it could be from anywhere," one senior FBI official said.

Investigators are not ruling out overseas possibilities, but current evidence points to "no direct or clear linkage" to any known terrorist cells, Fitzgerald said. That would mean it was not linked to Bin Laden, Iraq's Saddam Hussein or other Middle Easterners with known interest in bioterrorism.

One sign leading investigators away from the prospect of an Islamic fundamentalist is the use of the phrase "Allah is great" to close all three letters. Fitzgerald said the phrasing and the absence of Arabic text do not jibe with past terrorist attacks, and he suggested the author may have been trying to falsely cast suspicion on Middle Easterners.

All three notes also began with the date "09-11-01." But again, Fitzgerald said there is a strong possibility the attacker was hiding behind the date of the Sept. 11 hijackings as subterfuge. The attacker appears to be "an opportunist [who] took advantage" of the mayhem surrounding the hijackings to pursue his own agenda, Fitzgerald said.

The pattern of evidence points to a home-grown terrorist, investigators said. "We're certainly looking in that direction right now as far as someone domestic," the FBI supervisor said.

The FBI is also hoping that oddities in the three letters, which authorities released last month, could jog the memory of someone else who has gotten a letter from the same author. The letters were written in distinctive block lettering with a downward slope, for instance, and the author used distinctive "1" numerals, along with dashes to write the "09-11-01" date instead of slashes, investigators noted. The author spelled penicillin incorrectly in the line "take penacilin now," but Fitzgerald said this may have been an attempt to falsely "dumb down" the letter to throw investigators off the trail.

Postal authorities on Friday also revised their assessment of how a Hamilton, N.J., letter carrier may have contracted anthrax.

The FBI then believed Teresa Heller, 45, had probably handled one of the anthrax-laced letters. But once no anthrax spores were found at the small West Trenton postal branch where Heller worked, authorities were forced to reexamine the theory.

While anthrax hot spots have continued to be found at outlying New Jersey postal facilities, officials blamed the findings on cross-contamination and said the discoveries have been of little help in the investigation.

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, Robert A. Rosenblatt and Robin Wright in Washington and Janet Wilson in New York contributed to this report.

---

RESPONSE TO TERROR
Anthrax Teamwork Is a Struggle

Los Angeles Times
November 10, 2001
By CHARLES ORNSTEIN, TIMES HEALTH WRITER
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000089768nov10.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Da%5Fsection

WASHINGTON -- After a colony of anthrax bacteria was found growing in a mail bin at the Princeton, N.J., post office last month, the FBI and public health agencies couldn't settle on which group should take environmental swabs.

So they both did. And the state's public health laboratory was forced to process two batches of samples to be reviewed by two agencies instead of one batch in a combined effort.

"We used our samples to make public health decisions," explained Dr. George T. DiFerdinando Jr., the state's acting health and senior services commissioner. "They can hold onto their samples if they need to go to court." Critics say it was just another day in the national anthrax probe, with public safety and public health officials proceeding down separate tracks, unable or unwilling to collaborate on basic tasks.

The five-week investigation has been "a bureaucratic snafu of the first order," said Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.). "Any time you have two government agencies, it's like two pretty sisters--you always compete."

In this case, however, the usual bureaucratic competition has been heightened by a clash of cultures between law enforcement and public health. The two sides often approach their jobs in opposite--or at least very different--ways. Each has distinct habits and styles.

The FBI, police and prosecutors tend to keep information secret to win a conviction at trial. Public health authorities, by contrast, tend to share every detail they know, hoping to prevent diseases from spreading and treat people already infected.

Publicly, the sides say they are getting along remarkably well as they scramble to investigate 17 anthrax infections, four of them fatal.

"I think it's working out better and we're working to improve it," Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said last week, calling the reported differences between health and law enforcement officials "completely blown out of proportion."

But several instances in the last five weeks show a tenuous relationship marked by duplication of effort, delays, communication breakdowns and missed opportunities.

Consider:

The FBI sent virulent anthrax samples taken from the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) last month to a military lab in Maryland rather than to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's lab in Atlanta. As a result, public health officials learned of the results later than criminal investigators. Confusion over the meaning of the results led to further delays.

Two postal workers employed at the Brentwood mail processing facility, which handles most of the federal government's mail in Washington, died of inhalation anthrax before they could be treated. If officials had moved more quickly and prescribed antibiotics to the Brentwood employees, the two men might have been saved, critics of the operation say.

"You can see where the Postal Service and the postal workers fell through the bureaucratic cracks here," Cleland said.

- The New Jersey health department was forced to take its own environmental swabs at a post office in Ewing, N.J., because the military lab hadn't processed the FBI samples from the same location after two weeks. The swabs came back negative.

- The FBI didn't notify New York City health officials of a suspicious letter sent to NBC News until after the city learned of a network employee's possible anthrax skin infection from a private doctor.

- District of Columbia health officials learned from the news media about anthrax spores found in the mail rooms of several federal agencies.

"Had law enforcement and medical epidemiology been connected, I think we would have been in a better position to anticipate a problem," said Dr. Larry Siegel, senior deputy director of the District of Columbia Department of Health.

"If you're talking about information sharing, there is a disconnect. . . . I don't think we've had the kind of coordinated response to this that should be in place."

- When the FBI took over the investigation of the first anthrax death, in Florida, press briefings by public health officials halted. The law enforcement agency, seeking to protect the integrity of its investigation, urged health officials to keep mum, which stopped the flow of information about anthrax precautions and risks to a worried public, Cleland said.

"When it took the criminal bent and FBI took over, there really was no public health message out there," said Dr. Jean Malecki, director of the Palm Beach County health department. Without assessing blame, she said: "The public health message has got to be No. 1, no matter what bent an investigation takes."

FBI officials say they are not free to share all the information they collect, but they do pass along anything that may have a bearing on public health, including the results of anthrax swabbing.

"When the potential for a biological release exists, the primary mission of law enforcement and the public health community is saving lives," J.T. Caruso, the FBI's deputy assistant director, said at a Senate hearing this week.

At the same time, there is a level of secrecy, and sometimes duplication of efforts, that is required in a criminal investigation, law enforcement officials say.

If evidence does not have a direct bearing on the public health, "then it is a part of the criminal investigation and we're not at liberty to disclose the details," said Special Agent Sandra Carroll, spokeswoman for the New Jersey FBI office.

"There is clearly a division of labor that exists throughout the course of this process and as it stands, the lines of expertise are divided," she explained, adding that "given the circumstances, there has been extraordinary effort on all parts."

But keeping secrets from partners is "really just silliness," said Jerome M. Hauer, former director of the New York City Office of Emergency Management and currently managing director of Kroll Inc., an investigation firm.

"The FBI is not a public health agency. The FBI is not a medical agency. And anything they do in withholding information really jeopardizes public health and can significantly impact the health of the public."

Psychologists say they are not at all surprised by the uneasy working relationship between the two camps.

"Law enforcement people are . . . very concerned with control. They have to fix things. They have to make it better," said Harvey Schlossberg, who was chief psychologist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In public health, "they recognize that things have scientific error involved with them. Not everything works on schedule and is as predictable," he said.

Law enforcement workers tend to feel that "the people in the health field are not cooperating or they're not working fast enough or they're not specific enough," Schlossberg said. Public health workers sometimes "feel like they're being used" by law enforcement.

Bob Hogan, an industrial psychologist and personality test pioneer in Tulsa, Okla., says: "They're from different planets."

Making matters worse, the two groups have little experience working together. Said Dr. William Roper, former director of the CDC. "It's hard to have a warm, mutually supportive relationship when you've never met the people."

Cleland said he blames conflicting federal laws for the problem.

In One Case, Contact Is Continual

A law passed by Congress last year designates the CDC as the lead agency in a bioterrorism attack, he said. But an executive order from President Bush designates the Justice Department as the lead agency. Another executive order from Bush says Director of Homeland Security Thomas J. Ridge is in charge.

Cleland said he will push legislation that would, once and for all, designate the CDC as the top dog.

CDC officials downplay the differences with law enforcement.

"Let me emphasize that CDC is in constant contact with the FBI," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, acting deputy director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. "I personally am on the phone with the FBI at least two hours a day. . . . If there's a report of a suspicious powder that has a public health implication, you can be sure that the CDC is aware of it."

Experts say Bush's appointment of Ridge has created an outside arbiter who can force the two sides to work together. Ridge quickly summoned both sides to a White House meeting last month, where he told them to improve their relations.

Meanwhile, officials say they are struggling--and sometimes failing--to forge an effective alliance.

"What you're seeing is people learning how to do this," DiFerdinando said. "It's not pretty watching learning. It never is. . . . In any learning process, people make mistakes."

---

FBI fleshes out likely anthrax sender

November 10, 2001
By Jerry Seper and Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011110-67809308.htm

The FBI yesterday said three anthrax-laced letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, NBC News and the New York Post probably were written by the same person, an adult male who may have worked in a laboratory or has a scientific background.

"It is highly probable, bordering on certainty, that all three letters were written by the same person," the FBI said, adding that the letter writer is believed to have taken "appropriate protective steps to ensure their own safety," including taking anthrax vaccine or other antibiotics.

A detailed profile of the suspected culprit was released as part of an FBI appeal for help in locating the person responsible for sending anthrax letters that killed four persons in New York, Florida and Washington. The profile was developed by FBI behavioral experts, assisted by agents from the Terrorism Task Force.

Meanwhile, problems with the packaging of five truckloads of D.C. mail sent for decontamination to a firm in Lima, Ohio, caused the mail to be returned to the District without being treated, according to Russ Decker, director of the Hazardous Materials and Emergency Management Agency in Lima.

Postal officials in Washington yesterday declined to comment. "We're giving no specific information about the trailers," U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Irene Lericos said.

But Mr. Decker said in an interview that 18 trucks packed with potentially contaminated D.C. mail had arrived at Titan Scan Technologies in Lima since Oct. 26. He said several of the first trucks failed Titan's packaging standards and sat for two weeks before being sent back Wednesday and Thursday.

The Postal Service has awarded contracts totaling more than $42 million to Titan and Ion Beam Applications Inc. of Chicago to provide electron-beam and X-ray technology to sanitize mail, officials said.

Also yesterday, the condition of three Washington-area men hospitalized last month with inhalation anthrax further improved, as two were sent home from the hospital. They are a State Department employee in a mailroom at a facility in Sterling, Va., and a postal worker at the Brentwood Road mail processing center in the District. Neither has been identified.

A second Brentwood postal worker, Leroy Richmond of Stafford, Va., remains at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, where doctors said he is in fair condition and responding to antibiotics. Brentwood, the District's central mail-processing facility in Northeast, was closed Oct. 21, when two other workers, Thomas L. Morris Jr., 55, and Joseph Curseen Jr., 47, died of inhalation anthrax.

The FBI profile said the person who sent the letters "probably has a scientific background to some extent, or at least a strong interest in science," feels comfortable working with hazardous materials, has access to a source of anthrax, possesses knowledge and expertise to refine it, and works in a job where he has little contact with other people.

The profile also said he possesses or has access to laboratory equipment, such as a microscope, glassware and centrifuge; has exhibited an organized, rational thought process; and has familiarity, directly or indirectly, with the Trenton, N.J., area, where he is comfortable traveling, although he does not necessarily live there.

The anthrax letters went through a Trenton post office en route to their destinations.

Authorities believe the letter writer also may have held a grudge against those to whom he sent the letters, although investigators have not yet determined what that grievance might have been. The FBI said the targets were probably important to the culprit, and they may have been the focus of previous expressions of contempt that may have been communicated to or observed by others.

The FBI described the letter writer as nonconfrontational - at least in his public life - and who lacked the personal skills necessary to confront others face-to-face, instead choosing to confront problems by long distance. The bureau said the individual may hold grudges for a long time.

