------- 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.

------

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.

------

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 villages, or in a series of fortified bunkers dug into the hardened dirt.

But the Taliban retreat came in no small measure as a result of the U.S. bombardment, which appears to have been a significant factor in cracking the Taliban's military machine and its morale.

No Taliban fighters are present to describe the reasons for their sudden pullback, but evidence at the front line suggests the U.S. bombing campaign was both selective and powerful. The poorly supplied and outnumbered Northern Alliance guerrillas, who marched triumphantly into Kabul after the retreat, as well as U.S. military officials in Washington, said in interviews that the bombing had been an important factor in breaking the grip of the Taliban.

The bombing campaign, which began Oct. 7, first destroyed the Taliban's air force, consisting of about 20 Soviet-era fighters and some aging helicopters. Without air capability, the Taliban's ability to resupply itsforces was disrupted. Striking ammunition depots robbed the Taliban of some of its arsenal. And attacking vehicle convoys, from armored carriers to pickup trucks, severely limited the Taliban soldiers' freedom of movement.

The turning point was the battle for the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, where U.S. Special Forces operatives on the ground selected the bombing targets and directed the strikes. The fall of Mazar-e Sharif on Nov. 9 broke the Taliban aura of invincibility, sapped their morale, and started a domino effect of defections by regional commanders and provincial warlords.

A more limited bombing campaign was then unleashed on Taliban positions here, and those attacks continued until the Taliban's last day in the capital, when U.S. helicopters fired missiles at Taliban members fleeing the city in pickup trucks. The basic equation of the war, said a U.S. Air Force officer, was "21st-century air and space power combined with 16th-century land forces."

This officer, an expert in targetting, said the U.S. bombing may have been more important for its psychological effect on the Taliban than for the physical damage it did. Many times, bombs were dropped from U.S. warplanes that were at such a high altitude they could be neither seen nor heard. Suddenly, the world around Taliban troops would begin to explode, he said.

"You don't hear anything, you don't see anything, and all your best stuff blows up," he said. "It's like God did it to you -- your trenches, your tanks just blow up, cloudy or not, day or night."

Here on the front line, a Taliban bunker appears to have taken a direct hit. A metal shipping container that might have served as a bedroom is damaged, with blankets and pieces of clothing strewn about. There are empty food containers, cigarette packs, a dented license plate from a car registered in Kabul to a government agency.

"It was really loud," said a villager, Ahmed Mukhtar, who lives just a few yards away from what was the Taliban front line. "When the bombing started, we could see the Taliban leaving their positions, and running here to the Northern Alliance front line."

In the final days of the airstrikes here, Northern Alliance soldiers told journalists that the bombing had a deep psychological impact, hurting the morale of the Taliban troops. They reported overhearing radio conversations in which Taliban soldiers spoke of running for cover whenever the U.S. F-18 jets and B-52 bombers approached.

"Every day the United States bombs these positions, and every day the Taliban is getting weaker," Abdullah Mohammad, a 28-year-old observation post commander near the Bagram front lines, said a few days before the fall of Kabul. "They keep changing soldiers on the front line, because when the planes bomb, some of them get killed, and the morale of the others falls."

"The fact that they bomb their military bases, disrupt their communications, destroy their air force . . . of course means their morale is very low," Wahidullah Sabawoon, the Northern Alliance finance minister and a senior member of the leadership council, said in a recent interview. "They have no more training facilities. . . . Their air force is out of use. Their air defense has been destroyed."

The airstrikes were never as widespread or intense as they might have been, or as the Northern Alliance had hoped.

Rather than the kind of massive, debilitating bombing that was launched against Iraq at the start of the Persian Gulf War, the bombing here was more finely calibrated -- a tank here, a bunker there. That strategy evidently reflected the lack of "high value" targets. Also, it might have resulted from a fear of civilian casualties.

Since the airstrikes began, the Taliban has issued several reports of large numbers of civilians killed by errant U.S. bombs. The claims have not been independently verified, nor have Taliban casualties been possible to calculate. But as the Northern Alliance has swept the Taliban out of much of the country, no new evidence of civilian casualties has emerged.

A senior defense official in Washington offered an example of the speed and precision of the bombing. One night early in the campaign, he said, Taliban forces were maneuvering in the north, possibly preparing to attack across a key bridge. That night, in foggy weather, the bridge was hit by three Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMs -- bombs guided by signals from global positioning satellites. "That [had] a psychological effect for both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance," he said.

The Air Force officer provided another example. At one point, he said, a Northern Alliance commander told a U.S. Special Forces liaison officer that one tank had been blocking a line of advance for months. The U.S. officer offered to make it "disappear," then made a radio call.

Not long afterward, the tank exploded.

What was particularly striking, the Air Force officer said, is that B-52 heavy bombers dropped unguided "dumb bombs" with great precision because they were navigating using global positioning coordinates, transmitted by the Special Forces spotters. "With the B-52s, we're putting long sticks of Mark-82s down with such precision it is ridiculous," he said, referring to 500-pound blast and fragmentation bombs.

Added another official, "The B-52s, because of avionics upgrades, will drop a stick of bombs in a 1,000-yard area." Thus, he added, "I don't think we have 'dumb bombs' anymore -- we have accurate gravity bombs."

Also, B-52s dropped JDAMs for the first time. Previously, only B-2 stealth bombers had dropped them, a senior defense official said. "To tell you the truth, I don't think people [inside the military establishment] really understood how accurate the JDAM was," he added.

At times, one officer said, B-52s were sent to Afghanistan with a load of bombs but without an assigned set of targets to hit. Instead, they would "loiter" near the battlefield, waiting for assignments from the spotters. "They hit a lot of TSTs," he said, using the military abbreviation for "time-sensitive targets" -- that is, people or vehicles that can move away quickly.

In addition, he said, the campaign was unusual in military terms because the target sets were so small. "It wasn't like you had whole rafts of T-55s going down the road," he said. Rather, hitting one or two Taliban tanks or artillery emplacements could make the difference in permitting a Northern Alliance advance in a certain area.

Abdullah Jan, a top official in the Northern Alliance intelligence and security service, said the U.S. airstrikes "played a very important role" in Kabul and in Mazar-e Sharif.

Initially, he said, people in alliance territory "were hoping that America, because it is a superpower, would destroy the Taliban military machine in two or three days." But the bombing campaign got off to a slow start. Then, a few weeks into the campaign, when airstrikes started targeting Taliban front line positions north of Kabul and using B-52s, Taliban morale plummeted, he said.

Jan said the arrival of the planes usually could be heard clearly, giving the Taliban fighters time to take cover in underground bunkers. But the intensification of the strikes and the use of bunker-buster bombs and a few of the massive 15,000-pound bombs known as "daisy cutters" eventually took their toll.

"These kinds of bombs were more effective than other bombs," Jan said.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.

-------- arms sales

Egyptian Pleads Guilty in Arms Plot Final Prosecution In Conspiracy

Associated Press
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47195-2001Nov17?language=printer

MIAMI, Nov. 17 -- A guilty plea Friday by an Egyptian national concluded the prosecution of a $32 million plot to illegally export arms and a related plan for laundering arms sale profits.

Diaa Mohsen of Jersey City pleaded guilty in federal court to trying to export shoulder-launched Stinger antiaircraft missiles and night-vision goggles, two articles on a 19-item shopping list from undisclosed foreign buyers, federal prosecutors said.

Co-defendant Mohammed Malik entered an identical plea Thursday, and Mohsen and two others pleaded guilty earlier in the money-laundering case.

Mohsen and Malik are to be sentenced in February.

"This was all an attempt that never really worked," said Mohsen's attorney, Valentin Rodriguez. But given the role of Arabs in a weapons plot in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said, "We basically were forced into a plea."

Malik and Mohsen were arrested in June after inspecting a Stinger missile and M-16 at a West Palm Beach warehouse. The arrests followed a 30-month sting operation.

The defendants talked to the informant about buying Stingers, TOW anti-tank missiles, silencer-equipped M-16 rifles, the most advanced night-vision goggles and Cobra helicopter gunship parts.

Valentin said earlier that Egyptians were on the other end of the talks. Promised foreign wire transfers never came through.

In the money-laundering case, Mohsen, a former Deutsche Bank trader and an airplane broker were charged with trying to launder $2.2 million in cash offered by agents as proceeds from illegal arms sales.

-------- biological weapons

Nebraska

States
USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Omaha - Anthrax fears apparently aren't hindering holiday mail-order campaigns in any significant way. Direct mail is a big marketing tool for Nebraska businesses like Omaha Steaks and Sidney-based outdoor sports retailer Cabela's. Both say they clearly identify their mailings.

------

PUBLIC HEALTH
He Routed Smallpox, Now Tackles Bioterror

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/national/18POX.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - In 1980, D. A. Henderson did what no one else in history has ever done. He wiped a disease, smallpox, off the face of the earth. Now, smallpox is back - not as a naturally occurring killer but as a potential bioterrorist weapon. And D. A. Henderson is back, too.

At 73, the man who led the global effort to make the world safe from one of its deadliest scourges has re-emerged as the director of a new government program to make the nation safe from bioterrorism. His challenge is to prepare the United States for a germ attack at a time when the country is already deep into a war against terrorism.

"D. A. has, in essence, been the man for all seasons in science," said Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I think he is obviously in his final season, but it may be the most important season he ever had."

It is a season that is quickly becoming fraught with complications for Dr. Henderson, who has spent the past decade waging a determined, passionate - and, critics say, misguided - campaign to destroy the last remaining vials of the smallpox virus, in part to prevent it from being misused. This week, the Bush administration decided to retain the virus so scientists can use it to develop a range of new vaccines and treatments for the disease.

The decision means that the smallpox germ will very likely outlive Dr. Henderson, who is now in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the White House stance.

"There is a lot of concern about what D. A. in his new, highly exalted position, is going to say," said Dr. Peter Jahrling, a virologist at the Army's bioterrorism preparedness laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md., who has been Dr. Henderson's chief opponent in the destruction controversy. "Is he actually going to change his tune?"

In an interview on Friday, just as the administration was announcing its decision, Dr. Henderson answered that question with diplomacy, if not enthusiasm. "I'm a member of the administration at this point in time," he said simply, "and so I necessarily have to be in accord with the administration's position."

Formerly the director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, a research institution that he founded in 1997, Dr. Henderson has been warning about bioterrorism since the mid- 1990's. On Nov. 1, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, named Dr. Henderson to head the new Office of Public Health Preparedness. The appointment came as the administration was facing criticism for lack of coordination in its handling of the recent anthrax attacks, which killed four Americans and sickened more than a dozen.

"He really didn't want to do it," Tara O'Toole, who now directs the biodefense studies center, said. "But he didn't see any honorable way to say no."

A burly man with a full head of white hair, silver-rimmed glasses and a deep, gravelly voice, Donald Ainslie Henderson has a physical presence as towering as his reputation.

On a recent afternoon, he was seen in his government office, a spartan affair with a cardboard nameplate propped atop a fax machine. Standing against the sky-blue window treatments, suspenders pressed close against a stark white shirt, he exuded confidence, looking like the president in a Hollywood movie.

People in public health sometimes refer to Dr. Henderson as "the old man," borrowing the term soldiers use for generals they respect. He is uniformly described as a gracious mentor, albeit a demanding one.

"He does not suffer fools gladly," said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, a bioterrorism expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit foundation in Washington. "And he is accustomed to the power of command."

Those who know Dr. Henderson well wonder how his new mission will go. He does not like bureaucracies, yet he is now in the belly of a bureaucratic beast.

The labyrinthine Health and Human Services Department is a collection of agencies. President Bush has yet to fill the top posts at two, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. And an important position at the parent agency, the job of assistant secretary for health, is also vacant. It will be up to Dr. Henderson to draw these agencies together and form alliances with law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

"He believes that rules are for mere mortals to follow," said Jonathan B. Tucker, the author of "Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001).

"Sometimes I think he can rub people the wrong way because he is such a formidable personality and is so confident. Some people perceive that as arrogance," he said, adding that that was not his own experience of Dr. Henderson. "I think that's the risk of his approach. But of course, he has great credibility, given his history."

That credibility goes a long way on Capitol Hill. Last week, when Dr. Henderson appeared before a House committee, he was introduced by Representative Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana, as "a real American hero." The lawmakers then gave him a standing ovation; he shook his head and tried to wave off the applause. "In truth," he said later, "it's a little embarrassing."

An ancient, contagious and particularly hideous disease, smallpox kills a third of those infected with it, and Dr. Henderson is one of the few doctors in this country today to have actually seen a case.

The World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program, which Dr. Henderson ran from 1966 to 1977, was, he said, the effort of countless public health workers who toiled under grueling conditions, often living in villages without electricity and running water, in nations torn apart by war. They operated under the principle of "ring vaccination," containing outbreaks by vaccinating every patient infected, and everyone around those patients, moving outward in concentric circles until the virus stopped spreading.

Dr. Henderson's admirers say he should win a Nobel Prize, yet he was recently passed over for another prestigious award, the Lasker Foundation Award for public service. The prize went to Dr. William Foege, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who participated in the smallpox eradication effort and devised the ring vaccination strategy.

Despite the lack of official recognition, experts on smallpox say there is little doubt that the eradication effort, conducted in partnership with the former Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, succeeded in large part because of Dr. Henderson's cunning and derring-do.

When the Ethiopian health minister refused to cooperate with him, Dr. Henderson sneaked into the country and befriended the personal physician of the emperor, Haile Selassie. When Dr. Henderson believed the Russians were providing him with inferior smallpox vaccine, he went to Moscow - against direct orders from his superiors, who feared a diplomatic disaster - and demanded a better one.

"He created a lot of very loyal employees who were willing to go the extra mile," Dr. Tucker said. "If vaccine had to be sent out on Christmas Day, people would come in on Christmas Day to get the job done."

The world's last case of smallpox occurred in 1978, in England, when the virus escaped in a laboratory and infected a medical photographer. Two years later, it was declared eradicated worldwide. Nations that held samples of the virus were encouraged to either destroy them or transfer them to one of two official repositories that still exist, one in Russia and the other at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta.

Dr. Henderson became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, a post he held until the first Bush administration, when he served as science adviser to the White House.

When Bill Clinton was elected president, Dr. Henderson took a job in the health and human services agency, working as science adviser to Donna E. Shalala, Mr. Thompson's predecessor. But he left in 1995, saying he was not being consulted on issues of importance to him.

That year, Dr. Henderson said, he learned of the work of Ken Alibek, who ran the Soviet Union's biological weapons program and claimed to have developed smallpox as a weapon. But while Dr. Henderson became more concerned about bioterrorism - enough so that he founded the Johns Hopkins center - he nonetheless advocated destroying the official smallpox stocks, for several reasons, he and those close to him say.

First, the eradication program was an international effort, and other nations wanted the virus destroyed.

"We had countries around the world saying, `Why are Big Brother United States and Big Brother Russia keeping the virus?" Dr. Henderson said. Second, he said, there was a danger that the virus could escape, as it did in England. Third, by destroying its stocks, the United States could make possession of it a crime.

But national security experts and military scientists countered with the argument that has prevailed: only by keeping the virus would the United States be able to develop better treatments for a smallpox attack. Dr. Jahrling, of Fort Detrick, said recently that Dr. Henderson viewed destruction as "the crown jewel in his career" - a contention that Dr. Henderson dismissed in Friday's interview as "mythology."

Dr. Henderson may not stay long in his new job; he said he was committed to remaining with the government only as long as it took to create a bioterrorism preparedness program that others might carry out. Asked how long that might be, he replied by saying that he had promised the World Health Organization he would stay in Geneva for 18 months. He stayed 11 years.

More than anything, Dr. Henderson said, he would like to figure out a way to persuade the countries of the world to come together to condemn the use of germs as weapons. Of smallpox, he said, "We've got to put the genie back in the bottle."

---

For the Poor Worldwide, Anthrax Is Nothing New

New York Times
November 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/international/africa/18AFRI.html

JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 17 (AP) - The San bushmen did not see a potential threat when they stumbled upon a dead cow in a South African field. They saw precious meat. So they cooked and ate the animal.

It was only later, when lesions with black spots began forming on their hands, that it became clear how the cow had died. It had anthrax, and now so did they.

The people who have been infected by the disease in recent weeks in the United States are not suffering alone.

But in places as far afield as Zimbabwe, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia, authorities are worried about suspicious cows more than suspicious envelopes.

