------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Bush says he'll 'substantially lower' U.S. arms levels
Terrorists courted nuclear scientists
U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting
Nuclear claim questioned
NUCLEAR WEAPONS Fission Confusion
Bush and Putin Expected to Agree to Reduce Nuclear Arsenals
Eurotech progressing on its corporate strategy
Thief Needs Treatment for Radiation-Police
NYC, PENTAGON AREA MAY BE RADIOACTIVE
India has hydrogen bomb: Kalam
Nuclear Installations In Pakistan Magazine
Buttoning It Up Despite Musharraf's full cooperation
Braving PR fallout of nuclear plan fiasco
New water leak found at Japan nuclear reactor
Putin Looking to Boost U.S. Relations
Transforming Relations With Russia
Lax Nuclear Security in Russia
Ever cautious Swiss drill for nuclear accident
Federation of American Scientists news conference - 10 a.m.
Foreign tankers seen as security concern
Advocates say panel composition must change
Congressional support for de-alerting

MILITARY
Taliban ambush rebel convoy
Rebels jubilant over 'dramatic defeat' of Taliban
Rival Warlords Put Aside Bitter Feuds of Past
U.S. Hits Suspected Weapons Sites
Anthrax blamed on US scientist
Panel Criticizes Anthrax Response
Environmental regulators struggle over release of information
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
New tanks will give India a significant edge
Russian-made missile hits bull's-eye
Iraqi Defectors Tell of Kuwaitis in Secret Jail in Baghdad
Israeli troops enter village, kill suspected militant
Big Plans -- and Obstacles -- for a Fraying Alliance
Russia slams US on chemical weapons plant delay
General: Russians to Leave Chechnya
Injustice in Russia . . .
U.N. behind U.S. on forming postwar Afghan regime
Bush Ex - EPA Nominee Gets Navy Job
Vietnam-Era G.I.'s Watch New War Warily
A look at the two leaders

ENERGY AND OTHER
Germany gives green light for offshore wind plants
Larger turbines to push down wind energy prices
Electric Cars May Lose Push in Northeast
Shell called negligent in Brazil toxic waste case
Oil Drilling in Arctic Called Departure From Past Policy
World Lakes Said Overused, Polluted

POLICE / PRISONERS
Lawmakers say aviation security more urgent
Local Officials Accuse F.B.I. of Not Cooperating
Effort to Discover Terrorists Among Illegal Aliens
Man Surrenders in Terror Fund Probe
Why Clinton failed to stop bin Laden
MacArthur $5M Grant for Terror Study
Prague Connection

ACTIVISTS
German Authorities Detain Activists
Protesters Clash Over CNN Coverage
Who will defend the Constitution?



-------- NUCLEAR

Bush says he'll 'substantially lower' U.S. arms levels

USA Today
11/12/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/near.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Monday he will slash U.S. nuclear weapons to "substantially lower" levels even if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses to respond with similar cuts. The two leaders open three days of talks Tuesday.

Bush said he and Putin were on the verge of forging a relationship that "will outlive our presidencies." In an interview with Russian journalists, Bush said he would urge the 19-member NATO military alliance to build ties with Russia that go "beyond the current relationship."

The president suggested he still has differences with Putin over the U.S. missile defense program, which will soon violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty unless the pact is scrapped or amended. Putin has signaled that he is ready to agree to a formula that will allow the United States go ahead with tests related to missile defense as long as Bush preserves the treaty.

"The ABM treaty is outdated because it will prevent the United States from researching and developing weapons systems that will really reflect the true threats of the 21st century," Bush said, slumping comfortably in a Roosevelt Room chair across the hall from the Oval Office. "The big threat for us and for the Russians is not each other, but somebody developing weapons of mass destruction."

Bush's opposition to the ABM, as well as his pledge to reduce the U.S. nuclear cache regardless of Russia's plans, date to the early days of the 2000 presidential campaign. But coming as Putin arrived in the United States for three days of meetings, the remarks laid the groundwork for what aides said could be a remarkable session.

Though they are playing down the chances for a breakthrough on the ABM, senior administration officials said Monday it is likely that the pair will reach an accommodation on the issue - if not full agreement - before Putin leaves Bush's Texas ranch on Thursday.

Bush said one thing is certain: He will announce his numerical goals for reducing U.S. nuclear stockpiles.

"I'll have a number that I will share with him, and it's going to be substantially lower than today's weaponry, and I presume he'll have a number he'll share with me. The point is, what we don't need is the endless hours of arms control discussions," Bush said. "It's a new day when two new leaders step forward and say this is best for stability in the world."

Russia, no longer able to afford a Cold War nuclear stockpile, has promised new limits on U.S. and Russian stockpiles of not more than 2,000 long-range warheads for each country, down from a current total of about 6,000 each.

Bush advisers say they are considering 1,750 to 2,250 warheads apiece. A senior U.S. official said last week Bush's range dipped below 2,000.

Bush noted that he promised in the campaign to "reduce our weaponry to a level commensurate with keeping the peace but lower enough to say to the world that the Cold War is over. And there will be a specific range" announced Tuesday, the president said.

"Perhaps (Putin) will say the same thing. Regardless of whether he were to or not, I'm going to reduce our weapons," Bush said. "It is the right thing for America to do."

Bush said the leaders will sign a communique and complete several agreements including:

Bush's push to repeal the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which made trade concessions contingent on Russia's human rights performance. The amendment has had no practical impact on U.S.-Russian trade - the president has regularly waived it - but Russia sees it as a humiliating throwback to the days when Soviet officials were forced to make an annual accounting to the U.S. Congress to win its right to a place in the U.S. market.

---

Terrorists courted nuclear scientists

USA Today
11/12/2001
By Jack Kelley, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/12/lede.htm

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - At least 10 of Pakistan's top nuclear scientists were contacted by representatives of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist organization seeking their help to build a nuclear weapons program inside Afghanistan, senior U.S. and Pakistani officials said. The contacts are among the first hard evidence that bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been trying to develop a weapon of mass destruction, U.S. officials familiar with the evidence say.

They also underscore U.S. concerns that Pakistan's nuclear secrets could fall into the hands of terrorists - though there is no firm evidence yet that bin Laden possesses weapons-grade technology, they said.

Several of the Pakistani scientists accepted the representatives' offers, said U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the offers. But the scientists, many of whom are Taliban sympathizers and recent retirees, told the representatives that they would only work in Afghanistan with the approval of the Pakistani government, the officials said.

Intelligence experts in the West doubt bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network has nuclear weapons.

"I think it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon, but on the other hand, with the determination they have, they may very well," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday.

U.S. officials say bin Laden might have nuclear material for a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste.

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency said the offers, which were made within the past 2 years in Pakistan, were in the "early stages." It also said that only one of the scientists had traveled to Afghanistan since the offers were made.

After being informed of the offers by the FBI and CIA last month, ISI officials detained 10 people with "specific knowledge" of the country's nuclear weapons program to see whether they had been passing some of their nuclear expertise, raw materials or weaponry to the Taliban, U.S. officials said.

Among those questioned was Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

Since retiring in 1999, Mahmood traveled often to the Taliban stronghold city of Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he built what he described as three flour mills, Pakistani officials said. The three alleged mills, which U.S. officials say could have been scientific laboratories, were destroyed in the U.S.-led bombing campaign, Pentagon officials in Washington said.

Others questioned include Abdul Majid, former technical director of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons design facility, and Mirza Yusuf Baig, a former nuclear scientist. The three were questioned by ISI, CIA and FBI investigators, released, and then questioned again, their families said.

Pakistan, which started its nuclear program in 1974 and has at least 24 nuclear warheads, insists its nuclear technology and secrets are under tight safeguards. After Sept. 11, President Pervez Musharraf ordered a redeployment of the country's nuclear arsenal to at least six secret new locations and reorganized military oversight of the nuclear forces.

---

U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting
Some Delegates at U.N. Session Upset at Latest Snub of Pact Bush Won't Back

By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Monday, November 12, 2001; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12628-2001Nov11?language=printer

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 11 -- The Bush administration today boycotted a U.N. conference convened by Secretary General Kofi Annan to encourage states to ratify a global treaty banning nuclear weapons tests.

The decision to sidestep the three-day event represents the latest demonstration of U.S. opposition to the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has been signed by 161 countries, including the United States, and ratified by 85.

President Bush has made it clear that he will never submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification. But some delegates were miffed that the United States had chosen to snub many of its closest allies at a time that it is seeking to build a coalition to fight terrorism.

The decision brought an end to weeks of internal debate in the Bush administration over the wisdom of accepting an invitation to attend the conference as an observer. "We're not attending," a senior State Department official said today. "This is a meeting for ratifying states and we've made it clear we're not going to ratify."

The State Department had initially favored sending a low-level delegation to avoid a diplomatic confrontation. But the Pentagon hoped that a U.S. boycott would contribute to hastening the death of the nuclear pact.

The nuclear accord has long been a target of U.S. conservatives. In 1999, the Republican-controlled Senate voted 51-48 to reject a bid by President Bill Clinton to ratify the pact. Bush and his advisers have argued that the treaty is impossible to verify and that it may need to test weapons to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Russia, which has ratified the treaty, warned that the resumption of atomic tests could restart the nuclear arms race. Igor Sergeev, a special assistant to President Vladimir Putin, proposed today that the United States consider new negotiations aimed at improving the ability to verify treaty violations.

Wolfgang Hoffmann, the Mexican chairman of the conference, said that he expected other countries to follow Russia's lead. "This will obviously be a road down which many delegations will want to go in order to accommodate one very important signatory."

Annan told delegates at the opening session this morning that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington underscored the urgency of limiting the scope of the world's handful of nuclear weapons programs. "We have a precious but fleeting opportunity to render this troubled world a safer place, free of the threat of nuclear weapons," he said. "We must not let it pass."

Although the treaty has widespread support, its prospects for becoming law remain dim. The pact can only go into force after it is ratified by all 44 countries which have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Thirteen of those nations, including the United States, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, have yet to ratify the pact. Washington and New Dehli, which violated an informal international moratorium on nuclear tests in 1998, have insisted they will never allow the treaty to become law.

But Hoffmann said that he was still hopeful that the United States would one day ratify the pact. "I don't think there is unanimity within the U.S. administration on these issues," he said. "I think that if you keep up the pressure on the United States they will come around."

----

Nuclear claim questioned

By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011112-36821470.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says he doubts Osama bin Laden has nuclear weapons but that it is "reasonable to assume he might very well have chemical or biological or possibly even radiation weapons."

Mr. Rumsfeld, interviewed yesterday on CBS' "Face the Nation" and "Fox News Sunday," also said the United States has bombed some sites in Afghanistan that might have been used to develop chemical or biological weapons and narcotics.

"I think it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon, but, on the other hand, with the determination they have, they may very well," the defense secretary said on CBS, referring to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, which is believed to have masterminded the September 11 attacks against the United States.

While the U.S. military continues to hunt for bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist said in an interview last week with a Pakistani journalist that he has both nuclear and chemical weapons.

Bin Laden warned that he would be prepared to use those weapons against the United States if "America used chemical and biological weapons against us." The interview was conducted at a secret location, which the reporter, who was blindfolded, believed was near Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

Asked on Fox whether he is "seriously worried" that al Qaeda has weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "You bet."

However, Mr. Rumsfeld said in both network interviews that he is not sure whether the terrorists in question know how to use biological or chemical agents as weapons. "It's one thing to have the chemical or biological capability. It's another thing to have figured out how to weaponize it or develop the ability to deliver it," he said on "Face the Nation."

"We have a lot of information that they have the first step. We have less information with respect to the second," Mr. Rumsfeld added.

The defense secretary was one of three senior Bush administration officials on news talk shows yesterday who were asked to assess the likelihood that bin Laden has weapons of mass destruction.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," said, "I have no way of knowing, but I think it's unlikely that he has any nuclear weapons."

He called bin Laden's nuclear claim a "wild boast and threat" but said he did not know whether he had chemical and biological weapons.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice discussed the issue in appearances on ABC's "This Week" and CNN's "Late Edition."

She reiterated her previous statements that there was "no credible evidence" that bin Laden had nuclear weapons.

"We know he has been trying very hard to get them. We know he has said it is a religious duty to have weapons of mass destruction, and so we take him very seriously," she said.

"While there's no credible evidence of him having a nuclear weapon, we're taking the threat very seriously" and doing everything possible to make sure "he does not acquire usable weapons of mass destruction," she said.

Miss Rice went on to say that the United States was collaborating with "every intelligence operation practically in the world on the problem of al Qaeda and the Taliban and their weapons of mass destruction."

On CBS, Mr. Rumsfeld was asked about a report in the New York Times that said U.S. warplanes have not bombed some facilities in Afghanistan that show evidence of producing anthrax and cyanide.

"We have bombed some of them. We don't know where all of them are," he said.

"You can be certain that if we had very good information as to the location of a chemical or biological development area, that we would do something about it. We certainly have every desire in the world to prevent the terrorists from using those capabilities," Mr. Rumsfeld added.

He offered a slightly different perspective on Fox. He pointed out that a biological-weapons laboratory may be small, even mobile, yet capable of "creating enormous carnage in the world."

"So if we have suspicions, or information, or intelligence that suggests something might have such a role, then you are faced with this issue: Are you best taking it out or are you best learning more about it?" Mr. Rumsfeld said.

-------

NUCLEAR WEAPONS Fission Confusion
It was a week that embodied unclear policies and strategies on nuclear weapons

Outlook India Magazine
Nov 12, 2001
MARIANA BAABAR
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20011112&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=6

When US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told CNN he hadn't ruled out the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, it was construed in Islamabad as a reflection of Washington's growing frustration at the tardy progress of Operation Enduring Freedom.

But it was also taken to be a signal to the stubborn Afghans of the price they would have to pay for their continued support to the Taliban.

Rumsfeld's gratuitous remarks, though, united strategic thinkers, media and military officials in condemning the talk about tactical nuclear weapons. The News, for instance, was scathing in its criticism: "Fighting the human form of terrorism with conventional weapons might be an acceptable option in difficult circumstances but injecting an element of nuclear warfare into a conflict that is already producing too much death and misery is unconscionable. Neither the Pakistan government nor the people will be able to acquiesce to such an idea."

That Rumsfeld's remark coincided with the visit of US Centcom commander, Gen Tommy R. Franks, to Pakistan only heightened the nervousness here about Washington's intentions.

The protest against using tactical nuclear weapons goaded the regime to make public its opposition. Indeed, Islamabad's silence on the nuke issue could have only enhanced anti-US feelings and bolstered the jehadis in portraying Washington as an 'amoral' force out to decimate Muslims. Government spokesman Maj Gen Rasheed Qureshi said, "We firmly and categorically reject even the thought of using nuclear weapons tactically or otherwise."

But what provoked Rumsfeld to talk about tactical nuclear weapons? Though the Taliban barely has an organised army to take on the might of the superpower, there is little denying that the relentless bombing of Afghanistan hasn't achieved the desired results-neither has there been a rebellion against Mullah Omar, nor has the Northern Alliance succeeded in making any headway. Says Shireen M. Mazari, director-general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, "The ongoing use of cluster bombs and the impending threat that chemical and perhaps even nuclear weapons may be used means the war against terrorism is itself wreaking terror on an increasing number of Afghan civilians."

Strategic thinkers distinguish between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. Tactical nukes have low yields (below 100 kilotons or KT) and are used in battlefields to eliminate a large number of enemy troops with one blow. In contrast, strategic nuclear weapons have yields over 100 KT and are used on vast areas, say, cities. A lower level of devastation or not, Mazari says, "Rumsfeld's remark is certainly an act of desperation and not responsible at all. The Americans don't need nuclear weapons as they have enough conventional ones."

Adds columnist Ayaz Amir, "In its undoubted grief and agony, the US is in danger of forgetting what the Greeks taught: hubris invites retribution. While there's no denying America's distress, it will only help its cause if this distress is not clothed in too excessive an arrogance." Couldn't the US display this arrogance through the use of nukes? No, says former defence secretary Gen (retd) Talat Masood: "The US doesn't have to use tactical nukes as its armoury of conventional weapons is immense. I think Washington has restrained itself from showcasing its conventional military might. For a country like Afghanistan, Washington's conventional weapons can be as deadly as nuclear bombs."

Similarly, Gen (retd) K.M. Arif, who was close to President Gen Zia-ul-Haq, says, "I understand the US had internal debates and the possibility of using nukes was ruled out. The US did consider it at one point." Arif argues that much shouldn't be read into Rumsfeld's remarks as "its (the US') nuclear policy allows it to keep this option open and use its nukes whenever it wants to".

Others also say that 2001 isn't 1945, when the US was keen to end World War II. As of now, it is in no hurry to end its war, nor is there curiosity in studying the impact of nukes. The use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan at this early stage of the war could have other adverse consequences for Washington. Points out Masood, "You cross a very dangerous threshold and you take the war into a different zone altogether. You also cross the moral threshold: the coalition against terror would split overnight."

Adds Gen (retd) K. Mattiuddin, who has authored several books on Afghanistan, "The US has no need to go in for nuclear weapons. It would exercise this option in the event of a world war, or in case it had to go to war against China." But if remarks about tactical nuclear weapons weren't enough, there soon followed media reports about the US and Israel undertaking military exercises to neutralise Pakistan's nuclear weapons, in the event of President Pervez Musharraf being ousted from power. Qureshi shrugged his shoulders and declared, "These reports are baseless and ridiculous. It shows how ignorant they are of the procedure and have little idea of the system involved to safeguard these nuclear weapons. There is no question of anyone attacking or coming close to them."

But Masood doesn't share Qureshi's optimism. He argues, "I certainly think this can happen in the worst-case scenario. For instance, if power goes into the hands of some radicals, the entire world would be too eager to de-nuke Pakistan." But Arif thinks the media reports were in themselves bogus. "The article on the option of de-nuking Pakistan's capabilities was by Seymour Hersh, an anti-Pakistan Jew. He's just maligning our nuclear programme," he says.

Some others think any attempt to target Pakistan's nuclear capability could have catastrophic consequences. For one, it could split the otherwise united army, with factions competing to protect the nuclear arsenal and plunging the country into chaos.

Mattiuddin, anyway, thinks it wouldn't be easy, even for the US, to neutralise Pakistan's nuclear weapons. His argument: "Our nuclear weapons are not lying ready for someone to come and pick them up. They are not in an assembled state. Nuclear weapons are not so simple; they are not carried away in briefcases. For instance, these weapons cannot be detonated till you know the codes. And second, even if our weapons are neutralised, you cannot take the nuclear knowledge away from us."

What surprised some was Indian defence minister George Fernandes' statement that Pakistani nukes were in fact in safe hands. Strategic thinkers, however, feel Fernandes was only articulating New Delhi's own fears of being de-nuked, besides sending a message to the world that South Asian nations are responsible nuke states.

The 'nuke confusion' received a new twist with Islamabad arresting three top nuclear scientists who had worked at the prestigious Kahuta Research Laboratory. It was again the western media which had hinted at their role in assisting Osama bin Laden to acquire nuclear sinews.Though the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, laughed at the US' paranoia and declared his country couldn't even manufacture glass, the Pakistan government kept a stiff upper lip through the week.

Last week's nuclear confusion, indeed, vividly illustrates the dangers the Afghanistan crisis poses to Pakistan and the many inconceivable turns Operation Enduring Freedom could take.

---

Bush and Putin Expected to Agree to Reduce Nuclear Arsenals and to Fight Terrorism

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/international/12SUMM.html?searchpv=nytToday

President Bush will hold a summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this week and will try to close a number of agreements that could profoundly change the post-cold-war trajectory of relations between Washington and Moscow.

Meeting against a backdrop of war in Afghanistan and the national mobilization against terror at home, the two leaders are expected to announce deep reductions in the offensive nuclear arsenals that have stood - needlessly in the view of much of the world - like overhanging threats from the era of superpower competition.

The two men are also poised to establish a strong bond of cooperation - perhaps an alliance of sorts - in the struggle to quell the Islamic violence that has been welling up in Central Asia. The movements there directly threaten Russia's security and that of former Soviet republics that are striving - many with American investment - to tap one of the last great reservoirs of oil and natural gas on the planet.

Mr. Putin has also telegraphed that he is ready to reach an accord that will allow the United States to proceed with rigorous testing of antiballistic missile systems as long as Mr. Bush will agree to preserve the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which Russia sees as the cornerstone of strategic stability.

To critics who say that Russia has nothing to offer the United States, Mr. Putin has broadcast in a number of pre-summit-meeting interviews that Russia, the world's second-largest oil producer, stands ready to ensure the West's energy security in the event of war or disruption in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

A number of American leaders have been impressed.

"Russia has a tremendous capacity of being an alternate energy source for the United States," Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said last week.

Russia's churlish intelligence services have - under orders from the Kremlin - unloaded into American hands an inestimable amount of information about the networks that radiate out from Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network into the Middle East and Asia.

"This is a very different relationship now," said Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, in briefing reporters last week. "This is a different relationship than the one that Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon had, or even that George Herbert Walker Bush and Gorbachev had," she said. "It is a relationship that got new impetus to shared cooperative security issues concerning Sept. 11 and counterterrorism," she added, and one that will be based on growing economic ties and an expanded role for Russia in the West's security.

"I believe you will start to see the United States and NATO talk to Russia about how NATO and Russia can better relate," she said.

In Moscow, Kremlin officials told reporters this past weekend to expect as many as seven statements to emerge from the three-day meeting, which will begin in Washington tomorrow and carry over to Mr. Bush's Crawford, Tex., ranch on Wednesday and Thursday. The statements are likely to include one on the future of Afghanistan, an accord on joint efforts in counterterrorism, an agreement on missile defenses and reducing offensive weapons and an elaboration on Russia's role with NATO.

In addition, administration officials in Washington said they were pushing for a "significant proliferation element" in any new strategic framework sealed with Russia, an apparent reference to its continuing sales to Iran of weapons and civilian nuclear reactor technology that the United States fears will assist Iran's quest to develop nuclear weapons.

Bush administration officials have sought to tamp down expectations that the meeting will produce significant results. But it has been increasingly apparent since Sept. 11 that both leaders view the attacks on the United States as a galvanizing event to overcome resistance to a new Russian-American partnership, broader even than the one forged by President Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin.

It was not so long ago that Mr. Bush himself was a factor in resisting Russia and Mr. Putin. The Bush administration came to office espousing the view that Russia did not account for much as a world power anymore.

There is little agreement on what changed the course of Mr. Bush's thinking last spring. Some specialists have speculated that the confrontation with China over the collision of an American spy plane was a signal event that persuaded Mr. Bush and his advisers that their indifference to working collectively in foreign affairs was both alarming allies and driving other powers like China and Russia together.

Mr. Bush sought to overcome these apprehensions with a European tour in June. In his first meeting with Mr. Putin, in Slovenia, Mr. Bush said that he had found in Mr. Putin a partner he could trust, a step that was essential if only to quiet the apprehension Mr. Bush had incited among European leaders about America going it alone on missile defense. Of Mr. Putin, Mr. Bush said, "I am convinced that he and I can build a relationship of mutual respect and candor."

The sweep of events after Sept. 11 continues to impel the two leaders toward one another, notwithstanding the deep reservations many Americans harbor over Mr. Putin's background as a K.G.B. officer, whose political rise were orchestrated by Mr. Yeltsin and built on a brutal military campaign in Chechnya.

In Shanghai last month, Mr. Bush, with some emotion, noted that his first call from a world leader after the Sept. 11 attacks came from Mr. Putin. Since then, the distance between the two leaders' positions on a host of issues had closed rapidly.