The profile said the letter writer may have chosen to anonymously harass others he perceived as having wronged him, while also using the mail on those occasions. It also said he prefers being by himself more often than not, and if he is involved in a personal relationship, it will likely be of a self-serving nature.

Investigators have not determined and the profile does not say whether the letter writer is a foreigner or a U.S. citizen, but the FBI did not rule out the possibility of his ties to a terrorist organization, including the al Qaeda network founded by Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the September 11 attacks.

The profile said he "did not select his victims randomly" and made a specific effort to locate correct addresses and ZIP codes for those to whom he sent the letters and made sure that each contained proper postage.

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have caused the letter writer to become more secretive and to change usual patterns of activity.

The profile said he also may have displayed a "passive disinterest" in the events of September 11 and may have "started taking antibiotics unexpectedly." It said the intense media coverage also may have caused him to alter his physical appearance or he may have begun to show pronounced anxiety or mood swings. He also may have become more withdrawn or unusually preoccupied, the FBI said.

In addition to Mr. Morris and Mr. Curseen, Bob Stevens, 63, picture editor of a Florida tabloid newspaper, also died from inhalation anthrax. A fourth person to die from inhalation anthrax was Kathy T. Nguyen, 61, who worked in a New York hospital. It has not yet been determined how she contracted the disease.

Regarding the returned mail, officials said it was improperly packaged or bags were torn open on three trucks. The other two trucks contained packages, magazines and catalogs. Titan's method of sterilization works only on letters.

Postal Service spokeswoman Deborah Yackley said the mail probably was sent back to the Brentwood facility to be repackaged, although it's not clear what will happen to the larger items Titan said it cannot treat. Before the Brentwood center closed, postal officials estimate it was processing about 3.5 million pieces of mail a day.

"We're all concerned that there may be other [contaminated] letters," Kenneth Newman, chief investigator for the U.S. Postal Service, told reporters at a news conference yesterday. "That mail is being sanitized, and we're looking for other potentially contaminated pieces."

About 1 million pieces of mixed mail are still inside the facility, said Tim Harvey, the Postal Service's plant manager for the District. If there is another contaminated letter, it could be mixed in with that mail, he said.

Postal officials say they don't expect Brentwood to reopen anytime soon. "We don't know yet," said Deputy Postmaster General John Nolan. "We're still working out the details of how to decontaminate it."

Although the Daschle letter passed through just one mail-sorting machine at Brentwood, tests show that anthrax spores were found on seven different sorting machines in the center's back work area.

The reason so many sorters tested positive is because anthrax spores got into the "wind" or airflow and spread around the work area, Mr. Nolan said.

-------- britain

Blair: Coalition Has Momentum

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Britain.html?searchpv=aponline

LONDON (AP) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday that the U.S.-led military coalition has gained momentum since the Taliban was forced from the Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The capture of Mazar-e-Sharif was the biggest success since President Bush launched the U.S.-led airstrikes to force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

``I think it is clear that the momentum is obviously with the international coalition, the northern alliance having taken Mazar-e-Sharif, and now with the possibility of securing the northern part of Afghanistan,'' Blair told a meeting of the Labor Party's National Policy Forum. ``We are getting the northern alliance into the position where they can take territory from the Taliban regime.''

The Taliban acknowledged Saturday that it had lost Mazar-e-Sharif to the opposition northern alliance.

``We are doing the air attacks now really concentrated on Taliban troops, we are trying to make sure that the humanitarian passage is there so we can get food in to people inside Afghanistan and we are carrying on building the support internationally for the coalition against terrorism,'' Blair said.

But he told the party group there was much more left to be done.

``We have got to work on the other aspects, the military campaign, the political campaign and of course, what is happening on the humanitarian side to make sure that we bring this to a successful conclusion,'' he said.

Blair has conducted a diplomatic blitz in recent weeks, meeting with leaders on several continents in an effort to shore up support for the anti-terrorism efforts. British planes are supporting the American strikes on Afghanistan by providing refueling and reconnaissance.

The prime minister recently visited Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories in a whirlwind tour of the Middle East. He also hosted European leaders at a mini-summit, flew the Concorde to Washington to see Bush and met Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key ally, in London.

Blair said it was unclear whether there was any truth to bin Laden's claim in an interview with a Pakistani newspaper that he has nuclear and chemical weapons.

``He will make these claims; it is very difficult to judge their credibility,'' the prime minister said. ``What we do know is that any weapons of mass destruction that he can get, he will. And that is one reason why it is so important that we carry on with the action we are taking.''

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, told the Press Association news agency that bin Laden ``has condemned himself out of his own mouth as a threat to the peace and security of all of us.''

``This interview leaves no room for doubt that having murdered thousands of innocent civilians on Sept. 11, he and the al-Qaida organization would kill many thousands more if we failed to stand up to them.''

Back in Britain, Blair's government will seek emergency powers next week to detain suspected terrorists without trial, the Home Office said Saturday.

The government wants the right to detain without trial under what the Home Office called ``very limited circumstances'' -- when a foreign national is suspected of involvement in international terrorism and poses a threat to national security, if there is no immediate prospect of the suspect being returned to his or her country of origin.

Internment without trial has been used in Britain before, against Northern Ireland terrorist suspects and German citizens during World War II.

-------- iran

Khatami condemns attacks on U.S. as 'anti-Islamic'

November 10, 2001
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011110-69222550.htm

NEW YORK - Iranian President Mohammed Khatami yesterday said at the United Nations that the attack on America was an "appalling crime" as Iran edged closer to the United States after two decades of hostility.

"A most brutal and appalling crime has been perpetrated against American civilians," he said, characterizing the attacks as "inhumane and anti-Islamic."

Mr. Khatami urged governments and peoples to talk over differences, rather than allow suspicion to generate unending cycles of violence and hatred.

Iran is on the State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism.

Mr. Khatami, who has previously condemned the September 11 attacks, spoke at the United Nations in advance of the seven-day U.N. General Assembly debate, which opens today.

"The horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States were perpetrated by a cult of fanatics who had self-mutilated their ears and tongues, and could only communicate with perceived opponents through carnage and devastation," Mr. Khatami said yesterday, cautioning against letting the cycle of violence continue.

"The perception of a need for revenge, coupled with the misplaced sense of might, could lead to failure to hear the calls of people of good will or the cries of children, women and the elderly in Afghanistan."

He called Afghan civilians "a people whose share in life has been no more than to suffer a prolonged death in the shadow of perpetual horror, hunger and disease."

Sympathy for the people of Afghanistan - who have endured the brutal four-year regime of the Taliban militia, and now the U.S.-led military campaign - is expected to dominate the week of public addresses here.

Four dozen world leaders and 100 foreign ministers are confirmed to participate in the event, which was postponed after two hijacked airlines destroyed the World Trade Center.

President Bush will speak to the 189-member General Assembly this morning, amid unprecedented security.

The annual event is always conducted under tight security, but this year - in the wake of threats from Osama bin Laden - the landmark U.N. headquarters has been as secured as possible.

Arriving heads of state will have to drive around sand-filled dump trucks lining First Avenue, and walk between curtains to obscure the view of would-be assassins. There will be marksmen on nearby rooftops and police dogs in the hallways.

The New York Police Department has closed streets that abut the U.N. compound, and the U.S. Coast Guard has halted boat and barge traffic in the East River.

Uniformed police from several agencies will ring the perimeter.

"Security will be tighter than you have ever experienced before, because the threat is higher," U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Thursday.

More than 50 speakers, most of them ambassadors, spoke at yesterday's Iran-sponsored conference, "Dialogue Among Civilizations."

In his remarks, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte sought to separate Washington's war on terrorism from accusations that it is part of a broad Western attack on Islam.

"Attempting to don Islam's mantle, the terrorists argued that they pursued a holy war whose premise was the non-existence of another people," said Mr. Negroponte yesterday afternoon.

"But these men did not, could not, represent Islam. Instead, criminal actions such as theirs reflect utter alienation and hatred - a judgment that innocent people had no right to live, a unilateral decision to incinerate thousands of citizens of many lands and many faiths."

-------- israel

Bush Affirms Commitment to Mideast Peace

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President Bush reaffirmed his vision of a Palestinian state before the United Nations on Saturday, pledging to assist Middle East peace talks that he warned could only be successful if violence ended.

Bush also asked for action in the U.S.-led war on terrorism instead of sympathy for the September 11 attacks and issued an apocalyptic prophecy of terrorist intentions.

``We are working toward the day when two states -- Israel and Palestine -- live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by the Security Council resolutions,'' Bush told the opening of the annual gathering.

``We will do all in our power to bring both parties back into negotiations. But peace will only come when all have sworn off forever incitement, violence and terror,'' he said. He added that America was committed to a ``just peace in the Middle East.''

In the volatile West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli army staged a pre-dawn raid near the West Bank town of Jenin and reported a Palestinian man wounded after an explosive device he was planting near a Jewish settlement in Gaza detonated.

Before the attacks on the United States, the Bush administration had thought of using the General Assembly as the platform for a Middle East peace initiative.

It has since shied away from engagement despite Arab and European warnings that failing to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict creates a breeding ground for political violence.

Arab criticism of Bush's refusal to discuss peace with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat during his visit for the week-long General Assembly session threatened to undermine Washington's efforts to create a united front against terrorism.

Arafat was present in the U.N. hall as Bush spoke, but the two had no plans to meet. Palestinians charge officials from the Bush administration of bowing to Israeli pressure by refusing to meet Arafat and saying he is failing to combat terrorism.

BUSH WARNING, ARAB CRITICISM

In his address before 48 presidents and prime ministers and 114 foreign ministers at the United Nations, President Bush warned that perpetrators of the attacks would use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons as soon as they could.

In the Middle East, Washington faced criticism from ally Saudi Arabia. The English-language Arab News deemed Bush's refusal to meet Arafat a ``calculated snub,'' and said his stand on regional peace could sink the anti-terror coalition.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, reaffirming his commitment to restarting stalled Middle East peace efforts, told a joint session of parliament in Cairo that Israeli policies were undermining hopes for regional reconciliation.

The need for a Middle East solution was echoed by South African President Thabo Mbeki, who told the United Nations that ''the sacrifice of the Palestinian people should not be allowed to drag on any longer.''

Bush has refused to meet Arafat since taking office, but has met other Arab leaders and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Israeli political sources said Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was meeting late on Saturday with Sharon to discuss a new peace plan before leaving for the U.N. meeting.

Prospects for headway appeared limited, as the right-wing Israeli leader is known to oppose several reported aspects of the proposal, including dismantling Jewish settlements in Gaza.

Palestinians have said the Israeli peace initiatives are a ploy aimed at obstructing the launch of an international effort to resume deadlocked peace talks.

In continuing though relatively limited violence, Israeli forces demolished the house of a militant during a raid on the Palestinian-ruled village of Araqa, west of the West Bank city of Jenin early on Saturday.

The army blamed the militant for a shooting attack last month that killed three Israelis. It said it had arrested 12 people suspected of ``hostile terrorist activity,'' and reported late night anti-tank grenade fire at one of its posts in Gaza.

At least 701 Palestinians and 187 Israelis have been killed since a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in September 2000 after peace talks stalled.

-------- korea

KOREAS: NEW TALKS, OLD WORDS

New York Times
November 10, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

North and South Korea opened talks on reconciliation but remained far apart on the main issues, including security and family reunifications. The North blamed the South for setbacks in attempts to ease relations, saying a security alert in the South after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States disqualified South Korea from playing host to more visits between families separated by the Korean War. The South said the alert was meant to protect lives, including those of foreigners. The talks are being held at a resort in North Korea. Howard W. French (NYT)

-------- pakistan

Bush, Musharaff Text

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Musharaff-Text.html?searchpv=aponline

Text of Saturday's press conference by President Bush and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in New York, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks, Inc.

BUSH: Good evening.

