------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
WEEK IN REVIEW
British nuclear secrets on web
British Nuclear Forces, 2001
Depleted Morality Bombs In Afghanistan
Mystery metal bombs may cause Afghan war syndrome
Bush's Constitutional Coup: Kangaroo Courts & Disappearances
Rice: U.S. Nearing Arms Treaty Limit
Missing records delay payments for deaths of uranium workers
Nuclear Plant Neighbors Watch Security Closely
Power Failure
A Landscape in Peril
Driving Past The Point
Ridge Defends His Role as 'Coordinator'
We Must Act As If He Has The Bomb

MILITARY
Laura Bush gives radio address, rips Taliban
Taliban defenders offer conditional surrender
A Taliban Researcher Practiced Crude Science
Hair as a Battlefield for the Soul
U.S. to Press Afghan Rebels Not to Form Government
Hostile reception for Allied Forces
Attacks From Out of the Blue
Egyptian Pleads Guilty in Arms Plot
Nebraska
He Routed Smallpox, Now Tackles Bioterror
For the Poor Worldwide, Anthrax Is Nothing New
Some businesses have gotten a boost from terrorism.
Indian Army Sees Post - Taliban Risk in Kashmir
New U.S. envoy takes Mideast peace mission
Blair eyes closer NATO, Russia tie
What the Muslim World Is Watching
U.S. Envoy Looks for Change in Sudan
U.S., U.N. plan reconstruction of Afghanistan
States: Missouri, North Carolina
Two U.S. sailors missing after tanker sank
Missile Ship Monitors U.S. Strikes

ENERGY AND OTHER
Washington
Phillips and Conoco sign agreement to merge
Texas
California
Former Military Man Finds Himself Under Fire Over Rights Cases
World Trade Pact in Qatar

POLICE / PRISONERS
States: Maryland, Mississippi, Wisconsin
INS horror story
Uncertainty Stalls Anti-Terror Efforts
CIA Denies Keeping Military in Dark in Afghanistan
Secret CIA Units Playing A Central Combat Role
Oregon
Retracing a Trail to Sept. 11 Plot
'Holy War, Inc.': 21st-Century Jihad
A Time Out for Technophilia

ACTIVISTS
London Marchers Decry U.S. Strikes
URGENT, YOUR HELP WILL TURN THE TIDE.



-------- NUCLEAR

WEEK IN REVIEW

November 11-17
New York Times
November 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/weekinreview/18WEEK.html?searchpv=nytToday

Back at the Ranch

When Vladimir V. Putin came to Crawford, Tex., population very, very small, he and President Bush spent nearly an hour entertaining high school students with their views on arms control, women's rights and the best time to visit Texas (not August) and Siberia (not winter). Then Mr. Bush announced he would cut America's nuclear arsenal to 1,700 from 2,200 warheads. Mr. Putin vowed comparable, but unspecified, cuts. The only cloud: no agreement, and little progress, on amending or scrapping the 1972 treaty that prevents Mr. Bush from testing his treasured anti-missile system.

David E. Sanger

-------- britain

British nuclear secrets on web
Blunkett's Terror Bill " as police prepare for crackdown, the MoD makes an embarrassing gaffe

By Severin Carrell, Geoffrey Lean and Colin Brown,
18 November 2001
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=105530

Defence ministers have published details about the movement of nuclear bombs and plutonium throughout Britain, in apparent contravention of David Blunkett's attempt to crack down on nuclear terrorism.

They have released a list of scores of British cities, towns and counties through which lorries and trains carry the bombs and dangerous nuclear materials.

The publication of the details, on the MoD website, is a blow to the Home Secretary's counter-terrorism plans, which will suffer another reverse this Tuesday when 17 Labour MPs, including two former ministers, lead a Commons rebellion.

Mr Blunkett has been fighting criticism of his proposals, emphasising the threat from UK elements sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. "He said they would be getting more desperate and the risks of a terrorist attack were greater, not less," said a ministerial source.

Former ministers Mark Fisher and Peter Kilfoyle have joined the rebellion led by Bob Marshall-Andrews QC. The group also includes two select committee chairmen, Gwyneth Dunwoody and Tony Wright.

The publication of nuclear bomb transport routes - the most detailed disclosure of its kind - appears to challenge one of the toughest of Mr Blunkett's proposed measures. The new Bill makes it an offence punishable with seven years in jail to disclose any information which "might prejudice the security of any nuclear site or of any nuclear material". It makes this a graver offence than actually endangering the security of the sites and materials themselves, which is punishable by two years in jail.

The 59-page report - Defence Nuclear Materials Transport Contingency Arrangements - is intended to help the police, fire brigades and local councils draft emergency plans in case of an accident.

But it could offer potential terrorists a guide to the rail lines, roads and airports being used for nuclear materials.

It details security measures for nuclear convoys, lists Britain's military nuclear reactor factories and test sites, and, for the first time, the towns and counties where "special nuclear materials" such as weapons-grade uranium and plutonium would travel.

It reveals that a fire involving a nuclear warhead could lead to a massive explosion. It says the explosive in a warhead is unstable if heated: "If weapon is jetting (flames under pressure) explosion may be imminent, debris may be scattered within 600m radius."

Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, has considered asking the Territorial Army to guard nuclear power stations and Sellafield nuclear fuel plant.

Stewart Kemp, the secretary of Nuclear Free Local Authorities, a group funded by many local councils, said: "If the Government judges that there is an increased terrorist threat then the right thing to do is stop the transports altogether."

-------

British Nuclear Forces, 2001

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
NRDC Nuclear Notebook
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/nd01nukenote.html

In July 1998, Britain's Labour government announced several changes to its nuclear force resulting from its Strategic Defence Review:

- Only one British submarine will patrol at any given time, and that boat will carry a reduced load of 48 warheads--half the number the Conservative government had planned.

- The submarine will patrol at a reduced state of alert, its missiles de-targeted. It will be capable of firing its missiles within several days, not minutes as during the Cold War. It will also carry out a range of secondary tasks.

- Britain will maintain fewer than 200 operationally available warheads, a one-third reduction from the Conservative plan.

- Britain will purchase a total of 58 rather than 65 Trident II D-5 missiles from the United States.

When these decisions are fully implemented, the total explosive power of Britain's operationally available weapons will have been reduced by more than 70 percent since the end of the Cold War. The explosive power of each Trident submarine will be one-third less than that of the Chevaline-armed Polaris submarines, the last of which was retired in 1996.

British warheads are designed at Aldermaston, a 670-acre site in Berkshire. Final assembly takes place at Burghfield, a 270-acre site seven miles to the east. In February 1997, the component manufacturing facility at Cardiff closed after 36 years; its functions were transferred to Aldermaston and Burghfield, where about 3,600 people are employed. Warhead maintenance and disassembly takes place at Burghfield, where the last of the Chevaline warheads are scheduled to be dismantled by March 2002.

The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) is now managed by an industrial consortium consisting of Lockheed Martin, Serco Limited, and British Nuclear Fuels, which took over in April 2000, under a 10-year, $3.6 billion contract. On April 1, 1999, the Chief of Defence Logistics assumed overall responsibility for the routine movement of nuclear weapons within Britain. Day-to-day duties are being transferred from Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel to the Ministry of Defence Police, with support from AWE civilians and the Royal Marines. The process will be completed by March 31, 2002.

Bombers. The RAF once operated eight squadrons of dual-capable Tornado GR.1/1A aircraft. But with the withdrawal of the last remaining WE177 bombs from operational service in March 1998, the Tornados' nuclear role was terminated, bringing to an end a four-decade history of RAF aircraft carrying nuclear weapons. By the end of August 1998, all remaining WE177 bombs had been dismantled. Before the year is out, the RAF base in Bruggen, Germany, is scheduled to close, and the Tornados there will be reassigned to bases in Lossiemouth, Scotland, and Marham, England.

Nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). The first submarine of Britain's new Vanguard class began its first patrol in December 1994. The second submarine, Victorious, entered service a year later. The third, Vigilant, was launched in October 1995 and entered service in fall 1998. The fourth and final submarine of the class, Vengeance, was launched September 19, 1998, and commissioned on November 27, 1999, at the Marconi-Marine Shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness. The Royal Navy announced in February 2001 that the Vengeance entered operational service with the First Submarine Squadron and has begun patrols. The submarine has a total complement of 205 men, which includes a ship's company of 130 men while on patrol. The current estimated cost of the program is $19.8 billion.

Each Vanguard-class SSBN carries 16 U.S.-made Trident II (D-5) submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The United States and Britain share a pool of SLBMs kept at the Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic, Kings Bay Submarine Base, Georgia. Although Britain has title to 58 SLBMs, technically it does not own them. A missile deployed on a U.S. SSBN may at a later date be deployed on a British sub, or vice versa.

British submarines conduct their missile flight tests at the U.S. Eastern Test Range off Florida. The Vanguard conducted two successful Demonstration and Shakedown Operations (DASO) in May and June 1994, launching two missiles. The Victorious fired two missiles during its DASOs in July and August in 1995. In October 1997, the Vigilant also launched two missiles during two DASOs. On September 21, 2000, the Vengeance launched a Trident II D-5 during a DASO exercise.

One of the four subs is normally on patrol. Two others are training in port or in local waters and can be deployed on relatively short notice. The fourth submarine is undergoing repair and maintenance and would require significantly longer preparation for deployment. Each SSBN is protected by one or two hunter-killer submarines (SSNs) while en route to and from its patrol area. In fall 2000, the Royal Navy briefly withdrew all attack subs from service after the Tireless suffered a reactor malfunction. While other British subs were being checked for similar reactor problems, anti-submarine warfare assets (frigates, helicopters, and maritime patrol aircraft) were used to guard and survey transit areas around the shallow waters of the Irish Sea.

British SSBN patrols are believed to be coordinated with the operations of French SSBNs.

British SLBMs are thought to carry a variation of the U.S. W76 warhead designed for Trident I C4 and Trident II D-5 missiles, enclosed in a U.S. Mk-4 re-entry vehicle (RV). Reducing the number of RVs can extend the range of a missile. In its "substrategic" configuration, for example, a missile carrying a single warhead would have a range of more than 6,000 miles.

Several factors will determine the number of warheads in Britain's future stockpile. We assume that Britain will produce only enough warheads for three boatloads of missiles, a practice it followed with Polaris. As stated in the Strategic Defense Review, there will be "fewer than 200 operationally available warheads" in the stockpile, and no more than 48 warheads per SSBN. If all four SSBNs were fully loaded (MIRVed with three warheads) that would total 192.

A further consideration is the "substrategic mission." A Ministry of Defence official has described a substrategic strike as "the limited and highly selective use of nuclear weapons in a manner that fell demonstrably short of a strategic strike, but with a sufficient level of violence to convince an aggressor who had already miscalculated our resolve and attacked us that he should halt his aggression and withdraw or face the prospect of a devastating strategic strike."

The substrategic mission began with Victorious and "will become fully robust when Vigilant enters service," according to the 1996 White Paper. Vigilant achieved operational availability on February 1, 1998. Assuming this policy was implemented, some Trident II SLBMs already have a single warhead and are assigned targets once covered by WE177 gravity bombs. This means that when Vigilant is on patrol, 10, 12, or 14 of its missiles may carry as many as three warheads, while the other two, four, or six may be armed with only one warhead. There is some flexibility in the choice of yield of the Trident warhead. (For instance, choosing to detonate only the unboosted primary could produce a yield of 1 kiloton or less. Or choosing to detonate the boosted primary could produce a yield of a few kilotons.) With dual missions, an SSBN would have approximately 36-44 warheads on board during patrol.

We estimate that the future British stockpile for the SSBN fleet will be around 160 warheads. With an additional 15 percent for spares, we estimate the total stockpile will be approximately 185 warheads. About 15 other warheads are probably in some stage of maintenance and not operationally available.