To some experts, Mr. Bush has traveled the greater distance toward Mr. Putin's view of a collaborative new security structure in the world. It was Mr. Putin who, earlier this year, spoke forcefully in an interview with American correspondents in Moscow about the need for Russia and the United States to confront the threat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

"I feel that I personally am to blame for what happened," Mr. Putin said in the wake of the attacks. "Yes, I talked a great deal about that threat, but I guess it wasn't enough."

Mr. Putin's goal has been "to shift the United States away from the illusion that it is leading a unipolar world," said Clifford G. Gaddy of the Brookings Institution in Washington during a forum last week. "I stress the word illusion because Putin and other Russians never thought that this was objectively possible," he added.

There are still many prominent skeptics, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, who argue that it is premature to conclude that Russia has made a historic choice in favor of the West, but rather may simply be maneuvering cleverly to lay the most advantageous foundation for a long-term rebuilding of Russian national power.

"I would say that joining the West is exactly what Putin is not about," Mr. Gaddy said. "What Putin is about is, with respect to the U.S., is that he is absolutely convinced that the U.S. must not be allowed to continue to go it alone."

-------- business

Eurotech progressing on its corporate strategy

November 12, 2001
ECON Investor Relations, Inc.,
Dawn Van Zant, 1-800-665-0411 dvanzant@investorideas.com
From: "Darci Danyliu" <darci@hereyougo.com>

The Following is a Direct Communication from EUROTECH, Ltd. Chairman Chad A. Verdi and President/CEO Don V. Hahnfeldt

In light of the tragic events that occurred in our nation on September 11th and the resulting economic and market uncertainties, we wanted to give you a Company update.

After meeting with current and prospective customers, management does not expect the terrorist acts to delay current development plans or commercialization of our technologies. In fact, some of our market opportunities are expected to grow as funding is becoming available for a variety of products where our technologies can be applied to enhance homeland safety and security.

While Eurotech is progressing on its corporate strategy, the Company's management has focused on bringing together all of Eurotech's corporate resources to deliver its most promising technologies into the marketplace - radiation-resistant EKORTM, radioactive fixative RAD-X, non-intrusive ground survey EMR/ACTM, non-isocyanate polyurethane HNIPUTM, and its encryption technology. Each of these technologies exhibits qualities with the potential to be "disruptive" in the marketplace and the capability to become a leading product in its respective market. Limited revenues from delivery of these technologies have already begun to take place.

EKORTM and RAD-X have been demonstrated in the last few months at certain Department of Energy ("DOE") nuclear weapon complex sites as an innovative solution for managing nuclear waste. Revenue flow from the sales of the EKORTM and RAD-X products from small-scale DOE projects has begun. Following initial small-scale projects we have submitted proposals to DOE contractors that management believes could lead to multi-million dollar contracts. The 2002 DOE budget for environmental management is again over $6 billion. The Company is also actively pursuing commercial non-nuclear applications of EKORTM in the construction industry. A teaming agreement for this use of EKORTM is very likely in 2002. Management believes that revenues from this market opportunity can be substantial.

Eurotech has licensed EMR/ACTM as a complimentary technology to EKORTM, and together they can provide life cycle management services to nuclear environmental cleanups projects. For example, EMR/ACTM can identify a leaking tank of liquid waste, EKORTM can seal the leak, and EMR/ACTM can monitor the migration of the remaining contaminants in the subsoil and ground water. The Company is marketing these technologies to DOE contractors with numbers of active proposals submitted and under consideration. The outcome of these proposals should be known shortly and management believes they will be will very positive.

The Company has established two major divisions, which are moving steadily forward. The Nuclear and Environmental Technology Solutions division is supporting nuclear and non-nuclear applications of EKORTM and RAD-X. The Advanced Performance Materials division has brought HNIPUTM to the point of commercialization, and the Company is in negotiations with multiple large corporate entities for worldwide licensing/royalty revenue agreements in the coatings and foam segments of the $40 billion worldwide polyurethane market.

As a result of the tragedy of September 11th a new focus has been established on technologies that can counter the threat of terrorism here in the United States and worldwide. Eurotech's encryption technology may provide a unique and significant capability to secure communications. The Company is in discussions with appropriate United States entities formalizing agreements and sponsorship to deliver its secure communications products to the market. The Company has also recently announced that its ACTM technology is capable of non-intrusively detecting plastic explosives. EKORTM is being promoted as a complementary method of protecting our nuclear waste sites from possible acts of terrorism today.

With regard to the Shareholders' Meeting, the Company had anticipated holding its Annual Meeting on November 30, 2001 in New York City at the American Stock Exchange. After the terrorist attacks and the temporary closing of the AMEX building, we consulted AMEX on the issues of travel, dates, alternate locations, safety and security. We made back up plans and selected an alternate site to stay on schedule. The introduction of bio-terrorism and ongoing terrorist warnings have given us cause for continued concern for travel and the security at our primary and secondary meeting locations of New York City and Washington, DC. Therefore we asked AMEX for an extension of our Annual Meeting to early 2002. AMEX's Board of Governors approved an extension of our meeting, which we will hold on March 29, 2002, at a time and location to be announced shortly.

As reported in our last SEC filing, we are concluding a $1 million private placement and as disclosed before, we are pleased to announce that we will be closing on the first part of a new financing of $2.5 million that is in final negotiation. The Company has reduced its annual fixed cost basis by approximately 50 percent as part of its overall plan to reduce overhead expenses until additional revenues are achieved.

Thank you for your support, Chad A. Verdi, Chairman / Don V. Hahnfeldt, CEO

For additional information about Eurotech and its technologies visit the Company website www.eurotechltd.com.

Certain information and statements included in this release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Federal Privates Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.

-------- canada

Thief Needs Treatment for Radiation-Police

Mon, Nov 12 7:55 AM EST
Reuters
http://news.excite.com/news/r/011112/07/odd-radiation-dc

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - A determined thief who broke into a Canadian weather station made off with more than C$300 worth of tools, as well as a dose of radiation.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police issued an unusual warning on Friday urging the thief to seek medical treatment immediately, reminding him or her that the visit can remain secret because of doctor-patient confidentiality rules.

Police said the thief was exposed to radiation when entering and leaving the unmanned station at Mount Sicker on southern Vancouver Island through a Doppler Radar dome near the top of the facility.

"The radar dome is bathed in radiation. Human exposure to this type of radiation could result in permanent damage to soft tissue, i.e. eyes and testicles," police said a statement.

To reach the dome, the thief had to get through three barbed wire fences and climb an 80-foot spiral staircase. It is not known when the break-in occurred, but it was believed to have happened within the past three weeks.


-------- depleted uranium

NYC, PENTAGON AREA MAY BE RADIOACTIVE

Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001
From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>

The or a possible cause of what's being called "World Trade Center Syndrome" might be from the DU on the Sept. 11 airplanes[Depleted Uranium] that may have caught fire[probably].

Has anyone done and/or is anyone interested in getting out their Radalert or other rad monitoring device and measuring and testing radiation levels at:

1. Near The Former World Trade Center[In Manhattan or any of the other 4 NYC boroughs and Northern New Jersey]

2. Near The Pentagon

3. At or Near Shanksville, Pennsylvania where Flight 93 crashed?

From: "Leuren Moret" - leurenmoret@yahoo.com:

On Sept. 11, I called a medical doctor who lives 7 miles from the Pentagon and warned her that DU could have burned in the hijacked jets that crashed (up to 3000 pounds were used in 747's). She turned on her gamma meter - radiation levels were 8 times higher than normal inside her house. She informed the Nuclear Information ResourceService in Washington DC[Phone: 202-328-0002], and the EPA, FBI, HazMat and other emergency response agencies went to the Pentagon to investigate. A pile of rubble from the crash was radioactive, but the EPA rep said "oh... it's probably depleted uranium... it's not a health hazard unless you breathe it". Firefighters, Pentagon personel, and communities nearby DID BREATHE IT. There was no followup investigation, and what about the World Trade Center in NY? Radiation almost never gets into the media. It is a taboo subject.

From: "Dr. H. D. Sharma" <hdsharma@golden.net>[Physicist]

It does not matter whether the planes that hit the World-Trade Towers and the Pentagon have DU or not as long as DU does not catch fire. If DU catches fire -- most likely just like in the case of the El-Al plane that caught fire outside Amsterdam (Netherland), it will form aerosols of uranium dioxide. Inhalation of the aerosols can be harmful to human health depending on the quantity inhaled.

The presence of aerosols can be checked with the help of a simple radiation survey meter. Such meters are readily available and the site near the Towers should be checked for gamma-ray emitters as soon as possible. If you do not see any radiation from radioisotopes of thorium-234 and protoactinium-234, you are fairly certain that no DU has become airborne and it is unlikely to be harmful to human health. Hari Sharma.

-------- india / pakistan

India has hydrogen bomb: Kalam

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2001
Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1465593281

NEW DELHI: India possessed a hydrogen bomb and its nuclear weapons were "absolutely safe", noted scientist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who demits office on Monday as principal scientific advisor to the government, said on Sunday.

"Scientists and technicians who conducted the Pokhran II tests in 1999 are all satisfied with the results and we have a thermo-nuclear device," Kalam, regarded father of India's missile systems, said here.

Asked about the safety of nuclear assets, 70-year-old Kalam, who holds a Cabinet rank, said "safety standards are in-built in our country. We possibily have much better safety standards than many others".

On whether India should develop missiles with strike ranges longer than 'Agni-II', which can reach a target at a distance of over 2,200 km, he said "it depends on what kind of enemy the country faces and its strategy for the next 10 or more years. India is capable of manufacturing (a longer range missile) if the necessity arises".

Kalam, who will be succeeded in the key post by R. Chidambaram, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said that he was quitting his job as he wanted to work with younger people and high school students to create a scientific culture and push India to a developed nation status.

"Change, I believe, is very important in a man's life. Change allows a person to contribute very effectively," Kalam, who worked in key defence and space centres for the last 43 years, said.

A recipient of Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour, Kalam skirted a question as to who had given the command for triggering the underground nuclear blasts in Pokhran in 1998, saying "these days computers are there (to do the job)".

On his future plans, he said that he would return to Bangalore, where he had started his career, and would join the Indian Institute of Science as a distinguished professor.

An aeronautical engineer from the Madras Institute of Technology, Kalam said that he had been trying for a change since 1991 when he was offered the post of vice chancellor of Madras University.

"I am more comfortable with youngsters and high school students. I want to share their imagination. In the last few months, I have interacted with over 15,000 youngsters across the country from Tripura to Jharkhand, Bihar, Assam and Dindigul in Tamil Nadu and I want to ignite their scientific temper," he said.

The top sceintist said "the best example of a leader is when he allows change. I left ISRO and DRDO and I found better people emerging".

Describing himself as a "sea guy", Kalam said that he had worked all his life in sea coasts along the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. "I also found Pokhran challenging," he said.

He further said that he wanted to work with the youngsters to transform the country into a developed nation. ( PTI )

----

Nuclear Installations In Pakistan Magazine

Nov 12, 2001
Outlook India
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20011112&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=7

Over the years Pakistan has developed facilities to make nuclear weapons inside the country.As per media reports, Pakistan has about 24 nuclear warheads.

http://www.outlookindia.com/images/nuke_011112.jpg

---

NUCLEAR ESTABLISHMENT
Buttoning It Up Despite Musharraf's full cooperation, the US is taking no chances with the ISI or Pakistan's nukes

Outlook India
AMIR MIR
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20011112&fname=Cover+Story+%28F%29&sid=8

Embarrassed at repeatedly missing its target in Afghanistan, and quite paranoid of what Osama bin Laden may still have in store for it, the United States is attempting to tighten the screws on Pakistan's nuclear establishment and the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Its goal: purge the two organisations of alleged jehadi elements and sever any link between them and the Taliban as also bin Laden.

Last month, the Pakistan government removed then isi chief Lt Gen Mahmood Ahmed, presumably at the behest of Washington. Reeling under the same pressure, Islamabad has reportedly handed over three superannuated Pakistani nuclear scientists to American investigators for probing their alleged links with bin Laden and the Taliban.

Among them is Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood, former director-general, nuclear power, Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and his colleagues, Abdul Majeed, a former chief engineer, and Mirza Yousaf Baig, a senior scientist.

Sources claim that Sultan Mehmood, who was running an ngo by the name of Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Ummah Reconstruction), was arrested from his Islamabad residence on October 24, and subsequently released on October 26, after being cleared of the suspicion that "he was working against US interests". But he was picked up again the following day and allegedly handed over to a US team for interrogation.

Sultan's organisation was involved in voluntary activities in Afghanistan, but the US believes he used the ngo cover to assist bin Laden in his search for crude nuclear weapons. The scientist's family and close associates simply refute this charge.

The Pakistan government too has come to Mehmood's defence, albeit confusingly. Said government spokesman Maj Gen Rasheed Qureshi: "Sultan Bashiruddin retired in 1998 from the government service and became involved with an ngo. In the process, he had been to Afghanistan and certain questions are being asked about this and the process is continuing. He is not under arrest but is presently unwell and in an Islamabad hospital."

Claiming that Sultan's interrogation was in line with the policy of identifying those running dubious ngos, Qureshi said: "Bashiruddin is being asked as to why he had travelled to Afghanistan. Apparently, he was involved in some land development research. As poppy is no more being cultivated in Afghanistan, his efforts were to look for substitute crops."

Such clarifications apart, government sources say that Gen Pervez Musharraf's unstinted support to the US has fanned resentment in military and intelligence circles, even raising fears about his security and the future of his government. These sources say the cia has accused the isi of playing a double game post-September 11, of pretending to help and yet allowing the flow of weapons into Afghanistan. Wary of the isi, the US pressured Musharraf to remove Ahmed and co, via sweeping changes in the army on October 8, in the hope of getting credible intelligence on the Taliban.

On October 10, however, a mysterious fire broke out in the heavily-guarded General Headquarters (GHQ) building in Rawalpindi, reducing to ashes some top secret intelligence files there. Though the government claimed the fire was triggered by a short circuit, sources say some middle-ranking intelligence officers set the blaze, hoping to destroy evidence of cooperation between Pakistan and the Taliban and between the isi and bin Laden.

As far as the Americans are concerned, there's much the isi needs to conceal.

-------- ireland

Braving PR fallout of nuclear plan fiasco
Irish fallout exercise

The Irish Times - IRELAND
November 12, 2001
ireland.com
From: Cat@freewomen.freeserve.co.uk

The dry run brought little cause for comfort about our ability to respond to a nuclear accident, writes Joe Humphreys after watching the testing of a national emergency plan.

Whatever about the merits of Saturday's simulated nuclear accident as regards testing the national nuclear emergency plan, as a public relations exercise it came across as a genuine disaster.

Despite the fact Joe Jacob had been given advanced warning of the simulated incident, not to mention some six weeks to prepare his script following his infamous Marian Finucane interview, he remained as vague as ever regarding the advice to give the public in the case of a nuclear emergency.

Seven hours after the simulation began with an imaginary earthquake at the Wylfa nuclear power plant in Wales, the Minister of State for energy could offer no more advice than "stay indoors". All other information would be decided upon in the context of the incident, he said.

Well, he was asked, what of this incident? What advice would be given, for instance, on food consumption, or the ingestion of iodine? Ah, he replied, "we are talking hypothetically at this point," and he wasn't willing to speak about matters hypothetical.

Journalists called to this media "briefing" were left scratching their heads at what the Mr Jacob had described as "an exercise in information management". It seemed advice couldn't be given on a hypothetical situation, even in the context of a hypothetical situation.

It didn't quite help to secure what was one of the Minister's stated aims of the day, namely restoring public confidence in the country's "total state of readiness" for a nuclear emergency.

The second objective, he said, was to "fine-tune" the National Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents, to give it its official title. To meet both goals, the Department of Public Enterprise not only drafted in a team of consultants to evaluate the State's emergency response but also an external PR firm to manage the media's.

The exercise began at 5.15 a.m. with a phone call from consultants Environmental Resources Management (ERM) to a duty manager within the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland (RPII). This triggered a further series of calls, and the Emergency Response Co-Ordinating Committee - comprising representatives of Government Departments, the Garda Síochána and Met Éireann, among other bodies - was scrambled to the RPII's headquarters in Clonskeagh, Dublin.

ERM's director, Mr Sean O'Riordain, said relevant personnel were alerted to the day of the exercise, but not the time. While he would not say how good the initial response was, he confirmed the different officials "answered the phones".

Adding to the crisis atmosphere was the fact that the press briefing, shortly after noon, was conducted in a cramped front lobby of the RPII building. The media was not allowed upstairs to see the committee at work.

Mr Jacob emphasised the exercise was "not a reaction to anything".

And just in case minds were turning to his RTÉ radio interview, he added hastily: "it's not a reaction to the events of the 11th of September".

He added he expected a report on the exercise to be available within days. Soon after, he said, the public would receive their long-awaited information leaflets on the emergency plan.

In the meantime, the public have at least learnt one fact: Wylfa and not Sellafield is the closest nuclear plant to the Republic. So it wasn't a completely wasted exercise then.

-------- japan

New water leak found at Japan nuclear reactor

November 12, 2001,
by Masayuki Kitano
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13249/story.htm

TOKYO - A water leak was found at a Japanese nuclear power reactor operated by Chubu Electric Power Co Inc following a steam leak accident this week, Chubu Electric officials said on the weekend.

The water leak, which amounted to about a drip of water every few seconds, was found last week at Chubu Electric's 540,000 kilowatt No.1 reactor at its Hamaoka nuclear plant during an inspection, they said.

The Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka prefecture, central Japan, had been shut down after emergency alarms sounded on Wednesday. A leak of steam containing a small amount of radiation was later confirmed.

An official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, a government agency under the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (METI), said the water that was found leaking last week also contained radiation.

But he said the water leak did not pose a threat to people.

"It is a leak from inside the nuclear reactor...and the water does contain radiation," said Hiromitsu Yoneyama, an official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

"But it is not the type of leak that has the possibility of exposing people to radiation," said Yoneyama, adding that the water leak was discovered inside a container that houses the nuclear reactor.

"Such containers are built taking into account the possibility of leaks," he said.

The exact location of the leak and the cause would have to be confirmed through an inspection, which is expected to be completed later on the weekend, Yoneyama said.

SEPARATE INCIDENTS

Atsushi Sato, a Hamaoka nuclear plant official who was visiting Chubu Electric's Tokyo head office, said the water leak is believed to be unrelated to the steam leak accident.

"We think they are separate incidents," Sato said.

And the discovery of the water leak is unlikely to affect METI's tentative classification of the steam leak accident, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency's Yoneyama said.

"I think a change can be practically ruled out," he said.

METI has tentatively classified the steam leak accident as "Level one" on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the first such designation for an accident at a Japanese nuclear facility since July 1999, when coolant water leaked at nuclear power plant in Fukui prefecture, 320 km (200 miles) west of Tokyo.

The scale, introduced in 1992 to classify nuclear accidents, goes from zero to seven, with seven being the most severe.

Japan's worst nuclear accident, which occurred in September 1999 at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, was designated "Level four".

Hundreds of Tokaimura residents, plant workers and emergency personnel were exposed to radiation when an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction was triggered at the plant. Two workers later died.

Japan, heavily reliant on nuclear power, has seen a number of accidents over the past decade that have undermined public support for its nuclear programme, which meets a third of the country's electricity needs.

-------- missile defense

Putin Looking to Boost U.S. Relations

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-US.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- In the run-up to this week's U.S.-Russia summit, President Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly he's not looking for any concrete payoff for his country's contributions to the war against terrorism but simply a boost in bilateral relations.

``We would like to create a new quality in our relationship, and we would like to see in the United States a reliable, predictable partner,'' Putin told a group of American reporters in the Kremlin this weekend, two days before departing on his first trip to the White House.

``This maximum task is much more important, it seems to me, than receiving some material advantage of a transitory nature,'' he said.

Yet Putin's allies and critics alike have warned that he can't afford to return from the United States empty-handed.

``Putin is really taking a risk,'' Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia's influential Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, said Sunday on the Itogi television news magazine show. ``He's taking a risk because if Americans don't meet him halfway, then in several years Putin will be taken to account by society and the political class ... if they (the Americans) are simply courteous to him, take everything they can from us, and pressure us as they have before.''

Putin and his team have made a series of gestures to the United States in recent months. Putin committed Russia wholeheartedly to the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign, even giving a green light to deployment of U.S. troops in formerly Soviet Central Asia, long seen as Russia's sphere of influence. Officials have softened their unyielding opposition to U.S. plans to construct a national missile defense, suggesting an openness to compromise.

Last month, Putin pledged to close an electronic spying center in Lourdes, Cuba, and a naval base in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam -- two outposts that symbolized the Soviet Union's global reach during the Cold War.

While many Russians appear to support the moves, some allege that Putin is putting Russia's national interests behind the West's.

``In fact, Russia is already fulfilling the role of 'trolley' -- the deliverer of cheap natural resources to rich countries,'' Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov wrote last week in an open letter criticizing Putin's pro-western policies. ``And tomorrow, through these policies, it will become 'the American special forces' -- cannon-fodder for new international adventures.''

American officials have indicated that Bush is prepared to agree to sharp offensive nuclear weapons cuts, which would relieve Moscow of the need to siphon funds from its overstretched national budget to maintain a large nuclear arsenal. Washington has also softened its criticism of Russia's war in Chechnya -- endorsing the Russians' allegations that Chechen rebels have ties with Osama bin Laden.

Russian officials have long lobbied for these changes, but they want more.

Moscow seeks U.S. support for putting it on the fast track to membership in the World Trade Organization, ending its status as the only major world power outside the international trade system. Economists say WTO membership would help boost foreign investment in Russia, provide access to new foreign markets and cement Russia's place among the world's largest political and economic powers.

Russia is also pressing for a repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which made trade concessions contingent on Russia's human rights performance. The amendment has had no practical impact on U.S.-Russian trade -- the president has regularly waived it -- but Russia sees it as a humiliating throwback to the days when Soviet officials were forced to make an annual accounting to the U.S. Congress to win its right to a place in the U.S. market.

Karaganov, the analyst, said those concessions would be the minimum Putin should seek. The Russian leader should use the summit to press for a substantial change in Moscow's role in international security, addressing Russian objections to what Moscow considers NATO's unnecessary eastward expansion to Russia's very borders.

``If we get an agreement that Russia will become a partner of the leading powers of the world, that a new alliance is formed on the basis of NATO with the participation of Russia and Japan, or the Group of Eight creates a new security group with the aim of answering new security challenges ... we'd break out of the situation where we've been stuck: no man's land,'' Karaganov said.

---

Transforming Relations With Russia

New York Times
November 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/opinion/12MON2.html?searchpv=nytToday

After a whirlwind of diplomatic meetings over the weekend in New York, President Bush turns his attention this week to one nation and one leader. Mr. Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia will spend three days at the White House and Mr. Bush's ranch in Texas trying to strengthen the surprisingly cordial relationship that has developed between the two men and their two nations in recent months. Though obstacles remain, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin seem within reach of decisions that could open a new era of cooperation.

Mr. Putin gave a crucial boost to relations after Sept. 11 by providing strong support for Mr. Bush's campaign against international terrorism. He cleared the way for American military forces to use bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, Central Asian nations that border Afghanistan and were once Soviet republics. Moscow has also helped to arm guerrilla forces in Afghanistan. In the talks that begin tomorrow, the two leaders can enhance their cooperation against Osama bin Laden and other terrorist threats and work to narrow their differences on arms control and other matters.

Although advisers to both presidents caution that no formal arms control agreement is likely this week, the two sides are moving ever closer to an accord. Moscow is apparently ready to accept the missile defense testing that the Bush administration wants to conduct, as long as Washington does not formally repudiate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. The treaty can probably be preserved if the two leaders agree on language permitting limited defensive systems. It would be a grave error for Washington to walk away from a treaty that has helped keep nuclear peace for three decades.