In our hour of need just after the terrorist attacks on September the 11th, President Musharraf quickly condemned the evil-doers. He has shown even greater courage and vision and leadership in the weeks since.

Our nations share an urgent mission, which is to stop and defeat terrorism wherever it may exist. That mission is not directed against those who practice Islam. That mission is directed against the evil people.

We discussed ways to accelerate our progress in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We also discussed our humanitarian efforts to help Afghans through the winter. And we spent time on the need to work together for long-term reconstruction of Afghanistan once the Taliban no longer hold power.

Pakistan's efforts against terror are benefiting the entire world and linking Pakistan more closely with the world.

The United States wants to help build these linkages. I've authorized a lifting of sanctions and over $1 billion in U.S. support. I will also back debt relief for Pakistan.

I want to thank Senators Grassley and Baucus of our United States Congress for introducing legislation that will improve market access in the United States to Pakistan's products.

I'm pleased that the president is committed to restore democracy in Pakistan. Pakistan is a strong ally.

President Musharraf is a strong leader. And the world is deeply appreciative for his leadership.

Mr. President?

MUSHARRAF: Thank you very much, Mr. President.

It is my pleasure to be talking to all of you.

Let me first of all say that I myself, my government and the people of Pakistan condemn in the strongest terms the wanton act of terrorism on the 11th of September against the United States. We condole with all of the grieved.

Having said that, let me right away say that Pakistan has taken the considered decision to be a part of the coalition, to be with the United States, to fight terrorism in all its forms wherever it exists.

And let me also assure the president that Pakistan will remain committed to this, to the fight against terrorism.

We also -- or I also -- see now the start of a dawn of a new era of a relationship between Pakistan and the United States.

Pakistan will hope for a very sustainable and long-standing futuristic relationship developing between Pakistan and the United States, a relationship which we always have had in the past.

Having said that, let me say that I had very fruitful discussions with the president on Afghanistan and on the method of fighting terrorism.

On Afghanistan, we have unanimity of views on a political dispensation or which needs to be encouraged through the people of Afghanistan to be brought into Afghanistan, and a rehabilitation and a humanitarian relief strategy that needs to be worked out. We have total unanimity of views on these.

Lastly, I did apprise the president on Pakistan's concerns and for Pakistan's difficulties from the fallout of whatever is happening in our region. And let me very gladly say that the president showed total concern for it and also assured us, assured Pakistan, to help out in the maximum possible way.

I remain extremely grateful to the president for his concern for Pakistan and for his desire to assist Pakistan through the difficulty that we are facing at the moment.

Thank you very much.

BUSH: The president has agreed to take some questions and so have I. And both of us will take two questions from each side, starting with Mr. Fournier of The Associated Press.

Q: Thank you, sir. I would like to ask both of you about the same topic.

Secretary Powell suggested yesterday that the northern alliance shouldn't take control of Kabul. Does that mean you would discourage them from seizing the capital?

And please explain what he meant when he said that Kabul should become an open city and use post-World War II Berlin as an example.

And to you, Mr. President, why don't you think that Kabul should be taken by the northern alliance?

BUSH: Well, I think we share a common view that in order for there to be a country that is stable and peaceful on this good leader's western border, that any power arrangement must be shared with the different tribes within Afghanistan.

And a key signal of that will be how the city of Kabul is treated. We will encourage our friends to head south across the Shumali Plains, but not into the city of Kabul itself. And we believe we can accomplish our military missions by that strategy.

And so ... I don't want to put words into the good secretary's mouth, but we believe a strategy that makes sense for the long run is one that is all-encompassing.

And a signal of that strategy will be how the city of Kabul is treated.

MUSHARRAF: Well, I agree with the president totally.

Why I have been recommending that Kabul should not be occupied by the northern alliance basically is because of the past experience that we've had when the various ethnic groups were ahold of Kabul after the Soviets left. There was total atrocities, killings and mayhem within the city.

And I think if the northern alliance enters Afghanistan -- enters Kabul -- we'll see the same kind of atrocities being perpetuated against the people there, against the populace there, which should be avoided.

Q: Do you agree with that?

BUSH: Only, only, I said one question. Now you're going with three.

Q: This is for President Bush. I ask my present questions at home.

President Bush, your government and the U.S. government in the past and currently has been proactively using the U.N. Security Council to solve problems in conflict areas.

When will you invoke the U.N. Security Council to intervene on the issue of Kashmir, which is clearly an issue which is at the basis of conflict in South Asia?

BUSH: Well, we've had a very good discussion on this subject, and I assured the president that my country will do what we can to bring parties together to have good, meaningful discussions on the subject so that we can come up with a solution.

Q: ... the United Nations involvement in it, Mr. President?

BUSH: I think our involvement is exactly how I described it to the president.

Q: Mr. President, Osama bin Laden says he already has nuclear and chemical weapons. Do you believe him? And where do you think he would get them from?

BUSH: The only thing I know for certain about him is that he is evil. And, you know, I don't know what to believe about him, except that he wants to hurt Americans. I suspect he now wants to hurt the people of Pakistan.

And we're not going to let him. We will do everything we can to stop him here at home, and we're doing everything we can to hunt him down and bring him to justice.

Those kind of statements he utters reinforces the coalition's efforts to bring him to justice. And that's exactly what's going to happen with Mr. Osama bin Laden. All the more reason for us to pursue him diligently and to get him, and that's what we're going to do.

Q: It's Pakistan's turn now.

BUSH: Fine by me.

Q: My question is addressed to President George Bush.

Mr. President, the United States have, time and again, has said that it is against -- eradicate all sort of terrorism.

My question to you, Mr. President, is, when you are going to deal with the question of state-sponsored terrorism? My question is in reference to the Kashmir situation first.

And the other part of my question is, how do you view the personal contribution and role of Pakistan due to General Pervez Musharraf in curbing terrorism, global terrorism?

Thank you.

BUSH: Well, thank you very much.

I, my government strongly condemned the terrorist attacks on October the 1st -- strongly condemned them -- as did President Musharraf. He condemned those attacks as well.

We share the same vision about terror, that it should not exist anywhere in the world.

The president is working hard to strengthen Pakistan. He has got an education vision which I find to be enlightened. After all, he's got a very brilliant woman running the education department of Pakistan.

The reason I bring that up is both of us work hard to make our countries hopeful and optimistic. And we recognize that a terrorist attack on either one of us will disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens and disrupt our plans to bring prosperity and hope and opportunity for our respective countries.

Thank you all very much. Have a good evening tonight in New York City.

Thank you, sir.
MUSHARRAF: Thank you.

---

Pakistan Fears Lack of Afghan Political Plan

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-un-attack-pakistan.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf raised new doubts on Saturday about the U.S. anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan and warned of anarchy if an effective political strategy is not devised to follow military action.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, the key U.S. ally expressed concern about the lack of a strategy beyond the current bombing campaign.

Musharraf also seemed to suggest that Washington would need a substitute strategy if the military option failed.

``It is also essential that a fall back political strategy be evolved which could attain the same objective as being sought through military application,'' he said.

Later, at a news conference, he said bluntly: ``Now, whereas the military strategy is under application, there is no sign of the political and rehabilitation strategy.''

``And the danger that one sees, the apprehension is that if at all you achieve your objectives under these circumstances, there will be a vacuum which...will lead certainly and definitely to anarchy and infighting between the warlords.''

Vehemently underlining a theme of other world leaders at the U.N., Musharraf said eradicating extremism will ultimately force settlement of unresolved political disputes all over the world, especially involving Kashmir and the Palestinians.

``The extremist survives in an environment where millions suffer injustice and indignity,'' he said.

He made his comments just before talks with President Bush on the fringes of the annual U.N. meeting.

Pakistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, is a key to smash Afghan-based forces blamed for the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington -- Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda network and Taliban leaders who harbor them. More than 4,600 people were killed.

Islamabad helped create the Taliban in the mid-1990s z

-------- space

STAR WARS TEST ROCKET DESTROYED OVER ALASKA

From: "Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space"
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 11:26:31 -0500

They launched the strategic missile this morning (Friday, Nov. 9) from the Kodiak Launch Complex and then had to 'blow it up' downrange because they 'lost' communications with it. Those 'idiots' launched in snow/rain and winds. The weather was terrible today. Unbelievable they would launch! The AP called Mike Siroffchuch to see what he knew, because the reporter was having trouble getting information. We don't know very much ourselves. Most of the launch people 'skipped town' right away after the missile abort (chickens). There is suppose to be a news release out of Huntsville, Ala. (USASMDC), but we don't know when. Monday's a holiday. The Alaska news had a very brief report on the missile failure, but the launch they showed was a previous one (blue skies). This launch was the 225 degree SW trajectory down the east side of Kodiak Island, and it's the launch we were worried about if there was an accident. The missile carried 'radioactive' Thorium, Freon, Halon, Abestos. It's all in the ocean now unless some the missile debris landed on Kodiak Island somewhere.

When we see a DOD news release, we'll forward it on to you. Stacey Fritz in Fairbanks wrote up a quick story, but like us, she doesn't have all the details yet.

Take care.
Carolyn Heitman Kodiak Island

--

Test Rocket Destroyed Over Alaska
Launch Aborted After Data Failure

By MAUREEN CLARK
The Associated Press

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Nov. 10) - A rocket fired from Alaska's Kodiak Launch Complex had to be destroyed seconds after liftoff Friday when trackers lost communication with it.

It was the first time a rocket used in testing for the missile defense program had to be destroyed after launch, said Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the missile defense program in Washington.

The rocket was launched from the complex, operated by the Alaska Aerospace Development Corp., at 9:12 a.m. It was destroyed 52 seconds later when launch officials lost telemetry data and data transmission, Lehner said.

''It seems to be a telemetry problem and safety rules dictate that, if you lose that type of data transmission, you have to destroy the missile,'' Lehner said.

Despite the loss of data, the rocket remained on course until it was destroyed. Lehner said a board would investigate.

''It could take weeks to figure out what caused the problem,'' he said.

The missile's pieces dropped into the ocean and were spread over an area 17 to 45 miles from the island, Lehner said.

The military had announced Wednesday that it planned to launch the rocket sometime between Friday and Nov. 21, but would not give the exact time and date, citing security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Coast Guard had warned mariners to stay out of the launch clearance area due to the possibility of falling debris, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Douglas Green.

The rocket was launched to learn more about how ground-based radar systems in California would pick up the characteristics of a warhead and decoys in space, Lehner said.

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.space4peace.org globalnet@mindspring.com

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

Text of Bush's Speech at U.N.

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-Bush-Text.html?searchpv=aponline

Text of remarks by President Bush to the U.N. General Assembly on Saturday, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks, Inc.

Thank you.

Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen, we meet in a hall devoted to peace, in a city scarred by violence, in a nation awakened to danger, in a world uniting for a long struggle.

Every civilized nation here today is resolved to keep the most basic commitment of civilization. We will defend ourselves and our future against terror and lawless violence.

The United Nations was founded in this cause.

In the Second World War, we learned there is no isolation from evil. We affirmed that some crimes are so terrible they offend humanity itself, and we resolved that the aggressions and ambitions of the wicked must be opposed early, decisively and collectively before they threaten us all. That evil has returned, and that cause is renewed.

A few miles from here, many thousands still lie in a tomb of rubble. Tomorrow the secretary general, the president of the General Assembly and I will visit that site where the names of every nation and region that lost citizens will be read aloud.

If we were to read the names of every person who died, it would take more than three hours.

Those names include a citizen of Gambia, whose wife spent their fourth wedding anniversary, September the 12th, searching in vain for her husband.

Those names include a man who supported his wife in Mexico, sending home money every week.

Those names include a young Pakistani who prayed toward Mecca five times a day and died that day trying to save others.

The suffering of Sept. 11 was inflicted on people of many faiths and many nations. All of the victims, including Muslims, were killed with equal indifference and equal satisfaction by the terrorist leaders.