The cattle-borne form of anthrax can be found in nearly every region of the globe with grazing animals.

"Anthrax is not strange - this has always been here, and people get along with it," said Eliphas Nyamogo, a teacher in Kenya. "I think it has been much scarier in the United States because it is not something they have had for many years."

Last year, at least 2,000 people around the world contracted the disease from animals, according to incomplete statistics from the World Organization for Animal Health, which tracks human anthrax infections as well as animal outbreaks. The animals get the disease themselves from spores in the ground.

The South African government is concerned enough about the disease that every year it distributes nearly 100,000 pamphlets - illustrated with cartoons of unhappy cows - telling farmers to vaccinate their cattle and not to eat animals they suspect may have the disease.

The San who ate the cow in South Africa's Northern Cape Province in January were sent to a local hospital when veterinary officials investigating an outbreak in local animals noticed their skin lesions. Fifteen people were infected with the skin form of anthrax, treated with antibiotics and released.

"We get anthrax on a regular basis there," said Dr. Jaco Pienaar, deputy director of the veterinary services in the Northern Cape Province.

Anthrax is believed to be thousands of years old. Some historians believe the fifth and sixth of the Bible's Ten Plagues - the death of cattle followed by a wave of boils - represented an ancient anthrax outbreak.

Anthrax thrives in cattle, sheep and goats. Its spillover into humans is purely an accident of nature, said Dr. Ottorino Cosivi, an official at the World Health Organization.

The vast majority of human cases are skin infections, caused by handling tainted meat. A few people get the more deadly intestinal infections by eating the meat, and on very rare occasions, anthrax is inhaled, usually by people working with wool or hides from infected animals.

Some epidemiologists estimate that for every 10 infected animals, one person gets skin anthrax.

When an animal catches the disease and dies, infected fluids drip into the ground, turning it into an "anthrax field," Dr. Cosivi said. If another animal eats from the field, it too can become infected.

The spore can live in the ground for decades, and in at least one case has been found to live for centuries.

Heavy rains often trigger outbreaks, uncovering spores that had been buried under the surface. But droughts trigger outbreaks, too, concentrating the spores that may have blown into shrinking water holes.

"It stays in the soil for so long, we can have an outbreak any day," said Gerhard Schutte, general manager of South Africa's Red Meat Producers Organization.

In southwestern Zimbabwe, at least 40 people have been infected with the disease since Oct. 20, and a child died on Oct. 26, probably after handling meat from infected cattle, said Dr. Christopher Zishiri, the local medical director.

In Kenya, two people in the central district of Nyeri contracted skin anthrax last month after skinning a cow that had mysteriously died. They recovered after treatment.

In Turkey, 396 people contracted anthrax last year. All of them survived, according to the Turkish Health Ministry.

The disease is widespread throughout central Asia. Tajikistan reported 338 human cases last year, and 33 people were infected last October in one outbreak in Kazakhstan, mostly after illegally slaughtering sick cattle without veterinary supervision. India and Indonesia have also experienced recent outbreaks.

Six members of a Minnesota farm family were treated for anthrax last year when two of them showed signs of intestinal anthrax after eating meat from an infected cow they had raised and slaughtered.

But cases of natural anthrax are extremely rare in the United States, where stringent slaughterhouse regulations weed out bad meat.

Anthrax usually affects the world's poorest, who do not know of its dangers or are so hungry they do not care.

-------- business

Some businesses have gotten a boost from terrorism.

By Chris Baker,
THE WASHINGTON TIMES,
November 18, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20011118-11630828.htm

Stocks in defense companies have soared as the nation begins what is expected to be a long war. Biotechnology stocks have risen in the aftermath of the anthrax scares, and more employers are hiring guards for their offices, giving the security industry a boost.

Meanwhile, arts-and-crafts businesses and similar companies have reported a jump in sales because families are spending more time with each other doing inexpensive recreational projects.

Blockbuster Inc., the world's largest video rental chain, has predicted stronger earnings this fall because consumers are staying home more. And Campbell Soup Co.'s earnings this quarter were better than expected because Americans have stocked up on canned goods since September 11.

[The remainder of the article gives a very interesting list of which industries have lost how much money and how many jobs since September 11th.]

-------- india / pakistan

Indian Army Sees Post - Taliban Risk in Kashmir

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 2:42 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-attack-kashmir.html?searchpv=reuters

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Islamic militants are likely to try to make their way into the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir as they are routed in Afghanistan and then in turn pushed out of Pakistan, the Indian army chief in the tense border region said.

In a weekend interview with Reuters, Lieutenant General J.R. Mukherjee said the army was stepping up its efforts to stop guerrillas coming across the Line of Control which divides disputed Kashmir between India and Pakistan. But he denied charges by Pakistan that India was moving more troops to Kashmir.

He said militants from Afghanistan's Taliban militia -- which has lost control of most of the country after six weeks of U.S. bombing -- were undoubtedly coming in to Pakistan, despite Islamabad's attempts to seal off its Afghan frontier.

``Pakistan cannot afford to let them stay. So either they export them outside or they export them to Kashmir. A fair proportion will definitely try and be pumped in into Kashmir,'' he said at his headquarters in Srinagar.

Pakistan, which turned against its Taliban allies after the September 11 attacks on the United States, is under pressure from Washington to curb Islamic militancy at home as well. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf can scarcely afford to host thousands of fleeing militants, many of whom are Arab volunteers.

India wants Musharraf to end what it calls Pakistan's sponsorship of ``cross-border terrorism'' in Kashmir. Islamabad denies it arms or funds the Islamic militants who then cross the Himalayan mountains to join a nearly 12-year-old insurgency against Indian rule which has killed at least 30,000 people.

Mukherjee said that despite U.S. pressure, there had been no let-up in Pakistan's promotion of militancy in Kashmir, apart from in the first week or so after the September 11 attacks.

``They were a little bewildered and couldn't get clear-cut orders from across (the border). After that it is quite apparent that there were clear orders to them that Kashmir will carry on as before,'' he said.

In the biggest single act of violence, 38 people were killed when suicide bombers from a Pakistan-based militant group attacked Kashmir's state assembly in Srinagar on October 1.

Mukherjee said that well over a half of the 2,850 to 3,300 ''terrorists'' operating in Jammu and Kashmir were outsiders -- mostly from Pakistan, though also from Afghanistan and as far away as Yemen and Britain.

``They have been demoralized to a certain extent by events in Afghanistan, particularly over the last few days and therefore what we do discern is every possible effort being made to try and step up their morale by issuing orders, carrying out more fedayeen (suicide) actions and so on. They desperately need to see some success,'' he said.

``I see an active period ahead,'' he said. ``We'll try our best to ensure it doesn't get worse, but I see every possible attempt made to pump in more and more, including possibly the Taliban who have run out of Afghanistan. Pakistan can't afford to keep them on their hands either. It's too early to make a categorical statement but at least that is what it appears.''

Mukherjee declined to comment on whether he believed Indian troops should cross the 742-km (464-mile) Line of Control to attack militants in Pakistan, copying the example of the United States in hunting out its perceived enemies in Afghanistan.

But he said that in Kashmir troops had been stepped up along the military cease-fire line to stop infiltration by militants.

``As far as Kashmir is concerned we have definitely stepped up the quantum of troops along the Line of Control,'' he said. But there were no more troops in the region as a whole than before.

``I have only two divisions worth of troops on the Line of Control and two divisions worth of troops for counter-insurgency operations,'' he said, putting the strength of an Indian division at about 10,000 to 12,000 men each.

Both nuclear-capable foes have accused the other of moving up troops toward the Line of Control, raising fears the sporadic gunfire regularly exchanged across the cease-fire line could escalate into a full-scale battle.

India says it fires across the Line of Control to stop the Pakistani army from giving cover to militants coming into Kashmir.

Mukherjee said India had been fairly successful in reducing infiltration this year and should be able to stop many Islamic militants from coming in from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

''We have adopted a very strong counter-infiltration posture...with the same number of divisions that we have and we are quite sure that we would be able to stop a flood from coming in,'' he said.

-------- israel

New U.S. envoy takes Mideast peace mission

USA Today
11/18/2001
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/11/18/mideast-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell will announce Monday that the former head of U.S. military forces in Middle East, retired general Anthony Zinni, will go to the region to try to end more than a year of Palestinian-Israeli violence, U.S. officials say.

But Powell, who is delivering a foreign policy speech at the University of Louisville, won't unveil any new U.S. peace initiatives.

"No new plans are coming," Powell told ABC's This Week on Sunday. "What we have to do is to get the two sides talking to each other ... to get a cease-fire in place."

The speech, which was planned and then postponed after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, has taken on new political importance as the Bush administration seeks to strengthen Arab support for its anti-terrorism coalition. Arab nations have urged the administration to play a more active role in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a separate gesture to the Arab world, President Bush will host an iftar - a meal breaking the daylong Ramadan fast - for Muslim ambassadors to the United States at the White House this evening.

After 14 months of clashes that have killed more than 900 people, Powell will repeat Bush's call for a Palestinian state as well as a secure Israel, U.S. officials say.

Powell is expected to urge Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to drop his demand that Palestinian attacks on Israelis cease for 7 days before he agrees to peace negotiations. Powell also will repeat U.S. calls for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to stop violence and remind Israel that it has pledged to end expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

U.S. officials say Powell will not propose ways to resolve the future of Jerusalem and 3.5 million Palestinian refugees, two issues that blocked a peace deal at the end of the Clinton administration.

Egyptian Ambassador Nabil Fahmy says the Arab world is looking for Powell to provide "a road map to peace, and to send someone there to sit and get it done."

Zinni, the former head of the U.S. Central Command, is well-regarded in the region but may lack the clout of previous envoys who reported directly to the president. Middle East experts doubt there can be a peace settlement until there is a change in leadership on one or both sides. Sharon has ruled out significant territorial concessions, and Arafat has been unable or unwilling to stop Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

-------- nato

Blair eyes closer NATO, Russia tie

November 18, 2001
Agence France-Presse
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011118-79995106.htm

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair has proposed a closer tie between NATO and Russia to reflect the changed relationship between the former Cold War foes after the September 11 attacks on the United States, government sources said yesterday.

Under the proposals, contained in a four-page letter sent late Friday to Britain's 18 NATO allies and Russian President Vladimir Putin, a new joint council would be established opening up unprecedented possibilities for joint decision making and joint action in such crisis areas as the Balkans.

British and Russian officials stressed that the proposed council did not mean Russia would be a full member of the Western military alliance.

"They are not the start of Russia joining NATO," said Ilia Klebanov, the Russian deputy prime minister charged with overseeing military and industrial relations.

On the British side, an unidentified official said: "This could well lead to taking common decisions together and taking common action together."

"I don't rule out doing military things together," another senior British official said.

Mr. Putin called Mr. Blair yesterday to discuss the British proposal, according to the Kremlin. Russia has long complained that current institutional arrangements do not give it enough of a say in NATO debates.

"The current format of Russia-NATO relations is purely based on talk and yields nothing," Interfax news agency quoted Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov as saying yesterday.

NATO's relations with Moscow are enshrined in a treaty creating a Permanent Joint Council, established in May 1997 to reflect deepening ties since the end of the Cold War. Russia and the alliance also carry out joint military maneuvers, including naval rescue operations and troop retraining, in Balkan trouble spots such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

Ties have been strengthened since Mr. Putin offered unprecedented support for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

"There was a premise of there being a rapprochement before September 11, but the attacks have accelerated the process," Mr. Klebanov said. British officials said the "welcome" Russia gave to having U.S. and coalition forces based along border states in Central Asia, if necessary, showed the extent of the change in relations.

Moscow has strongly opposed some NATO projects, in particular a potential expansion at the summit planned for next year in Prague to invite Russia's former Baltic satellite states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to join.

Mr. Blair's proposals have surfaced ahead of a planned visit to Moscow next week by NATO Secretary-General George Robertson for what a spokesman said would be "informal discussions" on ways of reinforcing cooperation between the alliance and Russia.

-------- propaganda wars

What the Muslim World Is Watching

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By FOUAD AJAMI
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/magazine/18ALJAZEERA.html

Al Jazeera is not subtle television. Recently, during a lull in its nonstop coverage of the raids on Kabul and the street battles of Bethlehem, the Arabic-language satellite news station showed an odd but telling episode of its documentary program "Biography and Secrets." The show's subject was Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Presenting Che as a romantic, doomed hero, the documentary recounted the Marxist rebel's last stand in the remote mountains of Bolivia, lingering mournfully over the details of his capture and execution. Even Che's corpse received a lot of airtime; Al Jazeera loves grisly footage and is never shy about presenting graphic imagery.

The episode's subject matter was, of course, allegorical. Before bin Laden, there was Guevara. Before Afghanistan, there was Bolivia. As for the show's focus on C.I.A. operatives chasing Guevara into the mountains, this, too, was clearly meant to evoke the contemporary hunt for Osama, the Islamic rebel.

Al Jazeera, which claims a global audience of 35 million Arabic-speaking viewers, may not officially be the Osama bin Laden Channel -- but he is clearly its star, as I learned during an extended viewing of the station's programming in October. The channel's graphics assign him a lead role: there is bin Laden seated on a mat, his submachine gun on his lap; there is bin Laden on horseback in Afghanistan, the brave knight of the Arab world. A huge, glamorous poster of bin Laden's silhouette hangs in the background of the main studio set at Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, the capital city of Qatar.

On Al Jazeera (which means "the Peninsula"), the Hollywoodization of news is indulged with an abandon that would make the Fox News Channel blush. The channel's promos are particularly shameless. One clip juxtaposes a scowling George Bush with a poised, almost dreamy bin Laden; between them is an image of the World Trade Center engulfed in flames. Another promo opens with a glittering shot of the Dome of the Rock. What follows is a feverish montage: a crowd of Israeli settlers dance with unfurled flags; an Israeli soldier fires his rifle; a group of Palestinians display Israeli bullet shells; a Palestinian woman wails; a wounded Arab child lies on a bed. In the climactic image, Palestinian boys carry a banner decrying the shame of the Arab world's silence.

Al Jazeera's reporters are similarly adept at riling up the viewer. A fiercely opinionated group, most are either pan-Arabists -- nationalists of a leftist bent committed to the idea of a single nation across the many frontiers of the Arab world -- or Islamists who draw their inspiration from the primacy of the Muslim faith in political life. Since their primary allegiance is to fellow Muslims, not Muslim states, Al Jazeera's reporters and editors have no qualms about challenging the wisdom of today's Arab rulers. Indeed, Al Jazeera has been rebuked by the governments of Libya and Tunisia for giving opposition leaders from those countries significant air time. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, for their part, have complained about Al Jazeera's extensive reporting on the misery of Iraqis living under sanctions. But the five-year-old station has refused to be reined in. The channel openly scorns the sycophantic tone of the state-run Arab media and the quiescence of the mainstream Arab press, both of which play down controversy and dissent.

Compared with other Arab media outlets, Al Jazeera may be more independent -- but it is also more inflammatory. For the dark side of the pan-Arab worldview is an aggressive mix of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, and these hostilities drive the station's coverage, whether it is reporting on the upheaval in the West Bank or on the American raids on Kandahar. Although Al Jazeera has sometimes been hailed in the West for being an autonomous Arabic news outlet, it would be a mistake to call it a fair or responsible one. Day in and day out, Al Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage.

Consider how Al Jazeera covered the second intifada, which erupted in September 2000. The story was a godsend for the station; masked Palestinian boys aiming slingshots and stones at Israeli soldiers made for constantly compelling television. The station's coverage of the crisis barely feigned neutrality. The men and women who reported from Israel and Gaza kept careful count of the "martyrs." The channel's policy was firm: Palestinians who fell to Israeli gunfire were martyrs; Israelis killed by Palestinians were Israelis killed by Palestinians. Al Jazeera's reporters exalted the "children of the stones," giving them the same amount of coverage that MSNBC gave to Monica Lewinsky. The station played and replayed the heart-rending footage of 12-year-old Muhammed al-Durra, who was shot in Gaza and died in his father's arms. The images' ceaseless repetition signaled the arrival of a new, sensational breed of Arab journalism. Even some Palestinians questioned the opportunistic way Al Jazeera handled the tragic incident. But the channel savored the publicity and the controversy all the same.