Agreement is also near on trimming arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons by more than two- thirds, probably to somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 warheads apiece. Currently, the United States has about 7,000 and Russia a little under 6,000. Such reductions would substantially reduce nuclear dangers and costs, including the risk of a warhead being accidentally launched or stolen as Russia's military infrastructure decays.

While they're at it, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin ought to talk about ways to improve the inadequate security for Russia's nuclear weapons and materials. President Bush, who warned last week of Osama bin Laden's efforts to obtain nuclear bomb ingredients, should support Congressional efforts to add $100 million to programs that help Russia safeguard stockpiles of enriched uranium and plutonium.

Russia's relations with Iraq and Iran remain a source of friction. Iraq has exploited Russian support to evade international weapons inspections and cheat on United Nations sanctions. Russia has hoped that lobbying for eased sanctions will bring it new business contracts and repayment of Iraq's Soviet- era debt. These commercial considerations must be subordinated to the urgent need to curb Iraq's illegal biological and chemical weapons programs.

Similar concerns apply to Moscow's nuclear reactor and weapons sales to Iran. These deals have helped sustain Russia's struggling arms manufacturers and nuclear industry. Yet if Mr. Putin means to be a full partner in the struggle against terrorism, he must agree to restrict arms and nuclear deals with countries like Iran that refuse to cut their ties with international terrorists.

Mr. Bush made clear after his first meeting with Mr. Putin in June that he thought improved relations with Russia could be a centerpiece of his presidency. He has a chance to bring that goal closer to realization this week.

-------- russia

ATOMIC ENERGY
Lax Nuclear Security in Russia Is Cited as Way for bin Laden to Get Arms

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/international/12NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

VIENNA, Nov. 10 - In the last year, there have been dozens of violations of nuclear security rules in Russia and at least one loss of fissile material; Taliban emissaries have tried to recruit Russian scientists, and terrorists have tried to stake out a Russian nuclear storage site at least twice, say senior officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Western governments.

The officials detailed the incidents, citing conversations with Russian officials and verified news reports. Despite significant improvements in Russian nuclear security in the 1990's - some of it with American money and advice - up to half of ex-Soviet civilian and military nuclear stockpiles with weapons-grade material are not well protected.

Officials of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations body for monitoring nuclear programs, are deeply skeptical of Osama bin Laden's claim, in an interview published in Pakistan on Friday, that he possesses nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, given the vulnerability of material in the former Soviet Union, the increasing professionalism of nuclear smuggling and the relative ease of fabricating a primitive weapon, they cannot rule it out.

In the Kazakh port of Aktau on the Caspian shore, one ton of plutonium and two tons of highly enriched uranium sit near a now closed breeder reactor.

Ukraine, with 17 nuclear reactors and one research reactor, is considered a country of "serious concern" by officials because of its climate of government corruption and crime. Enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb remains at a research reactor just outside Belgrade throughout the 1999 Kosovo war.

Just last week, Turkey announced it had broken up a gang of smugglers who tried to sell 2.2 pounds of what appeared to be highly enriched uranium for $750,000 to undercover police officers, material they said they had bought several months ago from a Russian of Azeri origin.

Officials are increasingly concerned that terrorists willing to die could create a "dirty bomb," wrapping more easily stolen radioactive materials used in medicine and industry around a conventional explosive, like dynamite, to try to make a significant area of a city uninhabitable for many years.

Russian officials say their fissile nuclear material is under strict and improving controls. But only 10 days ago, in a discussion with officials at the United Nations agency here, Yuri G. Volodin, chief of safeguards for the Russian nuclear regulatory agency, revealed that in the last year, there were dozens of violations of Russia's regulations for securing and accounting for nuclear material.

Mr. Volodin noted one loss of nuclear material, which he called of the "highest consequence." He said he could not be more specific about the type of material or the size of the loss.

Last month, Col.-Gen. Igor Volynkin, head of nuclear security for Russia's military, said that twice this year Russian forces discovered stakeouts by terrorists of a secret nuclear arms storage facility, although he did not say where.

Also last month, an official of the Russian Security Council, Raisa Vdovichenko, told Russian journalists that emissaries of the Taliban had asked an employee of "an institution related to nuclear technologies to go to their country to work there in this field."

There is continuing evidence of efforts to traffic in nuclear material that give many officials deep concern.

In April 2000, the police in Georgia seized, in Batumi, several hundred fast-reactor fuel pellets, containing 920 grams - nearly a kilogram - of highly enriched uranium; in September, at Tbilisi airport, the police confiscated half a gram of plutonium.

The Russians say they thwarted an effort, at the very end of 1998, by an organized gang to steal 18.5 kilograms - more than 40 pounds - of highly enriched uranium from a military weapons facility near Chelyabinsk in the Urals.

Still, senior officials here and in Washington do not believe that Mr. bin Laden or even any state interested in a shortcut to a bomb - from Syria and Iran to Iraq and Libya - has been able to obtain the roughly 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of highly enriched uranium required to make a simple bomb, or the roughly 8 kilograms (17.6 pounds) of plutonium, a much more difficult material with which to work.

But they also admit that they cannot possibly know for sure.

The atomic energy agency has built a database of incidents of nuclear trafficking since 1993 - only counting incidents confirmed by the states involved. Of the 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material and 201 cases of trafficking in medical and industrial radioactive materials, only some 18 cases involved even small amounts of the fissionable material needed for a nuclear bomb - plutonium or highly enriched uranium (enriched by 20 percent or more).

Altogether in all these cases, agency officials say, there have been seizures of about 400 grams (nearly one pound) of plutonium and an additional 12 kilograms (26.4 pounds) of uranium at varying levels of enrichment, equivalent to only some 6 kilograms of uranium 235.

The most serious cases, involving large amounts of material, took place in 1993 and 1994, when Russian, German and Czech police officers made large seizures of very highly enriched nuclear material manufactured in the former Soviet Union, usually at nuclear-fuel fabrication plants.

In March 1993, in St. Petersburg, nearly three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of 90 percent enriched uranium-238 were seized; in August 1994, in Munich, the police seized about 360 grams of Russian-made plutonium; in December 1994, 2.7 kilograms (just over 5 pounds) of 80 percent enriched uranium-235 were seized, part of a shipment that showed up in smaller amounts in other places - and which officials hope was not part of an even larger shipment, apparently stolen from the Russian nuclear research center in Obninsk, about an hour's drive southwest of Moscow.

For context, officials point out, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had made only 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of bomb-capable uranium before the gulf war broke out.

But in fact the atomic energy agency's database is only a guide, and perhaps not even a good one. "Are we seeing half the iceberg or only the tip?" said one official, noting that the police consider seizures of drugs, a commodity far easier to secure, to represent only some 10 to 20 percent of what is shipped. Nor does the agency, devoted to civilian nuclear energy, know much about the military programs of states with nuclear weapons.

Friedrich Steinhäusler, a physics professor at Stanford University and co-director of a Stanford center on the physical protection of nuclear materials, said, "It's clear that we're seeing a typical move toward professionalism in this smuggling business, with increasingly fewer incidents of significance, but of greater significance, as professionals are probing the market."

He noted that traffickers increasingly are going south, over traditional smuggling routes through Turkey, the Caucasus and especially central Asia, closer to Afghanistan, where borders are extremely long and lax.

Matthew Bunn, assistant director of the science, technology and public policy program at Harvard University's Kennedy School, was a Clinton White House adviser. The main source of loose nuclear material remains the former Soviet Union, he says, with some 600 tons of weapons- grade nuclear material stored there outside of warheads.

The key question, he says, is to improve the security around military and especially civilian nuclear installations. In as many as half, he said, there are no automatic detectors that sound an alarm if material is smuggled out, and no security cameras where material is stored.

"For all the work we've done with Russia, after seven years, we still have most of the job to do," Mr. Bunn said. "This is a serious threat, and we know how to fix it," he said, urging that President Bush agree with Russia at the this week's summit meeting to account for and secure all nuclear material.

Some safeguards put in place by the Americans in the former Soviet Union no longer function, agency officials said - spare parts are expensive and available only from the United States, and sometimes guards do not bother to use the equipment.

The Vienna agency is also looking for a 10 percent increase in its own budget of some $320 million, said Graham Andrew, the special assistant for Scientific and Technical Affairs, to upgrade security standards around the world. He and other officials regard a terrorist nuclear bomb to be "highly unlikely."

But the likelihood of terrorists compiling the radioactive materials necessary to make a dirty bomb with immense economic and psychological impact is much higher, the officials say.

The dirty bomb is an almost ideal instrument of terror, Mr. Bunn said. It would not kill many people, but it would terrify, and make a large area unsafe to work or live in, possibly for decades or longer.

One official said: "Imagine a dirty bomb on the Washington mall. Do you abandon the White House?"

-------- switzerland

Ever cautious Swiss drill for nuclear accident

Story by Michael Shields,
Reuters:
12/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13263/story.htm

ZURICH - As the world wrings its hands over a potential nuclear attack by extremists, Switzerland is readying a drill to test how it can cope with an accident that spews radiation into the air.

In the works for more than a year, the exercise next week assumes that an atomic weapon contaminates the broad plain that stretches from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance, forcing millions into thousands of bomb shelters in houses and public buildings.

"This is absolutely the first time that we are practising for such a thing," Felix Blumer, spokesman for the National Alarm Centre, said last week.

With typical Swiss precision, its timing coincides perfectly with growing public concern that extremists could unleash biological, chemical or nuclear attacks that would outdo even the events of September 11.

"We could not have picked a better time," Blumer said.

Government officials, army officers, radiation experts and civil defence groups will conduct the computer-simulation drill on Monday and Tuesday from reinforced bunkers. Swiss citizens will not actually have to move underground.

"The assumption is there will be an accident with an atomic weapon that is so radioactive that practically the entire Swiss central plain has to go into the underground shelters. That of course would have wide-ranging consequences. All public life comes to a halt. People are not able to go to work," he said.

The point of the exercise is not so much getting people into the shelters, as getting them out again.

"How do you communicate that they should come out? Food will be contaminated. How do you deal with that? What can you eat, what can't you eat? All these things will be examined," Blumer said.

The drill underscores the importance Switzerland places on civil defence, even years after the Cold War.

Thousands of Swiss homes, hospitals and public structures have basement bomb shelters, thanks to a 1963 law requiring them in practically every new building.

In neutral Switzerland, a nation of 7.2 million that largely escaped the ravages of two world wars, telephone books carry instructions on what to do if an attack or accident dumps chemicals or radiation.

A siren system, regularly tested, warns the population to gather emergency rations and take cover in shelters now more widely used to store wine, vegetables, suitcases and furniture.

-------- treaties

Federation of American Scientists news conference - 10 a.m. -

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011112-320055.htm

The Federation of American Scientists holds a news conference to release a letter urging Congress to oppose Bush administration efforts to develop a missile defense that would undermine the ABM treaty. The participants include: Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner; and Robert Sherman, Federation of American Scientists. Location: Murrow Room, National Press Club, 14th and F streets NW. Contact: 845/424-8382 or 9140/589-5988.

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

-------- maryland

Foreign tankers seen as security concern

November 12, 2001
By Paul Owens
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20011112-11794072.htm

ANNAPOLIS - Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is calling on federal officials to reconsider a plan to allow tankers to deliver liquefied natural gas (LNG) to a terminal a few miles from the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant.

"I want to make sure every single agency with authority over LNG plants and shipping has looked at the risk of a terrorist attack," the Maryland Democrat said in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted approval last month to a proposal by Williams Gas Pipeline of Tulsa, Okla., to accept deliveries from tankers that travel up the Chesapeake Bay to its natural gas terminal at Cove Point in Calvert County. The terminal is located about 31/2 miles from the nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs.

If the proposal wins approval from other federal and state agencies, tankers carrying 34 million gallons of LNG would make deliveries once a week to the Cove Point terminal beginning in the second or third quarter of 2002, said Mike Gardner, district manager for Williams Gas Pipeline Cove Point LNG.

Miss Mikulski said she is "deeply alarmed" about the terminal's proximity to Calvert Cliffs, particularly now that federal security officials have warned that nuclear power plants are at risk of attacks from terrorists.

"If LNG tankers are allowed on the Chesapeake near Calvert Cliffs, a nightmare scenario could become reality," she said.

Miss Mikulski said LNG is carried by foreign-flag tankers with foreign crews. One source is Algeria, where Islamic radicals have been linked to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

"What were they thinking when they gave their preliminary approval on October 11?" she asked of FERC.

Tamara Young-Allen, FERC spokeswoman, said the commission did not consider security issues at Cove Point because the U.S. Coast Guard has jurisdiction in such matters.

The Coast Guard is conducting a review, scheduled for completion sometime next month, of the expansion plans at the Cove Point terminal.

Jim Shannon, a director of operations for Williams, said the company does not believe LNG deliveries to its terminal would pose any danger to the nuclear plant or the public.

Mr. Shannon said LNG could catch fire but would not explode. Federal regulators have established a 1,600-foot "thermal exclusion zone" around the terminal to keep out people or property that could be damaged in a fire. The zone's perimeter is more than three miles from the Calvert Cliffs plant.

"We feel an event is very unlikely, but if there is one, anything would be contained to the plant property," Mr. Shannon said.

Miss Mikulski said she is "not interested in debating the company."

"What I want to point out is that every permitting agency is looking at this as an energy issue," she said. "I want them to look at this as a national security issue."

Miss Mikulski said she was calling the issue to the attention of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, FBI Director Robert S Mueller III, U.S. Coast Guard Commandant James Loy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Richard Meserve and other federal and state officials.

"I'm just being hyper-vigilant," she said. Last week, Massachusetts incurred more than $20,000 in security costs to guard a 948-foot tanker carrying 33 million gallons of LNG as it moved through Boston Harbor to a terminal in Everett.

The chairman of the Massachusetts Senate's budget committee has called for the company that operates the terminal, Distrigas, to pay the cost of the additional security.

Distrigas has said that the millions of dollars in federal, state and local taxes it pays every year should include police and fire protection.

The Distrigas facility is one of three LNG terminals in the country accepting tanker deliveries, and the only one close to a major city. The others are in Louisiana and Georgia. The Cove Point terminal would be the fourth.

-------- washington

Advocates say panel composition must change

Hanford News
Mon, Nov 12, 2001
By The Associated Press and Herald staff
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1112.html

WASHINGTON -- Labor advocates want more workers on a panel advising on compensation for Hanford and other workers who were made sick building the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal.

Unless changes are made, the advocates fear not enough people will be compensated.

The panel is made up of mostly scientists, doctors and engineers, including Wanda Munn of Richland, a retired nuclear engineer.

Carl "Bubba" Scarbrough, president of the Atomic Trades and Labor Council at the government's nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., said workers can best understand -- and therefore convey -- the risks and working conditions of their jobs.

"We should be advisers," he said. "For one thing, our heart would be in the right place."

A law passed by Congress last year required the White House to appoint a panel that reflected "a balance of scientific, medical and worker perspectives." The 10 people selected included only one rank-and-file worker Richard Espinosa, a metal shop steward at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico.

White House spokeswoman Anne Womack defended the makeup of the board.

"We think it's pretty balanced," she said. Womack added that one of the doctors on the panel, James Melius, works for a union in New York.

Munn said her work at Hanford in nuclear safety, including the start up and safety of several operating systems inside the Fast Flux Test Facility, qualifies her to evaluate worker concerns.

"I've been there," she said.

Concerns about the makeup of the panel are understandable but with the group so new that it has yet to hold a single meeting, criticism is premature, she said.

The couple of people on the panel she already knows are well-qualified in health physics and familiar with radiation exposure science, she said.

The panel was named after the government acknowledged that radiation, silica or beryllium could have sickened some workers at Hanford and other nuclear sites. Congress has passed a law providing medical care and payments of $150,000 to sick workers or their surviving families. For more information, call 783-1500.

Many medical records are missing or incomplete, so the panel's primary task is to help determine how much radiation workers were exposed to on the job. If doses can't be estimated, the panel will help decide whether certain workers should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Richard Miller, an analyst for the Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, said he's concerned by the fact that three members of the panel are tied to the Energy Department. He said he is not worried about Espinosa's independence from the agency, since he is protected by a union.

Miller said lawmakers called for an "independent review process" and recognized Energy Department officials would have a conflict of interest. The legislation prohibited them from writing dose reconstruction guidelines.

"I want people who have absolutely no connection to the Department of Energy on this committee," he said.

Panelist Antonio Andrade, who is a radiation health expert at the Energy Department's Los Alamos lab, disagreed. He said people who are familiar with agency facilities are needed on the panel.

"If anything, we bring truth, experience and knowledge about specific situations to the table," he said.

Several lawmakers have asked the administration to add Mark Griffon, a health physicist who evaluates risks at nuclear facilities.

"He would have an inclination to be quite supportive of people who have been exposed but also continue to use a scientific basis for making decisions," said Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., who made his case in a letter to White House Personnel Director Clay Johnson.

Griffon said he received a call from the White House Friday asking him to submit an application.

On the Net: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health compensation office: www.cdc.gov/niosh/ocas/default.html.

-------- us nuc politics

Congressional support for de-alerting

Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001
From: fdpeace@earthlink.net

Recently, Congressional Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) appeared at a press conference in support of De-Alerting (taking off hair trigger alert)nuclear weapons, and both were also lead sponsors of bills to encourage initiation of the process of de-alerting.

Frank Dworak Pax Christi USA


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Taliban ambush rebel convoy

Montreal Gazette
MIKE BLANCHFIELD of The Ottawa Citizen, AP and The London Daily Telegraph contributed to this report
Monday, November 12, 2001
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={B7ECB2F7-6E92-44E2-B603-9FF4B42E090A}

Three foreign journalists were killed yesterday when a Northern Alliance convoy in which they were traveling was ambushed in northeastern Afghanistan.

Gazette reporter Levon Sevunts, who was traveling in the same convoy, survived the attack, but the newspaper was unable to establish direct contact with him late last night.

Johanne Sutton of Radio France Internationale was confirmed dead. Two other journalists, whose identities were unknown last night, also died in the attack. They are believed to be the first foreign journalists killed in Afghanistan since the war began last month.

Pierre Billaud, also of Radio France Internationale, a journalist from the German magazine Stern, a reporter from Radio Luxembourg and an Afghan interpreter were reported missing.

The convoy of armed vehicles and trucks was ambushed after leaving the Northern Alliance's military headquarters in Khoja Bahuddin, in the province of Takhar, near the Tajikistan border.

The Alliance had invited the journalists to accompany them to an area where Taliban militiamen were believed to be waiting to defect or had surrendered. The defection was a ruse, however, and the convoy was ambushed.

A reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul McGeough, who was also in the convoy, said: "About 6:30 p.m., Commander Bashir of the Northern Alliance suggested that we go to look at a Taliban trench that had surrendered.

"When we got there, they had not surrendered. Three of us clung on for grim death and we survived."

He said Sevunts was with him.

The editor in chief of Agence France Presse confirmed to The Gazette last night that Sevunts had arrived safely in Khoja Bahuddin.

Geoff Kitney, foreign editor of the Sydney newspaper, said Sevunts was en route to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with the body of one of the dead journalists.

Sevunts, 32, is a veteran war correspondent, having covered the Nagorno-Karabakh war and spent time in Tajikistan at the beginning of the civil war there.

He has worked for The Gazette for four years, first as a regular columnist in the world-news section, then as a general-assignment reporter.

Meanwhile, undaunted by the convoy attack and emboldened by its victories on the battlefield, Afghanistan's anti-Taliban opposition was chafing yesterday against warnings by the United States and Pakistan not to march on Kabul.

As the Northern Alliance continued to claim significant military gains against Taliban forces in northern and central Afghanistan, one of its top officials said Pakistan has no right to spread false "propaganda" about the advisability of taking the offensive farther south to the capital.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf urged the Alliance Saturday to stay out of Kabul, saying he feared they might commit reprisal atrocities.

Musharraf made the comments in New York, where U.S. President George W. Bush also advised the Alliance to halt its advance at Kabul city limits.

But fast-moving events on the ground might prove beyond U.S. control.

U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted yesterday that it cannot prevent the Northern Alliance from marching on Kabul. "We don't have enough forces on the ground to stand in their way," he said. "I mean they're going to make the decision."

Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister of the Alliance's political wing, the United Front, warned Pakistan yesterday to keep its nose out of the Alliance's affairs and said the United States "shouldn't be guided by Pakistani foreign policy. That's not acceptable."

"No single neighbouring country of Afghanistan should be able to play its game in Afghanistan once again," Abdullah said.

Abdullah said Pakistan should concentrate on solving its own internal problems, which include sporadic and severe outbursts of anti-U.S. sentiment since it joined the U.S. coalition against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The United States, grateful for the Pakistani government's support in its war against terrorism, is sensitive to the country's interest in the makeup of any new government in Afghanistan.

Echoing Pakistani sentiments, the United States does not want the rebels taking the city before the political framework for a future Afghan government is in place. The Alliance, which has been condemned by human-rights groups for atrocities, is comprised mainly of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, while southern Kabul has a high concentration of Pashtuns, the dominant Taliban tribe.

The rebel alliance, which parlayed its capture of the key northern city of Mazar-e Sharif into what is says are widespread military gains across northern and central Afghanistan, has no immediate plans to march on Kabul, said Abdullah. But it hasn't ruled out an offensive in the days to come, he added.

Abdullah said the United Front fully recognizes the need to forge a multi-ethnic coalition, and sees Kabul as the place to rebuild Afghanistan's political future.

The Afghani opposition is clearly galled by Pakistan weighing in on its affairs. Afghanistan has suffered for 22 years under various foreign interventions, including the invasion of the Soviet Union, the U.S.-financed mujaheddin resistance and Pakistan's support of the radical Taliban regime. The U.S. bombing campaign, now in its 37th day, is an attempt to crush the Taliban for its refusal to surrender terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, the man it blames for orchestrating the suicide jet airliner attacks of Sept. 11.

"To mention that the people of Kabul do not want the United Front to go into Kabul, it is the perception of the past, which was not right," Abdullah said, noting that thousands of Alliance supporters have been arrested in Kabul in recent years.

"Please don't allow Pakistan, once again, to guide the foreign policy of the United States," he said.

"For the first time, there is a unique opportunity for achieving peace in Afghanistan, for getting rid of the menaces" and allowing the Afghan people to be governed by a broad-based, democratic government.

Such a government would pose no threat to its neighbours or the world at large, said Abdullah.

The harsh words against Pakistan came as the Alliance continued to claim victories in several key northern cities and provinces, cutting off Taliban supply routes and driving the governing militia farther south.

The claims could not be independently confirmed because journalists are barred from most of the relevant northern areas of Afghanistan.

The turning point came Friday when the Taliban withdrew from the key northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, giving the Alliance control of the gateway to an important supply corridor from neighbouring Uzbekistan, and providing a possible staging ground for U.S. warplanes inside Afghanistan.

The Alliance claimed more victories yesterday in the cities of Taloqan, which it lost to the Taliban 14 months ago, Pul-e Khumari and Barymian in central Afghanistan.

The Taliban's Bakhtar news agency, however, denounced the claim of victory in Taloqan as an outright lie.

In northeastern Afghanistan, the fight for control of the Taliban garrison in Kala Kata, a harsh, mountainous region about 30 kilometres west of the rebel capital of Khoja Bahuddin, continued. At least 20 Alliance soldiers were killed and eight injured.

Abdullah said the Alliance would in the coming days launch offensives on the western city of Herat, near the Iranian border, and the northeastern province of Kunduz.

The military breakthrough of the Alliance followed a stalemate of several weeks on the ground in Afghanistan. Strategic U.S. air strikes on front-line Taliban positions, aided by the targeting expertise of its special forces operatives, paved the way for the Alliance offensive.