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/images/nd01nn.gif

Nuclear Notebook is prepared by Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Hans M. Kristensen of the Nautilus Institute, and Joshua Handler.

Inquiries should be directed to NRDC,
1200 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 400,
Washington, D.C., 20005; 202-289-6868.

-------- depleted uranium

Depleted Morality Bombs In Afghanistan

November 18th, 2001
by Russell Hoffman, Concerned Citizen
From: "Hans de Jonge" <hansdejonge@xs4all.nl>

Regardless of the outcome of this undeclared war in Afghanistan, the Depleted Uranium weapons we are using will leave a lasting legacy on a poverty-stricken nation, where, for the past 20 years or so, the closest thing to a hospital operating room has been a closet with sheets tacked up on the walls.

Now, while we "free" the Afghan people (to be "dirt poor", in the truest sense of the term), we make their burden worse by poisoning their countryside.

"All flying bombs - Tomahawk, JDAM etc. - are made of depleted uranium metal." a Pakistani doctor warns his countrymen. (Many rivers in Afghanistan flow into Pakistan.)

"DU is released from fired weapons in the form of small particles that may be inhaled, ingested or remain in the environment." says a UN World Health Organization official.

"We obviously put out instructions about avoiding depleted uranium dust," says Defense Department spokesperson Kenneth Bacon. "Troops are instructed to wear masks if they're around what they consider to be atomized or particle-sized depleted uranium - that is if rounds have struck tanks, there could be depleted uranium dust around," he said.

But the Afghan children -- who are much more susceptible to the effects of radiation than adults are, and who were attacked by packs of rabid dogs during the war (we read), and who will live among the ruins of the war -- are now scurrying over every nuked-out tank, bunker, Mosque, and cave entrance, getting covered in D. U. dust, looking for things of value and curios. We don't give them masks, or even warnings.

I believe we have a duty and a capability to develop safer weapons, which do not pollute the environment. And I believe we have a duty to be sure our weapons are carefully aimed. If we need to start triple-checking our targeting, when now we are only double-checking everything, so be it.

One wonders if our miss-rate isn't a cover for when we want to hit something we are not supposed to want to hit -- like a newspaper headquarters (which we did in both this war (Al Jazeera News Agency) and the last one (Chinese News Agency), or a Red Cross Warehouse.

But beyond targeting problems, it's clear once more that while we say we are avoiding collateral damage as much as possible, we use weapons which do ecological damage wherever they land.

Why do we use Depleted Uranium weapons? Not because of "its high density and the metallic properties that allow it to 'self-sharpen' as it penetrates armor" as the Pentagon claimed in 1998. Other metals have those properties, too -- some even better than D. U. But D.U. is extremely cost-effective, because anyone who has it just LOVES to get rid of it, and our nuclear industry has many, many tons of it which they are happy to give to the military.

All nuclear weapons, from atomic bombs to D. U. penetrating weapons, should be banned world-wide, immediately. War on guilty parties is bad enough, but war on the environment is always a war on innocents.

Sincerely, Russell Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

Quotes in the above essay were seen in an article circulated on the Internet and apparently originally published in: The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol. 5, No. 44, October 29, 2001.

------

NEW FEARS UK MEDIA BRIEFING:
Mystery metal bombs may cause Afghan war syndrome

Dai Williams, Occupational Psychologist and DU researcher
DU info bulletin no 30
17 November 2001
From: "davey garland" <thunderelf@yahoo.co.uk>

The rapid retreat of the Taliban may be partly due to a mystery metal used in new "hard target" weapons in the Afghan bombing campaign. It has been kept secret by the US and UK governments since 1997 but latest analysis of Afghan war reports and military information websites indicate that it is probably Depleted Uranium (DU).

If DU has been used then UK troops, aid-workers and media teams in former Taliban locations may be entering toxic disaster areas. Without immediate environmental monitoring they risk the same health hazards suffered by Gulf War veterans and Iraqi civilians - an Afghan War syndrome. So what is the mystery metal? The UK Government was asked this question three weeks ago but has not answered it.

Hard target weapons

The new generation of "hard target" smart bombs and cruise missiles can penetrate 10 feet of reinforced concrete before exploding. They were used to attack Taliban bunkers, caves, command centres, fuel and ammunition stores. They use "dense metal" warheads to double their penetrating power on hard targets. The 2 ton GBU-37 Bunker Busters and 2000 lb GBU-24 Paveway smart bombs, plus the Boeing AGM-86D, Maverick AGM-65G and AGM-145C hard target capability cruise missiles all use "advanced unitary penetrators" (AUP-113, AUP-116, P31) or BROACH warheads with the mystery high density metal in alloy casings.

Uranium or Tungsten?

The mystery metal must be hard and at least 2x as heavy as steel. Tungsten and Depleted Uranium (DU) are the main options. Both are used by US and UK forces for armour piercing shells. DU is preferred because it is burns inside the target to become an incendiary bomb and is far cheaper and easier to manufacture.

Uranium hazards and Dirty DU

DU (U238) is reprocessed nuclear waste. It burns in military targets and plane crashes to produce Uranium oxides as a fine, toxic, alpha-radioactive dust. The "Dirty DU" found in Balkans War target sites was contaminated with variable traces of U235 plus U236 and Plutonium from reactors. It presents a perpetual health hazard similar to asbestos - especially in the lungs. The UNEP report of DU used in the Balkans War played down its risks. They did not inspect bomb or missile targets. Uranium oxide dust is a suspected cause of Gulf War syndrome and the epidemic of cancers and birth defects in Iraq since the Gulf War where 300 tons of DU were used. UK EOD (bomb disposal) teams in the Balkans were instructed to use full radiation protection (NBC) equipment when inspecting DU targets (Hansard). 50-100 times greater hazard than in the Balkans Reports from the Center for Defence Information in Washington indicate that several hundred tons of smart bombs and cruise missiles have been used in the Afghan bombing including many of the hard-target weapons above.

The mystery metal is 50-75% of the weight of the bombs - up to 1.5 tons in the GBU- 37 Bunker Buster bombs. If this is DU then target zones will be 50-100x more contaminated than by the pencil-sized 30 mm (0.27 kg) anti-tank shells used in the Balkans War, and more like the DU ammunition fire in the Gulf War. DU oxide is known to travel up to 25 miles by wind so large areas may be affected by each bomb.

Government in denial about DU?

The UK Government is aware of the problem. They were asked to identify the mystery metal in hard target guided weapons by DU researcher Dai Williams via his MP on 17th October and direct to the Prime Minister on 1st November. No answers have been received. On 24 October Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told Parliament that "we do not rule out the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Afghanistan, should its penetrative capability be judged necessary in the future" (Hansard). He denied that DU has been used, at least by UK forces, on 1st and 5th November. Can he speak for US forces?

Hard target bombs and missiles have been used extensively in Afghanistan since 7th October. Until the mystery metal involved is identified and independently verified Mr Hoon's denials are not convincing. He is responsible for military, not humanitarian policies. After the bombing political responsibility for the truth is shared by the Cabinet. Political responsibility: minimising a potential health disaster

This question is an immediate occupational and public health issue for the 4000 UK troops plus aid and media teams about to enter Afghanistan, for those already there and for the civilian population. The first warning was a dying child who led a Taliban doctor to suspect that US forces were using radioactive or chemical weapons (Reuters, 28 October). Many Taliban troops near bombing targets will already be affected if DU has been used. This may be one reason for their rapid retreat.

The US and UK Governments have an immediate political responsibility to disclose the mystery metal used in the Afghan bombing. If DU has been used this will become obvious soon from medical reports. Precautionary action is essential now to minimise a potential health disaster. There is no cure for inhaling DU dust.

In 1999 the UK media questioned the use of DU in the Balkans so troops and aid teams were alert to its potential hazards. They have had copies of this analysis for two weeks but have stayed silent about the mystery metal question in Afghanistan. In the USA a Bill submitted to the US Congress on 18 October has called for a total ban on DU and facts about its use in Afghanistan. Veteran and environmental groups are waiting for the US Department of Defence's reply.

NGO alert

The Red Cross and Oxfam have been alerted to these potential risks. International aid organisations and allied forces would be wise to assume that the mystery metal is depleted Uranium until there is firm evidence otherwise. DU precautions apply as after the Balkans war (e.g. bottled water) plus avoiding bombed Taliban locations.

----

Bush's Constitutional Coup: Kangaroo Courts & Disappearances

Francis A. Boyle Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954(voice) 217-244-1478(fax)
fboyle@law.uiuc.edu
Sunday, November 18, 2001

A Coup against the American Constitution An interview with Professor Francis A. Boyle

Conducted Wednesday, November 14, 2001 by Dennis Bernstein, host of Flashpoints on KPFA Radio 94.1 FM Berkeley, California

Dennis Bernstein: You re listening to Flashpoints, on KPFA. This is Dennis Bernstein.

George W. Bush declared an extraordinary emergency yesterday that empowers him to order military trials for suspected international terrorists and their collaborators, bypassing the American criminal justice system, its rules of evidence and its constitutional guarantees. The presidential directive, signed by Bush as commander-in-chief, applies to non-U.S. citizens arrested in the United States or abroad.

Joining us to talk about this extraordinary measure is Professor Francis Boyle. He is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, in Champaign. I want to thank you for joining us, again, on Flashpoints.

Francis Boyle: Thank you, Dennis. I'm always happy to be on your show and your station, and I hope things go well in your meetings with Pacifica. It's a great station and it really needs to be kept on the air and going the way it's going.

Bernstein: Thank you very much.

Now, secret courts, military tribunals give us, first of all, your sense of what the implication is of this, maybe describe what you understand can happen.

Boyle: First, this executive order must be considered within the context of the massive assault that we have seen inflicted on the United States Constitution by the Bush administration and its Federalist Society lawyers, such as Ashcroft, Gonzales and their staff. We've discussed the Federalist Society on your station before, I think.

Since September 11th, we have seen one blow against the Constitution after another, after another. Recently, we've had Ashcroft saying that he had, unilaterally, instituted monitoring of attorney-client communications without even informing anyone he just went ahead and did it, despite the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures without warrant and the Sixth Amendment right to representation by counsel.

I won't go through all the [recently promulgated] measures here, but this is one of the more outrageous and dangerous. As you correctly point out, it applies both to alleged terrorist suspects here in the United States, who are not U.S. citizens and, also, abroad. We have to consider that separately. As for those here in the United States, clearly aliens here are entitled to the protections of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as to the Article III (Section 2, Clause 3) basic constitutional rights in criminal cases, including indictment, trial before a Federal District judge or jury, [rights relating to] venue and things of that nature. It would take me an entire law review article to go through all the problems with this executive order.

Moreover, there is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States Government is a party. It's a treaty and it, again, affords basic due process protections to everyone here in the United States, irrespective of their citizenship.

As for the applicability to alleged al Qaeda members, or even former al Qaeda members, over in Afghanistan, [there is] an even more serious problem there. The third and fourth Geneva Conventions, of 1949, clearly apply to our conflict now with Afghanistan. These alleged al Qaeda members would be protected either by the third Geneva Convention (if they are fighters incorporated into the army there in Afghanistan), or by the fourth Geneva Convention (if they are deemed to be civilians). Both conventions have very extensive procedural protections on trials that must be adhered to. This is not to say that a trial cannot happen. It can happen, but there are very extensive rules and protections Basic requirements of due process of law, set forth in both of these treaties, must be applied, under these circumstances. [Failures] to apply these treaties would constitute war crimes.

Second is the question of reprisals. This executive order is extremely dangerous, because what it is basically saying to the Taliban government and to al Qaeda is, We are not going to give you the protections of either the third or fourth Geneva Conventions guarantees on trials. What that means is that they could engage in reprisals against captured members of the United States Armed Forces. As you know, we have soldiers on the ground, now Special Forces in Afghanistan and we also have pilots flying over Afghanistan. Any of them could be captured by the Taliban government, by al Qaeda.