Since Sept. 11, I discovered, Al Jazeera has become only more incendiary. The channel's seething dispatches from the "streets of Kabul" or the "streets of Baghdad" emphasize anti-American feeling. The channel's numerous call-in shows welcome viewers to express opinions that in the United States would be considered hate speech. And, of course, there is the matter of Al Jazeera's "exclusive" bin Laden videotapes. On Oct. 7, Al Jazeera broadcast a chilling message from bin Laden that Al Qaeda had delivered to its Kabul bureau. Dressed in a camouflage jacket over a traditional thoub, bin Laden spoke in ornate Arabic, claiming that the terror attacks of Sept. 11 should be applauded by Muslims. It was a riveting performance -- one that was repeated on Nov. 3, when another bin Laden speech aired in full on the station. And just over a week ago, Al Jazeera broadcast a third Al Qaeda tape, this one showcasing the military skills of four young men who were said to be bin Laden's own sons.

The problem of Al Jazeera's role in the current crisis is one that the White House has been trying to solve. Indeed, the Bush administration has lately been expressing its desire to win the "war of ideas," to capture the Muslim world's intellectual sympathy and make it see the war against bin Laden as a just cause. There has been talk of showing American-government-sponsored commercials on Al Jazeera. And top American officials have begun appearing on the station's talk shows. But my viewing suggests that it won't be easy to dampen the fiery tone of Al Jazeera. The enmity runs too deep. Indeed, the truth is that a foreign power can't easily win a "war of ideas" in the Muslim world. Sure, we can establish "coalition information centers" -- as the administration has in Washington, London and Islamabad -- and dispatch our diplomats on "listening tours." We can give Al Jazeera extended access to the highest American officials and hope that these leaders will make an impression on Arab viewers. But anti-Americanism is a potent force that cannot be readily dissolved.

What's more, Al Jazeera is a crafty operation. In covering the intifada, its broadcasters perfected a sly game -- namely, mimicking Western norms of journalistic fairness while pandering to pan-Arab sentiments. In a seemingly open-minded act, Al Jazeera broke with a widespread taboo of the Arab news media and interviewed Israeli journalists and officials, including Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres. Yet at the same time, it pressed on with unrelenting anti-Zionist reportage that contributed to further alienation between Israelis and Palestinians.

What this means is that no matter how many Americans show up on Al Jazeera, the station will pursue its own oppositional agenda. Al Jazeera's reporters see themselves as "anti-imperialists." These men and women are convinced that the rulers of the Arab world have given in to American might; these are broadcasters who play to an Arab gallery whose political bitterness they share -- and feed. In their eyes, it is an unjust, aggressive war they are covering in Afghanistan. Watching Al Jazeera makes all of this distressingly clear.

Al Jazeera is on the ground in Afghanistan and reports the news up close. It is the only television news outlet with a bureau in Kabul. Alas, there is no skyline in the Afghan capital, no bright city lights that can illuminate America's nighttime raids. What worked so well for CNN in Baghdad has been impossible for Al Jazeera in Kabul and Kandahar. Instead, Al Jazeera's Afghanistan coverage supplies a pointed contrast between the high-tech foreign power, with its stealth planes and Tomahawk missiles, and the Taliban warriors, with their pickup trucks racing through stark, rubble-strewn landscapes.

In its rough outlines, the message of Al Jazeera is similar to that of the Taliban: there is a huge technological imbalance between the antagonists, but the foreign power will nonetheless come to grief.

In some videotape shown on Oct. 22, a band of Taliban warriors displayed what they claimed to be the wreckage of the second American helicopter they said they had downed. There was twisted steel with American markings shown in close-up. In an interview, a Taliban soldier said triumphantly that after the first helicopter had been hit, the second came in for support and rescue, and the Taliban soldiers downed it as well. There was blood, he said, at the scene of the wreckage -- and added that a search was under way for the "remains" of the American crews. A stylish warrior of the Taliban with a bright blue turban, the soldier spoke to the camera with great confidence and defiance. America's cruise missiles and bombs would not defeat the Taliban, he promised: "If these Americans were men, they would come here and fight on the ground. We would do to them what we did to the British and the Russians." Another warrior spoke with similar certainty. "God Almighty will grant us victory," he promised.

Al Jazeera's report was presented entirely from the Taliban's point of view. No doubts were expressed about the validity of the Taliban's military boasts -- including one soldier's claim that the steel from the American helicopters would immediately be sold off as scrap metal. The Western news media presented the same story rather differently. In addition to presenting the Taliban's claims, CNN noted a strong American denial. In the case of one helicopter, the Pentagon claimed that only the landing gear of a CH-47 had been sheared off, after its pilot flew too close to a ground barrier. And a helicopter that did crash, the Pentagon claimed, did so because of a mechanical malfunction -- not Taliban gunfire.

A report on Oct. 30 by Al Jazeera's main man in Kabul, Tayseer Allouni, similarly underscored the ideological preference of the station's reporters. "The American planes have resumed their heavy bombing of Kabul, causing massive destruction of the infrastructure of the country," Allouni reported as his camera surveyed unrelieved scenes of wreckage and waste. Although Al Jazeera's images revealed a few craters in the street, much of the devastation appeared to be unrelated to American bombs -- potholes, a junkyard with discarded shells of cars. Noting that Kabul's notoriously decayed "roads had not been spared," Allouni then offered a wistful tribute to the Taliban's public-works efforts. "It appears that all the labors that had been made by the Taliban government prior to the outbreak of the war to repair the roads," he said sadly, "have scattered to the wind."

As Allouni presented it, there appeared to be nobody in Kabul who supported America's campaign to unseat the Taliban. A man in a telephone booth, wearing a traditional white cap, offered a scripted-sounding lament that even Kabul's telephone lines had been destroyed. "We have lost so much," he said, "because of the American bombing." Allouni then closed his survey with gruesome images of wounded Afghans. The camera zoomed in on an old man lying on his back, his beard crusted with blood; this was followed by the image of a heavily bandaged child who looked propped up, as if to face the camera. The parting shot was an awful close-up of a wounded child's face.

The channel's slant is also apparent in tiny modulations of language. Its reporters in Kabul always note that they are reporting from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan -- the Taliban's official name for the country. Conversely, Washington's campaign is being waged not against terror, but against "what it calls terror."

Al Jazeera has a regular feature in which it briefly replays historical scenes and events that took place on that calendar day. On Oct. 23, the choice was an event that had taken place 18 years earlier. On that very day in 1983, a young man in a Mercedes truck loaded with TNT struck the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. The segment revisited the horror of that day -- the wailing of the wounded, the soot and ruin everywhere. The images were far more horrible than any I had ever seen of the tragedy. There was no sympathy in the narration, and a feeling of indifference, even menace, hung over this dark moment of remembrance. The message was clear: the Middle East was, and is, a region of heartbreak for the foreign power.

Al Jazeera loves the "Pakistani street" as much as it loves the "Afghan street." In its telling, the Pakistani street is forever on the boil, with "huge throngs" in Rawalpindi and Peshawar and Islamabad. One crowd in Rawalpindi was said to be particularly frenzied. Protesters angrily waved signs, some of them in English: "Afghanistan is in need of reconstruction not destruction." Anti-American demonstrations are, of course, eagerly covered by the Western news media as well. But by television standards, the Al Jazeera video was notably extended -- close to a minute long. In the clip, Islamist leaders prophesied calamity for the military ruler Pervez Musharraf. The crowd was dressed in South Asian white against the glare of the sun, and its rage seemed overwhelming. Looking at all those angry faces, it was easy to forget that General Musharraf, the ruler of Pakistan, was holding back the tide of anger in his country. The clip reached its maximum intensity when the crowd displayed an effigy of George Bush with a cardboard photo of his face. The protesters spat at the cutout, went at it with shoes. They pounded the American president to a pulp. It was a spectacle tailor-made for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera began broadcasting in October 1996. The preceding year, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the crown prince of Qatar, did a most un-Arab thing: he pulled off a palace coup, taking over the government from his father (who was vacationing in Europe at the time). The young ruler promptly announced a new order of things and set out to challenge Saudi primacy in the Gulf region. He hoped to underline his independence and give his small principality a voice in the world.

The young emir had good timing. Soon after he ascended the throne, an Arabic television joint venture between the BBC and a Saudi concern, Orbit Communications, foundered over the BBC's insistence on editorial independence. The Arab reporters and editors who worked on this failed venture were eager for a new opportunity. Qatar's new emir gave them a new lease on life. With his fortune footing the bill, Al Jazeera was born.

The emir's child has grown quickly. Although it is by no means the biggest Arabic television channel, its reach is expanding. Al Jazeera now reaches viewers in more than 20 Arab countries, mostly through private satellite dishes, which have become tremendously popular in the Middle East. Dishes can be purchased there for less than $100, and tens of millions of Arab families now own them. They are as common in Cairo slums as they are in Dubai mansions. Al Jazeera beams its signal free of charge to most countries. Outside the Arab world, in countries like Great Britain, it is offered as part of a subscription service. In the United States, around 150,000 subscribers pay the Dish Network between $22.99 and $29.99 a month to receive Al Jazeera as part of a multichannel Arabic "package."

Like America's own 24-hour news outlets, Al Jazeera is a repetitive affair. As with CNN, it is easy to see its luster withering away in a time of peace and normalcy. There are steady news updates throughout the day. (It is always daytime on Al Jazeera, which announces its coming schedule in Mecca time, Greenwich Mean Time and New York time.) There is a financial broadcast of the standard variety -- filmed out of London, with a source checking in from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Sports (soccer for the most part) gets its own regular report. There is a survey of the world press and a show dedicated to the secrets of the cinema. Oddly for a passionately pan-Arab channel, the station broadcasts dubbed programs bought from old American libraries: a wildlife documentary, a history of French art.

There is little coherence to Al Jazeera's scheduling -- segments about the American bombs in Kabul and the Israeli tanks in the streets of the West Bank alternate with quaint reports on life in Silicon Valley and the patterns of energy consumption in American cities. The end result has a hectic yet anonymous feel. Al Jazeera is not a star-driven channel; no particular anchor dominates it. It's the BBC pattern, reporter driven, with a succession of reporters and anchors drawn from different Arab lands.

The pride of Al Jazeera lies, without a doubt, in its heavily promoted talk shows, like "Without Borders," "Opinion and the Other Opinion" and "The Opposite Direction." One enormously popular program in this genre is "Al-Sharia wa al-Hayat," or "Islamic Law and Life." The program, which is full of belligerent piety and religious zeal, appears every Sunday evening at 9:05, Mecca time. It is structured somewhat like "Larry King Live"; an interview with a guest is followed by questions and comments from viewers.

One recent evening, the guest of the program was Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Hassan, a young Islamic preacher. A large man with a bushy jet-black beard, he was dressed in a white thoub and a loose white kaffiyeh without a headband -- an exaggerated Islamist fantasy of what Muslims in seventh-century Arabia looked like. Hassan was interviewed by Hasib Maher, a young, polite Al Jazeera anchorman in suit and tie.

Hassan was fierce; it was easy to imagine him inciting a crowd. He had the verbal skills and eloquence of his homeland. (Egyptians are the people of the spoken and written word in the Arab world; the Gulfies are its silent types.) Hassan knew the sacred scripture by heart: he knew the Sira -- the life and the example -- of the Prophet Muhammad; he knew the Hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet. He tackled the questions thrown at him with gusto.

Al Jazeera's anchorman asked Hassan about a fatwa issued by a number of religious scholars that ruled that American Muslims were bound to fight under the flag of their country, even if this meant going to war against fellow Muslims. Hassan would have none of this fatwa. "This puzzles the believer," he said. "I say that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said that the Muslim is the brother of every other Muslim. He can't oppress his brother Muslim or bring about his surrender or abandon him to non-Muslims. Come to your brother's aid whether he be oppressor or oppressed, the Prophet taught us. No one can deny that our brothers in Afghanistan are among the oppressed."

Hassan really knew how to milk the medium. In an extended monologue, he declared that the Islamic community, the pan-national umma, was threatened everywhere -- in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, the Philippines. The umma, he said forcefully, should know its pain and heal its wounds. Then he did something you never see on "Hardball": he broke into free-flowing verse. There was no shred of paper in front of him; this was rote learning and memorization:

Oh Muslims, we have been dying for centuries What are we in this world? . . . We are bloodied corpses, And our blood is being shed. Oh the honor of Islam, How that honor is being violated. . . . We strayed from the faith, And the world darkened for us. If the root dies, The branches and the leaves will die.

Hassan now owned his airwave pulpit. He was in full flight. A look of awe stole upon the anchorman's face. The anchorman queried Hassan about the attacks of Sept. 11: Did they implicate Islam and Muslims in any way? The preacher answered in his own way. "Oppression always leads to an explosion!" he said angrily. "Under the cover of the new world order, Muslims in Chechnya and Iraq have been brutalized. . . . Any Muslim on the face of the earth who bears faith in God and his Prophet feels oppression today. If a believer feels oppression and thinks that no one listens to him and that power respects only the mighty, that believer could be provoked to violent deeds. We saw things -- horrors -- in Bosnia that would make young people turn old. . . . Where were the big powers and the coalitions and the international organizations then? Where are they now, given what is going on in Palestine? The satellite channels have spread everywhere a knowledge of this oppression."

Hassan then answered an e-mail message from a viewer. "Should we turn the other cheek, as Christ advised?" the viewer asked. "No, I say," Hassan replied. "The Islamic umma must come to the rescue of the oppressed!"

This was soon followed by a call from a Palestinian viewer, Shaker Abdulaziz. He greeted Hassan and the host, wished them God's peace and mercy, then delivered an angry prose poem. "The wolf," he said, "should not be blamed if the shepherd is an enemy of his own flock! I saw the people, evildoers living next to evildoers, befriending the wolf and weeping with the shepherd." Abdulaziz was speaking in code, but Al Jazeera's viewers would understand his message: the false, treacherous shepherds were, of course, those Arab rulers who had betrayed their peoples and befriended the wolves of the West.

"I greet you from the Dome of the Rock," Abdulaziz said. "A people are being slaughtered, liquidated and trampled upon. Where are the Arab rulers and armies? They do nothing!" Abdulaziz's wrath grew stronger. He challenged the show's guest preacher directly. "Is it not time for Sheik Hassan to call from this pulpit upon the Arab peoples to rebel, trample their rulers and replace them with a just ruler and the rule of the Islamic state?"

Maher, the smooth anchorman, did not challenge his guest's assertions. He did not mention, for instance, that the West had come to the defense of Muslims in Kosovo. He simply moved on.

Next, a viewer named Hazem Shami -- from Denmark, of all places -- came on the line. "Peace be upon you," he began. "The insistence of the colonizing nations, with America as their leader, on tying Islam to terrorism is merely due to the fact that America considers Islam as the sole obstacle to its hegemony over the Islamic world. Even though Islam is a message of peace and mercy, it still refuses the hegemony of the kuffar (infidels) over the Muslims in all matters -- cultural, economic, military. Muslims should unite their countries in one Islamic state. Islam is the only challenge to world capitalism, the only hope after a black capitalist century."

The man in Denmark had posed no question, but Hassan nonetheless took his bait. "The Jews are the ones responsible for spreading this hostile view of Islam," the preacher explained. "The Jews dominate the Western media, and they feed the decision-makers this distorted view of Islam. No sooner did the attacks in America take place, the Jews came forth accusing the Muslims, without evidence, without proof."

It was strange hearing this unyielding view of the faith and this talk of "infidels" coming from a man in Denmark. Islam, once a religion of Africa and Asia, had migrated across the globe; it had become part of Western European and North American life. But in bilad al-Kufr ("the lands of unbelief"), it had grown anxious. The caller lived in Western Europe, but the tranquil Danish world had not seeped into him. He had come to this satellite program, to this preacher, like some emissary of war. In close proximity to modern liberties, he had drawn back and, through Al Jazeera, sought the simplifications and certainties of extreme faith.

One of Al Jazeera's most heavily promoted talk shows right now is called "The First of the Century's Wars," in homage to the battle in Afghanistan. A recent episode featured three guests -- one in Washington, one in London and one in the Doha studio. Demure at first glance, Montaha al Ramhi, the anchorwoman who led the discussion, is a woman of will and political preference. She was dressed on this day in the Hillary Clinton style: an orange blouse under a black suit-jacket. I could not make out her exact nationality in the Arab world; her accent didn't give her away.