Britain confirmed yesterday that it, too, has its own special forces troops on the ground in northern Afghanistan providing assistance to the Alliance.

Also yesterday, U.S. aircraft, including B-52 bombers, attacked Taliban positions on the front line about 50 kilometres north of Kabul and retreating bands of Taliban fighters.

---

Rebels jubilant over 'dramatic defeat' of Taliban

USA Today
11/12/2001
By Tim Friend, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/11/rebel-attacks.htm

KHOJA BAHAUDDIN, Afghanistan - Anti-Taliban forces seized the strategic northern city of Mazar-e Sharif over the weekend and were on the verge of capturing their former headquarters city of Taloqan. Experts say the successes end a month of battlefield frustration, vindicate coalition strategy and have set the stage for a push on Kabul in the spring, if not sooner.

Northern Alliance officials were jubilant. "The importance of this dramatic defeat for the Taliban is not only that they have lost large areas but that they have lost their main fighting force," Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah said Sunday.

Abdullah said the opposition had captured Taloqan and three other northern provincial capitals since Mazar-e Sharif, linchpin of the Taliban defenses in the north, fell to the alliance Friday. Interviews with commanders and alliance fighters, however, indicated they might only have had Taloqan surrounded and hadn't yet taken complete control of the city.

Military analysts said the advances have put the anti-Taliban forces in position to control all of northern Afghanistan and put pressure on the capital, Kabul. "Symbolically and strategically, taking Mazar-e Sharif was a big, big deal," said retired Army colonel Bill Taylor, former military analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The alliance has "had a very good last 3 days."

The Afghan Islamic Press, quoted by Reuters, reported men in Mazar-e Sharif were shaving their beards, women were throwing off their head-to-toe burqa cloaks, and music was blaring from shops to mark the departure of the fundamentalist Taliban forces.

"It has very big military and political implications," Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, said of the alliance progress. "I would say now it has turned the corner. Its successes are visible."

U.S. officials reacted cautiously Sunday. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the Mazar-e Sharif airport, the largest in northern Afghanistan, had not yet been secured. No Western media reporters are in the city to provide independent accounts of events.

Rumsfeld repeated the U.S. preference that the alliance not attempt to seize Kabul until a coalition government has been formed.

The alliance may not try to take the capital until spring. Abdullah said the rebels want to secure their expanding control over northern sections before moving south. Abdullah also said Sunday that the alliance would prefer a broad agreement with all Afghan groups before making the fight. But he added that "if there is a political vacuum in Kabul," alliance forces would forge ahead.

At least one alliance commander might not be willing to wait, however. South of here, closer to Kabul, alliance Gen. Alim Khan said, "If we want to enter Kabul, we won't care about U.S. willingness or unwillingness."

One immediate effect of seizing Mazar-e Sharif is to open an overland supply route to friendly Uzbekistan.

Until now, the Northern Alliance has had to bring in supplies over treacherous mountain passes. If the Uzbek government soon opens a strategic bridge at Termiz, just 40 miles or so north of Mazar-e Sharif, opposition forces will be able to bring in food, weapons and ammunition with relative ease, even through the winter.

Another major benefit of the weekend advances was cutting Taliban forces into smaller, isolated pockets that might be easier for the Northern Alliance to conquer. That, in turn, could encourage many to defect to the opposition side, Taylor said. "The Taliban is now scattered. Now the Northern Alliance can mass their forces and take them on a piece at a time," he said.

Though the victories in the north are welcome, they took longer than expected and may not presage a quick collapse of the Taliban across all of Afghanistan, said Michael O'Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. He said Taliban forces may be attempting to consolidate defenses elsewhere.

But many analysts said the weekend advances vindicated the strategy of the U.S.-led anti-terrorism coalition to wear down the Taliban by relying on bombing, special operations troops and Northern Alliance fighters, rather than building up a large force of conventional ground troops.

Opposition spokesmen claimed the Taliban had been routed in the north except in Qonduz province near the Tajik border and in Badghis province on the border with Turkmenistan. Strong Taliban units were also operating in Baghlan province, although the opposition claimed to have seized a key road junction at Pol-e Khomri.

Some of the heaviest fighting in coming weeks is expected near Taloqan in Kalakata. There, about 4,000 troops are dug in. Most are Pakistanis, Saudis and other Arabs. They aren't likely to give up easily because they face arrest if they try to return home and wouldn't be welcomed as defectors by alliance forces since they are not Afghans.

Contributing: Kirk Spitzer and Jill Lawrence in Washington; Pat McMahon in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; and Steven Gutkin of AP in Jabal os Saraj, Afghanistan

------

For Now, Rival Warlords Put Aside Bitter Feuds of Past

By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, November 12, 2001; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12593-2001Nov11?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 11 -- The Afghan guerrilla commanders who captured the city of Mazar-e Sharif for the opposition Northern Alliance, and are trying to expand the alliance's control across northern Afghanistan, are three men with disparate ethnic and religious backgrounds and a long history of fighting among themselves.

The three warlords -- Abdurrashid Dostum, Attah Mohammad and Mohammad Mohaqiq -- acknowledged that it was only by setting aside their differences and working together that they were able to end the Taliban's three-year occupation of Mazar-e Sharif.

"Revenge is ingrained in their minds," said Syed Fida Yunas, a Pakistani from the Pashtun ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. Yunas, who served as a diplomat in Afghanistan for two decades and has written histories of the country, argued that it was unlikely the diverse cast of characters could overcome mutual animosities to run Mazar-e Sharif -- much less the country. "I'm sorry to say, nobody likes each other," he said.

The three commanders are among the warlords who tried to jointly rule Afghanistan for a period in the 1990s, but instead plunged the country into a deadly civil war fueled by ethnic hatred, personal feuds and betrayals, revenge killings and ruthless bombings of civilians, especially in Kabul, the capital.

Their relations over the past two decades have been marked by opportunism and treachery, although many analysts say that as long as they share a common enemy -- such as the Taliban -- chances are they will stay united, particularly as they try to consolidate their hold over the north. Today, for example, Dostum, Mohammad and Mohaqiq held an extraordinary summit and agreed to replace military rule in Mazar-e Sharif with a civilian administration.

Human rights activists warn that the United States is gradually becoming ensnared in the politically dicey mission of backing warlords with abysmal human rights records who may not have widespread support within Afghanistan, and who could face prosecution by international tribunals for crimes against humanity and other war-related offenses. Many of the warlords may eventually be opposed by fiercely independent Afghans for aligning themselves with a foreign power, the United States.

"The U.S. and its allies should not cooperate with commanders whose record of brutality raises questions about their legitimacy inside Afghanistan," the international organization Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement. It criticized "the deplorable record of attacks on civilians" by "the various parties that comprise the United Front," the more formal name of the Northern Alliance.

Afghan warlords and their militias typically are identified with different ethnic and tribal groups in different regions of Afghanistan. They frequently have conflicting religious leanings and often are backed by competing neighboring countries.

The militias were formed by groups of Islamic mujaheddin, "holy warriors" who jointly fought against the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan. But when the communist successor regime collapsed in 1992, the militias turned their guns on one another in a deadly power struggle to control the country and the capital. Their ruthless fighting virtually destroyed Kabul -- 24,000 people were killed in the city in 1994 alone -- and was instrumental in fueling the rise of the Taliban, which won popular support in the mid-1990s by promising to end the country's civil war and to restore law and order.

Dostum, 46, a burly former communist, high school dropout and reputedly hard-drinking atheist, is an ethnic Uzbek who has been a key ally and enemy of virtually every militia in Afghanistan. He returned from exile in Turkey in April to rejoin the Northern Alliance.

Once Afghanistan's best-armed warlord and one of the few with fighter jets, he frequently changed sides in the middle of a fight and tilted the country's entire military equation. He has been backed by Uzbekistan, Russia and, most recently, Turkey, but over the years he has lost much of his military equipment and many of his forces.

In 1997, his top deputy, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, defected to the Taliban, forcing Dostum to flee Afghanistan. After the Taliban entered Mazar-e Sharif, Dostum's traditional stronghold, Pahlawan turned against his new allies and allegedly killed about 3,000 Taliban soldiers. When the Taliban retook the city the following year, they allegedly executed about 2,000 people, mostly ethnic Hazara Shiite Muslims.

Dostum -- who used to control the region from a large mud fort near the town of Shebergan -- was a bitter rival of both Mohaqiq and Mohammad, who joined him last week in capturing Mazar-e Sharif. And those two warlords also reportedly harbor deep animosities.

Mohaqiq, an ethnic Tajik, was a top leader of the Shiite Muslim fighting force Hizb-i-Wahdat-i-Islami, when that group joined with Pahlawan in ousting Dostum from Mazar-e Sharif in 1997. His fighters allegedly participated in the subsequent atrocities against Taliban forces, which included dumping soldiers into wells alive and then throwing in grenades.

Mohammad is a Sunni Muslim from the Hazara ethnic group. He is affiliated with the strongest military and political force in the Northern Alliance, Jamiat-i-Islami, the Tajik-dominated militia loyal to Burhanuddin Rabbani. Rabbani himself is a divisive figure, having refused to relinquish the Afghan presidency in 1996 as required under a power-sharing agreement with his coalition partners.

In the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, Mohammad fought against Dostum, who sided with the Soviets. In the recent campaign to take Mazar-e Sharif, Mohammad's forces reportedly moved to within a few miles of the city, but were forced to quickly withdraw after being left exposed when Dostum failed to back up his advance. Dostum and Mohammad then reconciled and agreed to work together under Gen. Mohammed Fahim, the Northern Alliance's defense chief.

Military analysts say that the next logical step for the alliance forces would be to consolidate their positions around Mazar-e Sharif and secure an overland supply route to Uzbekistan, where the United States has supply bases.

Dostum, Mohammad and representatives of the Hizb-i-Wahdat-i-Islami political party met today and agreed to station the bulk of their forces in separate camps outside and to the south of the Mazar-e Sharif. Each of the three forces will send 100 men to share a garrison inside Mazar-e Sharif, which will be administered by civil authorities under Rabbani.

The alliance is also expected to begin advancing west toward the city and province of Herat, where another legendary warlord, Ismail Khan, is hoping to recapture the province where he was once governor.

Khan, a 54-year-old Tajik, defended his base against Soviet forces for 10 years, then joined Rabbani's Jamiat-i-Islami when the Soviets withdrew. He governed his fairly peaceful and prosperous province until 1995, when he was accused of accepting payoffs to allow Herat to fall to the Taliban.

Khan escaped to neighboring Iran. He returned in late 1996 in an attempt to reclaim Herat, but one of his commanders defected to the Taliban and surrendered Khan to them. He spent more than a year in jail in the southern city of Kandahar before escaping with the help of sympathetic local soldiers. He fled again to Iran and was drawn back to Afghanistan only within the last year.

Following the traditional Afghan belief that whoever rules Kabul rules the country, the Northern Alliance leaders are anxiously planning their return to Kabul. Their ultimate test will be expelling the Taliban from the city and declaring a truce among themselves while an interim government is established. That challenge proved too much for them after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.

Mindful of the intense factional differences, both President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week they hoped the Northern Alliance, which is made up predominantly of ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks, would not try to take Kabul. Powell said the capital should be a neutral "open city," devoid of armed groups, until an interim government is established.

A key challenge will be finding a charismatic Pashtun leader willing to join the Northern Alliance who can rally his ethnic group behind him. Pashtuns make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan, Tajiks about 25 percent, Hazaras 19 percent and Uzbeks about 8 percent.

One top Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal warlord who received huge amounts of aid from the United States and Pakistan during the war against the Soviets, and who ruthlessly attacked Kabul and enforced a strict food blockade during the ensuing siege of the capital in the early 1990s, has been negotiating an alliance with the Taliban in recent weeks.

Hekmatyar, who now lives in Iran, reportedly has advised the Taliban where they can find hidden weapons caches in Afghanistan, including shoulder-launched, surface-to-air Stinger missiles.

Another Pashtun warlord who controlled parts of Kabul and relentlessly attacked the capital in the 1990s, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, is a top commander with the Northern Alliance, but it is questionable how much support he has. Sayyaf, a member of the conservative Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, was strongly backed by Saudi Arabia during the Soviet occupation and reportedly is a bitter enemy of some of his nominal allies in the Northern Alliance, particularly Dostum.

"It will be nothing short of a miracle if an ultra Wahhabi [Sayyaf], an orthodox Shiite [Mohaqiq] and an atheist warlord [Dostum] form a stable government in Muslim Afghanistan," said a senior military intelligence official from Pakistan who is monitoring events in Afghanistan. "Those who expect Rasul Sayyaf to join hands with . . . Mohaqiq or Gen. Dostum don't know the ground realities in that country."

Correspondent Doug Struck in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

----

U.S. Hits Suspected Weapons Sites

By Matt Kelley
Associated Press Writer
Monday, November 12, 2001; 6:58 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14235-2001Nov12?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden probably does not have a nuclear weapon, but likely has chemical or biological weapons, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.

U.S. forces have bombed some sites in Afghanistan that could have been involved in producing such weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said Sunday. Some of them have been bombed, some of them have not and others have not been found, he 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 al-Qaida, and had avoided bombing them.

Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials said they doubt bin Laden's claim that his al-Qaida network has a nuclear weapon.

"I think it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon, but on the other hand, with the determination they have, they may very well," Rumsfeld said on CBS.

The defense secretary and other officials said they were worried, that al-Qaida network could have weapons of mass destruction that possibly include radiological weapons - mixtures of conventional explosives and nuclear material designed to spread radiation without a nuclear detonation.

"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 president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on ABC's "This Week."

President Bush has said the anti-Taliban northern alliance should not take over the Afghan capital of Kabul, preferring to wait until a broad-based, post-Taliban government can be formed. Rumsfeld said that was important to encourage anti-Taliban resistance by some tribes of the Taliban's Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan's south.

The northern alliance is largely made up of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, not Afghanistan's main Pashtun ethnic group.

"We need them to oppose the Taliban, so they will have a voice in post-Taliban business," Rumsfeld said.

An official with the northern alliance said Sunday that "it would be ideal" if a broad coalition of all ethnic groups could come together before Kabul is taken. Abdullah, the opposition's foreign minister, said the alliance already includes some Pashtun forces.

The United States has had difficulty recruiting anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan's south. The Taliban captured and executed opposition Pashtun figure Abdul Haq last month, for example.

Besides, Rumsfeld said, "Kabul is not the military prize of prizes." The Taliban's capital is in the southern city of Kandahar, and Kabul has been so devastated by two decades of war that its 1 million people will need immediate humanitarian aid when the city changes hands, Rumsfeld said.

"The real prize of prizes is the Taliban leadership and the al-Qaida leadership and the al-Qaida fighting forces and the Taliban fighting forces," Rumsfeld said. "And they are not, for the most part, in Kabul."

Rumsfeld and Rice echoed comments by Bush, who has said he believes al-Qaida would use any chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons it has.

"They are not worried about loss of life," Rumsfeld said.

He said that even if al-Qaida has biological or chemical agents, it may lack the expertise to use them.

U.S. officials have said they believe al-Qaida has access to crude chemical weapons such as chlorine and phosgene poison gases, but not more complex weapons such as sarin.

-------- biological weapons

Anthrax blamed on US scientist

news.com.au
By MICHAEL BEACH in New York
12 nov 01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,3229971%255E15574,00.html

THE FBI believes the person behind the anthrax attacks in the US is a lone American scientist with no links to Osama bin Laden.

The homegrown terrorist probably used the September 11 attacks as a window of opportunity to unleash long-held grudges against the Federal Government and the media.

The snapshot was outlined by the head of the FBI's behaviour analysis unit, Jim Fitzgerald, after scrutiny of the three anthrax-laced letters and interviews with serial bombers in American jails.

Mr Fitzgerald said the anthrax mailer is most likely a man with a science background who had access to lab equipment.

"He prefers being by himself, more often than not," Mr Fitzgerald said.

The three anthrax letters were posted on different Tuesdays, suggesting to investigators the terrorist milled the anthrax during weekends.

Mr Fitzgerald said a "backyard model anthrax system" could be bought for no more than $5000.

The three letters sent to the New York Post , NBC newsreader Tom Brokaw and Senator Tom Daschle contained phrases such as "Death to America", "Death to Israel" and "Allah is Great".

The FBI believes the words were intentional to mask the terrorist's identity and instead throw suspicion on Osama bin Laden who has been blamed for the September 11 attacks.

Although investigators are unsure of the terrorist's motives, they are certain the targets were not picked at random.

"These people meant something to him," Mr Fitzgerald said.

"These victims may have been targets of previous expressions of contempt."

One of their main clues is the return address 4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, NJ - on one of the letters.

Although the school doesn't exist, there is a school with a similar name near Trenton, New Jersey, where the letter was posted.

FBI investigators believe the anthrax mailer may have had a connection with a Greendale school in the past.

It is unusual for the FBI to release its theories publicly during an investigation. But they are hoping someone may recognise the terrorist's characteristics.

This is how the FBI finally caught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who posted homemade bombs in the mail for 18 years.

After the Washington Post published his 35,000-word manifesto on the evils of technology, Kaczynski's brother recognised certain phrases.

The anthrax letters have killed four people and infected 17 others.

---

Panel Criticizes Anthrax Response

Associated Press
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Antiterrorism-Panel.html

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) -- The government's response to the recent anthrax attacks received generally poor grades Monday from members of a national anti-terrorism panel.

The panel said the Centers for Disease Control and federal, state and local agencies lack the testing laboratories needed to respond to a bioterrorism crisis.

``A national investment in the CDC and at local levels will be required to deal with bioterrorism,'' said Dr. Kenneth Shine, a commission member and president of the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine.

The commission was formed by the federal government in 1999 to study how well the nation was prepared for biological and other terrorist attacks.

Panel members said at a meeting Monday that the lack of testing labs delayed the discovery of anthrax in government buildings.

Trace amounts of anthrax were found only this weekend in 11 Capitol office buildings, nearly a month after an anthrax letter was mailed to Sen. Tom Daschle.

Shine also decried turf battles between the CDC and FBI over who had control of anthrax crime scenes.

Commission member M. Patricia Quinlisk, Iowa's state epidemiologist, said the CDC didn't do a good job of informing the public or the health care community about who was at risk of contracting anthrax.

``The imperfections in communication were widespread,'' she said.

The panel, chaired by Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, is putting together its final recommendations to Congress and the White House.

------

Environmental regulators struggle over release of information on chemical and biological hazards

Monday, November 12, 2001
By JOHN HIELPRIN,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11122001/ap_chemical_45539.asp

WASHINGTON-- Environmental regulators find themselves caught between conflicting mandates to give the public information about chemical and biological hazards and at the same time keep that information away from terrorists.

"The right to know is a proven tool for increasing public safety," Jeremiah Baumann, an environmental health advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told a House subcommittee on water resources and environment.

"Let's at least make the bad guys work for it," countered Amy E. Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons analyst for the Henry L. Stimson Center think tank.

Enter the Environmental Protection Agency, which two years ago created the Office of Environmental Information to work out such difficulties.

The Sept. 11 terror attacks made things that much harder.

"EPA is aware that we need a balance between protecting sensitive information in the interest of national security and maintaining access to the information that citizens can use to protect their health and the environment in their communities, EPA official Elaine Stanley testified.

Rep. Butch Otter, R-Idaho, said he did not see a way to avoid putting most of the EPA information on the Internet "unless you're going to suspend our First Amendment, like we did with the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Tenth amendments in our terrorist bill."

To date, the only information the EPA has removed from its Web site since Sept. 11 deals with risk management plans for industrial plants that handle hazardous chemicals, Stanley said. Those plans are required under the Clean Air Act.

The Clinton EPA's decision to post those plans for some 15,000 plants on the Internet in August 2000 "wasn't just bad, it was colossally bad," Smithson said.

Baumann said, however, portions of those plans revealing accident histories and emergency response plans had already been removed prior to September.

"Removing this information from public view does nothing to reduce the hazard," he said, citing nearly 5,000 facilities in the U.S. that store more hazardous chemicals than those released in a 1984 industrial accident in Bhopal, India. It killed 4,000 people within hours and inspired the first U.S. right-to-know programs about hazardous chemicals.

Stanley, who heads OEI's efforts on information analysis and access, said EPA has developed four criteria since the suicide hijackings to judge how delicately its information should be handled.

Some of its information is now restricted to reading rooms requiring proper identification.

The first criteria, based on "type," includes a plant's location and what types of chemicals it has. The second, "specificity," assesses the level of detail available for a plant. Third, "connectivity," is used to examine how well separate pieces of information can be applied to a particular disaster scenario. And fourth, "availability," accounts for how much control EPA has over the information.

Requiring the chemical industry under law to share information for the public welfare is one thing, said Gary E. Warren, a former deputy fire chief for Baltimore County, Md., and spokesman for the International Association of Fire Chiefs.

"Why on earth we would then turn around and provide that information to any interested party, who is anonymous and untraceable, is beyond me," he said.

-------- business

[Very interesting....]

FEDERAL CONTRACTS

States News Service
Monday, November 12, 2001; Page E09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12834-2001Nov11?language=printer

SETA Corp. of McLean won a $3 billion contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency for global solutions for the defense information systems network.

Litton/PRC of McLean won a contract worth up to $1.45 billion from the Army for computer software and systems engineering support.

Computer Sciences Corp. of Falls Church won a share of a contract worth up to $400 million from the Air Force for testing and evaluation services.

Science Applications International Corp. of McLean won a share of a contract worth up to $400 million from the Air Force for testing and evaluation services. Titan Systems Corp. of Largo won a share of a contract worth up to $400 million from the Air Force for testing and evaluation services.

Logicon of Reston won an $81.82 million contract from the Interior Department for scientific, engineering, logistic, administrative and acquisition support services.

Interop of Chantilly won a $73.3 million contract from the Interior Department for scientific, engineering, logistic, administrative and acquisition support services.

BAE Systems Applied Technologies Inc. of Rockville won a $58 million contract from the Navy for fleet ballistic missile system integration and logistics support services.

Brace Management of Largo won a share of a five-year contract worth up to $50 million from the Transportation Department for procurement support.

CACI International of Arlington won a $47 million contract from the Navy for information technology services.

Access Systems Inc. of Fairfax won a $26.4 million contract from the State Department for diplomatic security support services.

Applicators Inc. of Laurel won a $12.5 million contract from the Air Force for airfield repairs.

CACI Field Services Inc. of Chantilly won a $10.16 million contract from the Navy for logistical support services.

CO-STAR III of Mechanicsville, Md., won a $7.7 million contract from the Navy for operations services.

Moon Engineering Co. of Portsmouth, Va., won a $3.85 million contract from the Navy for repair and maintenance on the USS Portland.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $3.7 million contract from the Air Force for repair and maintenance of fire control equipment.

Plexus Scientific Corp. of Columbia won a $3 million contract from the General Services Administration for environmental services.

Litton Marine Systems Inc. of Charlottesville won a $2.98 million contract from the Coast Guard for instruments and laboratory equipment.

NLX Corp. of Sterling, Va., won a $2.14 million contract from the Air Force for professional, administrative and management support services.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $2.14 million contract from the Air Force for radio frequency exciters.

Automation Precision Technology LLC of Virginia Beach won a $1.77 million contract from the Air Force for passenger terminal screening services.

Litton Advanced Systems of College Park won a $1.74 million contract from the Navy for amplifiers.

Business Plus Corp. of Hampton, Va., won a $1.43 million contract from the Secret Service for support at a mail communications center.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $642,490 contract from the Air Force for electronics and precision equipment repairs and maintenance.

MCQ Associates Inc. of Fredericksburg won a $499,496 contract from the Army for minefield target detection sensors.

Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $454,650 contract from the Navy for landing-drag braces.

AIM Inc. of Parkton won a $308,205 contract from the Navy for bulkheads. General Cable of Fairfax won a $254,280 contract from the Justice Department for cable.

Brace Management of Largo won a $252,000 contract from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for contract closeout services.

Kollmorgen Corp. of Radford, Va., won a $191,055 contract from the Air Force for electrical holder assemblies.

Environmental Technologies Group Inc. of Baltimore won a $190,331 contract from the Marine Corps for hardware and abrasives.

Video and Telecommunications Inc. of Springfield won a $178,821 contract from the Space and Aviation Warfare Systems Center for miniature wideband cassette recorders and reproducers.

Aepco Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $121,988 contract from the Navy for supplies for the USS Wasp.

Phillips Swager Associates of McLean won a share of a $100,000 contract from the Federal Bureau of Prisons for architect-engineering support services.

Kaydon Corp. of Baltimore won a $94,525 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for plain encased seals.

ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $90,921 contract from the Defense Supply Center for demist shield assemblies.

Comptech Corp. of Rockville won an $87,862 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for aviation turbine fuel anti-static additives.

Lockheed Martin Federal Systems of Manassas won a $74,805 contract from the Navy for monitor panels.

Fairfax Precision Manufacturing Inc. of Sterling, Va., won a $70,740 contract from the Defense Supply Center for wing shafts.

Berkley Machine Works & Foundry Co. Inc. of Norfolk won a $69,440 contract from the Defense Supply Center for drive wheel hubs.

Delta Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $67,461 contract from the Defense Supply Center for compressor crankshafts.

The contracts listed were awarded by the federal government to companies and other vendors in Virginia, Maryland and the District. For more information, contact states2001@aol.com or call Myron Struck, managing editor, at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.

-------- india

New tanks will give India a significant edge

RAJAT PANDIT,
TIMES NEWS NETWORK,
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2001
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=1641249864

NEW DELHI: The T-90S tanks, which India will begin inducting into its Army in another month or so, should prove to be more than a match for the T-80UD tanks deployed by the Pakistani Army, feel military experts.

As per the schedule, India will receive 80 of the Russian T-90S tanks by the year-end, with about 40 more to follow soon. Indigenous assembly of another 190 tanks, imported in "completely-knocked down (CKD) or semi-knocked down (SKD) condition", will start the end of 2002. And by 2006, India hopes to commence indigenous production of the T-90S tanks.

"We chose the T-90S tanks - which have a three-member crew unlike other main battle tanks (MBTs) which require a crew of four - after extensive trials enough to counter Pakistan's drastic upgradation of its armour capability in the last few years," said a senior Army officer.

Indian Army personnel were particularly worried about Pakistan's acquisition of 320 frontline T-80UD tanks from Ukraine, their upgradation of the Chinese T-59 tanks and development of their MBT "Al Khalid" with China's help.

This posed a significant shift in conventional ground power in the western sector. And with the indigenous "Arjun" MBT programme running into technical delays, the Indian Army felt its strike corps were slowly losing the much-needed punch against Pakistani formations along the Punjab and Rajasthan borders.

With the upgraded indigenous T-72s and the new T-90S tanks gradually replacing the old warhorses such as Vijayanta tanks, officers feel the tactical edge will be restored once again. A few, however, strike a note of caution, "There is a talk that Pakistan is speeding up its plans to acquire another 250 T-80UD tanks."

Be that as it may, Army officers seem quite enthusiastic about the T-90S tanks.

For one, the tank is protected by both conventional armour- plating and "explosive reactive armour" (ERA), apart from NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) protection equipment. It also has the "Shtora electronic countermeasures system" mounted on it, which provides for infrared jamming, laser warning and grenade-discharging capabilities.

Apart from night-vision and night- fighting competence, the tank's 125 mm smoothbore gun can fire an array of armour-piercing, high-explosive or fragmentation ammunition. It is also equipped with the Refleks anti-tank guided missile system, with a range of 100 to 4,000 metres, to engage tanks fitted with ERA as also low-flying helicopters.

The government, on its part, categorically says that Pakistan's recently rolled-out MBT "Al Khalid" is "not superior to the tanks being inducted" in the Indian Army.

The decision to go in for the T-90S tanks was taken keeping in mind their compatibility with existing armament systems and equipment in the Indian Army, costs, offer of technology transfer and logistics.

----

Russian-made missile hits bull's-eye

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2001
AFP
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=2064117924

NEW DELHI: A supersonic Russian-made surface-to-air test missile fired from a site in Orissa on Sunday successfully hit its target attached to a pilotless aircraft, a defence spokesman said.

"It was a very successful test," said the spokesman, adding "the surface-to-air missile with a range of 15 km hit its target fixed to Lakshya."

Lakshya is India's pilotless target aircraft. India has been pursuing an ambitious project since 1983 to build an array of guided missile systems, including short, medium and ballistic missiles.

The Indian arsenal of guided missiles includes a medium range surface-to-surface missile and several versions of the ballistic Agni (Fire) missile, which can hit targets with nuclear warheads at distances ranging between 1,500 km and 2,500 km.

-------- iraq

Iraqi Defectors Tell of Kuwaitis in Secret Jail in Baghdad

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By CHRIS HEDGES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/international/middleeast/12KUWA.html

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 11 - Two Iraqi defectors, veterans of the country's intelligence service, say they worked in a secret site outside of Baghdad where 80 Kuwaitis captured during the 1991 war were detained in an underground prison.

"I guarded them in two-hour shifts with 14 other soldiers from the Fedayeen Saddam," said one of the defectors, referring to an all-volunteer unit named for Saddam Hussein. The two defectors said they worked at the prison for five years, starting in 1995.

The report contradicts the Iraqi government's longstanding contention that it has not been holding any Kuwaitis. But the Kuwaiti government has received "hundreds of reports" of people being held, senior officials said, adding that in the shrouded atmosphere of the Iraqi state, the reports cannot be confirmed.

Short of tangible evidence, such as fingerprints, signatures or photographs, such sightings must be treated with skepticism, the Kuwaiti officials say.

Rabea S. al-Adsani, director general of the National Committee for Missing and P.O.W.'s Affairs in Kuwait, said his government was convinced that "many Kuwaiti prisoners are still alive in Iraq."

The defector who had worked as a guard said that "the prisoners were all men. They were kept in an underground cell. They were rarely let out, usually once for a very brief time every three or four months, and only when the camp was empty."

He added: "We had to refer to them by their numbers. And we were not allowed to have any conversations with them." Nor were the prisoners supposed to speak at all, except in the presence of the general who acted as warden.

This defector, who was a sergeant in the all-volunteer unit, said that over time he developed a relationship with a few of the prisoners, though he was ordered not to fraternize. He provided four names of those he said were held, names that Kuwaiti officials have confirmed are listed as missing. These Kuwaiti officials asked that the names not be made public for fear that the prisoners' safety may be jeopardized.

Following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990, thousands of Kuwaitis were imprisoned by the Iraqis, although most were eventually released. Kuwait says, though, that 605 detained Kuwaitis were never heard from again. Most of them were civilians who refused to cooperate with the occupying Iraqi forces. More than 120 were students, 50 were teenagers and three were nurses whose crime apparently was to have treated wounded Kuwaitis.

The two defectors said they worked in a secret facility known as Salman Pak outside of Baghdad. The prison, they said, was covered by a grove of trees with only an air vent visible above ground. It was operating when they arrived in 1995. The second defector, a former lieutenant general in the intelligence service, said he knew of the imprisoned Kuwaitis but had not been inside the cellblock. "I was aware that we had them," he said.

The two said they did not know why the prisoners were being held.

Leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, the opposition group that helped arrange the meeting between the defectors and reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program "Frontline," said that prisoners often disappeared for years in the Iraqi prison system.

"It would be a mistake to look for any logic in this," said Nabil Musawi, one of the leaders of the opposition group. "Not everything makes sense. My father died after torture in 1981, yet to this day the authorities have never admitted that he was arrested. My family paid thousands of dollars in bribes to find out unofficially that he had been dead for 14 years."

The prisoners, the former guard said, were well treated by the standards of the Iraqi prison system. He said he did not witness any beatings or abuse. "They had three meals a day and their own toilet," he said. "There were even times they were fed meat, which surprised those of us who were guarding them since meat is hard to obtain in Iraq. A doctor came once a week, and a dentist and a barber visited too.

"When one of the prisoners needed an emergency appendectomy, he was taken to a special wing of the hospital for the intelligence service in Baghdad for the operation. We did not lose a prisoner in the five years I guarded them."

The former sergeant and guard said he joined the Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddam's Fighters, out of high school in 1995 as a way to avoid being conscripted into the regular army. As a member of the special unit, which has been used to put down civil unrest, he earned $60 a month, a large salary in postwar Iraq.

While his 520-member unit was doing its basic training at Salman Pak, a group of Islamic militants arrived for training, he said. His instructors were transferred to the other side of the camp to train the militants. His unit was broken up, and he and 14 others from the unit were sent to guard the Kuwaitis, he said..

The only time prisoners were allowed to carry on conversations was when Gen. Muhammad Jassim, who was in charge of the prison, was inside the cell, the guard said. He said that even conversations with doctors had to be carried out in the presence of the general.

"There was rule that unless the general was there, the prisoners could not talk," he said. "They had to keep silent."

-------- israel

Israeli troops enter village, kill suspected militant

USA Today
11/12/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/11/12/israeli-raid.htm

TEL, West Bank (AP) - In a 10-hour raid Monday on a Palestinian village, Israeli troops killed an Islamic militant and arrested 45 residents, including 16 on Israel's wanted list.

Israel also continued to hold parts of two Palestinian towns in the northern part of the West Bank. Troops moved into six towns after the Oct. 17 assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister. Officials said they were delaying a pullback from the last two because of intelligence reports of attempts by Palestinian militants to mount attacks in Israel.

The U.S. State Department has repeatedly criticized the Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas and called on Israel to withdraw and stay out.

In the latest Israeli incursion, soldiers moved into the West Bank village of Tel, next to the city of Nablus, around 2 a.m. Sealing off the village, they went from house to house, arresting suspected militants.

At one house, soldiers shot and killed Muhammed Reihan, 25, a senior member of the Islamic militant group Hamas. Reihan had been on Israel's wanted list since 1998 for the killing of two residents of the nearby Jewish settlement of Yitzhar.

Reihan's father, Yussef, 57, said Israeli soldiers surrounded his house and opened fire, and Muhammed went outside with a rifle, where he was killed. Then, he said, soldiers allowed the women to go to a nearby house and strip-searched the men.

The Israeli military said troops came under fire during the raid and returned fire, killing one of the gunmen.

The army said soldiers detained 45 residents of Tel. In a statement, the military said 16 were on wanted lists for a long time and belonged to the militant Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as the Tanzim militia, affiliated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah group.

The statement said the detainees were turned over to Israeli security services for questioning. Also, the military said, many weapons were found during the incursion.

Israeli military analysts wrote that incursions are part of an Israeli offensive against militant groups. On Oct. 24, Israeli forces moved into another Palestinian village, Beit Rima, looking for suspects. Five Palestinian police were killed in that daylong operation.

Arafat said Monday that "unfortunately," Israel had decided to continue its military operations, "but they should know we are a brave people."

Arafat appealed to Arab and Muslim leaders to support the Palestinian uprising against Israel during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins later this week.

Arafat said the Palestinians were determined not to end their struggle against Israel, according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Israel delayed its pullout from parts of the Palestinian towns of Jenin and Tulkarem as violence continued.

On Monday, the Israeli military said that at the beginning of the month, security forces arrested an Islamic Jihad activist, Baha Yussef Matzarawa, 21, from a refugee camp next to Tulkarem. The military said he confessed to a series of attacks, including bombings and shootings.

In Gaza on Monday, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy died of wounds suffered Friday. The Israeli military said soldiers opened fire because he was tampering with a security fence. Palestinians said the shooting was unprovoked.

On Sunday, a Palestinian gunman shot and killed a security officer at Kfar Hess, an Israeli farming village six miles from Tulkarem.

In Bethlehem on Sunday, a Palestinian was killed while preparing a bomb. He was a member of the Islamic Jihad group which has killed dozens of Israelis in bomb attacks.

Since fighting broke out on Sept. 28, 2000, 753 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 197 on the Israeli side.

-------- nato

Big Plans -- and Obstacles -- for a Fraying Alliance

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, November 12, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12864-2001Nov11?language=printer

Behind the Bush administration's belated move last week to invite German, Italian and other European forces into the Afghan military campaign lies an intense debate on both sides of the Atlantic about what should happen to the NATO alliance after Sept. 11.

The issue is partly short term and tactical: Despite resistance in the Pentagon, the White House concluded -- with a nudge from Colin Powell and Britain's Tony Blair -- that it needed to involve more NATO troops in Afghanistan in order to sustain European support for the campaign against the Taliban. The Europeans, for their part, wanted in so as to gain more leverage over the war's conduct.

But Sept. 11, which prompted the first invocation by NATO of its mutual defense mechanism in the half-century of its existence, also has precipitated a broader debate in both Washington and Europe about the future of transatlantic military relations. Some policymakers on both sides see a chance to resuscitate a directionless and fraying alliance, giving it, at last, a clear post-Cold War mission. Yet for others, Afghanistan is proving to be just another demonstration of the growing gap between the rhetoric of European-American political accords and the reality of military collaboration.

For some of the dreamers, Afghanistan looks like a setting for hammering out a decade's worth of geopolitical misunderstandings and repressed ambitions. The German government of Gerhard Schroeder, for example, considers the mere authorization of a few score commandos for possible operations against the Taliban a political breakthrough -- the end of Germany's military isolation and the beginning, it is hoped, of a more prominent role in Western policymaking. The biggest problem for Berlin since Sept. 11 has been getting the Bush administration to extend the offer of token military participation so that Schroeder could seize on the political opportunity.

For both Schroeder and Blair, shared duty in Afghanistan is also a way of locking the Bush administration into the multilateralism it was thought, at least in Europe, to be abandoning before Sept. 11 and ensuring that a struggle against terrorism that could define the world for decades revolves around a Euro-American axis. "There are multiple reasons why the members of the European Union will want to be listened to," said a senior diplomat in Washington. "The more impressive our contribution is, the more influence we will have."

In Washington, some Democratic strategists and senators, such as Joseph Biden and Richard Lugar, are urging the administration to use Afghanistan to commit the Europeans to a NATO that explicitly accepts that its mission is to operate globally. That was something the Clinton administration tried and mostly failed to establish; now, say some in both parties, an opportunity is at hand. NATO institutions should be rededicated to the war on terrorism and to countering weapons of mass destruction. European governments that have dragged their heels on defense spending then could be tasked with the job of creating and funding the kind of forces needed to fight the likes of al Qaeda. And the United States would ensure that it has allies for a war that will extend longer and farther than the Afghan bombing.

The high end of this vision goes still further, foreseeing a full "refoundation" of NATO at a planned summit meeting in Prague next year. With the impetus provided by war, the idea goes, NATO can settle festering disputes over a separate European Union military force and the role of Turkey, formalize a new relationship with Vladimir Putin's Russia and end the Cold War division of Europe for good by admitting up to seven new members in Central and Eastern Europe. The Bush administration already committed itself to an aggressive NATO expansion earlier this year, the argument goes; now it should use the Prague summit for a reorganization of transatlantic relations comparable to the summits of Bretton Woods or San Francisco after World War II.

It's heady talk. But back on the ground in Afghanistan, actual military collaboration is still little more than notional. Britain fired a few cruise missiles on the opening night of the war. Perhaps some of the ships, or commandos or other special teams eventually will show up in the theater. But the reality remains that most of the European forces don't have the training or equipment to play more than a symbolic role; Germany will use transport aircraft that are four and five decades old. And Pentagon commanders aren't eager to use either NATO's assets or its formal command structure -- many haven't forgotten the headaches of the Kosovo war, a NATO-run operation in which bombing targets became the subject of frustrating intergovernmental haggling.

The risk is that the post-Sept. 11 refurbishment of NATO will happen on diverging military and political tracks. After expansion at Prague, the staffing of the combined delegations at the North Atlantic Council in Brussels -- up to 26 of them, plus Russia -- could outnumber the European combat personnel in Central Asia. The winner in that case will be neither the European nor the American big thinkers. It will be Russia's Putin, who will be pleased to see NATO acting as the political club that, before Sept. 11, it vowed never to become.

-------- russia

Russia slams US on chemical weapons plant delay

RUSSIA: November 12, 2001
Story by Jon Boyle,
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13264/story.htm

MOSCOW - The head of Russia's Munitions Agency has angrily accused Pentagon and U.S. State Department officials of delaying building work on a factory intended to destroy thousands of tonnes of Soviet-era chemical weapons.

Zinovy Pak told Reuters in an interview late last week the Pentagon's refusal to release promised funds could force him to halt Russia's programme to neutralise the toxic agents.

The row could further delay a programme already well behind schedule. Moscow missed earlier deadlines to cut its 40,000 tonne (44,000 ton) stockpile, and is certain to miss the 2007 completion date set out in the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

The row erupted on the eve of Russian President Vladimir Putin's summit in the United States, where he is to discuss arms control with U.S. President George W. Bush. And it comes barely three weeks after the two leaders vowed to do all they could to prevent the spread of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. The issue is even more topical given the rash of anthrax attacks in the United States.

"Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the State Department are holding up decisions on the start of building work, for incomprehensible and unjustified reasons," said Pak, his huge hands tapping out his frustration on the table.

"Firstly, the United States is not giving the money, and secondly it is not giving the go-ahead for construction work to begin...I speak so harshly because I've just had a meeting with representatives of the United States."

The U.S. embassy was not immediately available for comment.

FUNDING DEAL

Under agreements signed in 1992 and 1996, the United States agreed to fund construction of a giant chemical weapons destruction plant at Shchuchye in western Siberia, where some 32,000 tonnes of organo-phosphate weapons are to be neutralised.

The U.S. Congress last year cut off funding because of Russia's failure to put in its own cash. But after intense lobbying by Pak on Capitol Hill, it was restored.

Pak said Russia had "fulfilled and even exceeded" U.S. spending targets, setting aside $25 million for the Shchuchye plant this year, a sum he said would be almost doubled in 2002.

"Russia has fully met (U.S. demands) and more. But unfortunately bureaucrats, first at the State Department and then the Pentagon, started thinking up new reasons for not starting to fulfil their obligations.

"The reasons they give are artificial...It's a game by bureaucrats who don't want there to be normal relations of partnership between Russia and the United States."

So far Russia has built housing and installed roads, water, gas and electricity. But a Reuters journalist who visited the site in June saw no construction apart from so far was a row of toilets - presumably for the contractors.

"I am greatly concerned, because I just don't understand whether the United States will take part."

Pak said he hoped Putin and Bush would discuss the matter at Bush's ranch in Texas, and that if Washington did not alter its stance by year-end, Russia might review the programme.

"Then we will tell the whole world that the United States didn't want to help Russia. They don't seem worried that Russia will retain a considerable amount of chemical weapons. But I don't think that will increase their security," Pak added.

SECURITY CONCERNS

Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, security has been increased almost daily at the seven Russian sites which store the deadly toxins, Pak said.

"We are doing everything so that not a single terrorist or anyone else will get their hands on even a gram of chemical weapons. But we can only give a guarantee when we have destroyed everything. Because with terrorism, theft is an art form."

Overall, Moscow says it needs $4 billion to destroy its chemical weapons stocks, although another dispute is brewing between Russia and Western states about when a chemical weapon can be considered destroyed.

Pak says once the active nerve agent is neutralised it can no longer be considered a weapon. Washington says the by-product should also be destroyed. Pak said the wording of the Chemical Weapons Convention was unclear on the issue.

A special session of the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which oversees implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, is to meet in The Hague on Tuesday to debate that very topic.

----

General: Russians to Leave Chechnya

By Associated Press
November 12, 2001,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-russia-chechnya1112nov12.story?coll=sns%2Dap%2Dnationworld%2Dheadlines

MOSCOW -- The top Russian military commander in Chechnya said Monday that most federal troops will be withdrawn from the breakaway republic by next spring, Russian news reports said.

Gen. Gennady Troshev said that only units stationed in Chechnya on a permanent basis will remain, the Interfax news agency reported. Those units are the Defense Ministry's 42nd motor-rifle division and the Interior Ministry's 46th brigade.

Troshev said that the withdrawal of the federal troops was part of a planned schedule to reduce the military presence in Chechnya. Troops will begin leaving early next year, he said. Similar troop withdrawals have been announced in the past, but not put into effect.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's strong support for the U.S.-led war against terrorism has earned him a reprieve from Western criticism about alleged human rights violations by Russian troops in Chechnya.

Speaking Monday to armed forces commanders in the Kremlin, Putin said the campaign in Chechnya "has been correct, on time and well-founded," according to Interfax.

Putin called the return to peace "irreversible," and said the federal troops permanently stationed in Chechnya must "become an important factor in the security of local residents and regional stability."

Russian troops withdrew from Chechnya in humiliation after the 1994-96 war with separatists, then returned two years ago after Chechnya-based militants invaded a neighboring Russian region, and after apartment bombings around Russia that killed more than 300 people and were blamed on Chechens.

Though Moscow claims to control most of Chechnya, armed clashes are frequent in the tiny southern republic.

------

Injustice in Russia . . .

Monday, November 12, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12869-2001Nov11?language=printer

BUSH ADMINISTRATION officials have been promoting what they see as a dramatic shift by Russian president Vladimir Putin toward cooperation with the West. It's true that Mr. Putin has been quick to join in the campaign against Osama bin Laden, and there are hopes for a groundbreaking U.S.-Russian agreement on a "new strategic framework" governing nuclear weapons and missile defense. But if Mr. Putin's political strategy really has changed, it's not yet apparent to Igor Sutyagin, an academic researcher at the prestigious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada in Moscow. For two years Mr. Sutyagin has been imprisoned on trumped-up charges of espionage brought by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB. He is one of a number of Russian academics subjected to bogus charges and secret trials since Mr. Putin came to power, in what Russian human rights activists describe as a systematic campaign to instill fear and silence dissent. Even as Mr. Putin courts the West, the campaign continues: Last week his prosecutors asked a court to sentence Mr. Sutyagin to 14 years in prison.

Details about the case of Mr. Sutyagin and others like it are hard to come by because trials are held in secret and coverage by the Russian media -- intimidated by Mr. Putin's campaign against the NTV television network earlier this year -- is scanty. But what is known is that the 37-year-old researcher specialized in military affairs; he prepared reports on subjects such as nuclear weapons and missile defense, using open sources -- mostly reports in the Russian press. Mr. Sutyagin's supervisors and colleagues have testified that he did not have access to classified information, but the FSB claimed that reports he prepared violated a Ministry of Defense decree on secrecy. What were the violations? No one knows: The decree itself is secret, and neither Mr. Sutyagin nor his lawyers have been allowed to read it. The only evidence presented in court has been assertions by the FSB and military officials that Mr. Sutyagin is guilty of violating a rule whose terms he is prohibited from discovering. If it all sounds like a bad parody of Kafka, that's precisely the intention: The FSB wants Russians to know that it has the ability to jail anyone who somehow displeases the authorities, regardless of evidence or the law.

It's hard to see how a government that continues to operate in this way can be a genuine partner of the United States, with aspirations to join the closest circle of U.S. allies in NATO. Mr. Putin probably calculates that the Bush administration doesn't care much about his domestic policies, or even his campaign in Chechnya, as long as he delivers on counterterrorism and missile defense. Administration officials say that's not true -- that they are not willing to drop democracy, press freedom or human rights in Chechnya from the U.S.-Russian agenda. If so, President Bush has a good opportunity to make a point. Mr. Putin is due to arrive in Washington for another summit meeting today, just as Mr. Sutyagin's court case resumes. Mr. Bush should tell Mr. Putin that if he wants to join the company of Western democracies, he must stop his bogus spy trials.