The terrorists are violating the tenets of every religion, including the one they invoke.

Last week, the sheik of Al-Azhar University, the world's oldest Islamic institution of higher learning, declared that terrorism is a disease and that Islam prohibits killing innocent civilians.

The terrorists call their cause holy, yet they fund it with drug dealing. They encourage murder and suicide in the name of a great faith that forbids both. They dare to ask God's blessing as they set out to kill innocent men, women and children. But the God of Isaac and Ishmael would never answer such a prayer.

And a murderer is not a martyr, he is just a murder. Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.

And the people of my country will remember those who have plotted against us. We are learning their names. We are coming to know their faces. There is no corner of the earth distant or dark enough to protect them. However long it takes, their hour of justice will come.

Every nation has a stake in this cause. As we meet, the terrorists are planning more murder, perhaps in my country or perhaps in yours. They kill because they aspire to dominate. They seek to overthrow governments and destabilize entire regions.

Last week, anticipating this meeting of the General Assembly, they denounced the United Nations.

They called our secretary general a criminal and condemned all Arab nations here as traitors to Islam.

Few countries meet their exacting standards of brutality and oppression. Every other country is a potential target, and all the world faces the most horrifying prospect of all: These same terrorists are searching for weapons of mass destruction, the tools to turn their hatred into holocaust.

They can be expected to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons the moment they are capable of doing so. No hint of conscience would prevent it. This threat cannot be ignored. This threat cannot be appeased. Civilization itself, the civilization we share, is threatened.

History will record our response and judge or justify every nation in this hall. The civilized world is now responding. We act to defend ourselves and deliver our children from a future of fear

We choose the dignity of life over a culture of death. We choose lawful change and civil disagreement over coercion, subversion and chaos.

These commitments -- hope and order, law and life -- unite people across cultures and continents. Upon these commitments depend all peace and progress. For these commitments we are determined to fight.

The United Nations has risen to this responsibility. On the 12th of September, these buildings opened for emergency meetings of the General Assembly and the Security Council. Before the sun had set, these attacks on the world stood condemned by the world.

And I want to thank you for this strong and principled stand.

I also thank the Arab and Islamic countries that have condemned terrorist murder. Many of you have seen the destruction of terror in your own lands. The terrorists are increasingly isolated by their own hatred and extremism.

They cannot hide behind Islam. The authors of mass murder and their allies have no place in any culture and no home in any faith.

The conspiracies of terror are being answered by an expanding global coalition. Not every nation will be a part of every action against the enemy, but every nation in our coalition has duties.

These duties can be demanding, as we in America are learning. We have already made adjustments in our laws and in our daily lives. We're taking new measures to investigate terror and to protect against threats. The leaders of all nations must now carefully consider their responsibilities and their future.

Terrorist groups like al-Qaida depend upon the aid or indifference of governments. They need the support of a financial infrastructure and safe havens to train and plan and hide.

Some nations want to play their part in the fight against terror but tell us they lack the means to enforce their laws and control their borders. We stand ready to help.

Some government still turn a blind eye to the terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken.

And some governments, while pledging to uphold the principles of the U.N. have cast their lot with the terrorists. They support them and harbor them, and they will find that their welcomed guests are parasites that will weaken them and eventually consume them.

For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid, and it will be paid. The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice. The Taliban are now learning this lesson. That regime and the terrorists who support it are now virtually indistinguishable.

Together, they promote terror abroad and impose a reign of terror on the Afghan people. Women are executed in Kabul's soccer stadium. They can be beaten for wearing socks that are too thin. Men are jailed for missing prayer meetings.

The United States, supported by many nations, is bringing justice to the terrorists in Afghanistan. We're making progress against military targets, and that is our objective. Unlike the enemy, we seek to minimize, not maximize the loss of innocent life.

I'm proud of the honorable conduct of the American military.

And my country grieves for all the suffering the Taliban have brought upon Afghanistan, including the terrible burden of war.

The Afghan people do not deserve their present rulers. Years of Taliban misrule have brought nothing but misery and starvation. Even before this current crisis, 4 million Afghans depended on food from the United States and other nations, and millions of Afghans were refugees from Taliban oppression.

I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: The Taliban's days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close. And when that regime is gone, the people of Afghanistan will say with the rest of the world, ``Good riddance.''

I can promise, too, that America will join the world in helping the people of Afghanistan rebuild their country. Many nations, including mine, are sending food and medicine to help Afghans through the winter.

America has airdropped over 1.3 million packages of rations into Afghanistan. Just this week, we airlifted 20,000 blankets and over 200 tons of provisions into the region.

We continue to provide humanitarian aid, even while the Taliban tried to steal the food we sent.

More help eventually will be needed. The United States will work closely with the United Nations and development banks to reconstruct Afghanistan after hostilities there have ceased and the Taliban are no longer in control. And the United States will work with the U.N. to support a post-Taliban government that represents all of the Afghan people.

In this war of terror, each of us must answer for what we have done or what we have left undone.

After tragedy, there is a time for sympathy and condolence. And my country has been very grateful for both. The memorials and vigils around the world will not be forgotten, but the time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived.

The most basic obligations in this new conflict have already been defined by the United Nations. On Sept. 28, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373. It's requirements are clear. Every United Nations member has a responsibility to crack down on terrorist financing. We must pass all necessary laws in our own countries to allow the confiscation of terrorist assets.

We must apply those laws to every financial institution in every nation. We have a responsibility to share intelligence and coordinate the efforts of law enforcement. If you know something, tell us. If we know something, we'll tell you. And when we find the terrorists, we must work together to bring them to justice.

We have a responsibility to deny any sanctuary, safe haven or transit to terrorists. Every known terrorist camp must be shut down, its operators apprehended and evidence of their arrest presented to the United Nations. We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.

These obligations are urgent, and they are binding on every nation with a place in this chamber. Many governments are taking these obligations seriously, and my country appreciates it.

Yet, even beyond Resolution 1373, more is required and more is expected of our coalition against terror.

We're asking for a comprehensive commitment to this fight.

We must unite in opposing all terrorists, not just some of them.

In this world, there are good causes and bad causes, and we may disagree on where that line is drawn. Yet, there is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequences.

We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. To inflame ethnic hatred is to advance the cause of terror.

The war against terror must not serve as an excuse to persecute ethnic and religious minorities in any country. Innocent people must be allowed to live their own lives, by their own customs, under their own religion.

And every nation must have avenues for the peaceful expression of opinion and dissent. When these avenues are closed, the temptation to speak through violence grows.

We must press on with our agenda for peace and prosperity in every land.

My country has pledged to encouraging development and expanding trade. My country had pledged to investing in education and combating AIDS and other infectious diseases around the world.

Following Sept. 11, these pledges are even more important. In our struggle against hateful groups that exploit poverty and despair, we must offer an alternative of opportunity and hope.

The American government also stands by its commitment to a just peace in the Middle East. We are working toward the day when two states -- Israel and Palestine -- live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders as called for by the Security Council resolutions.

We will do all in our power to bring both parties back into negotiations. But peace will only come when all have sworn off forever incitement, violence and terror.

And finally, this struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations itself. And the world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world's most persistent violators of human rights. The United Nations depends above all on its moral authority and that authority must be preserved.

The steps I've described will not be easy. For all nations, they will require effort. For some nations, they will require great courage. Yet, the cost of inaction is far greater. The only alternative to victory is a nightmare world, where every city is a potential killing field.

As I've told the American people, freedom and fear are at war. We face enemies that hate not our policies but our existence, the tolerance of openness and creative culture that defines us. But the outcome of this conflict is certain. There is a current in history, and it runs toward freedom.

Our enemies resent it and dismiss it, but the dreams of mankind are defined by liberty, the natural right to create and build and worship and live in dignity. When men and women are released from oppression and isolation, they find fulfillment and hope, and they leave poverty by the millions.

These aspirations are lifting up the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and they can lift up all of the Islamic world. We stand for the permanent hopes of humanity, and those hopes will not be denied.

We are confident, too, that history has an author who fills time and eternity with his purpose. We know that evil is real, but good will prevail against it. This is the teaching of many faiths.

And in that assurance, we gain strength for a long journey. It is our task, the task of this generation, to provide the response to aggression and terror. We have no other choice, because there is no other peace.

We did not ask for this mission, yet there is honor in history's call. We have a chance the write the story or our times, a story of courage defeating cruelty and light overcoming darkness. This calling is worthy of any life and worthy of every nation.

So let us go forward, confident, determined and unafraid.
Thank you very much.

---

Bush to tell U.N. 'time for action' is now

November 10, 2001
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011110-87408696.htm

President Bush yesterday said he would tell world leaders at the United Nations today that he wants cooperation, not commiseration, now that the war against terrorism is about to enter its sixth week.

"The time of sympathy is over; we appreciate the condolences," Mr. Bush said during a brief news conference with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. "Now is the time for action. Now is the time for coalition members to respond in their own way."

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the president will use today's speech to give "a fuller explanation of the Bush doctrine, in which those who harbor terrorists will also be held accountable for their actions - just as guilty as the terrorists."

Yet Mr. Bush also will meet in New York today with Pakistani President Hervez Musharraf, the only world leader who refuses to sever ties with Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Pakistan is also home to religious schools known as madrassas, many of whom are known to foster terrorism.

Although some in India are unnerved by Pakistan's growing alliance with the United States, the subject was not broached during Mr. Vajpayee's meeting and lunch with Mr. Bush yesterday, said Sean McCormack, spokesman for the National Security Administration.

But the two leaders discussed the disputed region of Kashmir, where India and Pakistan have been battling for years. During yesterday's news conference in the Grand Foyer of the White House, Mr. Vajpayee made a point of recalling an Oct. 1 bomb attack against the Indian legislative assembly in Kashmir.

"Even Pakistan realized that it was a case of terrorism," Mr. Vajpayee said. "We have to fight terrorism in all its forms."

Mr. Bush, who accepted an invitation by Mr. Vajpayee to visit India as soon as possible, seemed irritated by an Indian reporter's suggestion that the United States has a double standard on terrorism.

"When terrorism hits America, you go halfway across the world and make war in Afghanistan," the journalists said. "But when we suffer terrorism, you ask us to be restrained. Is an Indian life less precious than an American life?"

Mr. Bush replied: "I think there's one universal law, and that's terrorism is evil. And all of us must work to reject evil. Murder is evil, and we must reject murder."

When the reporter tried to interrupt, Mr. Bush added icily: "Excuse me. Our coalition is strong because leaders such as the prime minister fully understand that we must reject terrorism in all its forms."

During today's meeting with Gen. Musharraf, "the president will discuss the need for stability in the region and for a peaceful resolution between India and Pakistan over any other disputes," Mr. Fleischer said.

Acknowledging the administration's balancing act between India and Pakistan, he added: "There is a general understanding about the sensitivities in the region."

The White House is also sensitive to Saudi Arabia's ambivalence about the war against terrorism. Although Saudi Arabia has granted limited use of its airfields to U.S. troops, its royal family has given money to madrassas as a way to mute criticism from fundamentalist Saudi clerics.

Mr. Bush met yesterday with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, who on Thursday criticized the president for meeting with Israeli leaders but refusing to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

"The thing that is so sad is that what is needed to make peace is very little," the prince told the New York Times. "He cannot be an honest broker and only meet with one side."

Mr. McCormack yesterday reiterated that the president would not meet with the Palestinian leader when the two men attend the United Nations session this weekend.

Before meeting with Prince al-Faisal yesterday, Mr. Bush shrugged off the prince's criticism, insisting "our coalition has never been stronger." After the meeting, the prince left the White House without addressing reporters who were waiting for him in the driveway.

The president, who was described by his wife Thursday as an impatient man, is expected to display a touch of that impatience in today's address to the United Nations.