If a U.S. military [person] were to be captured, clearly, he or she would be entitled to all the benefits and protections of the third Geneva Convention, on prisoners of war. But the problem now is that President Bush has basically said, openly, publicly and officially, that we are not going to give prisoner-of-war benefits, or fourth Geneva Convention civilian benefits, to al Qaeda members, to former al Qaeda members, or to those who have sheltered, harbored or assisted them. That opens us up for reprisals. It opens up our own armed forces to be denied prisoner-of-war treatment. So, what we re doing here is exposing them to a similar type of treatment, which would be a summary trial, in secret, subject to the death penalty.

Bernstein: Let me jump in here, Professor Boyle.

According to the presidential directive, the president himself will decide which defendants will be tried by military tribunals and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will appoint each panel and set its rules and procedures, including the level of proof needed for conviction. This sounds almost like sort of a quiet coup.

Boyle: Clearly. What we've seen, since September 11th, if you add up everything that Ashcroft, Bush, Gonzales and their coterie of Federalist Society lawyers have done here, is a coup d'etat against the United States Constitution. There's no question about it.

When you add in the Ashcroft police state bill that was passed by Congress (and several members of Congress admitted, We never even read this thing when we voted for it.) that's really what we're seeing now, Dennis, a constitutional coup d'etat. There's no other word for it.

Bernstein: What are the implications when the president and the secretary of defense decide who will be the defendants and what the necessary level of truth will be? I mean, it's hard to imagine how that would work.

Boyle: This is really like the old Star Chamber proceedings, in the British Empire, where someone accused of treason would be called before a chamber in quiet, in secrecy. (It was called the Star Chamber because there were stars on the [ceiling]). There would be a summary hearing and the person would be sentenced to death. That was that.

The important point to keep in mind is that the president and secretary of defense are bound by the third and fourth Geneva Conventions for anyone over in Afghanistan or Pakistan. They have no discretion there.

As for here, in the United States, they are bound by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and they are bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. There is no exception that the president can unilaterally announce ipse dixit. That's exactly what this executive order you can read about it in today's New York Times is attempting to do.

Bernstein: It is, obviously, very concerning to Arab-Americans, to people on visas, with green cards. We now have a thousand people in custody. Ashcroft is talking about five thousand more that they want to take into custody. These are all people that could be tried secretly and convicted without [any] evidence that we would know anything about.

Boyle: That is correct. It's like we're becoming a banana republic here in the United States, with disappeared people, which was the phenomenon that we all saw down in Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, with the support, by the way, of the United States Government. The latest figure I've read is upwards of eleven hundred aliens, Arabs, Muslims, who have just disappeared somewhere. We don't know where they are or the conditions under which they are being held. We have no idea whether they have access to attorneys. We do know one of them died, under highly suspicious circumstances, while in custody. There have been reports that he was tortured to death.

I should point out that the phenomenon of disappearance is considered a crime against humanity [by] the International Criminal Court. This is very dangerous.

The critical question is: When will the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency start to turn these powers, that they have under the Ashcroft police state bill, against American citizens? Clearly, that will be the next step.

Bernstein: Well. We have been speaking with Professor Francis Boyle. He is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, in Champaign, Illinois. We thank you.

-------- treaties

Rice: U.S. Nearing Arms Treaty Limit

The Associated Press
Sunday, November 18, 2001; 2:10 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49251-2001Nov18?language=printer

WASHINGTON -- U.S. testing of a missile defense shield will approach the limits of an arms control treaty with Russia and require the two countries to "move beyond" the pact at some point, the president's national security adviser said Sunday.

President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin ended their summit last week without agreement on national missile defenses. Putin reaffirmed his opposition to testing that would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty; Bush's view is that the treaty is a relic and ought to be scrapped.

"The time is coming where our testing programs will start to bump up against the constraints of the treaty," White House aide Condoleezza Rice said.

"We're not going to violate the treaty, and that means that, one way or another, we're going to have to move beyond the ABM treaty," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press." One option for Bush is to give six months' notice of U.S. intent to withdraw from the treaty, as the pact allows.

During their talks, the two president did agree to reduce their countries' nuclear stockpiles by two-thirds, a compromise Rice called "a tremendous breakthrough."

While both nations will continue to work on an agreement regarding the treaty, Bush intends to move forward with "the robust testing and development program," Rice said. The administration wants to begin testing of sea-based missile defense technologies, for example, which is prohibited by the treaty.

"It is his obligation to make sure that his successors are not put in a position where we cannot defend ourselves against the now increasingly ubiquitous technologies associated with" offensive ballistic missiles, she said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Bush is fully committed to developing a "limited missile defense system" that does not threaten Russian strategic offensive weapons.

"But they know that, sooner or later, the testing that we have to do will run into the constraints of the ABM Treaty, and when that happens we have got to get out of the constraints of the ABM Treaty," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

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

Missing records delay payments for deaths of uranium workers

From: magnu96196@aol.com
BY VIRGINIA BALDWIN GILBERT
the Post-Dispatch
11/18/2001
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/66E3A72A89D217FB86256B09000EE2B9?OpenDocument&Headline=Missing%20records%20delay%20payments%20for%20deaths%20of%20uranium%20workers

Delores Tamme

One woman's quest for justice may result in thousands of local "warriors of the Cold War" or their survivors getting $150,000 compensation checks for work-related illnesses and deaths.

Delores Tamme of Ellisville watched her young husband die a swift, painful death from cancer in 1966. For years afterward, she wondered if the workplace accidents that exposed him to uranium radiation had anything to do with his death.

When Tamme read about a federal compensation program for uranium workers, she called the hot line and asked for the forms. Four months later, the regional claims office in Denver is just beginning to process her claim, asking her for medical records that were destroyed decades ago.

Of the 13,500 claims filed, 310 checks have been sent. Many claims have been waiting for supporting medical evidence.

Meantime, neither Tamme nor the claims workers knew that another government agency had the records all along for many employees.

A Labor Department official promised Friday to get to the bottom of the matter and make the records available.

Congress established the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program last fall to pay for workers who sickened or died from exposure to radiation or beryllium while working for private contractors making nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.

About 2,500 of those employees worked for what was then Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. in St. Louis or Weldon Spring. From 1942 to 1966, they processed uranium for atomic bombs.

When Congress set up the compensation program, the workers were called "warriors of the Cold War" whose contributions and suffering should be recognized.

But the two Cabinet departments charged with implementing the program have erected barrier after barrier, Tamme said.

"It sure has been a hassle to try to get any information," said Tamme, whose husband worked for Mallinckrodt. "For every avenue we've gone down, we've come to a roadblock."

The Department of Energy is the successor to the federal agency that hired the workers or their employers. It has a database of medical records and exposure measurements for every Mallinckrodt uranium worker and others who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s and '60s. In fact their exposure records - and cancer and death rates - helped establish occupational exposure limits the government uses today.

But the Department of Labor is processing the claims and has put the burden of medical proof on the claimants.

Peter Turcic, director of the compensation program, said Friday that he was unaware of the records. He declined to comment on why the Department of Energy did not make that information available.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy did not comment.

"I plan to discuss it with the (Energy) Department," Turcic said. "I will find out how we could get the information from them and pass it on to our claims people."

Meantime, Turcic said, people with claims for Mallinckrodt workers and others in the database should send a letter to their Department of Labor regional claims office authorizing the release of medical records by the Comprehensive Epidemiologic Database Resource.

In essence, the burden of establishing communication between the two departments is on the people seeking compensation.

"I apologize for that," Turcic said. "This is a new program. Everybody has been hired new. We provide training. As time goes on, I hope that things would improve."

A painful death at 33

Tamme said she was pleased to get the apology and the information on how to proceed. It has been a long time coming. She has cancer now, and she feels an urgency to get the claim settled, not so much for the money as for the recognition of what her family lost.

Her husband, James Adam Soukup, started working at Mallinckrodt Chemical Co.'s Broadway plant in 1949, right after he graduated from St. Louis Central High School.

He went to night school at Harris Teachers College and Washington University and earned a chemical engineering degree.

He moved with the operation to Weldon Spring in 1958 and was promoted in 1963 to supervisor of the unit that processed "scrap" uranium.

Soukup occasionally came home from work talking about a "close call" when he was sprayed with uranium-laden chemicals and had to shower off at the plant, Tamme said.

Shortly after the U.S. government closed the Weldon Spring plant in 1966, a biopsy showed that the painful lump under Soukup's arm was melanoma - a fast-growing, deadly skin cancer that already had spread to his lymph system. It soon showed up in his lungs and brain.

The last few weeks of his life, Soukup lost his sight and coughed up bloody pieces of lung, Tamme said.

He died five weeks after the diagnosis. He was 33. His widow, then 32, was left with two sons, ages 8 and 11.

She remarried two years later. Her second husband, Richard Tamme, died last year.

"We've had a good life," she said. "But this (claim) is for my boys."

And there's the question of justice, of Soukup's employer and his government coming clean on what they knew or suspected.

"They said it was not job-related," Tamme said, "but we always wondered."

In fact, the government had been collecting data on uranium workers almost from the beginning of the work on the first atomic bomb.

Each uranium worker got an annual physical exam. Each worker wore a badge to measure daily radiation exposure. Those records were maintained by the Atomic Energy Commission, then by the Department of Energy.

In 1979, government researchers began a cohort study of the collected records. Researchers recorded the names, medical histories and exposure measurements for 2,542 white men who worked with uranium from 1942 to 1966. The study excluded women and nonwhite men.

Of those who were studied, 837 had died by 1979. The study continued to record causes of death through 1988. Researchers estimated that workers were exposed to "200 times the contemporary maximum permissible concentration" of radioactive material.

A description of the records and the study is available online at cedr.lbl.gov, but details are not.

A "typical" worker was 30 years old and worked at Mallinckrodt for slightly more than five years. The study found "increases in a variety of cancers, particularly in those of the digestive and respiratory systems and prostate and brain cancer."

Privacy regulations prevent the government from releasing individual records, Turcic said.

There might be a way for an individual to retrieve those records from the Web site, but the database manager at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., could not be reached for comment last week.

Reporter Virginia Baldwin Gilbert: E-mail: vgilbert@post-dispatch.com Phone: 314-340-8345

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Nuclear Plant Neighbors Watch Security Closely

Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page SM02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43804-2001Nov16?language=printer

• Neighbors of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant and two others in Virginia are keeping a closer watch on the security measures implemented at the installations since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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Power Failure

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By H. JACK GEIGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/books/review/18GEIGERT.html?searchpv=nytToday

As every parent of young children surely knows by now, among the consequences of recent terrorist attacks, both physical and biological, are confusion, fear, profound insecurity and even depression among youngsters as they struggle to make sense of what is incomprehensible to them. Few stories are more poignant than the account of the New York first grader, glimpsing bodies falling from the flaming World Trade Center, who cried out, ''Look, teacher, the birds are on fire!'' Mental health organizations -- and even the federal Department of Health and Human Services -- have rushed to provide counseling and advice to parents and teachers on how to respond. For older children and pre-teenagers, an honest and clear presentation of both the facts and the uncertainties, together with reasoned reassurance, is a recommended path to the restoration of trust and the mastery of fear.

That is, in a sense, what Wilborn Hampton has attempted in ''Meltdown,'' his account of a potential disaster, similarly accompanied by early incomprehension, continuing uncertainty, scientific confusion and fear of a seemingly invisible and unpredictable but terrifying threat.

The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pa., took place in 1979. Hampton, then a United Press International reporter covering the accident and the subsequent crisis (and now an editor at The New York Times Book Review), sets out to explain what happened, from beginning to end. He does so not by writing a retrospectively objective history. Instead, the reader views Three Mile Island through his reporter's eyes, as he gives a day-by-day account of his attendance at unsatisfying press conferences by nuclear engineers and government officials, his visits to nearby communities turned into ghost towns by the flight of panicked residents, his images of the looming cooling towers of the plant and his own struggle to understand the threat.