Ramhi's subject for the evening was Osama bin Laden, and the responses of the Arab world to his message. Does bin Laden represent the sentiments of the Arabs, she asked, or is he a "legend" that the West has exaggerated? There would be her guest panelists, she announced, and there would be reports from the field, from the "streets" of the Arab world. The guest in Doha was a Palestinian writer and analyst by the name of Fayez Rashid; the guest in London was Hafez Karmi, director of the Mayfair Islamic Center; the third pundit was Shafeeq Ghabra, a liberal Kuwaiti political scientist who currently lives in Washington.

Karmi, a large man with a close-cropped beard, was dressed in a shiny silk suit, matched by a shiny tie. He had the exile's emphatic politics, and he had the faith. Ghabra had his work cut out for him. Indeed, as soon as Rashid launched his first salvo, it became clear that Ghabra was to be a mere foil for an evening of boisterous anti-Americanism.

"He is a celebrated resister," Rashid said of bin Laden. "The U.S. was looking for an enemy, and bin Laden had supplied it with the enemy it needed. He is an Arab symbol of the fight against American oppression, against Israeli oppression. . . . The U.S. had exaggerated Osama bin Laden's threat. This is the American way: it was done earlier in the case of Iraq when the power of the Iraqi Army was exaggerated before it was destroyed. . . . Now the Americans want to kill bin Laden to defeat this newest Arab symbol."

When Ghabra spoke, he offered a cautionary refrain. A new international order, he said, was emerging out of the wreckage of Sept. 11. "The world is being reshaped," he said. He warned against allowing the "Arab street" to dictate policy. Surely, he said, one wanted leadership and judgment from the Arab world, lest it be further marginalized and left out of the order of nations.

For Karmi, however, Osama bin Laden was a "struggler in the path of God." There was no proof, he added, that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the events of Sept. 11; he was merely a man who cared about the rights of Muslims. He asked and answered his own question: Why did the "Arab Afghans" -- by which he meant the Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980's to fight the Soviet Union -- turn their wrath against the United States? "They have been made angry that the enemies are inside the Arab world," he said, echoing bin Laden's Oct. 7 videotape. "By its presence in the Arabian Peninsula, or in Palestine through its unlimited support for the killing of Palestinians, America has brought this anger on itself!"

Rashid, the guest in Doha, offered further absolution for bin Laden. The man, he argued, was just "part of the Arab anger in the face of American arrogance."

The show paused for a commercial break. One ad offered a striking counterpoint to the furious anti-Westernism of the call-in program. It was for Hugo Boss "Deep Red" perfume. A willowy Western woman in leather pants strode toward a half-naked young man sprawled on a bed. "Your fragrance, your rules, Hugo Deep Red," the Arabic voiceover intoned. I imagined the young men in Arab-Muslim cities watching this. In the culture where the commercial was made, it was nothing unusual. But on those other shores, this ad threw into the air insinuations about the liberties of the West -- the kind of liberties that can never be had by the thwarted youths of the Islamic world.

Back on the air, Shafeeq Ghabra made his sharpest intervention of the program: There was a "democratic deficit" in the Arab world, he argued. "But if a Saudi citizen had to choose between bin Laden and King Fahd, he should choose King Fahd. Bin Laden has not come forth bearing a democratic project, or a new project to improve the condition of women, or to repair our educational system. What he proposes is a Talibanist project, which would be a calamity for the Arab people."

Ramhi, the anchorwoman, interrupted him, talking over his voice. "Someone has to say to the United States, this is a red line!" she shouted. "Here and no more, in Palestine and Iraq, in other Arab realms!"

Ramhi soon cut off the discussion and segued to a taped segment from Egypt. The report, a Cairo street scene, was full of anti-Americanism. "Any young Muslim would be proud to be Osama bin Laden," one young man said. "America is the maker of terrorism," another asserted, "and it is now tasting its own medicine." There was authenticity in this rage; it was unrehearsed and unprompted. The segment went on at some length.

Afterward, Ramhi admitted that there was a "minority opinion" to be found in Egypt. She cut to the brief comments of a quiet man, in a white shirt and tie, in the midst of a crowd. He was eager to exonerate his faith. "I am a good Muslim," he said, "and Islam does not permit the killing of noncombatants. Islam could never countenance the killing of civilians."

This dissent was immediately followed, however, by more belligerence. Men clamored for the "evidence," insisting there was no proof of bin Laden's guilt. And there was the unsettling verdict of the sole "woman on the street" interviewed. The young woman had a certain fundamentalist chic -- a colored head scarf arranged with flair and a confident way about her. She spoke of bin Laden with unadorned admiration. "Bin Laden is the only personality who is doing the right thing at this time," she said. "He is trying to awaken them from their slumber!"

Al Jazeera is the only Arab television station to have achieved global fame, but its status is inflated. The truth is, other Arab channels reach much wider audiences. The oldest, most successful of the pan-Arab satellite stations is the London-based Middle East Broadcasting Centre. The station is controlled by an in-law of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In addition to broadcasting the region's most popular program, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" MBC has five news broadcasts of its own. MBC's news programs come across as blandly professional. Compared to Al Jazeera, its reporters are staid, careful not to incur the wrath of Arab rulers or to challenge the established order. There is also the hugely popular Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International. LBCI is loaded with entertainment programming, but it also regularly presents news. The news on LBCI, a privately owned station, also has a tepid feel. Syria dominates the Lebanese world, and its news broadcasts avoid broadcasting anything that would offend.

Despite its comparatively small audience, Al Jazeera has received almost all of the Bush administration's attention so far. The doors in official Washington have now opened before Al Jazeera's reporters. Since Sept. 11, there have been interviews with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Surely, the emir of Qatar never imagined that the bet he took five years ago would be so amply rewarded. Al Jazeera still requires the emir's subsidies, but the station's heightened profile has brought it closer to solvency. Al Jazeera's footage from Afghanistan, for example, has been sold to news outlets around the world, with individual clips selling for as much as $250,000. And earlier this fall, CNN and ABC made arrangements with Al Jazeera to broadcast the Arabic station's exclusive video from Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera's defenders tend to applaud its independence from the censors who control state-sponsored outlets in the Arab world. For the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, there is the pleasure of channel-hopping at 2 in the morning and hearing a television station breaking with the widespread censorship and silence of the Arab news media. "It provides the one window through which we breathe," Soueif recently wrote of Al Jazeera.

In one sense, Soueif is right: the Arab world needed to be challenged. This was a region where the official media, in August 1990, withheld news of Iraq's conquest of Kuwait for three days. The pompous, sycophantic press in Arab countries -- whose main function has been to report the comings and goings and utterances of the ruler of the land -- has been dealt a major blow. For the first time, Arabs with a satellite dish now have access to uncensored news.

Al Jazeera's viewers see things that people of the region are clearly not meant to see. On Oct. 21, Al Jazeera offered silent footage of Bright Star, a joint Egyptian-American military exercise, off the coast of Egypt. It was a potent commentary on the stealth cooperation of the Egyptian military with the Pentagon. And despite the fact that its coverage of the intifada was horribly slanted, Al Jazeera should get some credit for being one of the few Arab TV stations to interview Israelis.

That said, Al Jazeera's virulent anti-American bias undercuts all of its virtues. It is, in the final analysis, a dangerous force. And it should treated as such by Washington.

A Madison Avenue advertising executive, Charlotte Beers, has been newly designated the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. The aim is to win the propaganda war, or the battle of public diplomacy in the Muslim world. She has her work cut out for her. The Bush administration is eager to explain America's war, eager for the Arabs and the Pakistanis to accept the justness of its military actions. But how can it possibly expect to persuade the reporters at Al Jazeera to change their deep-seated view of this conflict? It would therefore be folly for America's leaders to spend too much energy trying to moderate Al Jazeera. It would be counterproductive to give Al Jazeera's editors and reporters a special claim on the time of senior American officials.

There is a better strategy available to Washington. Instead of focusing on Al Jazeera, the White House could grant "pool interviews" to a large number of Arab stations. It could give the less inflammatory satellite stations, like MBC and LBCI, as much attention as Al Jazeera. Or, indeed, it could give them more. After all, MBC has a bigger audience; shouldn't it have a bigger influence, too? Why not give MBC the scoop of an interview with President Bush? Why not give LBCI some exclusive access to White House officials?

Americans must accept that they are strangers in the Arab world. We can barely understand, let alone control, what Al Jazeera's flak-jacketed reporters in Kabul and smooth anchorwomen in Doha are saying about us. An American leader being interviewed on Al Jazeera will hardly be able to grasp the insinuations, the hidden meanings, suggested by its hostile reporters. No matter how hard we try, we cannot beat Al Jazeera at its own game. But one thing is sure: there is no need to reward a channel that has made a name for itself through stridency and anti-Americanism.

There is a war on the battlefield, and that is America's to win. But the repair of the Arab political condition -- and the weaning of the Arab world away from radicalism -- is a burden, and a task, for the Arabs themselves. The only thing America can do is make sure that it never gives this radicalism -- and its satellite channel -- a helping hand.

Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is the author most recently of ''The Dream Palace of the Arabs.''

-------- sudan

U.S. Envoy Looks for Change in Sudan

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By MARC LACEY

KAUDA, Sudan, Nov. 16 - Nobody ran, as they usually do, when an airplane swept in low over the Nuba Mountains in Sudan the other day. For a change, it was food aid and not government bombs showering down on the people of Nuba, one of the most remote and wretched areas of a vast country at war with itself for 18 years.

In the first sustained aid effort in a decade to reach these mountains, planes allowed in by Sudan's government ferried food to about 150,000 people caught here in determined rebellion against the rulers of the north, and the capital, Khartoum.

Corn, lentils and salt, in 55-pound sacks, are plummeting down several times each day from the cargo holds of C-130 supply planes. In allowing these shipments to people it has repeatedly bombed, the Sudanese government is seeking to present a new, more moderate face to the United States.

Just three years ago, Khartoum was on the receiving end of American missile attacks, a response to the bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 for which Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were blamed.

Writing Sudan off as a terrorist menace that played host to Mr. bin Laden until he was expelled under American pressure in 1996, the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on the country and sought to isolate it.

Interest in Sudan revived this year in part because the country is involved with two of the Bush administration's most important constituencies: oil and religion.

Oil began flowing in 1998, much to the ire of American Christians who saw the revenue as enriching the Muslim government, enabling it to buy arms and continue killing Christians in the country's south. The civil war and war-related famine have claimed an estimated two million lives since the early 1980's.

Religious leaders in the United States and other critics of the Khartoum government have pressured the White House to work for an end to the war, some of them pushing for the southern rebels to be supplied with weapons to counter government attacks.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Sudan has sought mightily to change its image as a rogue state. The government has turned over the names of suspected bin Laden allies to Washington and granted the Pentagon permission to send military flights over Sudan's air space.

While the White House has welcomed those moves, President Bush recently extended sanctions imposed in 1997 to encourage the country to sever its links to terrorists and to end human rights abuses - including the enslavement of Christians in southern Sudan, which has drawn wide criticism, particularly on Capitol Hill.

For the Bush administration, the test of whether Sudan has really changed its ways will begin here. The White House's newly appointed special envoy for Sudan, John C. Danforth, was permitted this week to visit the rebel-held areas, an about-face for a government that has repeatedly objected to past American delegations in the south.

Still, the Sudanese government sent mixed signals. Several days before Mr. Danforth landed at the airport here, relief workers reported shelling that was believed to have come from a government army garrison.

Some American officials viewed the attacks as an attempt to scare off Mr. Danforth, and there were recommendations that the trip be scrapped. When Mr. Danforth raised the issue of the shelling with Sudanese leaders in Khartoum, they denied involvement.

Also, the government has permitted the relief flights to the Nuba Mountains for only a month - fearful, it says, that a longer program would be used to carry arms to the southern rebels.

After watching bags of food tumble from the sky this week, the American entourage moved through the southern towns of Rumbek, Wancuei and Turali, all controlled by the rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army.

In Rumbek and elsewhere, Mr. Danforth encountered fierce criticism of the Sudanese government. He heard Christians complain that they were persecuted by the Islamic north. "We don't want to be Islamics," said Gabriel Kuc Abiei, the headmaster of a school. "We want to exist as ourselves."

In Wancuei, residents showed Mr. Danforth bombed-out buildings that they said had been leveled by government troops. "Unless you help us, you will not find us here for long," said Peter Fan Nyal, leaning on a staff in the shade under a tree.

In Turali, a woman stopped in the center of a crowded market to recount for Mr. Danforth how she had been abducted by government- backed militiamen, who she said raped her and forced her to work for no pay. "I escaped but my children are still there," said Nyandt Deng Del.

As he moved through the mountains this week, Mr. Danforth, who has said he seeks to end the war, not apportion blame for its many atrocities, expressed surprise at this region's extreme poverty and reports of disease.

Mr. Danforth, an Episcopalian minister, repeatedly asked people about their religious background and their freedom to pray without interference. "We know that there will be no peace in this country or any country if people feel they are being oppressed, mistreated or prevented from practicing their religion," he said.

Mr. Danforth said he arrived with no detailed peace plan, but he called for an end to the bombing of civilians, a halt in abductions and slavery and an agreement to allow immunizations to go forward.

He also called for a permanent cease-fire in the Nuba Mountains.

The Sudanese government responded coolly to the proposals, American officials said. Some of the rebel leaders pleaded with Mr. Danforth for American military support. Others argued for a divided Sudan, with the northerners segregated from those in the south.

"Separate us, please," insisted Lewis Ane Kuendit, a teacher. "We are different people. There is no other way to bring peace."

Concluding his visit, Mr. Danforth acknowledged that conditions were grimmer and the prospects for peace less likely than he had imagined. "Am I pessimistic?" he said. "I wouldn't bet much on this. They've been at it for a long time and there's a great deal of mistrust between the parties.

"But, on the other hand, what is this fighting accomplishing? It may be that people will say, `Enough is enough.'"

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

U.S., U.N. plan reconstruction of Afghanistan

USA Today
11/18/2001
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nphoto.htm

WASHINGTON - The United States and international relief agencies are dangling the promise of billions in aid to lure the Northern Alliance into joining a broad-based Afghan government rather than setting up its own post-Taliban regime. The State Department will host a meeting Tuesday on Afghanistan's reconstruction needs, Bush administration officials say. Other aid conferences are planned in Pakistan and Germany.

United Nations officials say at least $1 billion will be required in the coming year for food relief and to jump-start agriculture, education and infrastructure repair programs. Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), says, "The likely figure for Afghanistan is $7 billion to $10 billion over 5 years." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to name Brown U.N. coordinator for Afghan reconstruction today.

The challenge facing relief workers is enormous, the result of 2 decades of war and long government neglect.

"It's not a question of what the country needs," says Ali Jalali, a former Afghan army officer who heads the Farsi-language service of the Voice of America. "The country needs everything."

Until the attacks Sept. 11, the Taliban controlled 90% of the land but provided few government services apart from enforcing the population's Islamic piety. Now power is reverting to warlords, whose corruption, brutality and incompetence made the Taliban seem the lesser evil when it seized power 5 years ago.

After entering the Afghan capital, Kabul, last week, Northern Alliance leaders insisted representatives of other Afghan factions come to Kabul to discuss forming a post-Taliban government. But after tough talk from U.S. and U.N. envoys, alliance leaders say they are willing to send delegates to Europe for a conference this week.

"One of the things we have going for us is that we are putting together an international reconstruction effort," Christina Rocca, assistant secretary of State for South Asia, said last week. "We hope that will serve as an incentive to participate in a broad-based government."

The international community opposes a government run solely by the Northern Alliance because it would not represent the country's largest ethnic group, Pashtuns, and has a record of brutality.

In Kabul, U.N. spokesman Eric Falt said the U.N. envoy to Afghanistan met Sunday with Burhanuddin Rabbani, the last internationally recognized Afghan president, and other ethnic leaders to discuss a plan that would require consensus on a new government, adoption of a new constitution and creation of a force to restore and maintain order.

Like the political process, economic rebuilding is likely to be ad hoc.

"It's very unlikely that post-bombing Afghanistan will lend itself to the neat formulas of reconstruction planners," Brown says. "It will be a very messy peace over a protracted period of time."

Relief workers will not have to start from scratch. Several thousand Afghans worked for U.N. agencies and foreign relief groups during the Taliban period, and there are community projects that can be revived even if a central government is not firmly established, U.N. officials say.

"Out of 29 provinces, 22 have not been affected by the recent conflict," says Julia Taft, assistant administrator of the UNDP. "We need to get in there and find out what is still functioning."

U.N. statistics on human welfare rank Afghanistan near the bottom:

• Life expectancy at birth is 41 years, and one in four children do not live until their 5th birthday.