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

U.N. behind U.S. on forming postwar Afghan regime

USA Today
11/12/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/11/postwar-regime.htm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - As rebel forces gained ground against the ruling Taliban, the Bush administration on Monday enlisted the support of seven nations and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to speed efforts to form a new government in Afghanistan. The aim is a broad-based coalition to take charge in Kabul, possibly including Taliban defectors. The United Nations might take interim control of the capital, and Muslim and non-Muslim nations are likely to join with Turkey in providing peacekeepers, U.S. officials said. In a declaration, the United States, Russia and six nations that border Afghanistan pledged "to establish a broad-based Afghan administration on an urgent basis."

For the Bush administration, which took office nine months ago dubious of what it scornfully referred to as "nation-building," it marked a turnabout in foreign policy.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi sat across the table from Secretary of State Colin Powell as they plotted Afghanistan's future. Iran, itself branded a sponsor of terrorism, is a longtime opponent of the Taliban militia.

Kharrazi expressed Tehran's regret over the loss of life in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, which launched the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and the al-Qa'eda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden. Powell thanked him.

Later Monday, a senior U.S. diplomat, James F. Dobbins, planned to fly to Europe and then Central Asia to help fashion a post-Taliban regime in talks with government leaders and heads of Afghan opposition groups.

It is a difficult assignment. The Bush administration has backed the Northern Alliance, which is carrying the fight to the Taliban and is gaining control of areas in the north. But the alliance is dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, whose entry into Kabul would upset the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.

As a result, Powell has proposed the Northern Alliance not drive into the city and that Kabul function as an "open city" for an interim period.

The top U.N. representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he hoped to get "a representative sampling of the Afghan population together to see what kind of interim arrangements we can work together for Kabul," hopefully within days.

Likely participants with Turkey in a combined peacekeeping force from Muslim and non-Muslim countries include Indonesia, Bangladesh and Jordan, U.S. officials said.

The closed ministerial meeting Monday, in a basement conference room of the U.N. Secretariat building alongside the East River, was held shortly after an American Airlines jet crashed across the river in the Rockaway area of Queens. There was no immediate evidence of a terrorist link.

U.N. headquarters was quickly sealed off, causing Powell to arrive about 15 minutes late for the meeting and the Pakistan Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to miss it entirely. His country was represented by a deputy.

Annan said the ministers "stressed the need for speed ... to bring the political aspects in line with the military development on the ground."

"We have to be nimble," he said. "We have to be able to move quickly, and we have to be flexible."

Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, foresaw in a speech to the U.N. Security Council "the overall liberation of Afghanistan, to the establishment there of a broad-based, representative, multiethnic government, and to our goal of a world free from the twin scourges of terrorism and of war."

The so-called "Six-plus-Two" committee comprising the United States, Russia and the six Afghan neighbors - Iran, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - has been trying for years to end war in Afghanistan.

In their declaration, the eight ministers backed efforts to find a solution that would be "broad-based, multi-ethnic, politically balanced, freely chosen ... and at peace with its neighbors."

The ministers condemned "the export of international terrorism" by the al-Qa'eda network, which is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The immediate challenge in the next few days, a senior U.S. official said, is to find a formula to convene a group of representative Afghans in the region or possibly in Europe.

In Tehran, a leading Afghan opposition envoy, Mohammad Kheirkhah, said a 120-member, multiparty council had been set up to help form a provisional government to replace the Taliban.

He said it would include all Afghan ethnic and religious groups, but exclude the Taliban.

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

Bush Ex - EPA Nominee Gets Navy Job

Associated Press
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Environmental-Post.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former Ohio official whose nomination to head enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency was scuttled by Senate opposition has been named to an environmental post for the Navy.

Donald Schregardus starts Tuesday as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for the environment, a position that does not require Senate confirmation, said Scott Milburn, a spokesman for Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

Schregardus, pronounced Shruh-GAR-duhs, spent 17 years with the federal EPA and eight years as director of Ohio's EPA. His nomination was opposed by environmental groups who said he failed to enforce federal clean air and water standards while leading the state agency.

Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., chairman of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, had promised to spend months scrutinizing Schregardus' record as head of Ohio's EPA before allowing a Senate vote on the nomination. Schregardus withdrew his name, saying he was proud of his record but did not want to endure such scrutiny.

Maria Weidner, a policy analyst for Earthjustice, criticized Schregardus' appointment to the Navy post.

``We are pleased that the White House is taking an interest in recycling,'' she said. ``Unfortunately, they're recycling a bad nominee by trying to again put him in an important environmental position.''

It was unclear exactly what responsibilities Schregardus' new position would include. Navy environmental officers typically oversee the cleanup of hazardous waste sites for the military.

Schregardus could not be reached to comment. A Navy spokeswomen said she had no information on the appointment.

---

THE VETERANS
Vietnam-Era G.I.'s Watch New War Warily

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By DANA CANEDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/national/12VETS.html

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Nov. 10 - With the month-old war in Afghanistan at a crossroads and poised for the introduction of ground troops, Vietnam War veterans say they are looking for indications of a clear military strategy and for signs of a shift in the mood of the nation.

Mostly, they say, they hope the United States has not forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, and they say they want to ensure that this generation of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen will not be thrust into an ill- defined and unpopular war.

"We have a founding principle that never again will one generation of veterans abandon another," said Tom Corey, an Army combat infantryman in Vietnam who lives in West Palm Beach and is president of the Vietnam Veterans of America. "I won't allow it; the veterans of America won't allow it."

So far, many of about a dozen veterans interviewed say, the conflict in Afghanistan seems well planned and executed. But they caution that with no commitment yet of significant numbers of ground troops, it is too soon to predict whether the war could be another Vietnam.

The fact that the war in Afghanistan is being waged in a remote land with a hidden enemy and a history of failed foreign intervention offers parallels to Vietnam, which are a cause for concern, the veterans say. But a clear difference in support for the war, the veterans say, is that the military is responding to a direct attack on the United States.

"Obviously there are no parallels between the jungle and the rice paddies and swamps, for sure," said Jim Doyle, who served in an Army infantry division in Vietnam. "There is a parallel with the enemy being able to come and go as they please. They own the territory."

"There are mountains and caves and no place to hide, from what I can see," Mr. Doyle said. "I think all aspects of our military capabilities are going to be necessary because we are going to have to rely on more unconventional types of battles then we have before. If we learned the lessons of Vietnam, and there are thousands of them, we need to think like the Vietcong did."

On a personal level, some of the veterans spoke of the emotional toll the Sept. 11 attacks and the war had taken on them. The Rev. Philip Salois, chief of chaplain services for the Boston Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and an Army Reservist who is chaplain for a medical unit that does combat stress control, said the number of veterans seeking assistance for symptoms of post-traumatic stress had increased significantly in recent weeks.

"There certainly was a surge in patients being seen who perhaps weren't coming as often," said Father Salois, who is an Army infantry veteran of the Vietnam War and national chaplain for the Vietnam Veterans of America. "They just needed someone trusted to be able to share some of the feelings they're going through," Father Salois said. "They're numb or they're going through anger and rage."

Days after the attacks, Father Salois said, he realized that he was one of the people overwhelmed by stress.

"I was trying not only to minister to patients but staff as well, then I had no place to go with my stuff. Two days later I broke down in my office. I was by myself and I felt like I was really losing it, so I called a couple of close friends who are ministers and shared some of my feelings."

Some veterans worry that younger Americans may have an unrealistic image of the nation at war.

John Rowan of New York City, who was an Air Force intelligence analyst in the Vietnam War, said: "If anything, the Vietnam War left people cynical, but I'm concerned that the gulf war left people lackadaisical that this could be done easily. It almost made it look easy with this video game war, with these smart bombs and stuff, and this is not going to be the case. The nature of the beast is that there is no clean war, and this isn't a video game as much as the mechanics make it look that way."

Mr. Rowan said that while Americans' support for the war remained high, he was not surprised that support abroad was wavering. "People are always going to protest," he said. "Look, war is hell, and people get killed, and civilians get in the way. The thing is to stay on mission."

Even so, many veterans said Americans had better be prepared for different images in the news if the conflict shifted to a ground war.

"We are going to have to be prepared to get our hands real dirty and bloody and do business with people who are creeps because that's the world we are suddenly realizing we're in," Mr. Doyle said.

Even if Americans support that concept in theory, he said, the public in general and veterans in particular will support the war only as long as it does not deteriorate into a quagmire.

"I don't know that the American public is ready to see a parade of flag-draped coffins come off airplanes like we did in Vietnam," Mr. Doyle said. "As a Vietnam veteran and combat veteran with a Purple Heart, if I see that what my civilian and military leaders are doing will unnecessarily risk the lives of American servicemen and women, I will not hesitate for one minute to voice my opposition to that policy."

Many veterans agree that the resolve of the public in support of the military retaliation is unlikely to waver soon, because the Sept. 11 attacks were on United States soil.

"We have been directly attacked, so I'm sure there will be a lot more support for our military and our government leaders in doing what we have to do," said Phil Litteer of Rochester, who was in the Army during the Vietnam War era, stationed in West Germany.

Mr. Litteer and other veterans say they are confident that as long as the mission remains clear, today's troops can achieve their objective. Many of them say their children will probably be on the front lines.

"Vietnam veterans are among the most united, patriotic people in this country," said Mr. Litteer, whose son, Brian, 29, is in the Army Reserve. "And so to me, the sons and daughters of Vietnam veterans are the natural people who would fight this war, having been brought up in a spirit of pride and dignity in the uniform of the United States."

----

A look at the two leaders

USA Today
11/12/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/nov01/2001-11-12-bush-putin-pics.htm

Name: George Walker Bush.
Age: 55.

Career: Businessman in various industries, primarily oil; managing general partner of Texas Rangers baseball team; Texas governor.

Religion: Methodist; says Jesus Christ gives his life meaning and direction.

Family: Married, twin daughters.

Leisure activities: Jogging, fishing, hunting, lifting weights, watching baseball.

Childhood: Born in Connecticut while father attended Yale University; raised in middle-class home in Midland, Texas, where father worked in oil business; attended Andover prep school in Connecticut; grandfather was a U.S. senator from Connecticut; father was Republican Party chairman, CIA director and finally president. Has three brothers and one sister; a second sister died of leukemia as a child.

Quote on his youth: "I had the great comfort of knowing my parents loved me. ... A sense of normalcy, unconditional love, it's the greatest gift that you can give to somebody."

Name: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Age: 49.

Career: 16 years with KGB, including five years in East Germany; deputy mayor of St. Petersburg; deputy in Kremlin property department; chief of FSB, successor to the KGB.

Religion: Mother secretly baptized him into Russian Orthodox church as a child. Now often seen in church. Belonged to KGB, which repressed religion during the Soviet era, but is believed to support role for Russian Orthodox Church in re-establishing Russia's national identity.

Family: Married, two daughters.

Leisure activities: Judo, downhill skiing, water-skiing, swimming, lifting weights, Russian steam bath.

Childhood: Raised in lower-class family, lived in cramped apartment with no hot water, common toilet; father was a Communist Party member. Two brothers died, one shortly after birth, the other of diphtheria in his youth.

Quote on his youth: "What matters more is not the material conditions on my living, but the fact that I was loved. My parents loved me. A lot. And I felt that at all times. And this feeling of love, perhaps, was the most important point that formed my character."

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Germany gives green light for offshore wind plants

November 12, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13250/story.htm

HAMBURG, Germany - Germany's ocean shipping and hydrography office (BSH) said last week it had given the go-ahead for the construction of the country's first offshore wind energy plants from early 2003.

Twelve individual plants will be erected in a 250-280 million mark pilot phase in the North Sea, 45 kilometres north-west of the island of Borkum.

The approved units are among 208 plants that have been applied for, BSH President Peter Ehlers said.

Germany, the world's leading wind energy producer accounting for a third of total production, wants to study how offshore operations affect shipping and the environment before allowing their construction on a large scale.

Wind energy could help contribute to its declared political target to double the share of renewable energies within the total power mix to 12.5 percent by 2010 in a bid to lower carbon dioxide emissions which are linked to global warming.

Energy firm Prokon Nord from the city of Leer has won the tender for the first project, which will start with an area of 5.6 cubic kilometres.

Wind speeds at sea are double those on land, thereby offsetting the higher costs of building offshore plants.

The high-tech wind power units have to be anchored at depths of 25-30 metres and are around 160 metres high.

---

Larger turbines to push down wind energy prices

REUTERS
by Birgitte Dyrekilde
November 12, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13251/story.htm

COPENHAGEN - The world's largest wind turbine makers are experimenting with turbines of up to 5 and 6 megawatts, twice as big as today's, with the aim of improving efficiency and eventually lowering costs for wind energy.

"To improve turbines' efficiency we are improving design and production, turbines will eventually become bigger," said technical manager Mogens Filtenborg at Vestas.

Danish Vestass Wind Systems and its partly-owned Spanish turbine firm Gamesa Eolica are leaders with a 32 percent world market share.

At present the top-five turbine makers sell turbines of up to 2.5 megawatts. Vestas and the third-biggest turbine maker Danish NEG Micon plan to initiate commercial production of 3 MW turbines by 2004, while privately-owned German Enercon, the world's number two turbine maker, will install one 4.5 megawatt prototype turbine next year and is mulling starting up commercial production after that, a spokesman said.

For competitive reasons turbine manufacturers only talk cautiously about future turbine projects.

"In the next generation of turbines, we will see even bigger generators and the development of 5 and 6 megawatt turbines is very likely, but I cannot elaborate," Vestas' Filtenborg said.

NEG Micon participates in a Dutch development project, Dutch Offshore Wind Energy Converter (DOWEC), developing turbines of up to 6 megawatts for offshore projects.

TURBINES SHOOT UP

Over the past 20 years turbines have grown from less than 100 kilowatts up to today's 2,500 kilowatts or 2.5 megawatts.

"Basically, efficiency has increased with the help of larger turbines and I believe this development will continue," said Flemming Rasmussen, aero electricity department chief at Risoe National Laboratory, run by Denmark's Ministry of Information Technology and Research.

"If the trend continues, I believe we will see 10 megawatt wind turbines by 2010," Rasmussen added.

Such huge turbines would primarily be suitable for offshore parks or desolate areas, he said.

To improve efficiency, turbine makers also closely watch production and prices for sub-components.

"In order to lower costs we work on improving production. We take more of the work ourselves - like our blade production - instead of purchasing from outside suppliers," Filtenborg said.

Only last week, Danish private-owned turbine firm Bonus, followed this strategy with plans to initiate its own blade production. So far Bonus has been dependent on supplies from leading Danish blade maker LM Glasfiber, owned by Britain's Doughty Hanson & Co.

WIND POWER STILL EXPENSIVE

The infant wind power industry, which has seriously taken off over the past 10 years in a move to fight global warming, is still heavily dependent on government subsidies.

Poul Erik Morthorst, Research Manager at Risoe National Laboratory, said electricity from wind turbines placed on fair onshore wind sites cost 25-30 oere ($0.03-0.036) per kilowatt hour (kw/h) compared to just over 20 oere per kw/h for coal and gas.

"It's difficult for wind energy to keep up with coal and gas, but in five to seven years I believe wind energy will be competitive and prices will have fallen to 20-25 oere per kw/h," he said.

Vestas aims at reducing costs to 20 oere per kw/h within one or two years. Turbine makers say the most efficient turbines at present are 850-900 kilowatt turbines, but that their size will increase over coming years.

"It takes some time to get production up and running at an optimal level and technology can still be improved for large turbines. We need more experience," said NEG Micon Chief Executive Torben Bjerre-Madsen.

----

Electric Cars May Lose Push in Northeast

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/nyregion/12ELEC.html

ALBANY, Nov. 11 - Two years after New York, Massachusetts and Vermont announced that they would require the sale of electric cars, they are considering postponing that requirement by four years and promoting the use of other emission-reduction technologies instead.

State officials say the change could actually produce a deeper cut in tailpipe pollution in the first few years, while giving car companies needed flexibility. Environmental groups question that claim and say the plan may not be legal. Most important, they say, a retreat by the Northeast states would damage efforts to make electric cars commonplace and economically viable.

The move would leave California as the only state requiring sales of electric cars over the next several years, cutting the market for them roughly in half. California's plan begins with the 2003 model year, which goes on sale in just 9 to 10 months. It requires that at least 10 percent of the cars sold by each manufacturer be much cleaner than current cars, and that 2 percent be zero-emission vehicles, or ZEV's - in other words, electric-powered.

Two years ago, Gov. George E. Pataki's administration, followed by Massachusetts and Vermont, adopted the California regulation with considerable fanfare, boasting that the Northeast would help create a national market for electric vehicles. The proposed rule now under consideration would take effect in the 2007 model year.

"It's hard to believe that Governor Pataki, arguably one of the most vocal electric vehicle advocates, would consider a four- year delay in the program," said Peter M. Iwanowicz, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York State. "The ZEV program is the key to a long-term strategy to rein in emissions, and any delay is a setback, and long- term air quality will suffer."

Top environmental officials of the three Northeast states insist that the change is, at this point, just an idea that they are weighing. But they spent several months negotiating it with the auto industry, producing a detailed proposed regulation. Officials in all three states say they expect it to take effect. New York's environmental conservation commissioner, Erin Crotty, said her department would decide next month whether to adopt the rule. She said postponing the electric car mandate would simply be a recognition that automakers are not yet ready to produce them. "While New York is very committed to zero-emission vehicles, they do have technology constraints," she said.

Automakers have protested for years that they would be unable to make commercially viable electric cars in time to meet the California mandate. The electric cars produced now run on batteries, have limited ranges and must be recharged frequently, making them less attractive to consumers. Car companies are betting instead on fuel cells to power electric cars, but that technology still needs improvement. Fuel cells use oil, natural gas or other fuels to produce electricity through chemical reactions, not combustion.

For the last decade, New York has consistently been the leader among the handful of Northeast states that have gone along with each step of the California Air Resources Board's emissions reduction program. Environmentalists credit that program, which is stricter than federal rules, with helping to drive advances in pollution control.

The Northeast states' participation has roughly doubled the share of the national car market operating under the California rules, to about 20 percent. In some cases, that has helped set a de facto national standard, as automakers have decided to build cars for the entire country that meet California standards.

California requires that by next year, 10 percent of vehicles sold must produce far less pollution than cars sold now. While 2 percent must have no emissions at all, the other 8 percent can have some, using technologies like more advanced versions of gas-electric hybrids now on the market, and seals that prevent fuel vapors from escaping.

The proposed Northeast rule would push the plan back by four years. In the interim, it would allow automakers to earn credit against the future requirement by producing alternatives like hybrids. California also awards credits, but the Northeast plan would give far more. For example, the sale of one advanced hybrid next year would relieve the maker from having to produce 12 electric cars in 2007.

The Northeast plan would also allow car companies to earn ZEV credits by using existing technology to cut pollution from light trucks, vans and sport-utility vehicles, which are not covered by California's plan. Officials involved in drafting the rule said the Pataki administration had insisted on that provision, which was ardently sought by the manufacturers.

For the first several years under the plan, "We'll actually end up with far more of the vehicles being very clean" and lower overall emissions, said Sonia Hamel, the Massachusetts director of air policy and planning.

Ms. Crotty, the New York environmental chief, said, "The alternate compliance plan is intended to get more, cleaner cars out there sooner." She said she did not know if the proposed rule would cut emissions more in the short run than California's, saying that was a central question her department was studying.

Environmentalists are extremely skeptical of such claims, and argue that they miss the point.

"What this program is primarily about is jump-starting the production of vehicles with no tailpipe emissions, zero, none," said Roland J. Hwang, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Until this technology takes off and starts to take over a big chunk of the marketplace, the reductions you get are fairly small, but when you get to that point, the benefits become huge."

Congress long ago authorized California to adopt pollution rules that are more stringent than the national standards. It gave other states a choice between accepting California's rules as their own, or living with those set by the federal government. Environmental groups say that federal law might prohibit states from charting a third course, and that they are deciding whether to sue if the Northeast plan is adopted. When asked if the plan was legal, Ms. Crotty said she was not certain.

Mr. Pataki's environmental record is a central part of his crossover appeal, as a Republican governor in a state that leans heavily Democratic. Democrats have made clear that as he prepares to run for re-election next year, they will make an issue of what they call a pattern of environmental programs that do not live up to their original intent.

In 1999, the governor announced that he would impose the toughest pollution controls in the nation on old power plants. So far, he has put no rule into effect, and the proposed rule does not go quite as far, or as quickly, as the plan he outlined two years ago. In the meantime, a few other states have imposed stricter standards.

-------- environment

Shell called negligent in Brazil toxic waste case

REUTERS
by Sharon Cohen
November 12, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13259/story.htm

SAO PAULO, Brazil - The Public Ministry of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo says a subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch group Royal Dutch/Shell was negligent in the exposure of at least 156 people to toxic pesticides.

According to a report due to be released next week and which sources close to the case made available to Reuters last week, the ministry found that Shell-Quimica had not only contaminated residents of a rural town in Sao Paulo state but that there had been "negligence, ineptitude and recklessness by the company's industrial leaders."

Shell officials reached by Reuters last week dismissed the report as baseless.

Last month, the state's health watchdog said it supported a study by the town of Paulinia that found that 156 of 181 residents living near a factory owned by Shell-Quimica had "unacceptable" levels of at least one metal or pesticide in their bloodstream. Fifty-nine people suffered from thyroid or liver tumors.

The ministry, which functions like a U.S. state's attorney, based its findings on visits to Paulinia and documents from the mayor's office and the Sao Paulo state environmental agency.

It said residents near Shell-Quimica's plant had been exposed to "chronic pollution, produced by Shell, since the 1970s through the air and then water in the neighborhood."

Shell has repeatedly rejected the charges and accused Paulinia of using low benchmarks to measure contamination compared with those recommended by the World Health Organization. It acknowledged in 1994, however, that it had polluted the soil and ground water at the pesticide plant and promised to decontaminate the site.

It has since provided drinking water, social counseling and medical exams for residents. But it denies that the contamination affected residents and is buying the property around the plant to avoid alarming residents.

Maria Lucia Braz Pinheiro, vice president of Shell-Quimica for Latin America, told Reuters she received the report on Tuesday and described it as "another report with technical inconsistencies and lacking a scientific base."

Shell owned the factory between 1974 and 1995 but stopped producing Aldrin, Dieldrin and Endrin pesticides in 1990, when Brazil banned them. They are among the 12 persistent organic pollutants, dubbed the "dirty dozen," that remain in the environment for over 100 years without breaking down and accumulate in the food chain.

----

Oil Drilling in Arctic Called Departure From Past Policy

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12ARCT.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - If Congress approves drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it will be breaking with government practice of the last 35 years, which has limited when drilling may occur in refuges, the General Accounting Office has concluded.

Oil wells are not uncommon in wildlife refuges around the country, and proponents of drilling have argued that if energy is extracted from refuges elsewhere, it can be done in Alaska, too.

In a report requested by an opponent of such drilling, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, the accounting office found that about 13 percent of the refuges, in 21 states, had some kind of oil and gas activity last year.

But the office, the investigative and auditing arm of Congress, also found that since the passage of the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act, in 1966, the only leases that the government has signed for oil and gas exploration were where drillers on adjacent private land were extracting fuel from under the refuges.

In most of the others, the petroleum development preceded the creation of the refuge, or private companies already owned the mineral rights in the refuge.