Hampton used this technique with great success in his ''Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter's Story.'' It is at least partly successful here because, wisely, he buttresses the narrative account with diagrams and drawings of the basic structures of nuclear power plants, the accident itself and the consequent threats.

In reasonably simple terms, he attempts to explain the basics of radiation and its effects on humans, the risks of the hydrogen bubble that formed within the reactor and the threat of an explosion and fire, and the nature and potential devastation of the worst-case scenario, a nuclear meltdown, a ''China Syndrome.'' The day-by-day approach draws a vivid picture -- the reader sees it as Hampton saw it -- of a developing crisis, the frenzied efforts to understand and control it, and its successful resolution.

Three Mile Island was an important, even historic, event, and there are far too few efforts as good as this one to engage older children in a serious but lively explanation of what happened, why it mattered and its present significance. Not the least of this book's rewards is the implicit message that dangerous possibilities can be controlled by a combination of expertise, bravery, wisdom and just plain muddling through. That has some contemporary relevance.

Because Three Mile Island was a much more complex story, scientifically and in its real physical threat to large populations, than was the Kennedy assassination, there are some limitations in Hampton's account. The diagrams purporting to explain how a nuclear power plant works, essential to a real understanding of the accident, are likely to be unfathomable to many young readers; there are far clearer alternatives already in print. Terms like ''radioactive steam'' and ''containment vessel'' appear frequently without sufficient definition. An important later analysis of the accident, which showed that the risks were greatest at a time when the authorities were most reassuring, and much less during the time (the hydrogen bubble) of their greatest fear, is not included. Backyard fallout shelters and schoolchildren's ''duck and cover'' exercises are described with no mention of their fundamental absurdity.

A more important problem is conceptual. ''Meltdown'' begins with the first atomic bombs at Alamagordo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ends with Chernobyl, a historical sequence that, despite careful but very brief disclaimers, may obscure for young readers the fact that these are vastly different events, operating through entirely different mechanisms. A nuclear power plant, even one in trouble, is not like a bomb.

There is no operating nuclear plant in the United States with a vulnerable design like that of Chernobyl. A triptych of photographs on the back cover only reinforces this notion. There are real and important controversies over nuclear power, which Hampton refers to often, but they do not require such frightening statements as ''After all, no one wants to carry a Geiger counter on every trip to the grocery store just to measure the radiation in the food.'' Or even worse, ''And no one wants to increase the possibility that children might be born with horrible deformities or face early death from cancer.''

It is no fault of either author or publisher that ''Meltdown'' arrives at such a bad time of national -- and children's -- anxiety. But what might have been read as accurate and dispassionate statements, even as a reassuring demonstration that a crisis can be controlled, now have an eerie similarity to current events. We are told early on that with the unleashing of the atom ''the world became a much more terrifying place.'' There are frequent references to invisible terror, and Hampton (though meaning only to refer to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) writes of people around the world who live with fears never far from their minds. These are legitimate aspects of the story that unfolded more than two decades ago, but some parents will have to make a judgment call, to decide whether these descriptions might be inadvertent reinforcements of the contemporary fears of a child who is already burdened by today's headlines.

H. Jack Geiger is a founding member and former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

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A Landscape in Peril

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By TIMOTHY EGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/magazine/18UTAH.html?searchpv=nytToday

Well before German marks and drachmas began showing up at the City Market in Moab, before Lycra became the second skin of nearly every visitor, even before cell phones became tourists' essential companions, the novelist and wilderness defender Edward Abbey wrote about the enduring paradox of Utah's canyon country: it is ''the least inhabited, least developed, least improved, least civilized, most arid, most hostile, most lonesome, most grim bleak barren desolate and savage quarter of the state of Utah -- the best part by far.''

A dozen years after Abbey's death, the ''savage quarter'' is anything but lonesome, though it may still be best part of Utah. Carved by the Colorado River and fine-sculptured by a frisky wind, the high, dry land of southeast Utah has become one of the foremost playgrounds for people on fat tires, four tires, rubber rafts and all manner of transport in between.

A shout still falls away in the white light of a desert afternoon. Stars still press through the inky bowl of a night sky. And the canyons, arches, spires and sandstone monuments are as immutable as ever in their demonstration of the slow clock of geologic time. But there is a sense around Moab that these natural wonders have too quickly become commodities, and that those who want to play among the canyons cannot do so all at once.

Moabites complain that their town and surrounding country, dubbed the mountain-biking capital of the world, have been ''Aspenized.'' I'm not exactly sure what that term means, but having heard it thrown around the West in conjunction with words usually reserved for people who start forest fires, I know it's not a good thing.

On the famous Slickrock Trail, just a pedal push outside Moab, mountain bikes are tire to tire -- more than 100,000 cyclists a year. All-terrain vehicles have torn up much of the fragile crust of the open land and eroded many of the back roads. Hyper-recreating tourists, park rangers say, are having the same effect on the terrain that mining and excessive grazing once did. Federal land managers have tried to keep campgrounds from becoming outdoor garbage dumps, and to teach people that what holds the canyon country together is a living skin that, once torn, can cause the ground to unravel. Still, as Bill Stevens, a Bureau of Land Management recreation specialist in Moab, says, ''everything seems to be getting just a little out of hand.''

The base elements of the canyon country -- sun, stone, wind, a wilderness of eroded rock and mazes -- used to repel people. It was a place for pygmy rattlesnakes, scorpions and howl-at-the-moon spiritualists. Abbey's book ''Desert Solitaire'' was based on two seasons spent near Moab, but now the title seems oxymoronic. Moab was a half-dead mining village with a couple of hard-edged taverns inhabited by men with chiggers in their beards. Old-timers, people who have lived in Moab since the days when Kokopelli was still a flute-playing legend and not real estate development, say a person could fall asleep in the middle of Main Street and not worry about a car coming by for hours.

What this area always had going for it was a surfeit of magnificent scenery -- Canyonlands National Park, southwest of town, Arches National Park, to the north, and more than two million acres of open terrain run by the Bureau of Land Management.

The Anasazi, of course, were all over the Colorado Plateau, leaving their closed-up stone apartments, their rock art of legless anthropomorphs and their pottery with its zigzags to eternity for later generations to puzzle over and interpret. Another group of inhabitants, Mormon settlers in the 1870's, named their town Moab after the biblical kingdom that was just short of the Promised Land. And short it remained, as a succession of ranchers and farmers tried to scratch a living out of the red dirt. The cold war gave a boost to uranium mining, transforming Moab into a boom town in the 1950's. But, as with all mining bubbles, the bust soon followed, and Moab settled into a slouch toward the grave.

A couple of John Wayne films, ''Rio Grande'' and ''The Comancheros,'' and a biblical epic in which Wayne had a bit part, ''The Greatest Story Ever Told,'' were filmed around Moab. It looked -- and felt -- empty and, at times, haunting.

Then, about 15 years ago, the canyon country was rediscovered, in frenzied fashion. Visitors to Arches National Park more than tripled in 20 years, from 269,489 in 1979 to 869,980 in 1999, and grew sixfold in Canyonlands during the same period, to 446,527. And the Bureau of Land Management property, once confined to lonely rockhounds, a handful of desert cowboys and a few petroglyph buffs, are now visited by more than a million people a year, in the estimate of federal officials in Utah, who say accurate counts are hard to come by.

In the early stages of the tourist boom, visitors came out of archaeological curiosity, or to roam and search for solitude. The canyon country is anything but linear, and it's not easy to read. Distances are deceptive. Temperatures can fall as much as 50 degrees from late afternoon to midnight. Humans can get swallowed in labyrinths of sandpapered rock. Afternoon thunderstorms can turn trickles into torrents, flooding canyons and stranding hikers. There are plenty of old mining roads all over the canyon country, but most of them are not marked. But the rewards for the visitor were, and still are, a sense of discovery and adventure in one of the last places in the continental United States to be fully mapped and charted.

Then came the toys, motorized and pedal powered, and, before long, Moab was mobbed, a town of barely 6,000 people with almost 2,000 hotel rooms. Mountain bikes did to Moab what surfboards did to remote beaches on Maui; the little town started to show up on lists of the best places for mountain biking and four-wheeling. Europeans, in particular, took to the odd-shaped features and pastel colors of the land.

Biking and Jeep clubs held jamborees, parties and field trips for masses of people. The shoulder seasons stretched into the winter. Spring-break keggers, built around daddy's Jeep and bonfires on public land, became a regular cause for a ranger's headache. All of this was good for an economy that had undergone a near-death experience, but the people who run the public lands saw it differently.

For one thing, the rangers know that the wrinkled topography of the canyon country is not a simple desert with a grand river running through it. The ground is alive and held together by a cryptobiotic crust, a thin tangle of lichens, bacteria, mosses and other components. Jeep and bike trails lead to its destruction. Park managers have tried to get people to stay on the maintained roads, but it has been a hit-or-miss effort. And once people get into the red rock maze, and get lost, they want immediate help.

''We get these cell phone calls all the time from people in their Jeeps who say, 'I'm lost and you need to come help me, but I can't tell you where I am,' '' Stevens says.

Land managers worry that arches that predate the arrival of the first humans on the continent could be chipped or marred by the most recent visitors, or that the innumerable Anasazi sites in the south could be vandalized. Increasingly, the rangers have had to referee conflicts between the different groups scrambling for their piece of the canyon country -- hikers versus bikers, horseback riders versus four-wheelers, target shooters versus bird-watchers -- as new extreme sports are invented. The latest craze around Moab is base jumping, in which people with parachutes fall from the tops of tall spires and cliffs. The life insurance industry is not crazy about it.

Park rangers, whose dual mandate is to provide recreational ground for the public and to preserve it for future generations, have placed limits on back-country permits to certain areas, trying to funnel visitors into well-maintained campgrounds and encouraging them to follow desert etiquette on the fragile land. They report some success, and also say that visitor traffic has started to level off. But the people who run the Bureau of Land Management acreage -- with a small staff and few guidelines -- say they are dealing with something close to recreational anarchy.

Moab, like other golden settings in the West, may now be expanding from a tourist economy to real estate. Plans are well under way to develop 150 condominiums, a 225-room lodge and 110 houses on two-acre sites in a development called Cloudrock. It won't be long, some fear, until the local people become props -- as they are in Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. -- bused into town from distant places where housing is more affordable.

But many visitors are already moving on to the ''next Moab,'' the other canyon country hamlets where espresso huts and bike-rental shops have sprouted overnight, places like Blanding, Monticello, Mexican Hat and Bluff. Within a few years, all will most likely lose their anonymity.

Abbey's biggest fear, as he celebrated this formerly underappreciated patch of America, was that people would run their motorized vehicles through places he considered holy. After all, he wrote, you can't drive a car into church.

Timothy Egan, who writes for The Times from Seattle, is the author of ''Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West'' (Vintage).

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Driving Past The Point [Mary McGrory quotes PSR]

By Mary McGrory
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44447-2001Nov17?language=printer

President George W. Bush told President Vladimir Putin that he is "the kind of guy I'd like to have in a foxhole with me." Apparently the feeling is mutual. As the two tootled around Texas, they seemed almost giddy with the promise of relief that each offered to the other.

Bush's dearest dream, of course, is to build a national missile defense system. Putin got the red carpet at Crawford because he hints at giving Bush the glad news that he can have his cake and eat it, too. Putin indicates that the ABM Treaty, the cornerstone of arms control, can be bent without being broken, so that certain presently outlawed missile defense tests can go forward.