• Only 39% of boys and 3% of girls attend primary school.

• Six million of the country's 25 million people have fled, including many professionals.

There is an average of one doctor per 50,000 people in Afghanistan, compared with one doctor per 120 Americans.

The World Bank estimates that some $500 million is needed just to rid the country of land mines.

A senior State Department official says the aid community is looking for some quick relief efforts to lure back refugees and give young Afghans an incentive to trade in Kalashnikov rifles for schoolbooks, hammers and plows.

There are concerns that pumping too much aid into Afghanistan too soon could wind up strengthening warlords and promoting a new civil war.

"The danger is a Pashtun vs. non-Pashtun conflict," says Peter Tomsen, U.S. envoy to Afghan factions when they fought the Soviets in the 1980s. He fears there could be a third Afghan war, this time among the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara ethnic minorities who make up the Northern Alliance and the Pashtun, who predominate in southern Afghanistan.

Tomsen says development projects can proceed "if there's a local leadership whose fingers are not dripping with blood and human rights violations." He suggests that donor nations start small and not inundate Afghanistan with funds that could wind up supporting new bureaucracies that are corrupt.

Others fear that funneling relief money through localities could hamper the establishment of a viable central government.

"I was optimistic that the Taliban would fall, but now I am very concerned that reconstruction will be hijacked by the warlords," Voice of America's Jalali says. "Defeating the Taliban and capturing Osama bin Laden is not enough."

Contributing: Thor Valdmanis and Tim Friend in Kabul, Afghanistan

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

States: Missouri, North Carolina

USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Missouri

Kansas City - A federal judge ruled that prosecutors can't use videotaped confessions an accused killer gave to U.S. Navy investigators in 1968. The judge said investigators coerced former seaman Michael LeBrun into confessing that he killed a shipmate while their ship was docked in the Philippines. Prosecutors are considering an appeal. The case was re-opened in 1998. The shipmate had been declared a deserter in 1968.

North Carolina

Camp Lejeune - Like local police who use Crimestoppers for tips, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has initiated a sort of Terrorist Stoppers. The program receives tips on potential terrorist threats from the public. NCIS Officials say the public should report any suspicious activity no matter how insignificant.

---

Two U.S. sailors missing after tanker sank

USA Today
11/18/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/11/18/soldiers.htm

MANAMA, Bahrain - The U.S. Navy was searching Sunday for two U.S. sailors missing in the Persian Gulf after boarding a rickety tanker deemed to be smuggling Iraqi oil.

The United Arab Emirates-flagged tanker sank at about 4:45 a.m. local time Sunday in the northern Persian Gulf, said Lt. Melissa Schuermann, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain. Six other Americans were rescued, she said.

The missing Americans were identified as Petty Officer 1st Class Vincent Parker, 38, of Preston, Miss., and Petty Officer 3rd Class Benjamin Johnson, 21, of Rochester, N.Y., a Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity.

Schuermann said it was too early to speculate on the reason for the sinking. She described the ship as being in "overall poor condition" and "grossly overweighted."

"We're doing a preliminary inquiry into the facts and circumstances surrounding the incident," she said.

The entire 14-person crew of the tanker, Samra, was believed to be Iraqi, she said. The body of one crew member was recovered and three others were missing, Schuermann said.

The U.S. Navy said the tanker was carrying an estimated 1,900 tons of Iraqi oil in violation of U.N. sanctions against Iraq.

In Washington, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz indicated that the sinking was accidental. He said the tanker had been intercepted as part of a long-running U.S.-led international maritime operation designed to enforce the U.N. oil embargo against Iraq.

"It is as a reminder that at the same time we are conducting a war in Afghanistan we have military (personnel) engaged in Bosnia and in Kosovo and in Iraq and in Korea. The world remains a dangerous place - not just in Afghanistan," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, told CNN the American sailors boarded the tanker as part of "normal interdiction efforts to make certain that the U.N. sanctions are being observed" when the ship sank.

"It may have been weather-related, it may have been overloaded, but we have no reason to believe it was a hostile incident of any kind," she said.

It was not clear whether the sunken Samra was leaking oil. The Navy said it was still focusing on search and rescue.

U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the Gulf War, prohibit Iraq from exporting oil without U.N. authorization. This year, the U.S.-led Maritime Interception Force has boarded numerous ships and diverted 99 vessels while enforcing sanctions.

The U.S. sailors had boarded the tanker from the USS Peterson, a destroyer whose home port is Norfolk, Va.

The search was being conducted with the help of helicopters from the Peterson as well as the USS Ingram, the USS Leyte Gulf, and an Australian frigate, the HMAS Sydney, Schuermann said.

---

Missile Ship Monitors U.S. Strikes

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Ships.html?searchpv=aponline

ABOARD THE USS VELLA GULF (AP) -- Navy Lt. Joe Ervin monitors the scores of glowing dots moving across his radar screen, which represent all kinds of aircraft flying above the Arabian Sea, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

During the hours of his watch aboard the USS Vella Gulf, it's Ervin's job to know the location of each warplane flying sorties from U.S. aircraft carriers floating in the northern Arabian Sea.

``It can be stressful, especially when you stand quite a few watches. So far, it's been a pretty smooth operation,'' said Ervin of Norfolk, Va.

The Vella Gulf Spy 1 radar system tracks the 70 to 100 aircraft of the U.S.-led coalition as they fly bombing or surveillance missions over Afghanistan as part of the response to the terror attacks on the United States.

With the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks fresh in their memories, 30 U.S. Navy radar, intelligence and communications specialists are watching to make sure that all aircraft, ships and submarines in the region are on course and pose no threat to U.S. military assets.

``As soon as the aircraft takes off, we track it, we pass that aircraft on to forward air controllers that are flying AWACS aircraft, and at that time our job is done. We wait till they come back, when they will check back through us and say, 'Hey, we're friendly,''' said Lt. Dan Reese, a Navy communications specialist from Virginia Beach, Va.

The cruiser also runs a sensitive data network delivering real-time connections between airborne pilots, AWACS surveillance aircraft and the U.S. command structure to provide instant assessments of damage to Afghan bombing targets.

Pilot messages scroll across one of the huge television screens dominating the room, known as the command information center.

``We're well connected for intelligence,'' said Reese, 37. ``Classified Internet provides for information exchange (in) real time between all of the various commands involved in the Operation Enduring Freedom.''

But the job of monitoring flight paths can be difficult.

As Ervin explained the complexities of his watch, he also tracked a commercial airliner from Pakistan as it moved on its designated flight path. Any deviation or descent toward a carrier will spark him into action, first placing a call to the pilot through a VHF radio frequency. If there is no answer, he will direct a U.S. jet to visually identify the plane, intercept it, and, if necessary, shoot it down.

So far, this hasn't happened.

Meanwhile, the 380-person crew relaxed Sunday with a ``steel beach'' party of grilled meat and soft drinks, served on the deck near the hatches of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Gunner's mate Chad France had good news: his wife, Penelope, had just given birth to Chad Jr., a healthy 7 pounds, 10 ounces.

``There are no words to explain it. It's my first,'' France, 29, of Marion, Ind., said as he handed out cigars. ``I'm kinda overwhelmed.''


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Washington

States
USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Seattle - A new study says the region is in position for a leadership role in clean-energy technologies. Alternative energy sources including solar power, wind turbines and fuel cells are going to be in high demand, the study predicts. It was financed by several Northwest utilities and a local nonprofit.

-------- energy

Phillips and Conoco sign agreement to merge

USA Today
11/18/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/11/18/phillips-conco.htm

TULSA, Okla. (AP) - Phillips Petroleum Co. said Sunday it will buy Conoco Inc. for about $15.4 billion in stock, creating the nation's third-largest oil and gas company.

Phillips, which bought the refining company Tosco Corp. earlier this year, will gain extra strength as a producer of petroleum. The combined market value of the new company would be $35 billion based on Friday's closing price of each company's shares.

Phillips would also assume roughly $8 billion in debt.

Under the terms of the deal - described by the two rivals as a merger of equals - the combined company, ConocoPhillips, would have reserves of 8.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent, daily production of 1.7 million barrels and $18.6 billion in debt and preferred securities.

The deal was approved by the boards of both companies on Sunday.

The merger is expected to close during the second half of 2002 pending regulatory and shareholder approval.

The agreement would create the world's sixth-largest oil and gas company, in terms of reserves and production, at a time of tremendous industrywide consolidation. The deal, which also includes a $550 million breakup fee, would give ConocoPhillips the No.3 spot in the United States behind Exxon Mobil Corp. and ChevronTexaco Corp.

ConocoPhillips would be based in Houston, home to Conoco but keep a reduced presence in Bartlesville, Okla., where Phillips employs 2,400 at its headquarters and research facility.

"This is really a growth story for Conoco and Phillips," said Conoco chairman Archie W. Dunham, who is delaying a planned retirement to serve as chairman of the combined company.

Phillips chairman James Mulva will be chief executive and president of the new company and become chairman when Dunham retires in 2004.

"What we saw was just an ideal time for us to put our growth plans together," Mulva said.

Conoco and Phillips have a combined global work force of 58,000 employees and expect to save at least $750 million annually by merging.

Mulva said most of the savings should come from realized operating efficiencies instead of job cuts, but an undisclosed number of jobs will be eliminated in Bartlesville.

Analysts said the deal would give the company better strategic balance.

"They really needed to beef up their exploration portfolio around the world," said Gene Gillespie, senior energy analyst with Howard Weil in New Orleans. "Conoco has a presence in some areas that Phillips is interested in, including the Gulf of Mexico and the MacKenzie Delta in Western Canada."

There have been several big energy mergers recently. In September, the Federal Trade Commission approved Chevron Corp.'s acquisition of Texaco Inc. That deal followed BP Amoco's takeover of Atlantic Richfield Corp. and Exxon Corp.'s acquisition of Mobil Corp. in 1999, as the world's largest oil companies look for size and breadth to gain a competitive edge.

Phillips shareholders are to get one share of each of ConocoPhillips stock for each Phillips share they own. Conoco shareholders will get .4677 shares of the new stock. The merger is expected to be tax-free to shareholders. Phillips shareholders will end up with a 56.6-percent stake in the new company.

Phillips is a familiar face to motorists in the United States with its Phillips 66 logo. Phillips sells gasoline at more than 12,000 locations under the Phillips 66, Circle K and 76 brands.

The company has more than 5 billion barrels of oil in reserve. Last year it merged its gas gathering and processing operations with Duke Energy and combined its chemicals division with ChevronTexaco.

Houston-based Conoco has oil and gas exploration activities in 20 nations and has 3.7 billion barrels of oil in reserve. Earlier this year, it acquired Gulf Canada Resources.

The company also operates nearly 6,000 miles of pipelines nationwide and has stakes in nine refineries in the United States, Europe and Asia. It operates more than 7,000 gas stations in Europe, Thailand and the United States.

-------- environment

Texas

States
USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Dallas - For at least a decade, thousands of gallons of antifreeze, jet fuel and other chemicals flowed from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport underground and into tributaries of the Trinity River, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Airport executives declined comment because a whistleblower's lawsuit has been filed. Other airport representatives said that pollution problems are widespread.

-------- homelessness

California

States
USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

San Francisco - The city's one-night count of homeless people found 36% more than a year ago. The Mayor's Office on Homelessness reported about 7,305 homeless people, compared with 5,376 last year. Officials attribute the increase to milder weather and better census-taking. Homeless advocates say the numbers are low.

-------- human rights

Former Military Man Finds Himself Under Fire Over Rights Cases

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By GINGER THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/international/18MEXI.html

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 17 - He was once a lawyer in a general's uniform. Then he traded his stars for business suits. Now, nearly a year in office, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha has been pushed to the front lines of political combat.

The assassination of a high-profile human rights lawyer, whose cases most often focused on crimes by the military, has stirred concern that Mexico's security forces even now abuse their power under the cover of impunity.

Human rights activists also charge that Mr. Macedo, a brigadier general who once served as the chief of military justice, is more committed to protecting the military than exposing and stopping their abuses.

Mr. Macedo's military case roster is marked by some of the worst episodes of violence by soldiers in last decade. But despite recommendations by the government's National Human Rights Commission to investigate and discipline soldiers involved in the attacks, soldiers were regularly protected from prosecution in civilian courts for human rights violations under Mr. Macedo's watch.

Abandoning the secretive culture ingrained in him by 34 years of army service, Mr. Macedo responded to the wave of criticism and talked about his military career in an extensive interview this week.

He said he considered himself a victim of a "campaign of disinformation." And he lamented, "My rights are violated when these things happen."

But there is more than Mr. Macedo's reputation at stake. Confidence in the attorney general's office, where Mr. Macedo once said that even the walls were corrupt, had begun to rebuild this year and helped transform Mexico's image abroad.

United States and Mexican law enforcement officials have forged new joint crime-fighting units, linked by trust, and have shared intelligence to capture important drug traffickers and to extradite fugitives.

As Mr. Macedo's commitment to solving human rights disputes is questioned, so is the credibility of Mexico's first democratically elected president.

Mr. Macedo is the first military man in almost a century to serve as the nation's chief civilian law enforcement officer. Political analysts said that his struggle to emerge from the closed cult of military life into the scrutiny of civil society mirrored the conflicted evolution of the Mexican armed forces.

In straight, composed language, Mr. Macedo offered platitudes about the importance of the Mexico's struggle to establish the rule of law.

"Openness is what this society demands and deserves," Mr. Macedo said.

"Public scrutiny is crucial for all our institutions - it is the only way we will be allowed to participate in this great new society."

In fleeting lapses, however, Mr. Macedo, the son of a general who entered the military academy at 14, revealed glimpses of his core. Although he has been called to serve in a world without salutes and uniforms it seems there is no taking the soldier out of him.

When asked to talk about his own views on some of the important human rights decisions ahead of the government, Mr. Macedo said such matters were beyond his authority. His role, he said, was to obey the orders of the president.

"I am convinced that we must comply openly and plainly with all of the commitments Mexico has made on international human rights," he said.

"But those decisions are not up to me. It is not up to me to decided what decisions to make on these matters. It is up to the government of my country, not the attorney general."

Mr. Macedo, 51, portrayed himself as a dedicated foot soldier in the democratic transition led by President Vicente Fox, the first opposition politician to control the government in more than seven decades.

He said in the hour-long interview that he was a man "committed to the respect and intense promotion of human rights." He boasted about charts showing that hundreds of federal agents had been dismissed from their jobs over the last year for corruption charges, and showing that the number of complaints filed against the attorney general's office for unfair treatment by the police had fallen nearly in half.

He talked about his office's significant successes in nabbing members of the country's most important drug cartels. He also said that nearly 100 accused and convicted criminals had been extradited to the United States.

"I want to restore the feeling among Mexicans that the attorney general's office is an institution of good faith," he said, "an institution that investigates instances of wrongdoing and turns them over to the courts."

But in the ideologically divided cabinet of a president who promised Mexico a second revolution, Mr. Macedo's views on human rights seemed prone to caution. As Mexico struggles to stamp out corruption from every office of the government, Mr. Macedo expressed faith in Mexican institutions - particularly the courts - and warned against initiatives that might undermine their authority.

He opposed the idea of establishing an independent truth commission to investigate the worst government abuses in recent history - a principal promise of Mr. Fox's campaign.

Mr. Macedo described the use of torture by law enforcement agents as isolated incidents by rogues, rather than signs of a systematic culture of abuse. He also said he supported Mexico's plans to submit to international courts only if they did not infringe on the Constitution.

After Mr. Macedo's confirmation by the Senate, a headline in the weekly magazine Proceso lamented, "Despite it all, Macedo de la Concha is attorney general." His appointment sparked protests by human rights groups, who expressed fears that Mr. Macedo would cover up past military misdeeds and "militarize" the civilian police.

"Although he has committed to defending human rights, Macedo de la Concha brings with him to the attorney general's office a number of unresolved matters from his time as chief of military justice," the Proceso story added, "complaints of torture, illegal arrests and disappearances conducted by soldiers that he failed to investigate."

Concerns about Mr. Macedo's human rights record, however, were drowned out by the world's optimism about Mr. Fox. Analysts said Mr. Fox believed that Mr. Macedo's efforts against drug trafficking would win the confidence of the United States law enforcement agencies.

In his former job, Mr. Macedo had been involved in the arrest and prosecution of three generals linked to drug trafficking, including the former Mexican antidrug chief, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, in 1997. It was believed that Mr. Macedo could end the conflicts that often erupted between the military and civilian security forces in the fight against drugs.