Opponents of drilling have generally argued that the Alaska refuge is a unique, fragile treasure that should not be threatened by an oil spill, or even by the infringement of industrial development. Mr. Markey raised an additional point, that drilling in the refuge would set a bad precedent.

Proponents of drilling, he said, "very disingenuously argue that many refuges allow for drilling."

"What they don't mention is that none of that permission has been granted since 1966," he said, "and that if the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge was made an exception, it would become a Trojan horse that could be used to permit drilling in the 297 other refuges that have been identified by the United States Geological Survey as having oil and gas potential."

In January, in The Wall Street Journal, Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana argued that there had been oil and gas production from refuges there for nearly 60 years, with 1,605 wells. "If Louisiana can do it, why can't Alaska?" Mr. Breaux, a Democrat, wrote. The wells and pipelines, he said, are on "fragile wetlands" that are home to a variety of wildlife. He said there had been "few adverse consequences."

---

World Lakes Said Overused, Polluted

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Lakes-at-Risk.html

TOKYO (AP) -- Nearly 1 billion people are at risk because of overuse and pollution of the world's lakes, said global experts gathered Monday in central Japan to draw up plans for fighting the trend.

Already, more than half the world's lakes and reservoirs -- representing 90 percent of all liquid fresh water on the Earth's surface -- have been harmed by pollution and drainage, said delegates at the International Conference on Conservation and Management of Lakes.

The problem is likely to get worse as the world's population increases, they said.

``Lakes are among the most vulnerable and difficult to restore of all natural ecological systems, but they have been widely ignored even as they have deteriorated,'' said Masahisa Nakamura, director of Japan's Lake Biwa Research Institute.

The lakes symposium in Shiga, Japan, is a preparatory meeting for the Third World Water Forum, which is expected to draw about 8,000 researchers and government officials when it convenes in the nearby city of Kyoto in 2003.

Up to 1 billion people worldwide depend on endangered nearby lakes for drinking water, sewage, fishing, irrigation, transportation or tourism, said World Water Forum vice president William Cosgrove. As those lakes wither, so do their livelihoods and health.

People in developing countries, who are more dependent on local surface water, are especially vulnerable, delegates said.

As an example of how fast things can change, panelists said 543 large and medium-sized lakes disappeared in China alone between 1950 and 1980 as their water was diverted for irrigation.

Adding to the dilemma is global warming, which is expected to raise average lake temperatures by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 50 years, Cosgrove said. Warmer water is not as good at naturally cleansing itself of pollution.

Among the lakes on the current session's watch list: the Great Lakes of North America, Lake Okeechobee in Florida, Lake Victoria in Africa and the Aral Sea between Kazakstan and Uzbekistan.

-------- police / prisoners

Lawmakers say aviation security more urgent

USA Today
11/12/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/queenscrash/aviation-security.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The crash of an American Airlines jetliner in New York City makes it more critical that Congress move quickly to pass an aviation security bill, lawmakers said Monday. "Regardless of the cause of this crash, we have to get a strong bill passed this week," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. "The American public needs it to give them confidence and we have no excuse not to do it." There was no immediate evidence that terrorists were behind the crash.

House and Senate negotiators last week began efforts to resolve differences in their bills aimed at making flying safer. The bills include such steps as fortifying cockpit doors, increasing air marshals on flights and more thoroughly inspecting baggage.

Congressional aides said progress was made in staff-level talks over the weekend on less controversial differences, but there was still no agreement on the biggest issue: The Senate wants to make all airport screeners federal workers, while the House would put screening under federal control but allow screeners to be privately employed workers.

President Bush, who supports the House version, has urged the two chambers to get a bill to him as quickly as possible, saying the legislation is needed both to prevent further attacks and to bolster people's confidence in flying.

Americans, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi told MSNBC, are "still fighting some very nervous feelings" about flying. Quick passage of an aviation security bill is "saying to the American people that we're doing all we humanly can," said Lott, who was in New York Monday.

House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, speaking in St. Louis, said the crash might get House Republican leaders "off their duff" to approve tougher airport security measures.

Gephardt said National Guardsmen mobilized to help protect airports should be inspecting every piece of baggage checked onto flights and "not just standing there looking good."

Hutchison, speaking in Texas, said that when she and other negotiators meet again on Tuesday she will push for language requiring inspection of 100% of checked baggage within six months of enactment of the new law.

------

LAW ENFORCEMENT
Local Officials Accuse F.B.I. of Not Cooperating

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/national/12FBI.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - The police chief of Portland, Me., says the F.B.I. threatened to charge him with obstruction of justice if his officers continued to chase a terrorism suspect after Sept. 11.

Baltimore's police commissioner says he was dumbfounded to learn that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would give him the names of suspects who might be connected to the September hijackings but not their photographs.

The mayor of Reno, Nev., was shocked to learn from a local television reporter - not from the F.B.I. - that the bureau had seized a suspicious letter from a local Microsoft office and that a preliminary test indicated it was laced with anthrax.

Two months after state and local law enforcement officials found themselves forced onto the front lines of a global war on terrorism, many are complaining that the F.B.I. is refusing to provide them with the information they need to protect their communities.

"There's real frustration," said Bill Berger, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and police chief of North Miami Beach, Fla. He said that despite repeated pledges from the bureau to step up cooperation after Sept. 11, he was still hearing angry complaints from his fellow chiefs. "I don't think that we can afford to have these impediments to information any longer," the chief said. "Some of these terrorists were living in our communities."

Criticism of the bureau's performance since Sept. 11 has been growing in Washington as well. The frustration on Capitol Hill has deepened in recent days with the disclosure that bureau agents may have missed opportunities to gather valuable evidence in the investigation of anthrax attacks.

The bureau's new director, Robert S. Mueller III, has acknowledged serious coordination problems with state and local law enforcement agencies, and he has pledged to work with them more closely.

"I learned that in some cases, the F.B.I. was turning away your offers of help - that is unacceptable," he told a convention of police chiefs last week. "I have heard that there are some areas where lines of communications aren't as open as they should be, where we're keeping you at arm's length."

But the frustration of state and local officials has already been communicated to Congress, where a powerful, bipartisan group of senators is supporting a bill to lift a variety of restrictions on intelligence sharing between the F.B.I. and state and local law enforcement officials - though complaints from the local authorities are not limited to intelligence sharing.

Since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, state and local officials have complained that the bureau is highhanded with its local counterparts and that the F.B.I. looks for any excuse not to share even the most innocuous intelligence information. Even with changes in the law, bureau officials say, it will still be impossible to share certain, highly classified national security information.

But the complaints from local officials have taken on new urgency with the government's warnings of the possibility of another wave of terrorist attacks on American soil. Many police departments say the bureau is passing up a valuable resource by failing to allow local police to follow up on the tips that have overwhelmed the F.B.I.'s 11,000 agents since Sept. 11 and is hampering their ability to protect their communities.

"There are 650,000 cops in this country, and we should all be used in this hunt," said Edward T. Norris, Baltimore's police commissioner. "There are leads that the F.B.I. can't possibly find the time to run down. We've got experienced investigators who can run them out."

The bureau has announced that a high-ranking official, Kathleen L. McChesney, an assistant director who now directs the F.B.I. training center in Quantico, Va., will be responsible for improving coordination with state and local police departments. "We're fighting the terrorists, not each other," said Ms. McChesney, who joined the bureau after seven years with the police department in King County, Wash.

Mr. Mueller has also agreed to a request from state and local police departments to make the bureau's watch list of criminal suspects available instantly by computer. The F.B.I. director is scheduled to meet later this month with a delegation of local police officials to discuss other ways to improve communications.

The F.B.I. does have prominent supporters in the ranks of state and local law enforcement agencies. The chief spokesman of the Los Angeles Police Department said city officials had received excellent cooperation from the bureau in dealing with terrorists threats since Sept. 11.

The police chief of Tulsa, Okla., Ron Palmer, said, "I know some of my peers are not pleased, but we're very lucky in Tulsa because we have established a good rapport with the F.B.I. - there is mutual respect and communication." Chief Berger in North Miami Beach said he, too, had a good relationship with the bureau's Miami office.

But in interviews, many other state and local officials around the country said that their frustration was growing and that they found it difficult to believe that Mr. Mueller would be able to change the culture of one of the federal government's most hidebound and turf-conscious agencies.

"I understand what the F.B.I. is about - it's all about culture and elitism," said Chief Michael J. Chitwood in Portland, Me.. "Sept. 11 should have changed all that. But it didn't. Sept. 11 showed that there are terrorists who lived among us. Who better to know these people than the local police?"

He said the exchange of information with the F.B.I. remained "a one- way street," with the bureau accepting information but offering none in return. The city's police were quickly drawn into the Sept. 11 investigation after it was discovered that two of the hijackers had spent their final night in Portland.

Chief Chitwood said his officers received a tip on Sept. 12 that an Afghan man living nearby might be tied to the hijackings and that he, too, had sought flying lessons.

But when Portland police officers went looking for the man, Mr. Chitwood said, they were confronted by local F.B.I. agents who issued a stark threat. "They said, `You tell Chitwood that he's skirting with obstruction of justice,' " if the inquiry continued, the chief recalled.

Mr. Chitwood said he later learned that the Afghan man had been under F.B.I. surveillance for weeks, without any notice to the local police department. The man, he said, was subsequently cleared of suspicion.

"I don't have to know what's going on in New York City," Chief Chitwood said. "I don't have to know what's going on in Los Angeles. But I think I'm entitled to know what's going on in Portland." A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in Boston, which oversees Portland, had no comment on the chief's remarks.

---

THE IMMIGRATION AGENCY
Effort to Discover Terrorists Among Illegal Aliens Makes Glacial Progress, Critics Say

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and CHRISTOPHER DREW
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/national/12IMMI.html

In placing the Justice Department on a wartime footing, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to lead the charge in ferreting out potential terrorists among the nation's illegal immigrants.

But on the ground, the order is being translated into reality at a glacial pace, if that, critics say.

Even though at least three of the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country illegally, the immigration agency has not been culling its files of other people here on expired visas, saying that the pool is too big to make it a useful tool in finding terrorists.

Nor is the agency quickly able to track people coming in and out of the country, since its antiquated system still records such information in paper files. About 200 people have been detained on immigration violations as part of the terrorism investigation, but nearly all of them were identified by federal or local law enforcement officers, not by immigration agents.

Indeed, the terror attacks have laid bare the country's longstanding ambiguity on the question of what to do about illegal immigration. Before Sept. 11, the Bush administration was engaged in serious negotiations to offer legal status to some of those immigrants, particularly Mexicans, who were in the country illegally.

Guest worker programs had been expanded, workplace raids had been suspended and much of the focus was on the economic benefits of attracting foreign workers.

But since the terror attacks, the political pendulum has swung toward greater caution, and the immigration service is trying to shift course.

In the hours after the World Trade Center towers fell, for instance, New York City police officers and F.B.I. agents rushed to the Port Authority bus terminal to check for possible accomplices on buses bound for Canada.

They stopped two Middle Eastern men, who admitted to overstaying their visas, police officials said. But when immigration agents arrived at the scene, they let the men go, just as as if nothing had changed that day.

Since then, law enforcement officials say, the immigration agency has been working more closely with the F.B.I. and detaining the illegal immigrants that are the bureau's target. But in recent interviews, immigration officials said they did not want to be seen as singling out Middle Eastern men, and they did not plan to search for undocumented immigrants on their own.

"No raids, no roundups, none of that," said Joseph Greene, the immigration agency's assistant commissioner for investigations.

So it remains to be seen just what the service will do to carry out the new initiatives set out by President Bush, who recently pledged that the government would become "very diligent with our visas and observant with the behavior of people who come to this country."

Critics on Capitol Hill are not optimistic, saying the service has been managed too poorly for too long to be fixed without even more radical changes. But while that debate goes on in Washington, the new reality is becoming clear in the courthouses where deportation cases are heard.

That was evident in Newark recently when an immigration judge, William Strasser, turned to a Pakistani man sitting before him in forest-green jail-house scrubs and spelled out the new rules of engagement. Immigration violations, the judge declared, would no longer be handled as they had been in the past.

"We live in different times than a year ago, you understand me?" Judge Strasser said. "There weren't threats before, possible threats."

The Pakistani man, Azhar Iqbal, 36, had been smuggled into the country with a forged visa and had been picked up in mid-October by the police and federal agents with several other Pakistani men in an apartment in Ardsley, a Westchester County town. He was quickly deemed to be of no use to the F.B.I. terrorism investigation and was held in jail on immigration charges.

As it has done with all the detainees who have been picked up since Sept. 11, the immigration agency objected to releasing Mr. Iqbal on bond.

In many cases, those objections have been overruled. But with Mr. Iqbal, Judge Strasser asked him why he should be allowed to stay in the country.

As it turned out, Mr. Iqbal had no good reason other than his own desperation. Barely able to communicate in English, he said something about floods having ravaged his family's farm in Pakistan. He told the judge he had paid a smuggler $16,000 to come into this country. "I stay for work, some money," he mumbled. "I am very poor. Flood in Pakistan."

The judge ordered him to leave the country in 30 days, and for him to be released from the custody of the immigration service in the meantime on an $8,000 cash bond. Though the judge entered his order on Oct. 26, Mr. Iqbal has not yet come up with the bond money.

Other detainees have also found that getting out of jail is not an easy feat.

Mahmood Abbasi, a limousine driver who had lived in this country illegally for more than a decade, was detained on Oct. 8. But even after a judge authorized his release on a $10,000 bond, and his family came up with the cash, it took eight days and a complaint to the immigration judge to obtain his release, said Mr. Abbasi's lawyer, Roland Gell.

The latest crackdown is being driven by Mr. Ashcroft and other top officials, who say there is no easier way to prevent further terrorist attacks than enforcing immigration laws.

Many of the arrests have come from traffic stops, old warrants for petty crimes and tips about suspicious activities from neighbors. So far, the focus is on people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, though more subtle distinctions are being made.

Mr. Gell said another client, an Indian man nicknamed "the pilot," was questioned by F.B.I. agents shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. He, too, had overstayed his visa. But when they learned he was a Hindu, and not a Muslim like the hijackers, the F.B.I. released him.

Still, the difficulties in picking through the vast pool of illegal immigrants, and deciding which ones might be connected to terrorists, are immense.

Last year, more than seven million foreigners arrived with tourist visas, while the State Department issued more than 100,000 temporary work visas and 280,000 student visas. Of the estimated eight million illegal immigrants now thought to be here, 40 percent are believed to have overstayed their visas.

In the past, illegal immigrants usually came to the agency's attention only if they were caught in a smuggling ring or picked up in a workplace raid. "If you laid low, life was fine," said Janet Sabel, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society.

But critics, including several powerful members of Congress, say that can no longer be tolerated.

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee, said the immigration service had been so poorly managed that some 250,000 immigrants who had received deportation orders were still in the country illegally.

"It's not just immigration enforcement," Mr. Sensenbrenner said in an interview. "Talk to anyone who has tried to get a green card for themselves or their loved ones. They will tell you that that part of the I.N.S. is just as incompetent."

Mr. Ashcroft said on Thursday that he planned to address these problems by breaking the immigration agency into two services, separating border enforcement from immigration processing. Mr. Sensenbrenner supports this general idea. But he has also proposed legislation to create a new post high in the Justice Department to take control of the immigration bureaus.

Mr. Sensenbrenner also said that Congress had more than tripled the immigration service's spending authority since 1993, and he had little patience for the notion that a lack of money had delayed its efforts to create a better immigrant tracking system.

But some experts warned that even with half of the 1,900 immigration enforcement agents assigned to work with the F.B.I., there were limits to what could be done.

"We're at risk of developing an exaggerated view of what immigration law can do in response to terrorism," said David Martin, a former immigration service general counsel who is now a law professor at the University of Virginia. "There's all this talk of monitoring either students or anyone who comes in on temporary admission. Those may be very good in their own right.

"But it's not an efficient way to win the struggle against terrorism."

And even as the talk is tougher on illegal immigration, there is, in truth, no rush to deport most of the illegal immigrants in the country.

In fact, the service recently encouraged illegal immigrants to report tips on terrorists and anthrax scares without fear of being caught.

And last month, on his visit to New York City, the commissioner of immigration, James W. Ziglar, urged illegal immigrants who had lost jobs or their family breadwinners in the trade center attacks to seek government relief, also without fear of retribution from the agency.

Mr. Ziglar said the service would not ask for the victims' immigration status. "We would not use that information against them," he said. "Frankly, we don't want that information."

-------- terrorism

Man Surrenders in Terror Fund Probe

Associated Press
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-Terror-Money.html

TORONTO (AP) -- The head of a money-transfer service that the United States accuses of diverting money to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network surrendered Monday to Canadian police.

Liban Hussein, 31, was taken into custody under an extradition warrant, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cpl. Louise Lafrance said. He was scheduled to appear for a bail hearing in Ottawa on Tuesday morning.

Hussein and his brother, Mohamed, operate Barakaat North America Inc. out of offices in Ottawa and Massachusetts. Last week, the U.S. Treasury said the company's assets should be frozen for allegedly financing terrorism.

Mohamed Hussein was arrested in Boston last week and faces a court hearing Thursday.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has called the Boston business and others around the country ``offices'' of the al-Barakaat network, one of two organizations on a list of entities with suspected terrorist ties.

Investigators believe tens of millions of dollars a year flow overseas through Al-Barakaat. Much of that was sent by Somali residents of the United States to relatives, with the networks skimming money off for al-Qaida through exchange fees, the U.S. officials charge.

Liban Hussein has denied any involvement between his company and terrorists, saying Barakaat simply helps Somalis send money to relatives back home.

The Husseins, brothers from Somalia who hold Canadian citizenship, have not been charged with terrorist activity.

Hussein now faces extradition proceedings in Canada that can last for months or years unless he waives his right to a hearing. His arrest came at the request of the United States, and he faces no charges in Canada.

Hussein's Boston lawyer, Sam Osagiede, said earlier Monday that Hussein wanted to turn himself in to argue his case to police.

``He's going in there for an interview, interrogation,'' Osagiede told The Canadian Press. ``If they want to detain him after that, that is not what I can tell.''

Barakaat North America received deposits of more than $3 million between January and September, U.S. authorities say. So far, the Customs Service has identified nearly $800,000 wired from Barakaat North America Inc.'s account to the Al Baraka Exchange in the United Arab Emirates. Assets of the Emirates' branch were frozen on Wednesday.

The FBI had already investigated possible ties between Barakaat and terrorists over a year ago, Osagiede said last week. At a meeting in September 2000, the FBI met with Osagiede and a company trustee whom he would not identify.

He said investigators wanted to ``determine if Barakaat North America had anything to do with funding of terrorist activities worldwide.''

------

Why Clinton failed to stop bin Laden

USA Today
11/12/2001
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
AFP
http://usatoday.com/news/acovmon.htm

In 1998, then-President Clinton ordered strikes against terrorist bases linked to the bombings on U.S. embassies in Africa. The attacks were tied to Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden was emerging as a terrorist as Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president. The Saudi exile would be implicated in the first World Trade Center bombing, which occurred a month after Clinton took office. Bin Laden would contribute to the Somali debacle that scarred the president's first use of military force abroad. His al-Qa'eda network would kill more Americans in two bombings in Saudi Arabia and at two U.S. embassies in East Africa, and nearly sink a Navy warship in the final months of Clinton's term. But nothing the Clinton administration did over 8 years - FBI investigations, a cruise missile strike against Afghanistan and Sudan, the training of Pakistani commandos for a covert operation that never took place - thwarted bin Laden's network and its terrorist ambitions.

Since the attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, questions have been raised about whether Clinton could have done more to stop bin Laden before he struck at the symbols of America's financial and military might. That issue is likely to be scrutinized for years.

Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials who worked in or with the Clinton administration on terrorist issues reveal an answer that lacks black-and-white clarity. The bottom line: The Clinton administration took significant steps against bin Laden but, reluctant to lose American lives and fearing a lack of public support, decided against the most aggressive responses.

Even Clinton's defenders acknowledge that, for much of his tenure, fighting terrorism wasn't his highest priority. In the campaign in 1992, he promised to fix the flagging U.S. economy, and in his first term, he devoted less time to foreign concerns. The inability of the CIA director to see the president face-to-face became the subject of White House jokes. In his second term, when bin Laden emerged as the mastermind of plots against Americans, Clinton was enmeshed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.

After bin Laden's final strike on Americans before Sept. 11 - the bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port in October 2000 - counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke argued for a rain of missiles to retaliate for the deaths of 17 sailors. As a lame duck, the National Security Council staffer argued, what did Clinton have to lose?

But, as they had before, Clinton and his most senior advisers decided the intelligence available wasn't good enough to pinpoint bin Laden's whereabouts and justify a missile attack.

"Clearly, we needed to do more: September the 11th happened," Clinton said in a speech Wednesday at Georgetown University without elaborating on what else might have been done. He defends his administration for doing all that was possible.

History's assessment

The issue of what Clinton did, or did not do, represents more than an exercise in finger-pointing. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are expected to hold hearings to determine what lessons can be learned from the past. History's assessment of Clinton's presidency will depend in part on how he responded to an escalating terrorist threat that exploded soon after he left office - a judgment that could weigh more heavily on his legacy than even his impeachment.

Clinton already has railed to friends about the prospect that critics will try to blame him for the attacks Sept. 11. Officials from his administration are braced for a round of second-guessing as the country's first stunned reaction to the attacks fades.

"We can look back and say Osama bin Laden didn't get weaker, he got stronger" during Clinton's tenure, says Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Clinton critic. "His network didn't get weaker, it got stronger."

Clinton officials say the administration did everything it could given uncertain intelligence, reluctant allies in the region and a public that hadn't yet been convinced by attacks on American soil that terrorism was the nation's top concern. The attacks Sept. 11 changed everything, they say. Pakistan became a public ally; Congress enacted proposals it had rejected before to expand law enforcement powers; Americans made restoring a sense of safety their first priority.

A series of commissions on terrorism in recent years had issued warnings and offered plans in reports that were gathering dust on shelves until Sept. 11.

"It's a different perspective when things happen far away and when they happen downtown," says former New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman, a Republican who headed Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and co-chaired a bipartisan commission on terrorism. "I suppose that the Clinton administration could have taken a much harder, tougher line, but I wonder whether or not it would have been supported."

'They showed weakness'

Critics contend that Clinton should have done more to take on terrorism and transform public opinion, even in the absence of a catastrophic attack.

"Admittedly, it's easier to show leadership after Sept. 11, (but) that's what leaders are for," says L. Paul Bremer, the top counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration and head of a congressional commission on terrorism. "Instead of showing strength, they showed weakness. The administration didn't have a very clear strategy to fight terrorism, and it doesn't seem to have been a high priority."

Top Clinton officials and the former president himself strongly dispute any charge of negligence. (Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, declined to be interviewed for this article.)

"This was absolutely a top priority for the Clinton administration," former national security adviser Samuel Berger says. Once bin Laden was identified as a serious threat, he says, "Not a day went by that we did not focus on this, and it was high on the president's list, too."

During Clinton's tenure, officials note, the budget for counterterrorism was tripled, a cross-agency counterterrorism center was established, two anti-terrorism bills were passed and a missile strike was launched.

"We did an incredible amount to get things started in dealing with this war on terrorism," former secretary of State Madeleine Albright says.

But Clinton's actions were complicated by domestic political turmoil, including the Lewinsky scandal and the 2000 election recount. He was hesitant throughout his presidency to deploy troops and risk casualties. Bureaucratic disputes flared among intelligence agencies. And his priorities generally centered on domestic issues, not foreign ones.

"I think I've done what I'm sure the Bush administration has done over their period of time: You replay everything in your mind, and you ask, 'Was there anything else that could have been done?' " Clinton said last month in response to a question at an appearance before the Washington Society of Association Executives. "I tried to take Mr. bin Laden out of the picture for the last 4 years-plus I was in office and before any Americans had been killed by him. I don't think I was either stupid or inattentive, so he is a formidable adversary."