"You will hear the president put the world on notice that he is appreciative of the fact [that] some nations have expressed sympathy," Mr. Fleischer said. "But sympathy only is not good enough; that nations need to take actions."

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

Air Force gets use of airfield in Tajikistan

November 10, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011110-99647663.htm

The Air Force will use an airfield in Tajikistan to conduct its first sustained tactical strikes in the U.S. bombing campaign against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, two military sources said yesterday.

The sources said the Air Force could begin those raids within two to four weeks. It plans to station about 50 strike aircraft there on Afghanistan's northern doorstep, the sources said.

The Air Force has been assessing facilities at three air bases since Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Tajikistan last week to discuss military cooperation with the former Soviet republic. The team has filed a report that says at least one airport will fit Air Force requirements.

"That's all we need for 50 aircraft," one military source said. The Pentagon has not publicly disclosed the assessment team's results or how many planes it will put in the Central Asian country.

To date, Navy planes from three carriers in the Arabian Sea have conducted most of the tactical missions since the bombing of Afghanistan began Oct. 7. Most Air Force munitions have been dropped by B-2, B-1B and B-52 heavy bombers.

The Air Force has been debating which mix of aircraft to put in Tajikistan. One option is to fly in 48 planes, one squadron each of F-16s and F-15Es, which specialize in hitting units on the move. Planners may trim each squadron and also put in AC-130 gunships, whose rapid-fire cannons and night scopes make the flying battleships highly effective against buildings and troops, according to the sources.

A base in Tajikistan would allow the Pentagon to open a new air front against the Taliban and generate more missions, or sorties. Air commanders are hampered by the fact that even carrier-based jets must refuel during their flights, cutting down on the number of sorties. Most land-based fighters sit unused in the Persian Gulf region, a 14-hour round trip from Afghanistan.

In contrast, the Air Force enjoyed close-in land bases during the 1991 Persian Gulf war against Iraq and the 1998 bombing of Yugoslavia. The basing rights allowed a single fighter to generate multiple sorties in a day, if needed.

Mr. Rumsfeld touched on the problem during a Pentagon press conference Thursday. He was asked to compare sortie rates today with those wars.

"You have to look at the availability of airfields and the distances one has to fly," he said. "If you can fly an aircraft two or three times in a day because of the distance being close and the access you have, you're going to get a higher sortie rate. To the extent you can't, you don't. And I think trying to go back and in your mind compare numbers like that is a misunderstanding."

Mr. Rumsfeld secured the framework for using the land bases during a trip to the region last week. Tajikistan wants the number of strike planes kept there at 50 or below. One possible location is the airport at Kulyab, which has been used by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance to replenish its troops and is about 25 miles from the Afghan border.

Opening a northern air front comes at an opportune time. The defense chief has said recently that the addition of special-operations soldiers inside Afghanistan has helped turn up more targets for fighter pilots to attack.

"Airfields closer to Afghanistan would give us an advantage in being able to generate more sorties," Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters at the Pentagon this week. "We would hope to have a capability to get access to Afghanistan from the north and the south."

A retired Air Force fighter pilot said a base within 25 miles of the Afghanistan border would allow pilots to fly to target areas, loiter and then return without refueling.

More Navy aircraft are on the way. The Navy yesterday confirmed an earlier report in The Washington Times that the carrier USS John C. Stennis would deploy to the region on Monday, instead of its scheduled departure in mid-January.

Pentagon officials said that once on station, the Stennis, the Carl Vinson, the Theodore Roosevelt and the Kitty Hawk will give commanders the option of running operations off three flight decks, as the fourth carrier pauses for replenishment.

A Navy source said that, depending on the war's status this winter, the Carl Vinson could be kept in the region past the end of a six-month deployment in January.

"Right now, there are no six-month deployments," the source said.

----

Attacks Alter Course at War College

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-War-College-Centennial.html?searchpv=aponline

CARLISLE, Pa. (AP) -- When the U.S. Army War College was founded, it was to be a place ``not to promote war but to preserve peace by intelligent and adequate preparation to repel aggression.''

This year, as the elite school for military leaders celebrates its centennial, its mission has never seemed clearer or more urgent.

Classes on the quiet, leafy campus about 120 miles from Washington, D.C., have always had a heavy emphasis on strategic theory to hone critical-thinking skills in the Army's rising stars. Understanding the puzzle of national security, analyzing the undercurrents of conflicts, and dissecting the great problems of war are part of the regular curricula.

Since Sept. 11, however, the instructors have refocused their courses to more closely examine a relatively new concept: ``asymmetric warfare'' -- the idea that an unseen, unknown and unconventional enemy will attack where least expected.

``It's a very busy time,'' said Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., a professor and director of the college's Strategic Studies Institute. The think-tank is made up of a blend of Army officers and civilians with mostly Ivy League credentials who prepare strategy and policy reports for Army brass, in addition to teaching.

``We've been asked by Army leadership to look at key issues that relate to the global war on terrorism ... everything from what types of legal authority do we need to defend the homeland to what should be the defined endgame -- or is the concept of victory itself even applicable?''

The college, which is celebrating its 100th year this Veterans Day weekend with public tours, military reenactments and field prayer services, is the second-oldest of the nation's three major schools for senior officers.

The school was founded by President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, Elihu Root, in 1901 in Washington, D.C., and moved to the historic Carlisle Barracks in 1951. The barracks were built in the 1700s to protect settlers during the French and Indian Wars; from 1879 to 1918, the post was home to a boarding school for American Indian children.

The oldest school for military professionals in the nation is the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., launched in 1884; the Air War College, located at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, was founded in 1946.

Both of those institutions have modified their teaching plans, too, since the terrorist attacks.

Last week, Admiral Vern Clark spoke to students at the Naval War College on the first day of a new symposium called ``Setting our Course in the Terror War.'' The seminars will cover topics including the Navy's role in homeland defense, ``offensive counterterrorism operations,'' and ``operational concepts beyond the terror war.''

The Air War College is incorporating a ``homeland defense'' war game into its final examinations this year. It is also considering adding representatives from nonmilitary agencies to its student body, ``including those likely to be associated with the new Office of Homeland Security,'' said Lt. Joel Harper, a spokesman.

At the Army college, members of the student body -- which includes 212 active and reserve Army officers, 28 civilians and 42 international fellows -- were in the midst of a course called ``War, National Security Policy, and Strategy'' on Sept. 11 when classes were interrupted by news of the terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Lt. Col. Megan Tatu, 45, an Army Reservist from California, said she and her classmates were discussing how President Eisenhower's aggressive stance on nuclear force was ``not the American way, to end up with these huge civilian casualties.''

``No sooner do we have this discussion than we see a weapon of mass destruction made out of a commercial jetliner full of innocents. It really hit me,'' she said.

Students were given the afternoon and the next day off. As faculty assessed the fallout and began considering how to incorporate the attacks into their lessons, the college -- normally an open environment -- went into emergency mode. Concrete barricades were installed at entrances and military police were stationed at gates.

Quick adjustments to lessons at the school included lectures by terrorism experts and a role-playing exercise that focused on security strategy inside the United States, said Robin Dorff, chairman of the school's department of national security and strategy.

Dorff played the role of President Bush while providing students with guidance on just how perceptive and practical their recommendations were.

``Our job was to address national security strategy, both near term and outward for 50 years,'' said Lt. Col. Joe Curtin, 43, a student who played the role of Vice President Cheney.

``One of the things we had to address was how global terrorism affected the strategy,'' Curtin said. ``Before nine-eleven, it would have been low priority. Now, it's at the top.''


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

U.S. Isolated as World Moves on Climate Treaty

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-environment-climate-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

MARRAKESH, Morocco (Reuters) - The first global multilateral talks since the September 11 attacks ended in success on Saturday with most of the world declaring it would push ahead with a major anti-pollution pact, but the United States will not be joining the party.

Eight months after President Bush shocked many U.S. allies by pulling out of the Kyoto global warming treaty, the rest of the world finalized the legal work which should let them bring it into force without the planet's biggest polluter.

Bush's critics abroad saw that as evidence Washington, already planning a strategic missile shield, was turning its back on the concerns of the rest of the world.

The Kyoto pact aims to reduce gas emissions from factories and exhaust pipes that many scientists say are gathering in the atmosphere trapping heat -- the so-called greenhouse effect.

U.N. scientists predict the result could be an increase in average temperatures by up to six degrees Celsius over the next 100 years, leading to rising sea levels, and an increase in major floods and droughts.

The events of September 11 led Bush to call on his allies for a global coalition to fight terrorism. At the end of the two-week climate talks in Marrakesh, many were calling for Bush to now rejoin what the global fight against climate change.

REASON TO REJOIN KYOTO

``If ever there's a reason to join the United States should do it now,'' said Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk, who chaired the ill-fated Hague talks on climate change two years ago when the United States was still a Kyoto participant.

``After the events of September 11, if there is any reason for the United States to call for international, global approaches (it should also) join a global approach to the existing global problem of climate change,'' he told reporters.

``That would add to the credibility of any other approach which is being sought by the United States seeking a global answer.''

The Marrakesh agreement sealed the legal text to govern how the treaty works and, crucially, is meant to give enough legal certainty for waverers like Russia and Japan to ratify it.

It commits the world's industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, by an average of five percent of 1990 levels by 2012.

As Russia and Japan indicated that the Marrakesh deal should make their ratification possible, Kyoto could come into force without the United States by late 2002.

Canada said the fact that the world had agreed a workable Kyoto rulebook showed its neighbor was wrong to opt out.

``Canada thinks the American position on Kyoto is wrong. The basic difference between us is we believe we can succeed in achieving climate change goals within the Kyoto process, the Americans believe you can't,'' Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson said.

``What we've done (by agreeing acceptable rules) is we have shown our original belief that the Americans are wrong is, in fact, accurate,'' he said.

NEW NORTH AMERICAN APPROACH

He added that he expected the U.S. to unveil a North American approach to cutting greenhouse gases which Canada would probably participate in alongside Kyoto.

``We'll be almost certainly the only country in the world in that position. So we are very concerned to make sure that the American system is compatible with Kyoto.''

The United States insists it will not return to Kyoto.

U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky said her country was looking for a global solution to climate change, one that would be a ``tapestry'' of national and regional measures, rather than the single worldwide system provided by Kyoto.

``Our overall goal is the same (as that of the rest of the world),'' Dobriansky told reporters earlier in the week. ``We have a common objective which is to address climate change and to seek reductions of greenhouse gases.''

Environmental campaigners said the United States would now be forced to make good on that promise, inside or outside Kyoto.

``The agreement, and the fact that countries will move to bring the protocol into force, will send strong support to those in the United States who want to push for action on climate change,'' Kate Hampton of Friends of the Earth told reporters.

Jennifer Morgan of the World Wildlife Fund said that as the United States had a great input during the years since Kyoto in helping draft the rules agreed in Marrakesh, some believe a return should not be too painful.

Many U.S. companies would be pressing for the right to participate in any future emissions trading market that is likely to develop under the Kyoto rules, she said.

``This agreement includes many of the elements the U.S. has been asking for over the years. It is an agreement that the Bush administration should embrace and come in to.'' Morgan said.

--------

Climate treaty set to be ratified

CNN
November 10, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/11/10/climate.talks/index.html

MARRAKESH, Morocco -- World environment and energy ministers have agreed on the fine print of a treaty to limit global warming, paving the way for its implementation next year.

The head of the Russian delegation to the United Nations-sponsored talks in Marrakesh said the deal reached on the legal language governing the 1997 Kyoto Pact should now make it possible for Moscow to ratify it.

"This (agreement) opens the way for ratification by all countries, including by the Russian Federation," Alexander Bedritsky told the conference, minutes after about 160 countries finalised the rules that will guide the treaty.

Since the United States controversially pulled out of the agreement to limit so-called greenhouse gases in March, ratification by Russia and Japan has become essential to make up the numbers needed to bring the pact into force.