Mexico's leading independent security expert, Sergio Aguayo, said President Fox believed that Mr. Macedo would impose discipline on an agency plagued by corruption and low-esteem. In the last 12 years, Mexico has had seven attorney generals. When Mr. Macedo took the job, he said, the agency had less than half the full complement of 3,500 federal agents.

In the interview, Mr. Macedo said it would take years to make the agency clean and healthy. And so far he has turned to his army friends for help; appointing 12 former military officers to high-level positions in the attorney general's office. In an interview in Proceso in April, he said he invited civilians to join but "many of them are not willing to risk their prestige, nor their lives."

But the assassination last month of a human rights attorney, Digna Ochoa, brought Mr. Macedo's military past back to haunt him. Ms. Ochoa, 37, a defender of peasant farmers and suspected guerrillas, was shot to death in her Mexico City office. Her biggest cases pitted her against Mr. Macedo's military justice system. She endured death threats for years.

Mr. Macedo said he had never met her. But, he said, he was indignant about her killing and determined to pursue her murders, even if that pursuit lead to the military.

"I will go as far as necessary," he said. "I have always lived up to my responsibility to guard the rule of law. That is my only interest."

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

World Trade Pact in Qatar

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

They fought about drug patents, farm subsidies, bananas and tuna. They pulled two all-nighters in six days. But representatives of the 142 member nations of the World Trade Organization finally settled on a framework for free trade in Doha, Qatar. Ministers agreed to begin negotiations aimed at ending European farm export subsidies, opening markets to insurance and environmental services, and reviewing antidumping rules. The United States made some concessions, but American businesses are broadly supportive of a trade agenda that could produce results as soon as 2005.

-------- police / prisoners

States: Maryland, Mississippi, Wisconsin

USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maryland

Annapolis - Former lobbyist Gerard Evans, convicted last year of fleecing customers out of $400,000, was transferred from federal prison to a halfway house. He spent less than a year of his 30-month sentence in prison. He could be released from custody by May 13 if he completes a drug and alcohol abuse program, a prison spokesman said.

Mississippi

Southaven - Local students plan to buy an $8,000 Christmas present for police: a gunpowder-sniffing dog. The department has drug dogs but no bomb-sniffer and has had trouble borrowing one from airport police in Memphis. A fundraiser is asking each student to bring in $1. The dog should arrive this week.

North Dakota Fargo - Many North Dakota law enforcement officials are struggling to make ends meet on their salaries, according to a survey conducted by The Forum newspaper. Logan County Sheriff Steve Engelhardt, for example, earns $22,440 a year. He's the lowest-paid sheriff in the state after nearly 30 years of police work.

Wisconsin

Wausau - The Marathon County Sheriff's Department is set to hire its first Southeast Asian cadet, officials said. Despite a growing Hmong population, Southeast Asian residents have only recently entered law enforcement. The county is to receive federal grants to hire five bilingual cadets over the next 5 years.

---

INS horror story

November 18, 2001
Michelle Malkin
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20011118-42352384.htm

The INS bureaucracy is a cesspool of elbow-rubbers, string-pullers, chest-puffers and cover-uppers who care more about protecting their backsides than upholding the law.

Look no further than the man who currently heads the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's counterterrorism unit. His name is Walter D. Cadman. As you read his stomach-churning story, remember what internal whistle-blowers at INS have been warning for years: Mr. Cadman is not an aberrant exception among the agency's top management. He is the rule.

Mr. Cadman joined INS in 1976, worked his way up the ranks, and then scored the plum job of Miami district director in 1992. Miami, of course, is one of the busiest hubs for immigration officials. Mr. Cadman did his best to impress the higher-ups from D.C.

But Mr. Cadman did more than just straighten the furniture when VIPs came calling. He helped create an entire false front. In June 1995, when an important congressional fact-finding delegation flew down to visit the Miami airport and the Krome detention center, Cadman participated in an elaborate scheme to deceive the politicians about how well these overcrowded facilities operated.

Nearly 50 INS employees wrote a joint letter to House immigration task force chairman Elton Gallegly, California Republican, alleging that Mr. Cadman and others had intentionally duped their Beltway guests during the visit. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) confirmed the Potemkin ruse. Among the OIG's findings: Mr. Cadman and 13 other senior staffers had released or transferred 101 of the 407 illegal aliens detained at Krome to make it look better. Of 58 aliens who were unleashed on the American public, at least nine were criminals and 35 had not been medically cleared for discharge.

The INS managers also ordered the temporary transfer of 45 detainees to other jails. They were bused to northern Florida and New Orleans several hours before the congressional delegation arrived. The taxpayers' bill for travel: more than $10,000. At the Miami airport, Mr. Cadman and his colleagues created the illusion of efficiency by evacuating detention cells, moving jailed detainees to unsecured areas, and hiring extra customs inspectors - who were paid overtime - to eliminate long lines. They also instructed underlings to lie to the congressional representatives about detention area procedures.

It took a year for Inspector General Michael Bromwich to fully uncover this nefarious plot. Why? Because Mr. Cadman and his cronies tried to cover up their tracks. While Mr. Cadman did not lead the conspiracy, Mr. Bromwich noted: "Mr. Cadman was a willing participant in efforts to mislead INS headquarters and then to mislead and delay the investigation of this matter." According to Mr. Bromwich, Mr. Cadman "refused to allow the OIG access to the computer servers that backed up the Miami District's electronic mail." Even after INS Headquarters directed Mr. Cadman's office to release the messages, "Cadman refused to provide access to his or his managers' computers or the servers."

The OIG was forced to hire computer specialists to reconstruct more than 4,000 e-mail messages and retrieve incriminating evidence. "Despite the OIG's efforts to get INS to preserve its records," Mr. Bromwich noted, "some e-mail was deleted before the investigators could review it."

Mr. Bromwich recommended that if INS couldn't fire Mr. Cadman, the agency should move him "where he would not have significant managerial responsibilities." Mr. Cadman headed to Washington and took a voluntary "demotion" as a criminal investigator - I kid you not - at a level which pays "at least $100,000 a year," according to INS watchdog Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican.

In 1998, Mr. Cadman was quietly named head of the INS' National Security Unit, where he coordinates counterterrorism efforts. That's right. This deceptive bureaucrat who condoned the reckless release of alien criminals, endangered the public and misled Congress is now in charge of helping law enforcement agents round up alien criminals.

Besides Reps. Gallegly and Tancredo, there has been no other uproar in Washington over Mr. Cadman's continued employment in one of the most important post-September 11 roles at INS. Only one other journalist, dogged investigator Bob Norman of the Miami New Times, has exposed Mr. Cadman's outrageous position. Meanwhile, INS spokeswoman Nancy Cohen told me the agency is "very supportive" of Mr. Cadman - who will not answer press inquiries directly about his Miami past.

It's "not an issue," Miss Cohen told me. Doesn't anyone else - in the White House, in the media, anywhere - disagree?

Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist.

----

Uncertainty Stalls Anti-Terror Efforts
Lack of Coordination, Guidelines Hamper Area Preparedness Planning

By Peter Whoriskey and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46919-2001Nov17?language=printer

Emergency agencies around the nation's capital are requesting $2 billion in anti-terrorism equipment and personnel, and the particulars of their wish lists have the ominous ring of Armageddon.

Mass casualty units. Biohazard first aid. Mobile command vehicles. Chemical bomb-containment devices.

But as police and fire departments attempt to arm themselves fora war on the home front, there is no consensus on how to prepare. Budget directors and elected officials have come to different conclusions about what they need to combat terrorism because, they admit, no one really knows.

The uncertainty leaves officials caught between spending limits and the urge to confront every conceivable nightmarish scenario.

The result is a patchwork of protection.

For example, while some police forces are preparing for chemical warfare by equipping each beat officer with a $99 escape hood good only for a few minutes of safety, others want to equip their personnel with full biochemical suits, at a cost of as much as $800 per officer. Prince William County has requested two for each officer.

While Prince George's County is hoping to stock $20 of antibiotics for every resident, other counties, such as Fairfax, are relying on state and national stockpiles.

While the District wants to outfit each of its schools with airport-style X-ray machines that could check backpacks and parcels, other jurisdictions are relying on part-time police officers to secure schools.

And while Fairfax County wants a $500,000 mass casualty unit -- basically a large truck fitted to carry first-aid equipment -- Arlington County wants a $215,000 bomb container for chemical and biological weapons, and the District wants an extra cherry picker to serve the White House.

"There are no textbooks and there are no recipes," said Jim Schwartz, deputy chief at the Arlington County Fire Department. "Each community is trying to assess its own needs."

National terrorism experts argue that the lack of clear equipment guidelines, as well as poor coordination among local departments, could lead to financial waste and unpreparedness.

"There has to be some sort of minimum capabilities that everyone must have, and no one has tried to address that," said Brian Houghton, the research director for the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a nonprofit group funded by Congress.

The U.S. General Accounting Office has criticized federal and local emergency managers in recent years for failing to fully analyze their equipment needs.

"There is little consensus . . . on the types of equipment needed for a city to prepare for a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear device terrorist incident," a GAO report found in June 1999.

In that report, investigators surveyed 24 federal, state and local officials about the utility of specific kinds of equipment for handling terrorist incidents.

The only item officials fully agreed on was yellow crime-scene tape. Opinions varied widely on 200 other pieces of equipment, such as water-testing kits and thermal-imaging cameras.

An update to that report published in September noted limited progress.

"If you analyze the threat and vulnerabilities, you can make better risk-management decisions," said GAO threat specialist Ray Decker. "If you don't, the crisis may be worse than it needs to be."

One of the key hurdles in addressing terrorism at home, experts say, is coordinating the efforts oflocal police and fire departments with each other and with federal law enforcement.

Police and fire chiefs in the region say they have made great strides.

But despite years of recommendations since the 1982 Air Florida crash here, police agencies in the region still do not operate on the same radio frequencies. On Sept. 11, for example, Arlington officers could not speak directly by radio with their counterparts elsewhere in the region.

Area law enforcement agencies also are somewhat unaccustomed to working with the FBI's terrorism experts. Several police chiefs in the area are only now requesting top-secret federal clearance for intelligence.

"One of my detectives gets a daily intel briefing from the FBI's anti-terrorism task force," said Barry J. McDevitt, chief of the Metro Transit Police. But "he can't share some of the information with me because he has top-secret clearance and I don't."

Police and fire departments around the nation's capital are competing against their counterparts across the country for $20 billion to be doled out by Congress to help communities prepare for attacks.

Officials in the Washington area say their communities are special targets, filled as they are with the people and the structures of the federal government. The District, of course, has the Capitol and the White House. Arlington has the Pentagon. Montgomery County has the National Institutes of Health. The CIA is in Fairfax, along with the homes of dozens of members of Congress.

"As long as the nation is at war, the nation's capital -- and I daresay our other local jurisdictions -- will be at risk," D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) told senators last week.

Area emergency planners are looking for money from a combination of local, state and federal sources. Fairfax has requested $25 million, Prince William $3.6 million, Arlington $21 million, the District $250 million, Prince George's $156 million and Montgomery about $47 million.

Virginia has asked for $3.8 billion, including about $1.6 billion for economic assistance. Maryland has asked for $128 million.

When Congress returns from its Thanksgiving recess, it will consider the first $80 million in requests for the Washington region, including $45 million for the purchase of emergency equipment, $19 million for chemical sensors in Metro stations and $20 million for equipment that would improve communications between rescue workers.

"We must be prepared for more terrorist attacks on important federal installations in the region," said U.S. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.). "We can't expect our local jurisdictions to bear the full burden."

A review of emergency preparedness budgets that cities, counties and states have developed since Sept. 11 turns up an array of definitions of what it means to be prepared.

For example, Prince George's County is asking for $16 million to have on hand a 10-day supply of Cipro, the antibiotic initially prescribed for anthrax victims, for each of its roughly 800,000 residents. The amount works out to about $20 per person.

"It's basic prevention," said Glenda Wilson, chief of staff to the Prince George's county executive.

But other jurisdictions see no justification for such a request.

"If there's a need, we would be supplied by the state or federal government," said Merni Fitzgerald, Fairfax County's spokesman. Besides, how would anyone know that they need $20 worth?"

Similarly, jurisdictions are divided on the basic question of how to equip beat officers to respond to the threat of biological or chemical weapons.

The Prince William and District police departments are seeking to equip every patrol officer with a full mask and suit.

"Police are going in first in many many cases, responding to every yahoo who says there is a spill or there is a package or there is a call," said Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, deputy mayor for public safety in the District. "They need to have the basics."

Fairfax and Montgomery counties, however, are equipping officers only with escape hoods.

Montgomery County budget officer Eric Carzon said police in his county requested full masks and suits for every officer. But officials decided against it.

"It was the sticker shock," he said. "At that level of money, is that what we really want to be doing? How far do you take that down? What about schoolteachers and principals?"

One of the items the agencies agree on is the mobile command unit -- basically a 40-foot mobile home filled with computers, phones and a conference table.

Arlington is asking for two and Fairfax one. Prince William officials want to replace theirs, and the state of Maryland wants one. But some terrorism experts say it is doubtful that the Washington area needs so many command buses, which have a price tag of $500,000 or more.

Command buses can spend more time in the garage than they do at major incidents, and they are easily shared -- as happened Sept. 11. Fairfax County's new command bus spent its first assignment as a show-and-tell object at the county fair.

"It doesn't make sense. And that's not to criticize anybody," said Bruce Morris, Virginia's deputy secretary of public safety. "At the Pentagon, if everyone who wanted one had that equipment, there would be no place to park it. You don't need 14 deluxe half-million-dollar command buses on any site."

Morris and others said the multiple requests for command buses show poor coordination among Washington area law enforcement agencies. Although the region's Council of Governments organizes meetings of police and fire chiefs, officials said their wish lists have been drawn up independently.

"Whether there are duplicates or not, I'm not sure if we are going to work that problem," said Joseph J. Zelinka, COG's public safety program coordinator. "It's up to the feds to sort this out."

"I wish it was that easy, that we had a formula for any of these issues," said Carzon, the budget specialist in Montgomery. "Nobody had any kind of list to use. I don't know if any such standards exist, but we didn't use them."

-------- spying

CIA Denies Keeping Military in Dark in Afghanistan

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-attack-cia.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA on Sunday dismissed as groundless claims that it had kept the U.S. military in the dark while carrying out an expanded paramilitary operation in Afghanistan, which has included air strikes by the spy agency's own surveillance drones.

``There has never been a better relationship between the CIA and the military,'' said a Central Intelligence Agency spokeswoman.

CIA paramilitary units, made up chiefly of U.S. military veterans, have taken on what amounts to a central combat role in the unconventional U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, a U.S. official said, confirming a Washington Post report.

On Sept. 27, one of the CIA units, drawn from the so-called Special Activities Division, established a bridgehead for the U.S. military special operations forces that followed, the Post reported on Sunday, citing well-placed sources.

In a companion piece the Post also cited two unidentified Air Force officials as accusing the CIA of failing to share information about its operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks that killed some 4,600 people in the United States.

Despite the presence of Air Force liaison officers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Air Force officers monitoring Kabul and other spots in Afghanistan occasionally have been ``surprised to see an explosion, only to learn later that the CIA was firing a missile,'' the newspaper reported.

``Something would happen, and we would say, 'What was that?','' the Post quoted one Air Force officer as saying.

However, a spokeswoman for the CIA said the relationship between the agency and the U.S. military's Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida had never been better.

``We are sharing all information with the Central Command on this issue and any suggestion that we are not is ludicrous,'' the spokeswoman said.

FRICTION BETWEEN MILITARY AND CIA IS COMMON

The Air Force and Central Command, which is run by Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the military campaign in Afghanistan, had no immediate comment.

Friction between the military and the CIA, which is duty bound to protect intelligence sources and methods, is common in wartime. In Afghanistan, it has been exacerbated by the CIA's maiden use of unmanned aircraft, called Predators, armed with ''Hellfire'' anti-tank missiles, the Post reported.

``That's the way they operate,'' another Air Force officer was quoted as saying of the spy agency. ``It's getting better. It's not fixed.''

Over the last month, CIA drones have fired about 40 missiles in Afghanistan, the Post reported -- the first time remotely piloted aircraft have been able to do so.

Separately, a CIA-run Predator provided the intelligence that led to three days of strikes last week which killed leaders of the al Qaeda network headed by Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Post said.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the CIA was working well with the military in the current campaign.