Nothing definite was said by either side. Bush urged generalities at a remarkable joint news conference at the local high school, but we can assume that a quid pro quo came up before or after the barbecue that Putin pronounced "a masterpiece of cooking." Putin surely found a moment to mention his obsession, Chechnya.The Russian president wants Bush, and the rest of the world, to see the separatist province as another hotbed of terrorism and that the rebels whom Moscow has so savagely fought are "Islamic bandits." To line up the leader of the global crusade against terrorism would be worth the trip for Putin. Bush had already vouched for the "heart and soul" of the former KGB agent.

What we should all hope is that the two new best friends discussed something else as they drove around Crawford -- Bush had to break it gently to Putin that real Texans ride their ranches in trucks, not on horses. The Cooperative Threat Reduction program, launched 10 years ago by senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, may not have been on their agenda, but threat reduction could have more to do with surviving terrorism -- particularly nuclear terrorism -- than missile defense or Chechnya.

The crucial topic was discussed at a news conference held by the Physicians for Social Responsibility at the National Press Club the day after Putin arrived in Washington. (PSR is an affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.) It is not a group that Bush heeds closely since it advocates the elimination of all nuclear weapons and the placing of all fissionable materials under international control.

Putin and Bush were supposed to be at the point of announcing reductions of approximately two-thirds of their nuclear stockpiles, but nothing definite was said. The scientists and doctors think that's all very well -- although John Pastore says both sides will still have "unconscionable and totally unnecessary nuclear arsenals" -- but they want the president to increase funding for the Nunn-Lugar program. It monitors the notoriously sloppy and casual Russian handling of its nuclear stockpiles and fissionable materials and keeps watch over plutonium and highly enriched uranium stocks. The Bush administration cut $1 million from the funding for this excellent program -- one that could save us from the unspeakable consequences of having these materials fall into the hands of terrorists.

Bush has not had anything to say since the presidential campaign about these efforts, and if he is not thinking about them during his week of glory, it is understandable. Not since George Washington has an American president had a more glorious string of successes.

A sudden, complete reversal of fortune set in in Afghanistan. A week ago, there was hand-wringing over the Northern Alliance, which suddenly came to life, knocked over Mazar-e Sharif, surged into Kabul and ended all whining about the slow pace of the war. Pictures of terrified refugees and wretched little child victims of our bombs were replaced with cascades of happy, grateful Afghans -- women daring to show their faces, men gleefully cutting their beards. Eight jubilant Western aid workers were freed from Taliban prisons. The Taliban evaporated.

The commander in chief, reveling in his vindication, simultaneously made his debut as a peacenik willing to slash nuclear stockpiles. Osamabin Laden is still at large, an Airbus with 260 aboard fell out of the sky in New York and the economy is tanking, but everything is coming up roses in Afghanistan at the moment.

The president has every reason to be thankful, but the doctors and proliferation experts are warning us that we have to persuade him to take other steps to make a safer world. What will protect us from "collateral damage" -- military-speak for 100,000 dead -- is not a missile defense shield but a serious program of straightening out Russia's nuclear mess. Nunn-Lugar makes it possible to offer Russia's nuclear scientists some other kind of future than slipping secrets or plutonium to aspiring terrorists, who will not be deterred by missile defense. When Bush and Putin meet again, let's hope that they get down to cases.

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Ridge Defends His Role as 'Coordinator'
Security Chief Sees Advantages in Not Grabbing the Helm

By Eric Pianin and David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47135-2001Nov17?language=printer

Fearing that the Energy Department might soon start shipping weapons-grade plutonium to his state despite the lingering threat of terrorism, South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges (D) recently turned to the new homeland security director for help.

Hodges urged Tom Ridge to intervene with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to ensure that there would be no plutonium deliveries to the Savannah River nuclear plant until a dispute over security and storage was resolved. Ridge expressed concern -- but did nothing to influence the decision when he conferred with Abraham at the Energy Department on Thursday.

"Part of my job is to coordinate," he explained in an interview. "I'm not going to make that technical decision."

Though he was handpicked by a wartime president and given the broadest mandate possible to help in the recovery and to defend the nation against further acts of terrorism, Ridge is groping his way in a critical new office that is heavy on responsibility but light on line authority and budget clout.

Having been thrown into the deep end of the bureaucratic pool with little guidance on how to survive, Ridge has chosen not to make waves. That has meant being a collaborator in crisis management, rather than trying to test his authority or throwing his weight around.

A number of government veterans argue strongly that without more formal power, Ridge is being set up to fail. "You've got this magnificent person straight from central casting with terrific leadership capabilities and credibility and experience," said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of national drug control policy in the Clinton administration. "But he has an inadequate mechanism to do the job. Six months from now, there's a danger that he will turn into little more than the speaker's bureau for homeland defense."

McCaffrey's assessment carries added weight because he experienced frustrations of his own in trying to direct the government's war on drugs with a small White House staff, limited resources and no statutory authority from Congress. Many lawmakers, including Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, and Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry (R-Tex.), have repeatedly warned that Ridge is in danger of becoming "another drug czar" unless Congress acts to create a permanent homeland security post with a large staff and consolidated government agencies under it.

But Ridge and other White House officials disagree, saying that Ridge can do more as a senior adviser with the president's mandate and a large staff of people detailed from other agencies than as the head of a separate federal bureaucracy. Ridge is operating with a skeletal staff of about 30 aides; the operation is planned to expand to nearly 100 members by early next year, about the size of the National Security Council staff.

Since he was sworn in as homeland security director on Oct. 8 and moved into a tiny West Wing office down the hall from his longtime friend President Bush, the former Pennsylvania governor has served as chief spokesman and troubleshooter, issuing warnings and reassurances as he looks for gaps in the government's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the mysterious appearance of anthrax spores in the mail.

"He's comfortable that his role is not to micromanage but to bring people together," said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, a friend of Ridge's and a former governor herself.

Ridge has rarely sought to impose his will on other Cabinet members. And the few tangible accomplishments he can point to are modest.

When Michigan Gov. John Engler (R) tried to keep National Guard troops on duty helping customs agents clear the way for workers and goods to cross the bridges from Canada, he was frustrated by bureaucratic and financial barriers. "I made one call to Tom Ridge," Engler said Friday, "and the red tape got cut and the decisions were made."

In another case, Ridge shifted money in the budget so the U.S. Postal Service could quickly buy equipment to irradiate mail that might contain anthrax spores.

Ridge also coaxed Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to announce plans to create a national terrorist tracking system that would consolidate federal intelligence capabilities.

On the other hand, New Orleans Mayor Marc H. Morial (D), the head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said that while the bipartisan group "had great meetings with Ridge" several weeks ago, that did not prevent the administration from supporting a reduction in funds for the local law enforcement block grant, "the only pool of money we have for police overtime and other domestic costs of the war on terrorism." Morial added: "I do not know if Ridge did weigh in or could have weighed in. But the administration position did not change."

Because he is technically responsible for coordinating law enforcement and intelligence operations, Ridge has had to shoulder some of the blame for the government's failure to uncover the source of the anthrax spores in the mail or to track down the accomplices to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"The intensity of the [anthrax] investigation I'm sure will never be appreciated because there is so much uncertainty and so much fear," Ridge said. "But the public ought to be assured that the resources of the attorney general and the FBI and state and local officials and postal inspectors are being used . . . to try to identify that source."

Ridge, 56, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a former House member, served nearly seven years as governor before he was tapped by Bush to relieve the president and Vice President Cheney of the major worry of guarding American soil from further attacks.

In announcing the appointment during a nationally televised address before Congress on Sept. 20, Bush said that Ridge would "lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism, and respond to any attacks that may come."

Ridge was given the responsibility for coordinating nearly 50 federal agencies and departments, overseeing everything from the interaction between the FBI and the CIA on intelligence to working with governors, mayors and state agencies to prepare for potential attacks. Once the president had declared that Ridge was his surrogate on homeland defense issues, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said, "I can't imagine any Cabinet officer would be dumb enough to challenge that."

While usually deferential to Cabinet members, Ridge abruptly summoned Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Thompson and government scientists to a damage control meeting at the White House on Oct. 24 after a breakdown in communications between the FBI and public health officials slowed the response to the crisis in Washington, where two postal workers died of inhalation anthrax.

"It just seemed to me that [the government] wasn't moving as quickly as it has got to move in a crisis," Ridge explained. "You've got to move. You've got to be agile. You've got to share information quicker."

Postal officials credited Ridge with prodding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin examining the potential health hazard to workers at the Brentwood postal distribution facility in Washington before the first case of inhalation anthrax was confirmed. Deborah Willhite, Postal Service senior vice president, said Ridge had a positive, "interactive" relationship with postal officials.

Some lawmakers, mayors, governors and police have complained about the two FBI national alerts that warned of imminent terrorist attacks that never materialized. Ridge said last week that officials are reviewing proposals for the creation of a more sophisticated federal system -- modeled after a military intelligence network -- that would call for different levels of response, depending on the quality of the warnings. He noted that they are also studying plans for alerting state and local law enforcement agencies and officials about the possibility of a terrorist attack without making a public announcement.

"I think everybody is still struggling mightily to come up with the right thing to do," he said.

Ridge concedes that he has lost sleep worrying about all of the potential threats to the country, including the possibility of bioterrorist attacks using anthrax spores or the smallpox virus. On Thursday, he said that it is "common sense" to assume that terrorists might strike again in retaliation for the collapse of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, amid reports that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network may have been trying to develop chemical and nuclear weapons.

"I think we have the capacity to deal with whatever any enemy or enemies can throw in our direction," Ridge said during an interview. "But there's a need to establish priorities and to build as quickly as possible the capacity to respond to the widest range of threats."

Staff writer Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

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We Must Act As If He Has The Bomb

By Graham Allison
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44450-2001Nov17?language=printer

Letters to the Editor: mailto:OPED@washpost.com

The question is suddenly urgent: Could the inconceivable happen? President Bush has previously warned the world that Osama bin Laden is seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction. Now, bin Laden himself claims to have chemical and nuclear weapons -- and "the right to use them." We cannot know for certain whether he is bluffing, but Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has confirmed that documents detailing how to make nuclear weapons have been found in an al Qaeda safe house in Kabul. And we can certainly expect that as the noose tightens aroundthe terrorist's neck, he and his associates will become increasingly desperate.

All of this means that, incredible as the possibility remains even in the aftermath of Sept. 11, we must now seriously contemplate that bin Laden's final act could be a nuclear attack on America.

The consequences of such an attack would far outstrip the horror we have already witnessed. Imagine that al Qaeda had struck the World Trade Center not with a van filled with explosives, as in 1993, nor with planes fully loaded with jet fuel, but with an SUV containing a nuclear device. Even a crudedevice could create an explosive force of 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT, demolishing an area of about three square miles. Not only the World Trade Center, but all of Wall Street and the financial district and the lower tip of Manhattan up to Gramercy Park would have disappeared. Hundreds of thousands of people would have died suddenly. In Washington, if such a vehicle exploded near the White House, an area reaching as far as the Jefferson Memorial would be immediately and completely destroyed, and a larger area, extending from the Pentagon to beyond the Capitol, would suffer damage equal to that caused to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

That same year, in a Post op-ed, I warned: "In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out." I was fortunately wrong about the timing, but I believe the same estimate can be made with even greater justification today. The question is whether the outrage of Sept. 11 will now motivate the United States and other governments to act urgently to minimize the risk of nuclear mega-terrorism.

Unhappily, the evidence to date is not encouraging.