Unlike the European Union, neither country has yet committed itself unequivocally to ratifying the pact.

Japan also indicated Tokyo could ratify the deal. "We will have our cabinet decide on this after I get back but I feel personally we have a very good package," Japanese Environment Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi told Reuters news agency.

The Kyoto Protocol committed the world's industrialised countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide, said to cause global warming by an average of five percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

Saturday's announcement of deal, reached after tough bargaining at the end of the two-week conference, provides a detailed rulebook governing the complex treaty.

"We have an agreement," British Environment Minister Michael Meacher said after marathon negotiations on the final day of the meeting.

"It's a remarkable day for the environment after four years of negotiations on Kyoto," he added.

"We're quite confident now that the (Kyoto) protocol is saved," said Olivier Deleuze, the European Union's chief delegate at the talks. Eyes on Russia, Japan

The pact seemed in jeopardy last March when, after four years of tortuous negotiations on its content, the U.S., the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, pulled out of the agreement, saying it would hurt the U.S. economy.

The 15-member EU has said it will ratify Kyoto by 2002, but the treaty must be ratified by at least 55 countries responsible for 55 percent of the world's 1990 CO2 emissions before it can come into force.

"I am sure all countries will ratify, except for the United States," said Deleuze, who is also Belgium's Energy Minister.

"Those who don't ratify, that's for a political reason," he added.

The long-term aim of the treaty is to curb what U.N. scientists say is the artificial warming of the Earth's climate and its consequences: rising sea levels, melting ice caps, changing rainfall patterns, increased flooding and more frequent droughts.

After Washington's abrupt withdrawal, all eyes turned to Russia and Japan. Without them, the whole pact could collapse.

In the final hours of the conference, Australia, Japan, Russia and Canada objected to five points on how market-based mechanisms would function.

The mechanisms are designed to help countries meet their targets by buying or selling carbon credits on an international financial market, or by reducing their quota by expanding forests and farmland that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The U.S. position weighed heavily on the meeting. At the previous conference in Germany last July, all other countries decided to press ahead with the first compulsory global accord on the environment, despite the U.S. withdrawal. But some said the absence of the United States made it virtually worthless.

A U.S. delegation was in Marrakesh and attended even the difficult negotiations in the waning hours of the conference. But the delegates refrained from participating in talks on the treaty itself, The Associated Press reported.

They were, however, involved in drafting a statement that would be sent from Marrakesh to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, next September. The U.S. aim was to limit references to climate change issues and ensure that the focus was on social, economic and other environmental issues.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said his administration is drawing up its own plan to control greenhouse gas emissions, and has announced funding for more studies and technology research.

But Washington has repeatedly delayed unveiling the plan, and the chief U.S. delegate, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, says there is no timetable for its preparation.

---

Climate conference reaches deal

BBC News
Saturday, 10 November, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1648000/1648515.stm

Negotiators in the Moroccan city of Marrakech have agreed the final details of how the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and global warming will work.

The deal will be voted on by a plenary session of the Kyoto signatories later on Saturday.

Working through Friday night to meet a deadline set by chairman Mohamed El Yazghi, delegates finally agreed the rules of how to implement the protocol.

"There is agreement on everything by everyone," said French Environment Minister Yves Cochet.

The Kyoto Protocol calls on nearly 40 industrial countries to limit or reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases - primarily carbon dioxide from industry and cars - which some scientists believe are rapidly raising global temperatures.

The accord assigns each country a target and sets an average 5.2% emission reduction from 1990 levels, to be achieved by 2012 - although environmental groups say the reality is nearer 2%.

Key umbrella

One of the main sticking points has been the issue of carbon "sinks" - forests, grassland and other vegetation which absorb carbon dioxide, and can be counted against a country's emissions reduction target.

With the US - the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses - definitely refusing to ratify the protocol, the support of Australia, Canada, Japan and Russia became vital.

This tactical alliance is called the Umbrella Group, and it had been blocking agreements on certain key points.

Substantial concessions had already been made to Russia in the last round of talks in Bonn in July.

Russia was allowed to argue that its vast forests soaked up at least 17 million metric tonnes of carbon a year, thus sparing it the need to reduce its use of coal and oil by that amount.

The exact details of the final deal are not yet clear, but it seems apparent that Russia will be able to sell its excess energy credits and that Japan will be able to buy them.

The EU says it will ratify Kyoto by 2002, but its support alone will not be enough to bring the treaty into force.

For that to happen, Kyoto must be ratified by at least 55 countries responsible for 55% of 1990's emissions.

The BBC correspondent at the talks, Elizabeth Blunt, says that one notable feature was the improved relations between the United States and the other participants.

The United States, she says, now recognises climate change as real and a problem requiring action.

Now that the "rule book" for Kyoto has been drawn up, the US can see what participation would involve.

The Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk said in Marrakech on Saturday that he believed the United States would eventually rejoin the process.

---

Countries Approve Kyoto Rules

Yahoo News
Science - Associated Press
Saturday November 10
By ARTHUR MAX, Associated Press Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011110/sc/climate_talks_14.html

MARRAKECH, Morocco (AP) - International delegates agreed on Saturday to the first-ever rules aimed at stopping global warming - a pact the United States, the world's biggest polluter, has rejected.

Negotiators meeting in Marrakech, Morocco emerged from more than 19 hours of haggling behind closed doors early Saturday and said they had smoothed over differences in how to enforce the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites), which calls for cuts in carbon dioxide and other ``greenhouse gases'' suspected in global warming.

``I'm tired, but it was worth it,'' Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson said.

All 165 participating countries approved the full set of rules later Saturday morning.

The Kyoto Protocol requires industrial countries to scale back emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an average of 5 percent from their 1990 levels by 2012.

The United States, the world's biggest polluter, watched from the sidelines, having decided in March to abandon the treaty and draw up its own action plan.

Other countries said they still hoped to eventually win over the Americans.

``The big question now is how we bring the United States into the biggest international effort against the greenhouse effect,'' said Olivier Deleuze, Belgium's state secretary for the environment and head of the European delegation.

Delegates said the agreement opened the way for ratification by enough countries to bring the treaty into force, probably before a global environment summit next September. The summit will mark the 10th anniversary of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when countries adopted the first voluntary measures aimed at stopping climate change.

The treaty needs ratification by 55 countries, including those that produced 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990. Without the United States, virtually every other industrial country would have to endorse the agreement to reach that goal.

Environmentalists welcomed the rules, even though they said the agreement was a watered-down version of what had been envisioned.

``It's a poor deal,'' said Bill Hare of the Greenpeace environmental group. ``But that doesn't mean it's not worth having. It is a first step.''

On the last day of the two-week conference, negotiators had been stuck on five points related to mechanisms that countries might employ to ease the task of reducing emissions.

Canada, Russia, Japan and Australia rejected a paper submitted Thursday night on how countries could trade pollution ``credits,'' holding out against nearly all the other 161 countries attending the conference.

The deadlock was finally broken with a four-point compromise paper.

``With the addition of this paper, the package is satisfactory. I am very pleased,'' said Canada's Anderson.

The mechanisms are designed to help countries meet their targets by buying or selling credits on an international financial market, or by reducing their quota by expanding forests and farmland that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The U.S. position weighed heavily on the meeting. At the previous conference in Germany last July, all other countries decided to press ahead despite the U.S. withdrawal. But some said the absence of the United States made it virtually worthless.

A U.S. delegation was in Marrakech and attended even the difficult negotiations during the last hours of the conference. But the delegates refrained from participating in talks on the treaty itself, participants said.

On Saturday, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi - who had months earlier shown some reluctance to go ahead with the agreement without Washington's cooperation - said he was pleased by the agreement.

``In order to ensure effectiveness of the measures against global warming, it is important that all countries act under one single rule, and Japan will continue its maximum efforts in this regard,'' Koizumi said.

Scientists say glaciers are already melting and rain patterns are shifting because of global warming. Over the next century, temperatures could increase by as much as 10 degrees, possibly raising sea levels and causing more intense storms and droughts.

-------- health

BRITAIN: FOOT-AND-MOUTH CONTROLS LIFTED

New York Times
November 10, 2001
Warren Hoge
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

The government lifted livestock movement controls on large swaths of Northern England, leaving fewer than 5 percent of affected farms still under the restrictions imposed eight months ago to combat foot-and-mouth disease. Nearly four million animals have been slaughtered in the campaign to rid Britain of the disease, and there have been no new cases confirmed since Sept. 30.

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

China officially joins WTO

CNN
November 10, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/11/10/china.WTO/index.html

DOHA, Qatar -- Trade ministers from across the world have officially approved China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) after 15 years of negotiations.

The move was approved unanimously at the WTO's ministerial meeting in the Gulf state of Qatar on Saturday and brings a market of 1.3 billion people into the global trading system.

China's entry is expected to boost economic reforms started in the world's most populous nation more than 20 years ago and open the huge market to the rest of the world.

To applause, trade ministers from almost all the WTO's 142 members unanimously voted in favour of China's application.

China will become a full member 30 days after its parliament ratifies the agreement and informs the WTO. That may happen as soon as Sunday.

The approval of once-isolated communist China was planned to give the WTO maximum publicity and to ensure that some positive news would come out of the meeting, which has the main aim of launching a new round of trade liberalisation negotiations.

On Sunday members are expected to admit China's neighbour, Taiwan.

"Both are already major influences in world trade. Their participation in the WTO will be a boost for us and them," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told the plenary session before the vote.

French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said the WTO could not genuinely be called a "world" organisation without the world's most populous nation.

"When a country as important as China decides to join the WTO, it means there is a new impetus toward the development of trade," he said.

"We see China as very good partners... and I believe their entrance is definitely going to help us," Nigerian Trade Minister Mustapha Bello said. Intense security

WTO Director-General Mike Moore said on Friday that the entry of China and Taiwan was "a major historic event."

The WTO meeting is being held amid intense security following the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities and U.S.-led counter-strikes on Afghanistan.

To guard against possible attack, Qatar has thrown a cordon around the talks, and a U.S. helicopter ship and two other vessels carrying 2,100 marines stand sentry in the sparkling waters off the capital Doha.

As serious negotiations began on Saturday, it became clear that rich countries such as the United States and the European Union still have a lot of work to do if they are to convince developing countries to agree to a new trade round.

Developing country opposition helped sink attempts to launch a round at the last WTO meeting in Seattle two years ago.

Kenyan Planning Minister Adhu Awiti said that, at present, Kenya was not ready to give the go-ahead to a new trade round.

"As it stands now, we would not be ready to go for a new set of negotiations when we are not satisfied with the explanation of why the old ones have not been implemented," he told Reuters.

"We'd rather get the old implemented and take the new positions step by step," Awiti said, adding that this was a view shared by African nations and developing countries in general. Malaysian Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz told Reuters she saw the chances of a new round being launched as only 50/50.

EU agenda

She said there were differences between the EU and the rest of the world on the environment and other issues.

The EU wants environmental issues and investment and competition rules discussed in a new round in addition to the traditional issues of agriculture, industrial goods and services. Developing countries oppose that.

The last WTO meeting in Seattle was disrupted by mass street protests against globalisation. But just a few hundred union and environmental activists have been granted visas by Qatar.

China will benefit from WTO membership, using entry to give the final push towards a market economy after Communist leader Deng Xiaoping started the revolution in 1978.

Though some members did voice fears about Beijing's ability to stand by its pledges.

Chinese officials dismissed the concern.

"China's market is open to the outside. As long as the market is open to the outside, the more economic growth we have and the better for the world," Beijing's top trade negotiator Long Yongtu told reporters.

China is already the world's seventh largest trader and is keen to champion the cause of developing countries after it enters the WTO.

But some countries worry that China's entry could bring more trade disputes as Beijing tests its new-found power.