``I don't want to confirm what the CIA does or does not do,'' he said on the ABC television program ``This Week.''

``Let me just say that they have been doing some rather splendid work with respect to our activities in Afghanistan, working alongside our military forces that are inside Afghanistan,'' Powell said.

``I think we have a very fine linkup between our intelligence assets, our military assets, all within the framework of a good political and military strategy, and it's now starting to show rather significant results.''

---

Secret CIA Units Playing A Central Combat Role

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47201-2001Nov17?language=printer

The CIA is mounting a hidden war in Afghanistan with secret paramilitary units on the ground and Predator surveillance drones in the sky that last week provided key intelligence for concentrated U.S. airstrikes on al Qaeda leaders, according to well-placed sources.

The CIA units, whose existence has not been previously disclosed, are operating in what amounts to a central combat role in America's unconventional war in Afghanistan. On Sept. 27, one of these units was the first U.S. force to enter the country in the current terrorism war, paving the way for U.S. Special Operations forces. The units also have been providing the rebel Northern Alliance movement with intelligence on opposing Taliban and al Qaeda troop concentrations, the sources said.

The units are part of a highly secret CIA capability, benignly named the Special Activities Division, that consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the U.S. military.

The division's arsenal includes helicopters and airplanes and the unmanned aerial Predator drones equipped with high-resolution cameras and Hellfire antitank missiles. Last week, a CIA-run Predator provided intelligence resulting in three days of strikes that killed key al Qaeda leaders. But it was unclear what role CIA information played in the successful attack on Muhammad Atef, the senior operations lieutenant for Osama bin Laden whose death was confirmed yesterday by the Taliban.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has given almost daily briefings summarizing the course and accomplishments of the U.S. military action in Afghanistan, which began six weeks ago. Absent from those briefings are any details or sense of the CIA's covert role in the battles, a secret war that has until now remained largely under wraps.

The role of the CIA's paramilitary units has been particularly important in Afghanistan, several sources say, because much of the war has turned on intelligence and targeting information. The CIA warriors also bring an experienced knowledge of the territory and Northern Alliance factions.

In addition to its paramilitary units, the CIA's Special Activities Division has inserted into Afghanistan specialized CIA case officers from the agency's Near East Division who know the local languages and had previous covert relationships with the Northern Alliance going back years.

For the last 18 months, the CIA has been working with tribes and warlords in southern Afghanistan, and the division's units have helped create a significant new network in the region of the Taliban's greatest strength.

One source said that the Special Activities Division units have directly or indirectly helped with hundreds of successful military strikes since Oct. 7, when the U.S. military bombing campaign began. The handling of intelligence for airstrikes and the use of the Predator has led to some turf friction and complaints about sharing between the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, but both military and nonmilitary sources say the relationship is working and has provided obvious benefits. The CIA's global response center monitors critical intelligence and video and is in direct communication with the U.S. Central Command, which runs the war from its headquarters in Tampa.

In addition to their war-fighting role, the CIA's covert units designate locations where the massive U.S. humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan is most needed.

All of this covert CIA work is a key part of President Bush's strategy, which one source described as an attempt to "deny the sanctuary of Afghanistan to bin Laden and his al Qaeda network." Bush in September signed an intelligence order, called a finding, ordering the CIA to use all necessary means to destroy bin Laden and al Qaeda. About $1 billion in new funds have been provided the CIA, most of which is for covert action.

The CIA work with the Northern Alliance and tribes in the south is central to that strategy. Operationally, it means that once the CIA locates opposition groups in Afghanistan that have the will and capacity to hunt and kill Taliban and al Qaeda members, those groups will receive covert or overt U.S. support in the form of weapons, ammunition, food and money.

A unit of the Special Activities Division was the first to enter Afghanistan after Bush declared his war on terrorism. The unit established a bridgehead on Sept. 27 for the regular U.S. Special Forces that followed.

These CIA paramilitary units have moved in and out of Afghanistan periodically, and some have established permanent bases. The special units work "hand in glove with the special forces and notably have provided a crucial eyes-on-the-ground capability," a well-placed source said. The Special Activities Division reports to the deputy director for operations, the clandestine arm of the CIA.

Before last year, the division was called the Military Support Program, or MSP, which had existed in the agency for decades.

Senior administration officials attribute a significant portion of the speed and effectiveness of recent Northern Alliance advances in Afghanistan to the assistance of the CIA units.

Key has been the precision bombing of Taliban logistics. The sources said coordination on targeting among the CIA special units, traditional satellite and signals intelligence and the U.S. military has improved significantly over the course of the short war, accounting, in part, for the rapid collapse of Taliban forces. "They can't get food and ammunition," a source said. "The Taliban communications have been largely severed."

Because the CIA has focused on bin Laden and al Qaeda for years and gained a strong foothold among the Northern Alliance opposition, several sources said the Afghan phase of the war on terrorism may turn out to be easier than coming phases directed at terrorists in other countries where there is less of a CIA presence.

In some respects, the war on terrorism in Afghanistan appears, at least so far, to provide some ideal circumstances.

First, the special units have been going in and out of Afghanistan since 1997, and have gained immense operational experience and important contacts, particularly with the Northern Alliance.

Second, the CIA gained experience during the 1980s covert war in Afghanistan, when the agency provided massive support and funding to the mujaheddin rebels, who eventually drove the Soviet army out. The Near East Division has 10 to 20 case officers with Afghan experience, knowledge of the terrain and languages, and contacts with anti-Taliban groups and tribes. Some of these case officers have been inserted into Afghanistan with the help of the CIA's paramilitary units as liaison and support for the Northern Alliance.

Third, in the mid-1980s, the CIA set up a counterterrorism center to coordinate intelligence and operations within the U.S. government. Personnel are assigned from the CIA, the FBI, other U.S. intelligence agencies, even the Federal Aviation Administration. Nearly 300 worked in the center before Sept. 11, and that number has swollen to 900 since the terrorist attacks that killed more than 4,300.

Nine days after the terrorist strikes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush outlined the plan for the war on terrorism in a nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress. He said the war might include "covert operations, secret even in success."

-------- terrorism

Oregon

States
USA Today
01/11/18
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Eugene - A new mediation program that encourages offenders and victims to settle their disputes paid off following the terrorist attacks. A man phoned an Arab activist on Sept. 11 and said Muslims should be erased. Christopher Younce, 33, avoided a trial by sitting down with Tammam Adi and making amends. With caller ID, Adi, 51, traced the call; Younce was cited for second-degree intimidation.

------

THE INVESTIGATION
Retracing a Trail to Sept. 11 Plot

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/international/europe/18HAMB.html

HAMBURG, Germany, Nov. 15 - Shortly after Sept. 11, when the United States sent out urgent inquiries for leads on the suspected hijackers, German officials quickly traced three of the ringleaders to an apartment in this affluent northern port.

It was an important break. But the names and address - Marienstrasse 54 - suddenly seemed familiar, German investigators say, and then they realized why: in 1998 and 1999, they had those same men and that same apartment under surveillance because of suspected links to an operative for Osama bin Laden.

When nothing came of the surveillance, it was abandoned. Yet during that period, the investigators now ruefully admit, Mohamed Atta and his colleagues used the apartment as a base to plan the Sept. 11 attack.

"We have learned a lot in the meantime," confessed a senior German government official, referring to the group, now known as the Hamburg cell.

Among the lessons, investigators say, is just how easily terrorist plotters can blend in with innocent foreign students in large Western cities like Hamburg, making their detection so challenging even when the police have them directly in their sight. The Hamburg cell members were indistinguishable from hardworking Arab and Muslim students seeking only to gain skills and education. For the tenants of Marienstrasse 54, the aim was to turn the West's techniques into the means of its own destruction.

The tenants under surveillance included not only two of the actual hijackers but three other plotters who slipped into Pakistan and probably Afghanistan in the days before the attack. Today, American and German investigators say, those three are among the most wanted men on earth. They know as much as anyone alive about the plot, and they are dangerous, likely to attack again.

In recent days, German and American officials have been meeting in an effort to pin down everything they know about the three fugitives. One, Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah bin al- Shibh, a Yemeni, whose real name may be Ramzi Omar, may well have been the missing 20th hijacker who failed to participate in the Sept. 11 attacks because he was denied a visa, the F.B.I. recently said.

Another was perhaps even more important, the logistical brains behind the cell. He is Said Bahaji, a student of electrical engineering who fooled German intelligence as well as his father-in-law.

Osman Kul, whose daughter, Nese, married Mr. Bahaji at a local mosque in October 1999, said he had little grounds for displeasure when he learned of the couple's plans. Over coffee in his living room, Mr. Kul said he did not know until much later that some of the seemingly nice young men at the wedding were radical Muslim students involved in the plotting for Sept. 11.

Mr. Kul, the son of Turkish immigrants to Germany, admits that he would have preferred a son-in-law of Turkish descent. But he was pleased when Mr. Bahaji, now 26, and Nese, who just turned 21, had a son, Omar, last spring.

Since Sept. 11, Mr. Kul, like German investigators, has had a different view. Mr. Bahaji is thought to have obtained apartments, organized financing and communications, and helped the German hijackers apply for visas to the United States. Though he was probably never intended to participate directly in the hijackings, his activities show how seamlessly the group blended into student circles in working class neighborhoods.

"I see now that he was an actor," Mr. Kul said, "a splendid actor."

Mr. Kul last saw his son-in-law in early September. At that time, Mr. Bahaji announced that he was going to Pakistan for computer courses.

At the meeting, the roles of Mr. Kul's daughter and son-in-law appeared reversed, he said. His daughter, an active young woman who loved snorkeling and horseback riding, was clad in lengthy garments and a veil in the Muslim tradition; Mr. Bahaji, apparently in preparation for his trip, had shaved his thick beard.

Investigators traced his route to Karachi, Pakistan, via Istanbul, Turkey, but there the trail was lost. Except for an e-mail message sent to his wife shortly after his arrival in Pakistan, he has not been heard from since.

The man who almost led investigators to the hijackers, Mamoun Darkazanli, a dapper 43-year-old native of Damascus, Syria, came to the attention of the German police in 1998 after the arrest near Munich of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who was later extradited to the United States, where he faces trial in New York for terrorism.

American officials had placed Mr. Salim on a terrorist watch list early in the summer of 1998. In August of that year, bin Laden operatives set off truck bombs outside two American embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 people. A month later, Mr. Salim went to Germany.

Mr. Salim's cellphone had Mr. Darkazanli's phone number programmed into it. Mr. Darkazanli had signing rights for Mr. Salim's account at the Deutsche Bank. In 1995, when Mr. Salim first came to Germany, to buy radio equipment for the bin Laden network, Mr. Darkazanli helped him.

Mr. Darkazanli told the police the deals were legitimate business. Reached by phone recently, he refused to answer questions, saying he was acting on the advice of his lawyer.

Mr. Bahaji, born in Germany, spent his childhood here and in Morocco. He served in a tank unit of the German Army before settling in Hamburg to study. Mr. Bahaji may have been responsible for the plotters' computer literacy.

Thorsten Albrecht, who rented the apartment to the group, described how the plotters equipped each of the three bedrooms with a table and computer hooked up to high-speed data lines. After marrying, Mr. Bahaji left the apartment on Marienstrasse and moved with his wife into a two-room, ground-floor apartment nearby that still has his name on the mailbox.

The German authorities say, however, that Mr. Shibh, 29, from Yemen, lived in the apartment after Mr. Bahaji left. Like his roommates, though not Mr. Bahaji, Mr. Shibh was supposed to go to the United States, learn to fly and take part in the September attacks. In the summer of 2000 he applied for a visa to study flying at the Florida Flight Training Center, in Venice, Fla., where another of the Sept. 11 pilots, Ziad al- Jarrah, studied.

On Aug. 15, he transferred $2,200 from his account at Citibank in Hamburg to a branch of the West Coast Bancorp in Sarasota, Fla. At about that time, Zacarias Moussaoui, another suspected terrorist, was detained in Minnesota. In his possession, the police discovered a note with Mr. Shibh's German cellphone number. But the American consulate in Frankfurt turned down his visa request, and Mr. Shibh was stranded in Germany.

The letter terminating the Marienstrasse lease was also signed by the third missing man, Zakariya Essabar, a 24-year-old Moroccan, whose apparent ambition to perish in the September attacks was also thwarted. Abdelghani Mzoudi, another Moroccan student, who signed the letter and Mr. Atta's last will and testament, recently described Mr. Essabar as something of a headache for his fellow tenants: he never wanted to help clean the kitchen, had visitors at odd hours and was very secretive.

On the Thursday after the hijackings, the German police raided an apartment in a three-story brick building on the eastern edge of Hamburg, looking for Mr. Shibh, but they found only a shaken Algerian couple, Ali Hermouche and his wife. Mr. Hermouche, in an interview, said he met Mr. Shibh in July in a cafe, and Mr. Shibh told him he was a poor student in need of a place to stay.

Mr. Hermouche offered him the keys to his apartment while he and his wife took their August vacation. When they returned on Sept. 8, Mr. Shibh had been there, but he had left the key in an envelope in the mailbox as they had agreed. Mr. Shibh has not been seen since.

---

'Holy War, Inc.': 21st-Century Jihad

November 18, 2001
By ETHAN BRONNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/books/review/18BRONNET.html?searchpv=nytToday

The gathering -- a sea of colored cloth, flowing robes, turbans and fezzes, of silk headscarves and pantaloons -- rose rhythmically to chants of ''jihad'' and ''Allahu akbar'' (''God is great''). Anguished lectures described an unrelenting threat from the West. It was 1995 in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, at a biennial meeting of militant Muslim groups from more than 80 countries. The theme was straightforward: the West, led by the United States, had defeated the Soviet Union through the exploitation of Muslim forces in Afghanistan. Now the Americans, with their sick culture of sex and hamburgers, were moving to phase two, establishing their hegemony as the sole and unstoppable superpower. Look around, speakers said. Palestine was overrun by Jews armed with nuclear weapons, Iraqi children were being starved, Kashmir was bleeding, Chechnya destroyed, Algeria imploding, Bosnia disintegrating. The United Nations and Amnesty International were tools of the West, the media run by Zionists.

None of it was shocking to anyone spending time in the Arab world in the 1990's. Yet in the era of the globalizing economy, with Israel and the Palestinians making progress on a peace framework, and with the sophisticated classes of Jordan, Egypt and even Syria wearing Chicago Bulls shirts and watching CNN, the conference seemed especially pathetic and irrelevant. I was the only American reporter there, and while I was struck by the depth of the anger and the dangerous failure of the attendants to see that they were being left behind by history, I couldn't really blame my colleagues for passing it up. What future did this crowd have? As a Western diplomat based in Khartoum put it to me, the meeting was a ''gathering of losers.''

Since September, we have all begun to focus more clearly on the power of such shared rage. And while Osama bin Laden was not at that conference, his name was heard often. Three years later, when he announced the formation of the ''Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,'' the text he issued sounded like a summary of its speeches.

Peter L. Bergen, an American-born, English-educated television journalist, set out six years ago to meet and understand bin Laden. As he says in ''Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden,'' completed in August and rushed into print after the Sept. 11 attack, he had wanted to get to the bottom of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Through intermediaries in London, he persuaded bin Laden to give his first television interview to the English-speaking world to CNN in 1997. The opening chapter of this engaging, well-written account of bin Laden and his organization tells of Bergen's trip with the correspondent Peter Arnett to a cave in Afghanistan to interview the man whom the State Department the previous year called ''the most significant financial sponsor of Islamic extremist activities in the world today.''

Bergen has a fine eye for detail, and as we accompany him over pothole-filled paths, across chaotic borders, checking out arms bazaars and listening to bin Laden's soft cough as he proclaims that Americans are fair game for attack, we sense we are on an interesting journey with a trustworthy guide. Bergen frames several issues well that are now of some urgency to grasp. Al Qaeda, bin Laden's organization, is best understood, he says, as a multinational holding company based in Afghanistan. The traditional structure of a holding company, he points out, is ''a core management group controlling partial or complete interests in other companies. Holding companies are also sometimes used by criminals to disguise their illegal activities and are often based in countries where they can operate with little or no regulatory scrutiny.''

Bergen notes the significance of 1979 in contemporary Muslim history. That was the year of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. He compares the way Muslims were drawn to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan to the way socialists and fellow travelers were drawn to Spain to fight Franco's fascists in the 1930's.