As the Bush administration took office in January, a bipartisan task force, chaired by former Senate majority leader Howard Baker (now ambassador to Japan) and former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, presented a report card on non-proliferation programs with Russia. The task force's principal finding was that "the most urgent unmet national security threat [my emphasis] to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen, sold to terrorists or hostile nation states, and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home." The danger can be summarized in three propositions. First, attempts to steal nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material are not hypothetical, but a recurring fact. The past decade has seen scores of incidents in which individuals and groups have successfully stolen weapons material from sites in Russia and sought to export it -- but have been caught. Just in the past month, the chief of the Russian defense ministry directorate responsible for nuclear weapons reported two recent incidents in which terrorist groups unsuccessfully attempted to break into Russian nuclear storage sites. In the mid-1990s, more than 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium -- enough material to allow terrorists to build more than 20 nuclear weapons -- sat unprotected in Kazakhstan. Recognizing the danger, the American government purchased the material and removed it to a Department of Energy facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Second, if al Qaeda or some similar group obtained 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium, or less than half that weight in plutonium, it could, with materials otherwise available off the shelf, produce a nuclear device in less than a year. Obtaining such fissionable material -- an ingredient that is fortunately difficult and expensive to manufacture -- is in fact the only high hurdle to creating a nuclear device. But as a director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories wrote a quarter of a century ago, "If the essential nuclear materials like these are in hand, it is possible to make an atomic bomb using the information that is available in the open literature." An even easier alternative is a radioactivity dispersal device, a conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive materials that disperse as fallout when the bomb explodes.

Third, terrorists would not find it difficult to sneak such a nuclear device into the United States. The nuclear material required is actually smaller than a football. Even a fully assembled device,such as a suitcase nuclear weapon, could be shipped in a container, in the hull of a ship or in a trunk carried by an aircraft. Since Sept. 11, the number of containers arriving at U.S. points of entry that are being X-rayed has increased to approximately 10 percent: 500 of the 5,000 containers currently arriving daily at the port of New York/New Jersey, for instance. But as the chief executive of CSX Lines, one of the foremost container-shipping companies, put it: "If you can smuggle heroin in containers, you may be able to smuggle in a nuclear bomb."

If bin Laden and other terrorists have not so far succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons, or materials from which to assemble them, we should give thanks for our great good fortune. If they have acquired them -- as bin Laden now claims -- most people will quickly conclude that, under existing conditions, this was bound to happen.

There can be little doubt that bin Laden and his associates would carry out a nuclear assault were they capable of doing so. Last year, the CIA intercepted a message in which a member of al Qaeda boasted of plans for a "Hiroshima" against America. According to the Justice Department indictment for the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, "At various times from at least as early as 1993, Osama bin Laden and others, known and unknown, made efforts to obtain the components of nuclear weapons." Additional evidence supplied by a former member of al Qaeda describes the group's attempts to buy uranium of South African origin, repeated travels to three Central Asian states to try to buy a complete warhead or weapons-usable material, and discussions with Chechens in which money and drugs were offered for nuclear weapons. Bin Laden himself has declared that acquiring nuclear weapons is a "religious duty."

Preventing nuclear terrorist attacks on the American homeland will require a serious, comprehensive defense -- not for months or years, but far into the future. The response must stretch from aggressive prevention and preemption to deterrence and active defenses. Strict border controls will be as important to America as ballistic-missile defenses.

To fight the immediate threat, the United States must move smartly on two fronts. First, no effort can be spared in the military, economic and diplomatic campaign to defeat and destroy al Qaeda, and in the international intelligence and law-enforcement effort to discover and disrupt al Qaeda sleeper cells and interrupt attempted shipments of weapons.

Second, the United States must seize the opportunity of a more cooperative Russia to "go to the source" of the greatest danger today: the 99 percent or more of the world's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that are stored in Russia and the United States. The surest way to prevent nuclear assaultsis to prevent terrorists from gaining control of these weapons or materials from which to make them. President Bush acknowledged this in his joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Thursday, declaring that "Our highest priority is to keep terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction."

What the two presidents failed to announce, however, are concrete actions to achieve this objective. While theirsuccess in agreeing to cut the number of operational strategic nuclear weapons cannot be gainsaid, the stark reality is that this reduction has no effect on our most urgent unmet national security threat.

Bush and Putin should have announced that the United States and Russia would lead a new joint international undertaking to minimize the risks of nuclear terrorism, as well as terrorism by means of other weapons of mass destruction. They should have pledged to ensure that their respective governments will do everything physically and technically possible to prevent terrorists or criminals from stealing weapons or weapons-usable material from their stockpiles. They should have instructed their governments to develop a joint plan of action to concentrate weapons and materials in the fewest possible sites, secure them by the most technically advanced means, and neutralize highly enriched uranium by blending it down for subsequent use in civilian nuclear power plants. Within Russia,such a program should be jointly financed by the United States, its allies in the war against terrorism and Moscow.

Despite the successes of the past week, the long-term goals of our war on terrorism remain elusive, and the future no doubt holds frustrations as well as celebrations. In that light, calling upon leaders to act to prevent attacks of a kind that have not yet occurred may seem overly demanding. But if we fail to act on this agenda now, how shall we explain ourselves on the morning after a nuclear Sept. 11?

Graham Allison, an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton, is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the author of "Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy" (MIT Press). This article is revised and updated from a version that appeared in last week's Economist.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Laura Bush gives radio address, rips Taliban

USA Today
11/18/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/17/laura-bush.htm

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) - Laura Bush took the lead for the administration Saturday in the latest public effort to discredit the Taliban, decrying the ruling militia's "brutal oppression" of women in Afghanistan.

The campaign is meant to make restoring women's rights a priority when a new government emerges after the war.

While Mrs. Bush gave what aides said was the first weekly presidential radio address delivered in full by a first lady, Amnesty International said the U.S.-aided Northern Alliance and other Afghan opposition groups also have committed "heinous abuses" against women.

Her remarks closed out a week in which the Taliban showed signs of collapsing after abandoning several important cities. The United Nations top envoy for Afghanistan was trying to persuade the Northern Alliance to join other factions in a meeting outside the country on forming a transitional government.

The regime "is now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan, especially women, are rejoicing," Mrs. Bush said.

"Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists."

The first lady's address was broadcast on a day she and her husband spent on their Texas ranch. The president had a pair of security briefings, tinkered around the property and called German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to congratulate him for winning a vote of confidence Friday that backed his pledge of 3,900 troops in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Bush also signed a stopgap spending bill funding federal agencies whose regular appropriation measures have not been enacted since the government's fiscal year began Oct. 1

Mrs. Bush offered a catalog of examples of mistreatment of women and children - an account bolstered by a State Department report released Saturday.

Since taking Afghanistan's capital Kabul in 1996, the Taliban has prohibited schooling for girls over age 8, shut down the women's university, and forced women to quit their jobs, the report said. The Taliban restricted access to medical care for women and limited the ability of women to move about freely.

"With one of the world's worst human rights records, the Taliban has perpetrated egregious acts of violence against women, including rape, abduction and forced marriage," the report said.

Mrs. Bush and the State Department emphasized that her address was not aimed at most other Muslim nations. "Islam is a religion that respects women and humanity," the report stated.

But women face severe treatment in some other Muslim countries, including U.S. allies.

"Honor killings" are rampant in Islamic Pakistan, where men kill women they say have tarnished their reputations. Pakistan's independent Human Rights Commission has documented hundreds of attacks against women, some accused of simply looking in the direction of another man.

In Saudi Arabia, religious police financed by the Saudi government instruct women appearing in public to cover their hair and all of their faces with a black cloak, called an abaya, except for a slit revealing the eyes - much like the Afghan cloak called the burqa. If they disobey, they can face possible fines or even jail.

Women in Saudi Arabia are prohibited from many professions including law and engineering. The monarchy that runs Saudi Arabia imposes a style of Islam that does not allow women to drive or travel alone.

In Kuwait, women cannot vote or run for office.

Yemen and Pakistan have deeply conservative tribal areas where women are essentially required by local traditions to stay at home, to not work and to stay fully covered.

"We welcome the (administration's) statements, but we should be more universal rather than just speaking out against Afghanistan," said T. Kumar, advocacy director for Asia at Amnesty International USA.

There were more documented cases of women raped by members of the Northern Alliance when its leaders controlled the country in the early 1990s than there were during the Taliban's reign, Kumar said.

When alliance forces took control of the Afghan city of Khwaja Bahauddin, the first order they issued was to ban women from singing in public, according to a private news agency that reports on religious freedoms.

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Taliban defenders offer conditional surrender

USA Today
11/18/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/18/taliban-quit.htm

BANGI, Afghanistan (AP) - The Taliban offered on Sunday to surrender their last northern stronghold if Arab and other foreign fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden in the city are spared, an anti-Taliban commander said. The Northern Alliance, meanwhile, agreed to a conference on neutral ground to plan a multiethnic government. The offer to surrender Kunduz came after U.S. bombers unleashed their heaviest strikes so far on the city.

Warplanes also were reported in action near the Taliban southern stronghold of Kandahar and areas of eastern Afghanistan where bin Laden is believed to maintain camps and hide-outs.

In Washington, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the advances on the ground were reducing bin Laden's room to maneuver. "We think that the more that we are stripping away his protection ... that we're beginning to narrow his possibilities for hiding," Rice said on CNN's Late Edition.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Northern Alliance had agreed to take part in U.N.-brokered talks with other Afghan factions about forming a new power-sharing government in Afghanistan.

The head of the alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, said Saturday that his group supported such a conference but wanted it to take place in the capital, Kabul. The United Nations favors a neutral site.

After talks in Tashkent, Uzbekistan with U.S. envoy James Dobbins, the alliance's foreign minister, Abdullah, said the meeting "will be held outside Afghanistan," possibly as early as this week.

That would represent a major concession by the alliance, which clearly wanted the conference to take place in a city under its control. Abdullah said some locations proposed by the United Nations "were acceptable to us," citing Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

"It is my understanding based on the discussions we had today that the issues of venue and timing of such a meeting are agreed," Dobbins said.

The United States had been putting heavy pressure on the Northern Alliance to drop Kabul as a venue for the talks. Powell expressed hopes the meeting organized by the top U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, would take place in days.

"We've got to get this moving," Powell said on Fox News Sunday.

He told ABC's This Week that the United States believes any new power structure in Afghanistan should include women. However, he said, "we're not going to dictate what they do with their government."

Rice echoed those comments.

"We have to remember that Afghanistan is a place where women were educated, where girls were educated, where lots of women were doctors and teachers. This is not a new concept," she said on NBC's Meet the Press. "But certainly, we cannot choose the members of the next Afghan government."

The United States launched its military campaign against Afghanistan on Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, the top suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States.

The Afghan Islamic Press, a private Pakistan-based news agency, reported more than 70 people were killed by U.S. bombing around Kandahar and in eastern Nangarhar province. The claim could not be independently verified.

B-52s struck Taliban positions outside Kunduz, unleashing their biggest bombs yet in the area.

Flames shot into the air after bombs hit, and cracking booms carried across the valley floor toward the Northern Alliance's own foxholes in opposing ridges. Avalanches of soil cascaded down hillsides. Taliban soldiers could be seen running out on the distant ridges, trying to find cover.

Refugees fleeing Kunduz say a hard core of Taliban soldiers and allied Arab, Chechen and Pakistani fighters are in control after fleeing other districts across the north in the past week.

The refugees told of terror at the hands of Taliban troops and foreign fighters. The foreigners, fearing they will be killed if the city falls, were reportedly blocking Afghan Taliban trying to surrender.

One refugee, Dar Zardad, said Taliban killed eight boys in their late teens after some of the youths laughed at the militia fighters. Zardad and other refugees in Bangi, a village about 30 miles to the east, recounted how fighters shot and killed a doctor when he delayed responding to their summons to come treat wounded Taliban troops.

Witnesses said at least 100 Taliban soldiers were shot, apparently by gunmen from their own side, as they approached Northern Alliance lines in an attempt to surrender.

Still, Taliban leaders in the city were negotiating with alliance commanders by radio.

The Taliban said they would surrender if the alliance guaranteed that non-Afghans fighting alongside the Islamic militia would not be killed and if the surrender were witnessed by U.N. representatives, an alliance commander, Nahidullah, said in the city of Taloqan, about 40 miles to the east.