Tokyo is already embroiled in a festering trade dispute with China over a surge in Chinese agricultural exports to Japan.

---

China admitted to WTO
Asian countries fear losing export markets to China

Saturday, 10 November, 2001
By BBC News
Steve Schifferes at the WTO talks in Doha
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_1648000/1648579.stm

The world's most populous country, China, was officially admitted to the World Trade Organisation on Saturday after a 15-year battle - a monumental change to the world trading system

In a ceremony lasting just a few minutes, the 142 members of the World Trade Organisation unanimously approved the accession of the word's largest country into membership.

Loud applause and hugs between the Chinese delegation and the head of the WTO, Mike Moore, greeted the decision in the glittering conference hall in Doha, Qatar, where trade ministers are meeting to try and launch a new trade round.

For its part, China pledged to work hard to ensure the success of the trade negotiations, and thanked the five heads of the WTO who have been in post since it began its struggle for membership in 1986.

But it put the WTO on notice that a trade round could only succeed if it addressed the gap between rich and poor nations, and ensured that all countries would gain from globalisation, as it staked its claim to lead the group of developing countries.

The United States was the first to congratulate China on its membership.

US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick hailed the move as an historic step that would strengthen the WTO.

And he said everyone would benefit from the expanded access to markets and the expansion of a rules-based trading system.

Later, a US press briefing on China was delayed when a group of protesters drawn from the non-governmental organisations attending the conference blocked the entrance, shouting slogans like "the world is not for sale" and "Zoellick go home."

For his part, the EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy said it was the end of a long and arduous road and an enormous achievement.

Competitive threat

China hopes that WTO membership will cement its commitment to economic reform, which has led to a rapid economic expansion in the past 20 years and an explosion of foreign investment.

But some other countries, particularly in Asia, fear that China may take away export markets as it expands its trade.

"Of course China is going to be very competitive, but having China competitive under rules, under a binding dispute mechanism, is, I would have thought, in the whole world's interests," Mike Moore, the head of the WTO, said.

Long Yongtu says opening China's markets benefits the whole world Industrial countries, who have negotiated a wide range of deals opening Chinese markets in agriculture, telecoms and financial services, are hoping that China will live up to its commitments.

"Just like every member of the WTO, China will have to deliver on its commitments, and we will be watching this very carefully," Pascal Lamy, the EU trade commissioner, said.

China insists it will meet its obligations.

"As long as our market is open to the outside, the more economic growth we have and the better for the world," China's trade negotiator Long Yongtu told reporters.

China will become a formal member of the WTO 30 days after it approves the terms of membership and notifies the WTO secretariat.

---

Trade Ministers Approve China's Entry Into WTO

By Naomi Koppel
Associated Press
Saturday, November 10, 2001; 11:31 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7088-2001Nov10.html

DOHA, Qatar -- The World Trade Organization formally invited the world's most populous country, China, to join on Saturday, bringing the once-isolated communist country - and its 1.2 billion consumers - firmly into the global marketplace.

Trade ministers from almost all the WTO's 142 members unanimously approved China's application for membership, after more 15 years of negotiations.

"The ministerial conference so agrees," the chairman, Qatari Minister of Finance, Economy and Trade, Youssef Hussain Kamal, declared, setting off a round of applause.

Addressing the meeting afterward, Chinese Trade Minister Shi Guangsheng said his country will "abide by WTO rules and honor its commitments while enjoying its rights."

He added that China supported the WTO's plan to launch a new round of trade liberalization negotiations "on the basis of full consideration of the interests and reasonable requests of developing countries."

The approval of China was planned to give the WTO maximum publicity and to ensure that some positive news would come out of the meeting, which has the primary aim of launching the new round.

On Sunday members are expected to admit China's neighbor, Taiwan.

"I believe that as this century unfolds and people look back on this day, they will conclude that in admitting China to the WTO we took a decisive step in strengthening the global economic trading system," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told the meeting.

He said he believed China could only win from joining the WTO and praised the "incredible entrepreneurial dynamism of the Chinese people."

French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius said the WTO could not be called a "world" organization without the world's most populous nation.

"When a country as important as China decides to join the WTO, it means there is a new impetus toward the development of trade," he told reporters.

"We see China as very good partners ... and I believe their entrance is definitely going to help us," Nigerian Trade Minister Mustapha Bello said.

China first applied to join the WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, in 1986. Since then it has been negotiating terms of membership with its major trading partners and changing national and local laws to comply with WTO rules.

After a fraught final two years of talks, WTO negotiators finally approved the deal in Geneva in September.

China has made giant strides in opening its markets to become a major player in world trade, and the membership agreement commits it to continue dropping trade barriers over the next few years.

Its membership in the WTO means it will have to open its markets to goods and services from other WTO members, but will also increase its export opportunities - a situation that its Asian neighbors especially regard with some apprehension.

China will become a full member of the WTO 30 days after its parliament ratifies the agreement and informs the WTO. That may happen as soon as Sunday.

Terms for the admission of Taiwan were completed 18 months ago, but the final decision was delayed because of the 1992 understanding that China would be the first to join the body that sets rules on international trade.

China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949, and Beijing considers the island to be a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary.

Beijing at first objected to Taiwan's joining at all. It was finally agreed that Taiwan could join because it is a separate customs territory with different rules on importing goods. It will not be regarded as a country.

Negotiators will now return to trying to agree on the issues for the launch of a new round of trade talks, conscious that they are under the spotlight after the failure of the last attempt, in Seattle in 1999.

Those pushing for a new round said success would send a strong signal of confidence in the world economy and of solidarity in the aftermath of the terror attacks on the United States.

"The world needs signs of hope," Zoellick said.

-------- spying

Spy Plane Crew Member Speaks of Heroes

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Spy-Plane.html?searchpv=aponline

EVERETT, Wash. (AP) -- A crew member on the spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet and landed on Hainan island says no one on board was a hero.

Instead, the heroism of those combing the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York was hailed by Lt. j.g. Richard Payne at a veterans appreciation dinner Thursday night.

Payne was the tactical evaluator on the surveillance plane that made an emergency landing April 1 after the collision with the Chinese fighter. He and the other 23 crew members from the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station spent 11 days in Chinese custody.

Payne and his crew are now flying over the region around Afghanistan to gather information for U.S. and British missile attacks.

``When we returned from China, they called us heroes,'' he said. ``We were not heroes. We still do not see ourselves as heroes. You can ask any member of the crew. We were just doing our job.

``True heroes are ordinary people who show uncommon valor during extraordinary times.''

Police officers, firefighters and others who risked their lives to find survivors and recover bodies after the Sept. 11 attacks are an inspiration to the nation's military personnel, Payne said.

``They did not volunteer to fight a war. We look to them for strength today in every mission that we fly over Afghanistan.''

-------- terrorism

THE BUILDINGS
Why Trade Center Towers Stood, Then Fell

New York Times
November 11, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/nyregion/11COLL.html?pagewanted=all

For a span of time that lasted thousands of heartbeats and spared thousands of lives, the World Trade Center towers withstood the crashes of two jetliners and the flames stoked by their fuel. But eventually, the fires softened the steel structures, and the twin towers collapsed in a terrifying avalanche.

Now engineers think they are closing in on the specific structural failures that, like a few loose stones on a mountain, set off the deadly sequence of events inside the burning, partly smashed buildings. It could all come down to the sagging steel underpinnings of a few floors, which then tore away connections held by pairs of three-quarter- inch bolts and a pattern of welds where the floors were bound to columns.

Exactly which failure began the sequence - which occurred under extraordinary conditions never envisioned in the buildings' design - remains a matter of intense debate. Some analysts hold that too much evidence was destroyed in the collapses to say for certain.

But a leading theory has emerged as teams have sifted through the wreckage, examined photographs and videos and run computer simulations on aspects of the disaster. Many engineers now believe that relatively lightweight steel trusses holding up the reinforced concrete floors sagged in the heat and failed first when the connections that held them to the tightly spaced palisade of steel columns on the outside of the buildings gave way.

Each failure rapidly led to a larger and more serious one until the buildings plummeted with incredible fury, their upper floors striking the ground at an estimated 120 miles per hour.

"The most likely series of events would involve the floor supports," said Jon Magnusson, chairman and chief executive of Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire in Seattle, a structural engineering firm involved in the towers' original design.

Mr. Magnusson, who is also a member of a forensic team assembled by the American Society of Civil Engineers to determine the causes of the collapses, said attention had focused on the connections, around the outside of the floors. "If a member like that failed in a fire, that could mean the whole floor could go," he said.

The initial failures, in the impact zones between Floors 94 and 99 in the north tower and Floors 78 and 84 in the south, would not have directly caused the collapses, the engineers say. Rather, as the first floor to go fell and took out one or two more, the tightly spaced steel columns within the aluminum facade, themselves weakened by the fire, would have had no lateral support.

"Then all of a sudden your skin becomes detached and it becomes like a piece of paper," said William F. Baker, a partner in charge of structural engineering at the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who is also part of the American Society of Civil Engineers team.

The exterior columns, or skin, could then have buckled under the tremendous weight above them, said Mr. Baker, who noted that the team had not reached a consensus and that its conclusions could change.

But Eduardo A. Kausel, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that the avalanche theory is correct. Once the columns on those few floors buckled, he said, the rest of the columns had no chance of stopping the collapse.

"They simply popped out of the way of the avalanche like matchsticks," Dr. Kausel said. "The collapse front accelerates as it progresses downward." Computer simulations reveal that after the first buckling, the upper floors probably reached the ground almost as quickly as a rock dropped from the same height would have, he said.

The studies also show that the surviving columns redistributed their load after the initial impacts, saving thousands of lives by preventing an immediate collapse. The studies may also explain why the south tower, struck second, fell first.

In describing their structural autopsy, the engineers strike a delicate balance. No building could be expected to survive such an onslaught, they say, and the trade towers performed admirably. But it is possible that skyscrapers with a different structure would not have ultimately collapsed, and the engineers say it is essential to understand what happened and why. That knowledge, Mr. Baker said, could help reduce the likelihood of future collapses, with all the human devastation and political upheaval they imply.

"It's important that we understand how these buildings behaved," he said, "because we don't have much other evidence of similar collapses that are useful for the industry to learn."

The structural ideas that guided the twin towers' design, considered innovative in the 1960's, became popular in the 70's and 80's before high- rise engineers turned to newer concepts, said William Faschan, a partner at Leslie E. Robertson Associates in Manhattan, one of the principal engineering firms that created the trade center's design.

"At the time of the World Trade towers," which were completed in the early 1970's, Mr. Faschan said, "tall buildings meant steel."

So rather than the combination of concrete and steel structural members common today, he said, the towers would be held up by beams, columns, plates and trusses of pure steel. But the twin towers and other structures like them were set apart by a design that divided the load between the tightly spaced columns around the outside of the building and a smaller core of heavier beams at the center.

Seen from above, the 110-story twin towers were approximately squares, 209 feet on a side, with 59 columns on each face. The core, containing the elevators, stairwells and mechanical equipment, consisted of a rectangular arrangement of 47 heavier columns. The core columns carried about 60 percent and the exterior columns 40 percent of the towers' weight, which totaled 276,000 tons each above the plaza level.

But the exterior columns, 14 inches square in cross section, had another function that proved crucial.

The columns gave the towers enough stiffness to withstand hurricane-force winds of greater than 100 m.p.h. During the buildings' construction, the columns were assembled in modular fashion by stacking triplets of 36-foot-long sections held together by steel plates, or spandrels.

When a hijacked Boeing 767 jet struck the north face of the north tower (the one with the 370-foot antenna) at 8:48 a.m. on Sept. 11 and another struck the south face of the south tower at 9:03 a.m., the impacts briefly exerted sideways forces on the buildings equivalent to about 25 million pounds, said Tony Tschanz, a principal at Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire. The stiffness of the columns kept the buildings from tipping over, he said.