What did Bush do?

Some Clinton partisans say any criticism that not enough was done before Sept. 11 should be shared with President Bush, who had been in office for 8 months when the attacks took place. Bush also didn't order retaliation for the Cole bombing, although the investigation in Yemen continued on his watch. The argument for retaliation presumably grew stronger as evidence mounted of bin Laden's involvement, they say.

"We started the investigation in October," Albright says. "We arranged the diplomatic aspects of it. The election was in November. We did what we could with the time we had. What has happened since?"

Also during Bush's tenure, the FBI and CIA failed to pick up clues that the worst terrorist assault in the nation's history, years in the making, was about to be unleashed.

Most Americans fault both administrations. In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll early last month, three of four said Clinton didn't do enough as president to capture or kill bin Laden. Although Bush gets sky-high approval ratings for the job he's doing now, six of 10 said he didn't do enough before the devastating attacks, either. The poll was conducted just before the U.S. bombing campaign on Afghanistan began.

"I don't think that this administration looked at it in the beginning any differently than the previous administration," says Brent Scowcroft, who heads a Bush panel studying the intelligence community and chairs Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. "Terrorism was something we tried to deal with, but it's something that affected other countries, not us." The catastrophe on Sept. 11, he says, "was a big wake-up call" for everyone.

Clinton won the White House in 1992 in an election that seemed to prove the limited political benefits of making foreign policy a priority. He denied the first President Bush a second term despite the Persian Gulf War victory over Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Clinton made it clear he would focus first on the domestic economy - "like a laser," he said - and then would tackle the health care overhaul he had promised during the campaign. He initially left foreign policy largely to the State Department, refusing even to schedule a standing weekly meeting with his first secretary of State, Warren Christopher.

'That must be Woolsey'

James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, says he never met privately with Clinton after their initial interview. When a small plane crashed on the White House grounds in 1994, "the joke inside the White House was, 'That must be Woolsey, still trying to get an appointment,' " Woolsey recalls.

"Clinton was quite uninterested in foreign policy, which would include intelligence matters as well," says Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist who worked on an intelligence commission appointed by Clinton in 1994. Johnson says Clinton paid little attention to the commission or its final report, issued in 1996. The commission recommended "evolutionary" changes that would reduce staffing at some of the spy services and give the CIA director more power to referee disputes among agencies over money, power and turf.

"I think Clinton was riveted in on 'the economy, stupid,' and didn't really follow foreign policy unless it hit him over the head," Johnson says. "It took really a crisis and a drumbeat in the media suggesting he better pay attention to these things to get him to do so."

There were crises. The World Trade Center was damaged by a truck bomb in February 1993. In October of 1993, Army Rangers deployed in Somalia for a U.N.-sanctioned mission, authorized by the elder Bush, came under deadly fire. Eighteen were killed. A dead soldier's body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Within a few days, the president announced that U.S. participation in the Somali campaign would end by March 31, 1994.

The impact would echo through his time in office.

Aides say the experience in Somalia reinforced Clinton's caution about military action abroad. He was convinced that military missions carried great peril and that the American public wouldn't accept even small numbers of U.S. casualties.

For bin Laden, who provided weapons and warriors for the unrest in Mogadishu, there were lessons from Somalia as well. He had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the mujahedin fighters' success in sending Soviet troops packing had surprised and encouraged him. Experts say he drew similar conclusions - that superpowers could be vanquished, sometimes with surprising ease - from the limited U.S. response in Somalia.

"Our boys ... went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war," bin Laden said in a rare interview, conducted in 1998 by ABC at a mountaintop camp in Afghanistan. "Our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier, and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging."

'We couldn't indict him'

By 1995, U.S. intelligence officials were paying attention to bin Laden because of his multimillion-dollar family fortune, his hostility to the United States and his ties to known terrorist groups. "He was considered a dangerous man," recalls Philip Wilcox, the top counterterrorism official at the State Department at the time.

Senior administration officials were intrigued when Sudan, eager to improve its dismal relations with the United States, secretly offered in early 1995 to turn over bin Laden to the Saudi government, which had exiled him 4 years earlier. But the Saudis declined.

"They were afraid it was too much of a hot potato, and I understand where they were," Clinton recalled at his speech to association executives. He said the United States was helpless to take up Sudan on the offer directly: "We couldn't indict him then because he hadn't killed anybody in America. He hadn't done anything to us." (Only in 1996 would bin Laden's links to the first World Trade Center bombing and the Somali battle become known.)

In retrospect, some critics call the administration's decision to demur wrongheaded and inexplicable.

"We felt we had to fight him with Marquess of Queensberry rules," says Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, contemptuously contrasts the administration's by-the-book ruling with the legal gymnastics Clinton later would use during the Lewinsky scandal. "The administration could explain that perjury was not a crime, and could explain the key is how to interpret the word 'is,' then tells you they couldn't find a lawyer who would say, 'Grab him?' " the Georgia Republican says. "You just have to wonder, were these people consciously gathering in a room to remain impotent?"

In response, Wilcox says it's "outrageous" to suggest that the "United States Department of Justice should distort American laws and due process in order to cook up phony charges against people."

But bin Laden soon would be linked to the killing of Americans. Over time, intelligence officials tied him to the bombing in November 1995 of a military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans and the bombing in June 1996 of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 Americans.

The FBI investigations that followed were stalemated. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who went to Saudi Arabia several times to press the inquiry, complained that the Saudis refused to share evidence or allow access to suspects. After the first bombing, the Saudis had beheaded several suspects despite FBI requests to interview them. When he retired last spring, Freeh told The New Yorker that the Khobar Towers bombing was "the only unfinished piece of business that I have."

Secret talks by State Department officials with the Taliban, the ruling regime in Afghanistan thought to be harboring bin Laden, went nowhere.

Message by missile

A more devastating terrorist attack 2 years later would prompt the administration to ratchet up its response, at least for a while.

Bin Laden quickly was identified as the prime suspect when truck bombs destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. The toll was much higher than before: 224 people killed, including 12 Americans, and more than 5,000 injured.

"No matter how long it takes or where it takes us," Clinton vowed then, "we will pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done."

Two weeks after the bombings, Clinton ordered Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan and a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan. Intelligence reports had indicated bin Laden would be meeting there with 200 to 300 al-Qa'eda agents.

But bin Laden and most of his lieutenants had left before the missiles fell, and the Sudanese and the factory's owner denied the facility produced chemical weapons. Top Clinton officials were stung by the failure of an attack they had hoped would be a triumph. Some analysts scoffed that the attacks made bin Laden a hero in the Islamic world.

The experience would make members of the Clinton team even more cautious about moving without the sort of convincing intelligence that, in the end, they would never have.

A list of more ambitious military options was prepared and reviewed, but not even the Pentagon was enthusiastic about implementing them, senior Defense officials say. The city of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual center, could be bombed to the ground, but there was no guarantee that bin Laden or his inner circle would be there. Special operations forces could make a helicopter assault by night, but that raised sobering images of President Carter's humiliating attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.

Clinton and his top aides judged the risks too high and the possibility of success too low unless there was more precise intelligence pinpointing bin Laden's whereabouts. That proved to be impossible to get. Bin Laden was constantly on the move and trusted only an inner circle of aides. The intelligence services had few informants on the ground in Afghanistan; critics say a Clinton administration rule imposed in 1995 that set restrictions on the use of unsavory characters had sent a message to field agents to be cautious in recruitment.

"We did what we could given the support and the intelligence we had, and we consumed all the intelligence we had," Albright says.

"There was never a disagreement among the military people, the intelligence people or the diplomatic people that (if) we had sufficient intelligence to act again," Berger says. "We were ready and willing, but while we had some hopeful moments, we never reached the point where we had a high confidence of success."

The administration did take other steps. Soon after the embassy bombings, Justice Department lawyers concluded that the United States legally could try to kill bin Laden, despite a long-standing executive order banning assassinations, because he was judged to be in a state of war with the United States. In 1998, Clinton moved to clamp down on the financial network that supported the al-Qa'eda network. He and Gore in private sessions pressed the Saudis to cooperate, but they were unsuccessful. In 1999, Clinton authorized CIA agents to work with rebel forces in Afghanistan.

The CIA also secretly began to train Pakistani commandos for a covert operation in Afghanistan. But when Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was overthrown in a military coup later that year, the new government withdrew its cooperation. The plan was never attempted. "We tried to get the Pakistanis involved in this, realizing that it was a difficult thing for them," Clinton said. "They had both the greatest opportunity but the greatest political risk in getting him."

Critics argue, however, that if Clinton were serious about getting bin Laden, he would have pushed the intelligence community harder to pinpoint his location and deployed U.S. troops to accomplish the mission.

Clinton "shares a portion of the blame for Sept. 11 and its tragic aftermath," says retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, author of Fighting for the Future, a book on terrorism and other 21st century threats. He says the president never "threw the screaming fits" demanding better intelligence and more options that would have made it clear within his administration that stopping bin Laden was an overriding priority.

Gingrich complains that, when push came to shove, Clinton never delivered on his defiant rhetoric against terrorism. In behind-the-scenes budget negotiations in 1998, after the embassy bombings, the speaker says he insisted on $1.4 billion in emergency funding for the CIA over administration objections, an account supported by an intelligence official. Former Clinton budget director Jacob Lew says the administration worked with Congress to reach an agreement both sides could support, including the additional agency funding. The emergency allocation wasn't renewed the next year, when Gingrich had left office.

"The Clinton administration understood the need to send a message (by firing the missiles), and I very much supported that," says Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA operative. "Now, the next step is, did they follow up after they sent the message? And the answer there is a little grayer, a little less laudatory for the administration."

He calls it a case study in "too little, too late, in a way."

'Nothing happened'

After the Cole was bombed and nearly sunk in October 2000, FBI investigators were dispatched to Yemen within hours. But they encountered roadblocks, even after Clinton made two stern phone calls to the president of Yemen demanding more cooperation. Yemeni officials arrested eight people, but none has been put on trial.

The debate about what to do in the wake of the Cole attack was emblematic of the push-and-pull that marked the efforts throughout Clinton's term to battle terrorism. Among the factors:

- The domestic political situation was complicated. The Cole attack came in the final weeks of a close presidential campaign; some Clinton advisers worried that military strikes would be seen as a ploy to boost Gore, the Democratic nominee. Then the election wouldn't end: The Florida recount stretched for another 5 weeks.

Two years earlier, the U.S. embassies had been bombed in the middle of the Lewinsky scandal. Retaliatory missiles were launched 3 days after Clinton testified before a grand jury, prompting some members of Congress to speculate that the strikes were an effort to distract public attention from his personal problems.

- Bureaucratic disputes flared. Within 2 weeks of the Cole bombing, CIA analysts believed bin Laden was linked to the two suicide bombers, but FBI investigators weren't convinced. The issue of responsibility was still officially unsettled as of Sept. 11, although al-Qa'eda months earlier released a recruitment video hailing the attack.

- Military action seemed inherently difficult. Clinton's reluctance to use military force, and his tentative relationship with the Pentagon, made him reluctant to use force in a sustained way - that is, beyond the launch of cruise missiles. That made any retaliation difficult. With fragmentary intelligence information, action inevitably was going to be risky and success uncertain.

For the Clinton administration, that was the fundamental problem: Where was bin Laden? If he could be located, Clinton had authorized a military strike against him. But the president's inner circle - Albright, Berger and Defense Secretary William Cohen among them - agreed that basic question was never answered with enough certainty to order special operations forces deployed or missiles launched.

In his final weeks in office, Clinton focused intensely on the tantalizing prospects, ultimately unfulfilled, of reaching a Mideast peace deal. A U.S. attack in the region almost certainly would have destroyed those fragile hopes. Clinton was also at the center of a whirlwind of lobbying for last-minute presidential pardons. His second term ended with no military response to the deaths of the 17 U.S. sailors.

"We were all waiting for the hammer to fall after the Cole," Peters says, "and nothing happened."

Contributing: Jonathan Weisman

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MacArthur $5M Grant for Terror Study

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Attacks-MacArthur-Grants.html

CHICAGO (AP) -- A foundation that annually awards ``genius grants'' to scholars, scientists and artists is giving $5 million toward the study of issues related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation already has approved 14 grants totaling $3.245 million for organizations to study issues such as conditions that give rise to terrorism and the effect increased security has on civil liberties.

Among those receiving the money are think tanks, human rights groups and media organizations.

The grants range from $65,000 to $500,000.

Additional grants that would bring the total to $5 million have not yet been approved, said MacArthur Foundation spokesman Ray Boyer. He said those grants will likely be approved in the next few months.

On the Net: MacArthur Foundation: http://www.macfound.org/index.htm

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Prague Connection

New York Times
November 12, 2001
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/opinion/12SAFI.html?searchpv=nytToday

SAN DIEGO -- The undisputed fact connecting Iraq's Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks is this: Mohamed Atta, who died at the controls of an airliner-missile, flew from Florida to Prague to meet on April 8 of this year with Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi consul.

Al-Ani was known to the B.I.S., the Czech counterintelligence service, as a "case officer" of Iraqi intelligence working under diplomatic cover. "A case officer is not merely an agent," notes Edward Jay Epstein, the espionage analyst and my fellow Angletonian. "An agent executes assignments, but a case officer serves as the intermediary between an agent and the state intelligence service controlling that agent."

Saddam has long been infuriated by the ability of Radio Free Europe to foment dissent inside Iraq. Wiretaps of Saddam's Prague consulate led the B.I.S. to suspect al-Ani of enlisting agents to blow up R.F.E.'s Prague headquarters.

Al-Ani usually met agents at his consular office, where he could plausibly appear to be issuing them visas. But in Atta's case, the case officer took pains to avoid showing any direct link to Iraq. Why did the case officer meet Atta away from the Iraqi consulate? Surely the Iraqi, under round-the-clock surveillance, knew the B.I.S. would follow him.

Epstein has a "false flag" theory: "A remote location in Prague, not connected to Iraq, would allow al-Ani to misidentify himself to Atta. Such an alias, or false flag, could both aid the recruitment by appealing to Atta's ideological interest and conceal Iraq's involvement. False flags are a common tool of recruitment by intelligence services."

Perhaps Saddam, hardly a devout Muslim, did not want to show his hand to bin Laden's mid-level religious fanatics. The B.I.S. followed al- Ani to a clandestine meeting at a hotel with Atta, who had just come to the city. After that meeting, the Czechs shadowed Atta to the airport for his flight to the U.S.

Why didn't the B.I.S. inform the U.S. about Atta at that time? Here was a suspected plot against a large U.S.-financed facility; within two weeks, the Czechs declared his case officer, al-Ani, persona non grata and shipped him back to Baghdad. Were the C.I.A. and F.B.I. kept in the dark about his agent flying back and forth to America under his own name of Atta, or were our counterspies informed but did nothing?

Last week, the Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman, confirmed to CNN that al-Ani and Atta met in Prague (which Czech officials had at first denied). But Zeman was eager to dissociate that meeting from planning to destroy New York's twin towers: "Atta contacted some Iraq agent [sic] . . . to prepare a terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe."

Really? How does the Czech prime minister know what the Iraqi spymaster and Atta discussed? He could know only if the meeting were bugged or if al-Ani talked before being thrown out of Prague. Was the C.I.A. or F.B.I. informed about the U.S. interest in why al-Ani was ejected, and what travelers to America had recently been in secret contact with him?

After all, Atta had flown from Virginia Beach, Fla., the day before and returned the following day. That shows urgency: one does not back and forth across the Atlantic within 72 hours to meet secretly with a known Iraqi intelligence officer for no reason.

We since have learned that Atta, who had made at least one earlier trip to Prague, returned to the U.S. to open a bank account at the Sun Bank in Florida and received $100,000 to finance his mission through an Arab emirate money changer. But before that money to finance his Sept. 11 attack could pass, Atta apparently needed to stop in Prague first, where Iraq's al-Ani was running agents.

The Prague connection links Saddam and bin Laden at the agent level. Now here is an unpublished report that suggests Saddam helps the terrorist leader on a personal level:

In mid-May, two of Saddam's secret service agents arrived at the clinic of Dr. Mohammed Khayal, Baghdad's leading kidney specialist. The doctor hurriedly packed a bag and was escorted to a government car. Three days later, he was returned, and the building was soon abuzz with the word that Saddam's Dr. Khayal had been to Afghanistan where his patient was Osama bin Laden.


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German Authorities Detain Activists

By Stephen Graham
Associated Press Writer
Monday, November 12, 2001; 11:50 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15566-2001Nov12?language=printer

DANNENBERG, Germany -- More than 100 activists intent on halting a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste have been taken into custody by German security forces who want to avoid a repeat of protests that disrupted a transport in March, police said Monday.

More than 15,000 police were deployed to protect six rail cars carrying nuclear waste that is being shipped from a reprocessing plant in La Hague, France, to a storage site in the northern German town of Gorleben.

The shipment crossed safely in Germany on Monday afternoon, after authorities removed 20 protesters who tried to lie down on tracks on the French side of the border.

Along the route in Germany, police reported several attempts to block the train or sabotage the tracks. There were far fewer protesters than in March - when activists delayed the shipment for 16 hours by chaining themselves to tracks - but police said they seemed more determined.

"We will see smaller groups on the streets, but more militancy," said police chief Hans Reime in Lueneburg in northern Germany.

On the tracks near Dannenberg, 370 miles from the French border, police said they found a concrete block of the kind used by protesters to chain themselves to the tracks in March. It was the third block found in recent days.

Police also detained four Greenpeace activists who chained themselves in treetops over the tracks near Dannenberg, where the waste is to be unloaded for the 20-mile trip by road to Gorleben.

A Greenpeace spokesman said the four had intended to hang above the tracks with a banner denouncing German power companies. Police dogs tracked them down, and officers used ladders to climb up to the activists and force them down, Greenpeace spokesman Stefan Schurig said.

Police said border guards also found loosened bolts on railroad tracks at several locations, including 64 near the French border.

Police began taking protesters into custody Sunday. By Monday afternoon 106 people had been detained, but most were released, police said. However, 14 were arrested and held on charges including resisting state authority.

Wolfgang Ehmke, a spokesman for a Dannenberg residents group that has campaigned against the shipments for 25 years, said many more protests were planned in the days to come, including a convoy of slow-moving vehicles intended to hinder police.

He acknowledged there were fewer demonstrators than in the past and said the war in Afghanistan has made nuclear power a secondary issue for many Germans.

However, he said there would be no let up in protests against Germany's plan to phase out nuclear power over the next 20 years. Protesters want Germany's nuclear plants shut immediately.

"What the governing parties had promised hasn't happened," Ehmke said. "There'll be no peace here."

German power companies and the government agreed this year to phase out nuclear power, but anti-nuclear activists say 20 years is too long to wait.

Germany sends spent nuclear fuel to France for reprocessing under contracts that oblige it to take back the waste - shipments the protesters maintain are unsafe.

Authorities have imposed restrictions on low-flying aircraft over the last stretch of the route, but police said the measure was routine and not linked to any fears of terrorism.

----

Protesters Clash Over CNN Coverage

By Associated Press
November 11, 2001, 2:25 PM EST
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-brf-cnn-arrests1111nov11.story

ATLANTA -- About 200 people rallied against CNN's coverage of the war in Afghanistan, leading to three arrests.

"CNN, half the story, all the time," they chanted Saturday at CNN Center.

The protesters said millions of refugees and residents in Afghanistan face starvation but CNN isn't telling the story.

A network spokeswoman did not return a call seeking comment on Sunday.

Several of the demonstrators wore bandanas over their faces.

George Ward, 21, from Columbia County, was charged with criminal trespass. Samuel Sabel, 21, from Montgomery, Ala., was charged with violating Georgia's anti-mask law, which dates from the height of the Ku Klux Klan era, along with simple battery and obstruction. Matthew James Wallace, 20, of North Carolina, was also charged with violating the anti-mask law.

----

Who will defend the Constitution?

Nat Hentoff
November 12, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20011112-62700286.htm

It is difficult to wield the Bill of Rights against the new anti-terrorism law because, as George Melloan has written in the Wall Street Journal, terrorist attacks "engender an 'anything goes' mentality within the nation under attack." However, lost in the general approbation of this law is his further point that "if the attacks force a general curtailment of civil liberties, the terrorists have won."

But Mr. Melloan felt it was a good idea that Congress attached a "sunset clause" to the anti-terrorism bill that is now the law. But these evildoers - as President Bush accurately characterizes the terrorists - will continue their shadowy war against us for an indefinite time. So, in four years - when the "sunset clause" requires Congress to review this law to see if it's gone too far - it's highly unlikely there will be any changes in those sections of the law that seriously curtail civil liberties.

Already, the rush to pass the anti-terrorism bill was so swift that when it came time to negotiate the differences between the House and Senate versions in a traditional conference, the leaders quickly met behind closed doors in a "pre-conference," and no formal conference was held. Therefore, when parts of the bill are challenged in court - and they will be - the judges will not have before them a clear sense of the legislative intent of this law.

Except for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has provided careful and valuable analyses of the new law - and a few other groups that worry that the "anything goes" mentality will do long-term damage to the Constitution - the public at large is far more concerned with security than with the new law's giving extraordinary powers of surveillance, with limited judicial review, to the executive branch.

As Sen. Russell Feingold, Wisconsin Democratic, who cast the only vote in that body against the anti-terrorism bill, tried to tell his colleagues - many of whom, as in the House, had not had time to thoroughly read the legislation - the new law "goes into a lot of areas that have nothing to do with terrorism and have a lot to do with the government and the FBI having a wish list of things they want to do, whether it be getting into people's computers, medical records and other areas not related to terrorism."

What has not been clearly enough reported in the media is the new law's wider and looser standards of government electronic surveillance - of phones, computers, Internet searches and e-mail - that not only apply to terrorism investigations but also, in some areas, are expanded to include regular criminal investigations. The very specific requirements of the Fourth Amendment have been somewhat attenuated through the years, but the Founders would never recognize what has happened to their handiwork in this law that shreds privacy protections not only for suspected terrorists.

Also expanded, for example, are permissible FBI secret searches - gaining entrance to homes and offices when the subjects are away. In these so-called black-bag jobs, notice of what has been taken is delayed for a considerable time, and that makes it difficult to contest the legality of the search before the contents are revealed to a number of other intelligence agencies. It's as if J. Edgar Hoover were still among us.

As for the celebratory, roving wiretaps in the law - and the one-stop national warrant for them - the government can now follow any suspect's communications on all kinds of phones as well as pay phones. And the surveillance can also include any pay phone in the area visited by the suspect. Included are search engines in public libraries that nonsuspects may also be using. And, as law professor and privacy expert Jeffrey Rosen notes in the New Republic, "If your colleague [unbeknownst to you] is a target of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation, the government could tap all your [own] communications on a shared phone, work computer or a public library terminal."

Another section of this anti-terrorism law allows the CIA to again spy on Americans at home. The CIA's charter forbade that agency to engage in internal security functions. In the past, the CIA, when engaging nonetheless in these kinds of investigations, showed brazen disregard for Americans' constitutionally protected rights. But, as in other sections of the new law, the very definition of constitutional rights is being diminished. And that makes the future composition of the Supreme Court all the more important.

While most Americans are not disturbed by the weakening of the Bill of Rights, James Van Buren, president of the Worcester County, Mass., bar association tries to remind us in that group's publication that "Preserving our freedoms is the only sure way to thwart the terrorists' goal."

When, in four years, the sunset clause brings a congressional review of the effects of this law, we will see if Americans still believe the Constitution needs to be weakened.

Nat Hentoff is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column runs on Mondays.


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