There was no immediate word whether the opposition alliance has accepted the offer. Northern Alliance forces had moved a multiple-rocket launcher and two tanks up to the road that is the eastern approach to Kunduz, but there was no sign an attack was imminent.

The Taliban were barring people from leaving Kunduz, telling them, "If you leave the USA will bomb all the city," said Zardad, the refugee. He said he made it out of the city only after Taliban beat him with their rifle butts.

Other refugees said Kunduz residents were hiding indoors and closing their shops for fear of summary execution by the Taliban. Foreign fighters, using local translators, were broadcasting loudspeaker announcements saying they would be taking the offensive against Northern Alliance troops laying siege to the city.

In the western city of Herat, Northern Alliance officials showed journalists a mass grave near Shindand military airport that they said contained the bodies of 27 anti-Taliban fighters massacred by the Taliban. They said the Taliban killed the men - many of whose bodies had bound hands - sometime before the Taliban fled the city last week.

In Kandahar, meanwhile, the Taliban appeared still in control despite a reported deal last week for their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, to leave the city. However, the situation there was said to be tense, and sources in the city, contacted by telephone from Pakistan, said the Taliban had extended the nighttime curfew to keep people off the streets.

The sources spoke on condition they not be named.

Afghan sources in Pakistan, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said a delegation of tribal leaders was in Kandahar trying to negotiate a transfer of power. The report could not be independently confirmed.

In Quetta, Pakistan, Ahmed Karzai, younger brother of anti-Taliban leader Hamid Karzai, said opposition forces clashed with Taliban fighters late Saturday in Uruzgan province north of Kandahar but had no further details.

Local leaders not connected to the Northern Alliance have taken control of several areas in southern Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance, which is made of several factions, has seized cities in the north.

Rabbani, whose faction is the biggest in the alliance, has never relinquished his claim to the presidency, though the Taliban forced him out of Kabul in 1996.

The alliance is largely made up of minorities - including ethnic Tajiks like Rabbani, Uzbeks and Shiite Muslims. The United Nations wants them to share power with Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group, from which the Taliban drew their strongest support.

------

TERRORIST'S COOKBOOK
A Taliban Researcher Practiced Crude Science

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ with DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/international/18CHEM.html?searchpv=nytToday

The man who left behind notes, drawings and technical reference books in a two-story private house in Kabul was probably someone with at most an undergraduate education in chemistry and physics who knew how to cook up crude explosives.

The man also had a taste for designing hopelessly futuristic weaponry and little understanding of the practical difficulties that would be involved in building it.

In voluminous sketches and jottings almost resembling notes for a would-be defense contractor's brochure, the man describes his concept for an ultrafast, stealthy fighter jet he names the Aladdin Ghoul.

"Welcome to Aladdin concept," the notes say in English. "It is designed with the fundamental guidelines that might seem ridiculously exaggerated, but in fact these fundamental guidelines are easily attainable."

Unfortunately for the Taliban's out-of-the-box thinker, his favored weaponry and propulsion systems - one of which may be based on an article in the November 2000 issue of Scientific American - would either be useless anywhere but in the vacuum of space or inapplicable to jets for practical reasons.

"Some of this stuff could be done by a good high school science fair student," said Douglas Olson, a chemist who manages blast testing at Wilfred Baker Engineering in San Antonio, Tex. "It's doodling concepts on paper." But Dr. Olson added: "This guy's been exposed to a number of concepts. That means he's been around awhile."

References to nuclear weapons, probably by the same person, may suffer from similar faults. But chemical formulas written by him and by another man, a Bosnian, who left notes behind at the Taliban defense ministry in the same quarter of Kabul, show clearly that they knew how to make crude explosives.

In an apparent reference to the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, one chemical formula at the defense ministry is annotated in Bosnian, "Was used in Oklahoma."

The intellectual resources available to the creator of the Aladdin Ghoul are not difficult to trace. Found in the house were pages from "Principles of Physics" by Michael Nelkon, a British physicist and educator who died in 1995.

First published in the 1950's and reprinted as recently as 1981, Dr. Nelkon's book is the equivalent of an advanced high school or beginning undergraduate text.

Photocopied pages from what is apparently a basic chemistry text covering standard topics like molecular bonding and inorganic reactions were also found.

But in a series of pages devoted to weapons, there are also detailed page-and-volume citations to a book identified only by its title, "Chemistry and Technology of Explosives."

Dr. Olson said the book was almost certainly a standard if somewhat dated reference book in his field by Tadeusz Urbanski, who is identified on the title page as having been in the department of technology at Warsaw Polytechnic. The book was first published in 1965 and is listed on Amazon.com as being out of print.

On papers at the house with notations like "how to make the bomb" and "how far you should be from the weapon," the writer includes chemical formulas for at least one World War I-era explosive related to TNT, called picric acid, which is easy to make but seldom used - except by terrorists - because it often explodes accidentally.

"If you wanted to make some in your bathtub and you were not as concerned about dying, you could make it more easily than you could make plastic explosive," said Douglas Raber, a terrorism expert and the director of the board on chemical sciences and technology at the National Research Council.

But the Aladdin Ghoul would be different. The writer calls it a "totally new unconventional fighter plane" and says it could be powered by a "hydrazine-fueled rocket" and a "simple solid state ramjet." Its "subdued heat signature" would make it almost impossible to detect, he says.

Referring to research at "University of Texas, Houston," he says it could have a devastating cannon based on electromagnetism.

The cannon may refer to research on a concept called a plasma jet by Edgar Bering, a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Houston, and colleagues at the nearby Johnson Space Flight Center.

The plasma jet was described in a November 2000 article in Scientific American by the leader of the effort, Dr. Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, an astronaut and a physicist. The plasma jet, still in its research stage, was designed as a propulsion system for long space voyages.

Researchers said the Aladdin Ghoul's propulsion systems would be impractical, and the supercannon would require nearly 10 percent of the entire worldwide output of electricity to be operated inside Earth's atmosphere.

"To run a plasma jet at sea level is completely prohibitive," Dr. Bering said. "You suck up all your energy in ionizing the atmosphere."

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Hair as a Battlefield for the Soul

November 18, 2001
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/weekinreview/18SCIO.html

WASHINGTON - CELEBRATING their liberation from Taliban rule in Afghanistan last week, men shaved off their beards, while women unveiled their faces and revealed bits of hair. Suddenly, ordinary people needed to show they had regained control over their looks. But why?

It helps to understand that the Muslim world today is waging two wars on overlapping battlefields: one between traditional interpretations of Islam and modernity, the other between the will of the state and the rights of the individual. Islamic scholars, lawyers and feminists debate laws and traditions governing such obviously serious issues as freedom of speech, divorce, inheritance, child custody, polygamy, flogging and stoning.

But the most visible manifestation of the Taliban's control over people has been the forced bearding of men and the forced veiling of the bodies and faces of women.

So the subject of hair is anything but trivial.

For women, the rules governing hair-covering stem from a passage from the Koran that states: "Say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty. . . . They should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their ornaments."

"Zinah," the Arabic word for ornament, has come to mean "hair." So, strictly speaking, women can go bareheaded only in front of other women, their husbands, fathers, sons, nephews, servants, slaves and children small enough to "'have no sense of the shame of sex."

But the Koranic verse itself is open to interpretation, and the Koran also states in many verses that there is no compulsion in Islam. That has prompted debates about - as well as experimentation with - the extent, color and design of hijab, or Islamic cover.

For men, there is even more confusion because there is no Koranic verse requiring that they grow beards. But the Prophet Muhammad had a beard, as had the prophets of Judaism and Christianity before him. So having a beard can be a visible symbol of being created by God. And many Muslim clerics over the centuries have written opinions strongly recommending beard- growing or even calling it an Islamic duty.

"In the world in which Islam was revealed, men kept their beards whether they were Christian, Jewish or Muslim," said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. "There were no beardless prophets. You never had a shaved Moses or Abraham or Jesus." ( Even today, he added, practitioners of other religions, like some rigorously Orthodox Jews, place great importance on men retaining facial hair and women not displaying their own hair.)

Over the centuries, the absence of a Koranic dictum on facial hair led to variety. According to some sayings attributed to Muhammad, the mustache should be too short to be placed in the mouth. Some Sufi dervishes responded by growing their mustaches long - to show their independence from the esoteric rules of organized religion. Other clerics claimed that although Muhammad had a good-sized beard, his mustache was thin, which prompted some pious Muslims to clip their mustaches short. Many Muslims who are averse to beards but believe shaving is wrong keep a short growth that they clip every few days. Decades ago, Communists in the Muslim Middle East sported Lenin-like goatees.

Under the Taliban, men were required to grow beards at least four inches long. The order was based on what some Islamic scholars believe is a somewhat spurious Islamic teaching, because traditionally, a man with a long beard meant one of two things: either he was of a venerable age or had great spiritual or intellectual authority. "Even in Egypt today, a long beard on a 22-year-old would be considered a sign of pretension," said Mr. Nasr. "You will not find many ordinary bakers with long beards unless they're 70 years old."

Choice - to veil or not, to shave or not - has been an issue in Islam for more than a century. In 1935, going even further then Turkey's secular modernizers, Reza Shah of Iran decreed that the wearing of traditional dress for both women and men was punishable by a prison term. The army and police roamed through villages to enforce the law, tearing the all-enveloping chador off women and handing out free Western-style suits to men. Reza Shah also forbade men to wear turbans. Mustaches were allowed (the shah wore one) but beards were forbidden, even for clerics, although the ban was only episodically enforced.

To many women, the veil was a source of protection, respect and virtue. In her 1992 memoir, "Daughter of Persia," Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the daughter of an Iranian Qajar prince, recalled her mother's bitter reaction to Reza Shah's edict: "He doesn't fear God, this evil shah - may God curse him for it!" Some women refused to leave home, some because they didn't want to be bareheaded in public, others to protest coercion.

For men of the cloth in Islam, a beard is essential. In the days of the Iranian monarchy, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is now Iran's spiritual leader, was humiliated by having his beard shaved and his turban removed during one period of imprisonment. A former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a midlevel cleric, is considered most unlucky because he has a few strands of hair on his face.

Perhaps the clearest rules about hair for Muslims govern those making the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are supposed to do once in their lives. That trip, the hajj, is a ritual of death, purification and renewal, and men are required to remove some of their hair, although they do not have to shave their heads. Men and women clip or shave their underarms and their pubic hair and during the hajj men let their facial hair grow. At the end of the hajj, men must go to barbers to clip or shave their hair.

One of the most confusing moments in the history of hair in the Muslim world in the 20th century came in the late 1960's, when Western hippies trekked through places like Iran and Afghanistan. For the Muslims who lived there, the long hair and beards were confusing. Westerners weren't supposed to look like that.

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STRATEGY
U.S. to Press Afghan Rebels Not to Form Government

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/international/18MILI.html

CRAWFORD, Tex., Nov. 17 - The Bush administration said today that it would apply intense pressure on the Northern Alliance, newly in control of Kabul and much of Afghanistan, not to create a government on its own but to fulfill its promise to let the United Nations put together a broad coalition to rule the country.

At the same time, after a meeting of the National Security Council conducted from President Bush's ranch here this morning, the administration also vowed to vigorously prosecute the war against remaining Taliban holdouts. It pledged, as well, to refocus its efforts on crushing Al Qaeda, the terrorist network, and its surviving leaders, who apparently include Osama bin Laden.

"Nobody is declaring any victory," President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said in a telephone conversation from Washington after this morning's teleconference. "This phase of the war will end only when the objective is met and Al Qaeda is no longer capable of wreaking havoc," Ms. Rice said.

She spoke as the president and his aides grew increasingly concerned about reports that the Northern Alliance was already putting together the rudiments of a government in Kabul, one that Washington fears could exclude the dominant Pashtun ethnic group and rekindle the kind of internal strife that plagued the country until the Taliban took over in 1996. Today, the former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, returned to Kabul, five years after he lost power. His critics quickly warned him not to seize power again, saying his rule was a violent failure that led to the Taliban's dominance.