Those structures played another lifesaving role as the jets, 156 feet from wingtip to wingtip, each tore out about 35 exterior columns before plunging inside. Because of their close spacing and tight connections, the surviving columns on each damaged face instantly formed a kind of arch - the technical term is a Vierendeel truss - over the holes and prevented an immediate collapse.

"It's fair to say that the close spacing of the exterior columns was one of the key elements that allowed those buildings to remain standing," Mr. Faschan said.

The aluminum wings and the planes' fuselage would have been almost instantly shredded into pieces the size of an adult's fist, said Tomasz Wierzbicki, director of the impact and crashworthiness laboratory at M.I.T. Engines and other heavy parts continued to the core, but by working out the amount of energy involved, Dr. Wierzbicki and a student, Liang Xue, determined that at most half the inner columns could have been broken or severely mangled.

The buildings stood. Then the fires broke out.

Under terrific loads, said John D. Osteraas, director of civil engineering practice at Exponent Failure Analysis Associates in Menlo Park, Calif., steel columns have much in common with a wooden yardstick or an uncooked spaghetti noodle: only with lateral support can they hold up much weight.

"If you brace it so it can't buckle, it can carry quite a bit of load," Mr. Osteraas said.

So the exterior columns, for example, were braced laterally by their connections to the floor trusses themselves. The trusses, made largely of lightweight, zigzagging webs of steel rod a little over an inch in diameter, held up a steel deck covered with four or five inches of reinforced-concrete flooring.

The trusses were welded to pieces of angle iron, or light steel beams with an L-shaped cross section, which were in turn fastened with pairs of three-quarter-inch bolts to a small plate jutting from the exterior columns.

The jets would have knocked loose large amounts of fireproofing that had been sprayed in thick layers on all of the steel in the building, said Mr. Osteraas, who has examined the debris at ground zero.

Even more important, jet fuel, about 10,000 gallons per plane, spilled and immediately began burning at much higher temperatures than those of ordinary office fires. At the center of the impact zone, the temperature would have "jumped exponentially," said Yogesh Jaluria, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers.

Steel begins losing much of its strength at roughly 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, Dr. Jaluria said. Some places inside the buildings probably shot above 2,000 degrees within seconds, he said. In minutes, that heat would be spread by rising air and flames and by conduction through the steel itself, he said.

Engineers are still not sure whether the hot fires or the lack of fireproofing posed the greatest danger. Either way, the light steel of the trusses heated up first, and in the next 20 or 30 minutes, the floors began to sag between the interior and exterior columns.

Because they were not designed to withstand that kind of force, the links of the trusses to the columns may have been the first to go, Mr. Osteraas said.

"Those bolts were essentially the weak link in the system," Mr. Osteraas said. "In engineering terms, we refer to something like that as a mechanical fuse."

Once begun, the avalanche took only seconds. If one floor fell and tore out at least part of another, it would mean that many exterior columns, themselves hot and weakened, were suddenly without lateral bracing for 36 feet or more. (The columns in the core had a separate set of heavier side braces.)

The columns then buckled under the colossal weight above them and the avalanche reached its horrible conclusion.

While that is the leading theory, other engineers are pushing the idea that the columns in the center, where the fires may have been hottest, lost their strength and buckled first.

"I don't disagree that the floors must have collapsed at some point," said Matthys Levy, a founding partner at Weidlinger Associates, who has written a new chapter on the core-collapse theory for his 1992 book, "Why Buildings Fall Down," and plans to release a new edition in January. "I don't think that's enough to cause the buildings to go down."

But however that debate resolves itself, most engineers seem to agree that damage to the core was probably a factor in why the south tower collapsed more quickly than the north.

That seems to be because the second plane rammed the south tower well to the right of its center line, in such a way that the wreckage struck a shorter side of the rectangular core. The first plane hit near the center of one long side.

That means that any piece of debris from the second plane could take out as many as eight interior columns in a row, perhaps greatly weakening the east side of that core and making that tower more susceptible to a collapse.

The south tower, its top listing noticeably to the southeast, fell at 9:59 a.m.; the north tower followed at 10:28 a.m.

Workers have been removing debris and human remains from the site ever since.

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Developments in Terror Investigation

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Major-Developments.html?searchpv=aponline

Developments Saturday related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks:

-- One Navy aircraft carrier comes home as another prepares to deploy to Afghanistan. President Bush says Taliban's rule ``drawing to a close.''

-- In interview with Pakistani newspaper, Osama bin Laden says he has nuclear and chemical weapons and vows to unleash them if United States uses similar weapons.

-- British Prime Minister Tony Blair says U.S.-led campaign has gained momentum since Taliban forced from key Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

-- After abandoning key northern city, Taliban forces retreat south toward Kabul, where opposition threatens imminent attack. Opposition forces claim to have seized three provincial capitals in what may signal collapse of Taliban's rule in north.

-- Pentagon halts search for Bryant L. Davis, declares the fireman apprentice dead; soldier from Chicago had fallen overboard Wednesday from USS Kitty Hawk in the Arabian Sea.

-- New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani says charges dropped against all but one of 18 firefighters arrested after World Trade Center protest.

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THE HOME FRONT
After Asking for Volunteers, Government Tries to Determine What They Will Do

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/national/10HOME.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - A day after President Bush asked Americans to respond to the war on terror with an outpouring of volunteerism, his administration began trying to figure out how to mobilize a vast force of Americans for a still sketchy role on the home front battlefield.

Mr. Bush gave a task force on citizen preparedness, run by his homeland security and domestic policy advisers, 40 days to recommend ways for Americans to help with civilian tasks.

Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, said today at a White House briefing, "There is an inventory of things we believe we can give America to choose from to help us in this battle against terrorism."

In an interview, Mr. Ridge said some of his ideas included drawing on the expertise of retired police officers and asking retired physicians to train disaster personnel and retired nurse practitioners to learn new emergency skills.

"We just have to identify those who have the greatest potential for service and go recruit," Mr. Ridge said.

He said he was also talking to the national Ad Council about helping to "inform and inspire" people to join such efforts.

In World War II, it was clear how Americans would wage the war at home: through gasoline and food rationing, tin foil drives, victory gardens and buying war bonds. Women entered the industrial work force, and all the steps made a crucial difference. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a fireside chat called such efforts "the privilege of making whatever self-denial is necessary."

Now a debate has been rising over exactly how much sacrifice is really needed and how those at home should respond to what Mr. Bush calls "a different kind of conflict."

Mr. Bush can easily explain what that means in military terms: "It's a war that matches high-technology weapons with people on horseback," he said today. But many officials say it is less clear how people can respond at home to a conflict that may be more akin to the cold war.

Some commentators are even arguing for national conscription for the military and for homeland defense efforts like border patrol. Others by contrast say that a wartime mentality of sacrifice and a radical change in the way Americans live would mean that terrorists had won. Mr. Bush himself said much the same thing on Thursday night.

Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, expressed that view this way: "There are certain sacrifices we have to be prepared to make, but it's not like we need to be given something to do. Au contraire. The best thing you can do to defeat this enemy is live your normal life, because it will do two important things: keep the economic train running and it will demoralize the enemy more than the enemy would demoralize you."

Mr. Ridge said today that it was "a little bit misleading" to look to World War II as a model for today's homeland security effort.

"We had an economy, a country that was struggling economically, on its way out of depression," he said, "and we didn't have surplus resources so there was the need to ration meat and sugar. It's a little bit different today."

He said that Americans willing to volunteer now were, in fact, making a sacrifice.

"They are taking time away from their family and their profession," he said. "That's a significant contribution."

Some of the impulse for the volunteer effort is to keep national spirit up and provide a role for Americans who want to do more than display their patriotism by flying and shopping again. Mr. Bush's advisers said it would be demoralizing if they could not find a way to harness the energies of Americans who want to help. Other political figures say it could also undermine the war effort if Americans become disengaged.

"People are going to have to get involved in this," said George Christian, who was President Lyndon B. Johnson's press secretary at the end of his term in some of the bitterest days of the Vietnam War. "So far it's a government effort, as it should be, but people aren't engaged."

Part of the federal government's task if it is to mobilize a vast homeland volunteer effort is to find ways to train people for their roles and to create an emergency structure for them to report to. New York City eventually had to send all but the most skilled and essential volunteers away from ground zero.

Stephen Goldsmith, the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees the AmeriCorps and Senior Corps programs, said today that training, recruiting and managing volunteers was difficult to do well. Mr. Bush asked the corporation to start homeland security efforts in public safety, public health and disaster preparedness.

Mr. Goldsmith said the expansion in the ranks of the national service programs proposed by Mr. Bush might allow the corporation to use its enlistees in national service to manage other volunteers for public health and security efforts. "The goal here would be to leverage numbers," he said.

But others say volunteerism is insufficient for the times. "We're in a war," said Charles Moskos, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, "and this is the first time in American history that we have a serious war going on without a draft." Dr. Moskos dismissed Mr. Bush's call for volunteerism as "patriotism on the cheap."

In a recent article in The Washington Monthly, Mr. Moskos and a co- author, Paul Glastris, contended that a new draft would focus less on raising conscripts for the military than on enlisting men and women for such tasks as border patrol, tracking immigrants and guarding dams, nuclear power plants and sports complexes.

But many officials believe a draft would be too unpopular and that it would bring in more people than needed.

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, who has long been a proponent of national service programs, said, "I believe the government needs to provide opportunities for people who want to be of service, but I'm not at the point where I think that should be mandatory."

Asked about mandatory national service, Mr. Ridge said: "You just don't put a volunteer out on the border. There are certain levels of law enforcement where you really want professionals involved."


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Germans Protest Nuclear Waste

New York Times
November 10, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Anti-Nuclear.html?searchpv=aponline

LUENEBURG, Germany (AP) -- Demonstrators gathered Saturday along the route of a large nuclear waste shipment headed to a long-disputed dump in northern Germany. It was the start of a week of protests that police say may turn violent.

German power companies and the government agreed this year to phase out nuclear power, but the shutdown will take about 20 years -- too slow for Germany's well-organized anti-nuclear activists.

About 5,000 people marched through Lueneburg, 40 miles west of the Gorleben waste storage site in a peaceful protest Saturday. Bur police warn some activists are becoming more radical and that anarchist groups could make it a focus of their protest against the war in Afghanistan.

Thousands of officers are on duty in a bid to prevent any repeat of similar protests in March, when environmentalists delayed the shipments for 16 hours by chaining themselves to train tracks. Police used water cannon against protesters who pelted them with bottles.

Last month, the rail bridge was damaged by a bonfire of tires and straw lit beneath it. Engineers are working frantically to complete the repairs so that the six containers with about 80 tons of waste from a French reprocessing plant can pass.

``Let's see how long the train takes this time,'' Jochen Stay, a spokesman for one of the groups organizing the protests, told the rally Saturday.

A court has banned gatherings within 50 yards of the shipment's route. The organizers insisted another protest Sunday along the route would go ahead.

---

World Briefing

New York Times
November 10, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

NORTHERN IRELAND: PROTEST AT SCHOOL LIFTED In what they said was a goodwill gesture, Protestants in the Ardoyne neighborhood of north Belfast suspended their protest outside the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School yesterday morning for the first time since Sept. 3 to avoid upsetting the girls before they took the secondary school admissions exam. In a significant scaling down of their security presence, the police no longer wear riot gear while guarding the route to the school. Brian Lavery (NYT)

GERMANY: FEARING A NUCLEAR DISASTER Environmentalist groups said they would stage large protests next week to block a trainload of nuclear waste on its way to a storage center near the northern town of Gorleben. The 370-mile journey of the six containers from a treatment center in western France is expected to begin on Monday. A similar trainload in March drew thousands of protesters and prompted the mobilization of 30,000 police officers, the largest single security operation in post-war German history. Victor Homola (NYT)

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