The United Nations is urgently trying to figure out a way to install a broad-based government, and the United States, Russia, Britain and France are all telling the Northern Alliance that even in the flush of victory, it should not declare the formation of a new government.

"The fact is that Kabul fell much more quickly than any of us expected," a senior administration official said today, noting that at a news conference on Tuesday at the White House Mr. Bush had warned the alliance against occupying Kabul. Within hours, they did just that.

"But it should be very clear to the Northern Alliance that you cannot have a declared government" that is dominated by the minority ethnic groups that make up the alliance, the senior official said. "We need the United Nations in, and we cannot have a vacuum of power."

In Ottawa, the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, joined in the chorus of those asking the alliance to refrain from establishing its own regime.

Today's national security meeting and other sessions of top officials dealt largely with how to refocus the American military effort on hunting down Al Qaeda leaders. "There are conditions that have to be met here," Ms. Rice said. "Loosening the grip of the Taliban was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The Al Qaeda network and its leadership has to be destroyed."

Mr. Bush has said nothing in public about Afghanistan since the scale of the Taliban's retreat became evident in the last week. An official who has dealt with Mr. Bush often said he had shown no signs of celebrating the Taliban's defeat, and had focused instead on the changing strategy. It is a risky moment for the president, because the battle has moved from one of air power to one of ground operations, with hundreds of American commandos fanning out across the country. The chances of American casualties have risen dramatically, officials concede, but they believe that weeks of reminders to Americans about the stakes in the battle against terrorism have psychologically prepared Americans for losses.

Today the Taliban confirmed that Mr. bin Laden's top aide, Muhammad Atef, a former Egyptian police officer suspected of planning the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, had been killed by American bombs near Kabul.

The Taliban envoy to Pakistan said today that Mr. bin Laden had left Afghanistan "with his children and his wives," but a senior administration official said that "we have no evidence that is true." Twice last week Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said he thought Mr. bin Laden might try to escape the country, perhaps taking a helicopter through jagged mountain valleys where he could not be tracked by American radar.

Taliban troops were surrounded in Kandahar, their stronghold in the south, which seems increasingly likely to fall. But American officials said there were no indications that the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, was seeking a negotiated surrender of the city.

"We have thousands of troops in Kandahar and in the provinces around it and we have decided to fight to retain control of them to maintain Islamic rule," Muhammad Tayeb al-Agha, a spokesman for Mullah Omar, said on Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network based in Qatar. The Taliban foreign ministry spokesman, Maulvi Najibullah, also declared that its forces would not give up Kandahar, Reuters reported.

Pentagon officials reported that the military situation in and around Kandahar appeared to be violent and unpredictable. Continued fighting was also reported at Jalalabad, which lies between Kabul and the border with Pakistan in the east, and at Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

One official said the Pentagon had received reports that Mullah Omar had been encouraging Taliban forces inside Kandahar to continue fighting. This official added that there appeared to be some Taliban commanders trapped inside Kandahar who wanted to defect. But, in a situation similar to that in Kunduz, some of them have been executed by non- Afghan forces who have no intention of yielding the city without a fight.

Another senior Pentagon official said that there was fighting on all sides of Kandahar today, and that American war planes were attacking Taliban positions in and around the city. He said the Pentagon had also received reports that some Taliban forces were retreating from Kandahar and that Pashtun tribes in the region were becoming more active in the rebellion. Officials also said that forces led by Ismail Khan, a warlord who controls the western city of Herat, were moving toward Kandahar.

It was unclear whether American commandos were with Mr. Khan. In Herat, Mr. Khan said he believed that many of the Taliban who fled fighting, first in Herat and then further south, have fled toward Hilmand Province, more than a hundred miles outside Kandahar. "The Taliban think it's a safe place," he said. General Hazimi, Mr. Khan's second in command, said that about 10,000 forces have been put on alert for a possible drive toward Hilmand, but that they would rather see local Pashtun troops beat the Taliban since it is Pashtun territory.

One senior American official said that the military action in Kandahar was "overwhelmingly driven by local fighters who see their chance to oust the Taliban." Pentagon officials said American Army troops were working as liaison officers with Pashtun tribes in the south, as others had been with Northern Alliance units in the north.

Other Special Operations forces are working more independently, sometimes engaging in firefights with roving enemy forces of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, gathering intelligence during quick raids, closing down roads and seizing weapons.

As Muslims began the first day of fasting to observe the holy month of Ramadan, Pentagon officials said there would be no let-up in the bombing. American warplanes struck at Taliban bunkers, command buildings and mobile forces in locations around the country.

But officials said the number of planned attack areas had dropped off sharply in the last 48 hours, partly because there were fewer obvious targets to hit and partly because the fighting had shifted into cities.

Officials said the American air strategy had changed toward having jet fighters, most of them flying off two aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, search for ground targets. As jockeying for power in Kabul and in outlying provinces continued, Mr. Rabbani, the former Afghan leader, arrived in Kabul, the capital, for the first time since the Taliban seized power in 1996. He said at a news conference that he supported a multiethnic government.

Francesc Vendrell, an envoy from the United Nations, was expected to arrive later in the day to try to open negotiations for a broad-based interim government. His arrival had been postponed on Friday because of problems ensuring the safety of the his aircraft, the United Nations said.

But the Northern Alliance, which has been consolidating its hold in Kabul, has not officially embraced the international efforts to establish a new government.

A senior administration official said that the administration was trying to put together a meeting under United Nations auspices that would establish that coalition, and prevent a return to power of the same kind of government structure that was ousted by the Taliban in 1996.

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Hostile reception for Allied Forces:
Growing row over British troop influx

DAVID CRACKNELL AND JAMES CLARK
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18 2001
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/article/0,,9002-2001531324,00.html

BRITAIN was engaged in urgent negotiations this weekend to "clarify" Northern Alliance demands that no more coalition troops should be sent into Afghanistan.

Plans to airlift more than 4,000 Royal Marines and paratroopers into two airfields have been delayed by suggestions from Northern Alliance commanders that the coalition has played its part in the war.

British soldiers, including members of the secretive Special Boat Squadron, were flown into the heavily bombed Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, on Friday. They are assessing damage and preparing a security perimeter to protect against missile strikes.

The plan had been to use Bagram for the first airlift this week of British troops or to fly in large numbers of engineers, together with infantry protection, to rebuild the airfield if it proved unserviceable. But surprise declarations from the Alliance have left the advance party looking dangerously isolated while British and American diplomats attempt to forge a compromise.

Military experts believe Britain and America may have underestimated the desire of competing Afghan warlords to take charge of their reclaimed towns and cities.

Speaking after a meeting with Alliance leaders, Engineer Arif, its deputy chief of intelligence, said most of the British forces who arrived at Bagram must leave.

"There are 85 of them who have come without any prior co-ordination in the name of humanitarian aid led by the United Nations," said Arif. "Our decision is that 15 can stay and the others go."

Arif made it clear that the opposition forces remained uneasy about their relationship with the US-led coalition. He said, however, that the Alliance had no objections to the presence of a small group of aid workers to supervise the distribution of humanitarian supplies.

Ministers attempted to play down the significance of the defiant statements from the Alliance while accepting that the situation was "messy". Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, said the warnings were being taken seriously but that co-operation between coalition military advisers and Alliance leaders had been "exceptionally good" and he expected the situation to be fully resolved.

"The Northern Alliance is made up of different contingents, some of which have a slightly different agenda to others, so it is inevitable that we will hear this sort of thing from time to time," he said.

A Downing Street official added: "We recognise that it is going to be a bit messy for a few days as we get things into shape. We have a UN security council resolution and our troops are on a reconnaissance mission. You have to be careful when it comes to statements from the Northern Alliance, because there are a number of people who claim to speak for it. It is a pretty loose outfit."

The Alliance's nervousness appears to have been compounded by confusing messages from the US-led coalition about the nature and role of the force deployed in Afghanistan.

On Friday Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, muddied the waters by suggesting that British forces were in Afghanistan to bring the terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda lieutenants to justice and to destroy the Taliban.

His remarks were at odds with the comments of Hoon, who said the small number of British troops who had gone into Bagram were there simply for reconnaissance purposes. Downing Street avoided confirming Straw's remarks and refused to discuss any imminent combat role.

There were also indications from cabinet sources that Tony Blair is becoming frustrated with the Bush administration for concentrating on the capture of Bin Laden at the expense of getting aid into Afghanistan and negotiating a new post-Taliban regime.

The British force, taken from 3 Commando Brigade and the army's 16 Air Assault Brigade, had been given the task of securing the route from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul, protecting aid operations and diplomats in Kabul and keeping the peace in the capital. Military planners predict at least one British death a month.

The Headquarters Company of the commando brigade would establish its forward bases in Bagram and Kabul, backed up by the air assault brigade, with US helicopters, ground-to-air defences, radar and paratroopers in armoured Land Rovers.

Meanwhile, a larger force would establish a rear base at Mazar, from which aid operations would be directed. The remainder of the force would secure the Mazar-Kabul road.

However, if this operation stalls, then the crucial deployment of aid into the country before winter begins will not happen. Aid agencies, including the World Food Programme, have suggested that starting such an operation in winter would be impossible.

"What is going on at Bagram is essentially a reconnaissance operation," said Hoon.

"I am not going to deploy anybody into a dangerous situation unnecessarily and until we know what the reconnaissance says about Bagram, we will not know if it is really a viable option. It may be that we will need to put engineers on the ground to make it workable and they would need protecting as well."

Support for British troops to help keep the peace in Kabul was signalled yesterday by the exiled former king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, a Pashtun who is pressing for a broad-based ruling coalition from ethnic groups that have been sworn enemies for years.

Zahir Shah said a demilitarised zone controlled by an international force was crucial to reconciling tribal groups. "I wish to see Kabul as a demilitarised zone because it is a multi-ethnic city where each group has its own neighbourhood," he said. "The danger is that the ethnic groups will start to fight each other.

"I see a positive role for the British. They would be well-received because the Afghan people are conscious that they took part in the bombing campaign to help them."

British ministers hope that UN representatives, once established in Kabul, can call up troops themselves under the auspices of their organisation. That way, said a cabinet minister, the Alliance could have its "honour smoothed".

Last week the UN expressed its frustration with the Alliance for blocking efforts to resolve the country's future, but the organisation is hoping talks can now begin.

Colonel Bob Stewart, commander of the British UN forces in central Bosnia during the Balkans conflict, said the UN was moving "at the speed of a striking slug", which was creating a huge political vacuum in Kabul.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN, denied this, although he acknowledged that the situation in Afghanistan was a worry. He said the UN had to work with "legitimacy" and it would take a few weeks to set up a transitional government.

Burhanuddin Rabbani, the ousted Afghan president, returned to Kabul yesterday, five years after the Taliban drove him out. He said the Alliance would not cling to power and would welcome a broad-based post-Taliban government. He said the Alliance would respect the will of a loya jirga - or grand assembly of tribal elders and faction chiefs - to decide on a future government. But he did not say when this would be held. Five British Muslims said to have been killed in the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan have this weekend returned alive to Pakistan.

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Attacks From Out of the Blue
U.S. Airstrikes on Taliban Hit Military Targets and Morale

By Keith B. Richburg and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46926-2001Nov17?language=printer

BAGRAM, Afghanistan, Nov. 17 -- The narrow road running south toward Kabul is a testament to the devastation wrought by weeks of U.S. aerial bombardment.

Demolished tanks line the road, one flipped upside down, another with its gun turret sheared away. Discarded treads from tanks and other armored vehicles litter the open field. On the side of the road nearby are two huge craters.

This was the front line of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, until its fighters suddenly fled to the south this week. The strict Islamic movement had conquered most of the country, and was backed by a formidable core of Pakistani, Arab and other foreign fighters. They lived in abandoned buildings from long-vacated village