Given the hysteria and half-truths surrounding bin Laden, Bergen steers a sensible course, sorting through competing stories. He bursts the myth that the C.I.A. created bin Laden, pointing out that the agency never had a direct relationship with him and that he was anti-American from the start. He also helps elucidate what so many Muslims find attractive about bin Laden -- that he came from an immensely wealthy family and could easily have spent his time, like other rich Saudi boys, in Monte Carlo hotel suites, but chose to live in utter austerity, sleeping on floors, fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and spending his money supporting the Muslim cause.

Bergen offers limited psychological insight into bin Laden but he does suggest a few themes. He takes us to the rugged north of Yemen where the bin Ladens originated (the veiled, sheltered women there are so secluded, he says, that they speak their own dialect). The family had moved to Saudi Arabia by the time Osama was born in 1957, one of 50 or so children of Mohammed bin Laden, a fiercely self-directed man who went from having nothing to being a construction tycoon with contracts to expand the great mosques of Mecca and Medina.

Mohammed bin Laden died when Osama was 10, and Osama seemed, from his university days forward, to attach himself to somewhat older men with radical, uncompromising visions. First he fell under the spell of two prominent professors of Islamic studies at King Abdul Aziz University, and in recent years has been under the influence of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who is widely thought to be the real brains behind Al Qaeda's operations of the past few years. The book devotes several chapters to the major bin Laden milestones of recent years -- his early contacts with the Taliban, the American Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in October 2000.

For readers who feel they are swimming in daily newspaper articles and television reports and want a single source that brings all the background together, this readable book works well. But since many other fine journalists are now going over the same ground and offering ever more complete versions of what was known in August, for those really interested in Al Qaeda, this is more of a place to start than end. The book contains one significant failing, in my view, and that is Bergen's analysis of why bin Laden is at war with the United States. Bergen takes issue with Samuel Huntington's widely cited thesis that there is a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. He says bin Laden has a clear and specific political agenda -- changing American policy in the Middle East. He opposes the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of Iraq, support for Israel and for regimes, like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that he considers apostates from Islam. Bin Laden has never, Bergen notes, railed against Coca-Cola or Madonna or homosexuals.

But this seems a cramped, literal parsing of bin Laden's few public statements and, in the end, simplistic and unsatisfying. You do not have to accept Huntington's argument entirely to see that this battle is over more than American foreign policy. Bin Laden is the product of a generation of Arab and Muslim failure to come to terms with much of the modern world; Arab societies have imported Western gadgets and machinery but not adopted its method of inquiry. Arab discourse today is stuck between the poles of what the British-Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya has called ''triumphalism and breast-beating.'' This means that the contours of public debate across the region remain sadly limited; education is confused with indoctrination. That, along with poverty and corruption, provides fertile ground for the rage bin Laden stokes. Until those things change, the clash championed by him and his followers will be as much cultural as it is political.

Ethan Bronner, an editor at The Times, was the Middle East correspondent for The Boston Globe from 1991 to 1997.

------

GEARHEAD NATION
A Time Out for Technophilia

November 18, 2001
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/weekinreview/18LOHR.html?searchpv=nytToday

THERE was a sense that this could be a turning point like no other, that perhaps technology will never be viewed in quite the same way," said Robert C. Post, a senior fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology.

Historians, by education and inclination, are practitioners of the long view. But Mr. Post and many fellow members of the Society for the History of Technology, who gathered in San Jose, Calif., last month, agreed that Sept. 11 - coming at the end of an extraordinary, decade-long infatuation with technology - may have a lasting impact on a nation known for its technological optimism.

Airliners and the mail became weapons, while skyscrapers became targets, and all of it shook the belief that America's technological supremacy could shield it from a troubled world. But terrorism is not the only reason the American faith in technology is being questioned. The collapse of the dot-com bubble and the precipitous slide in technology stocks on Wall Street has also had a sobering effect. The economic surge of the 1990's was led by investment in the digital technologies of computing, telecommunications and the Internet. Technology startups were the vanguard of a "new economy" that would render economic downturns obsolete. Meanwhile, traditional companies would be obliterated - "Amazoned" - by Internet upstarts.

The Internet was also seen as an important cultural, political and social force, a democratizing technology that would overthrow the old order. When Wired magazine began publishing in 1993, it declared, " The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon." It struck a chord at the time, but no longer.

"The story's over," said Jason McCabe Calacanis, publisher of The Silicon Alley Reporter, whose current issue will be its last. "You can't have a magazine about unemployed people."

Henry Blodget, a 35-year-old Wall Street analyst who became a pied piper for Internet stocks, said last week that he was leaving Merrill Lynch , taking a buyout offer along with thousands of others. "It just seemed like a good time to pursue the next thing," he said. Who could argue?

Boom-and-bust cycles - in business and in public attitudes - have been a hallmark of new technologies for more than a century. These cycles of business euphoria, disenchantment and consolidation typically last 5 to 10 years, and they accompanied the creation of the telegraph, railroad, electric power and automobile industries, among others.

Every new technology brought with it confident pronouncements that it would, as the Internet enthusiasts declared, "change everything." The telegraph was going to eliminate the obstacles to communicating over vast distances, and with them ignorance and discrimination. The railroad collapsed physical distances, and would unify American society. And the electric light bulb would "defeat the night."

"Americans are much more likely to go to the incense shrine of technology and get carried away," said John Staudenmaier, editor of Technology and Culture, a quarterly journal of technology history. "And when things turn negative, they also tend to behave as if their faith has been betrayed. We are surely in the betrayed and shocked cycle."

Still, the major technologies of the last 150 years did have a profound impact, and so, probably, will the Internet. A study, led by the Brookings Institution, concluded in September that Internet technology will add one-quarter to one-half a percentage point to the productivity growth of the United States economy over the next several years. Over a decade, that would mean additional economic growth of 2.5 percent to 5 percent, or additional wealth of about $1,250 to $2,500 a person.

SO the question now is whether the United States is experiencing the downswing in just another cycle or whether it is something more - possibly a shift away from the nation's characteristic technological optimism?

Throughout history, dominant nations stayed that way in part because they were pre-eminent in the technology of the day. Their influence waned when their innovative edge eroded. The long-term economic decline of Britain, the pioneer of the Industrial Age, was partly attributable to the evolving attitudes of the English elite beginning in the 19th century, a denigration of technological progress and a "profound cultural pessimism," according to Martin J. Wiener, author of "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980." That translated into less investment and innovation.

THERE have always been articulate critics of technology in the United States, like Lewis Mumford, the social philosopher who wrote skeptically of the "myth of the machine." But they have generally not shaken the mainstream belief that technology is synonymous with progress, and that progress meant something good - higher living standards, greater convenience, longer lives.

The lasting effect of the terrorist attacks, historians suggest, may be similar to the legacy of the atomic bomb or the use of military technology in the Vietnam War. Both have become indelible reminders that technology is not always beneficent, but neither caused a retreat from the fundamentally optimistic American view.

In this case, said Joel Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University, technological development will likely move in new directions, rather than slow down. World War I, he notes, brought rapid development in the chemistry of explosives and poison gas, and the aerodynamics of fixed-wing aircraft, which supplanted airships. World War II sharply accelerated the development of nuclear weapons and power, antibiotics and computer technology.

The present conflict, he noted, could well stimulate biotechnology to combat bioterrorism, and hasten the deployment of high-speed telecommunications networks and the development of low-cost, sophisticated video-conferencing to partly obviate the need for air travel.

"Terrorism isn't going to stop technology," Mr. Mokyr said. "It's going to tweak its direction."


-------- activists

London Marchers Decry U.S. Strikes

New York Times
November 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-Britain-Protests.html?searchpv=aponline

LONDON (AP) -- Thousands of demonstrators marched through central London on Sunday to protest the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan, some carrying placards reading ``Imperialism Not War'' and many chanting ``We don't want your racist war.''

Police said 15,000 people marched peacefully from Hyde Park through Picadilly Circus and later packed Trafalgar Square under a gray autumn sky. The Stop the War Coalition, which organized the march, put the turnout at 50,000, including people from anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist and Muslim groups.

Participants said that despite a week of major developments in Afghanistan, where the anti-Taliban northern alliance has won a string of decisive victories, many Britons still opposed the use of force to fight terrorism.

``Killing the people in Afghanistan does not bring back the lives in New York City,'' said Paul Embery, a London firefighter. ``Fighting is just fanning the fires of terrorism.''

As marchers passed through Picadilly Circus, a group of protesters carrying a banner saying ``Muslims for Justice'' briefly sat down in the street.

``People are just angry and they want to voice their concerns,'' said Jawid Yakoob, an accountant who traveled from the central English city of Birmingham to join the Muslim group.

Later, demonstrators congregated in Trafalgar Square, where politicians and activists addressed the crowd into the evening hours.

``We have seen the removal of one feudal tyranny, only for it to be replaced by another,'' said Alan Simpson, a Labor Party lawmaker, referring to the northern alliance, which now controls parts of Afghanistan previously under Taliban rule.

As the sun set, thousands of demonstrators -- both Muslims and non-Muslims -- shared dates and water to celebrate the end of a day of fasting as part of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

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URGENT, YOUR HELP WILL TURN THE TIDE.

Nov 18,2001
From: "Peace" <envir_456@yahoo.com>

Dear Caring friend,

Your letters about important issues have awakened many politicians and their conscience. However, there is still much work to do. We must all make an effort to continue.

Today, we are asking concerned citizens to show that they care about world PEACE and about the Palestinians plight who have suffered for more than 50 years. The leaders and politicians would want to hear from you, URGENTLY!

This serious issue matters to every citizen in this world. Now is the time to speak out to help the long suffering Palestinians. We enclosed a SAMPLE LETTER and CONTACT Information and important REFERENCES list for you to help.

All of the politicians and media need to be educated on the TRUTH of this issue. The Contact information is long but important. Please be patient. If we have offended you, we deeply apologize. Thanks for your kindness, compassion and understanding.

SAMPLE LETTER:

(Note: you are welcome to write your own letter if you wish. thanks )

ATTENTION:

a: Please place your Name, Address , City, State, Zip, at the BEGINNING and the End of your letter. Please Sign as "US Constituent(s)" or "Constituent(s)" or "US Voter(s)", if you live in USA.

b: Please INCLUDE All of the REFERENCES list in your letter.

--

FROM: Your Name(s), Your Address, City, State, Zip Country, U.S. Constituents or U.S. Voters, if you live in USA.

Subject: Please Stop Supply Weapons/Aid to Israel to Kill Palestinians.

Dear Mr. President,

As concerned citizens and voters , we strongly urge you: Please immediately STOP supply the deadly WEAPONS and $2.7 Billions Aid each year to Israel to kill the suffering Palestinians and to build massive Jewish settlements in the bloody robbed land from Palestinians. We urge you, please immediately STOP support Israeli's "terrorism", "killings", "bulldozing" Palestinians homes, land.

FIFTY Years of the US government unlimited biased policy towards Israeli had really triggered all of the hatred in the Middle-East and World unrest. Egyptian Parliamentary Speaker Ahmed Fathi Sorour said the "real" terrorism was what has been practiced by Israel against the "unarmed" Palestinians.

For decades, Israel bulldozed Palestinians homes, killing their fathers, mothers and they have the world superpower U.S. full support and supply all the advanced WEAPONS to them (for $2 Billion a year) then Israeli uses them to kill Palestinians. The Palestinians have nothing, watching their homes being bulldozed by the Israelis and being kicked out from their own homes, now living in refugee camps, in numerous rows of "tents" with no light in the tunnel. The poor Palestinians have no war planes so some frustrated youths throw rocks or, in the extreme cases, turn themselves into human bombs. The US blindly, shamefully continues to support Israel's killings, bulldozing Palestinians homes and terrorism endlessly. Some examples eyewitness photos show: http://www.cactus48.com/murder.html http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Imwas/MorePicture.html http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Imwas/Picture2496.html http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Imwas/Picture2500.html http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Imwas/Picture2502.html (Please see References #6, #4)

"Will there ever be peace in Palestine? No. The Israelis can continue to Murder, Imprison, Isolate, Torture, Impoverish, Brutalize and Harass the Palestinians for the next 50 years, and for the next 50 years Palestinians, generation after generation, will resist the occupation of their land by any means they can." ---- Quoted from Orlando Sentinel,October 26, 2001(see References #1)

Former President Jimmy Carter stated in November 2000 that: "An underlying reason that years of U.S. diplomacy have failed and violence in the Middle East persists is that some Israeli leaders continue to 'Create Facts' by building settlements in Occupied territory." (http://www.cactus48.com/intifada2000.html) (see important References #1.A)

The alarming factual article "Intifada 2000 and The Peace Process" written by the "Jews for Justice in The Middle East" concluded that: "Given the damage that has been done to the Palestinian people, Israel's obligation is to make whatever amends possible. Among these should be assisting the creation of a sovereign Palestinian State in the entire West Bank and Gaza with its Capital in East Jerusalem." please see important References #1.A)

On Nov.16, 2001, the USA TODAY had a very good article:

"Arabs brace for the next U.S. action. U.S. sympathy seen only as move to get support in war ". (please see References #2)

We urge US government do NOT use Arabs countries to get its own purposes done and then dump them and walk away.

According to many of the Arab countries recently that such US biased deadly policy is the major cause that US paid huge price. Please review an alarming article from Washington Post on Nov. 16, 2001: " Egypt Cautions U.S. on Aid to Israel Arab States May Seek Nonconventional Arms, Mubarak Says" (see References #3)

Malaysia's prime minister Mahateir Muhammad has called for linking the war led by the US against terrorism to Israel, rather than the Islamic states. "Mahateir warned that this war against terrorism seems increasingly as a war against Islam. He stressed that such an impression can not be eliminated unless deterrent measures are taken against the Israeli occupation forces which terrify the Palestinians people in the occupied territories." (Please see References #5)

On Nov 13, 2001, the Egyptian President Mubarak had said:

"It is regrettable and strange that they are asking Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to stop violence at a time when they (the Israelis) continue to kill and arrest security men of the Palestinian authority. Is this logical? Is it logical that strikes, destruction and killing continue against the Palestinian people and (Palestinian) security men are arrested and then the, (Israelis) ask the Palestine authority to stop violence?" (see References #7)

Lebanese Christian gunmen, working under Israeli command and supervision massacred 3,000 Palestinian refugee in the Sabra and Shatilla camps during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in Sep., 1982. Tantura Massacre also exposed recently. (see References #8)

A very alarming Editorial Opinion article from The Jordan Times (www.jordantimes.com ), Sunday (Oct. 28, 2001): "The Arrogance of Power" According to the article, the US Congress and government itself may have problems with its own integrity. It hinted that:

THE US CONGRESS NOSE IS DRAGGED BY THE ISRAELIS.

The following is part of the article:

".....particularly during the last 30 years when the powerful lobbying tactics supported by Jewish money for American politicians started to pay off. It was the fruit of relentless work which, among other things, involved digging up American politicians' past and also cornering them into situations that, if made public, would have destroyed their political future............

One of the first priorities of Israel after the shocking Sept. 11 aerial assault in New York and Washington was to deflect the thought that the US might have been paying the price for its almost total support that allowed the Jewish state to continue its brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories. ............. U.S. Republican Bob Dole lost his U.S. Presidency, since he made no secret of his feeling that his country's support for Israel was indeed damaging its own international interests............

A good number of American Congressmen who speak out after quitting office, agree in private that they recognize the lopsided American approach to the Middle East and the righteousness of the Arab cause but that they could not express it since it would have meant the end of their political career. ...........

What we see today is a small, country with a six-million population which has a long record of defiance of international legitimacy, laws, agreements, conventions and public opinion, and which receives massive doses of American financial, military, diplomatic and political support, implicitly telling its benefactor to fall in line with its whims."

Many Americans now start to wonder WHO is the other bottom line Real enemy hidden behind the WTC tragedy?

We urge you, please:

Please immediately STOP supplying U.S.AID and the deadly WEAPONS to Israeli to kill the suffering Palestinians. Please stop supporting Israeli's "Terrorism" in the Middle-East.

Please immediately to be completely being FAIR in the Middle-East PEACE PROCESS.

Please immediately demand Israeli to withdraw from all of the Palestinians HOME LAND which were robbed by bloodshed and continuing the New construction in occupied land by Israeli.

Please immediately urge Congress and all US politicians to Stop taking money from the Jewish lobby because it gravely imbalances US Mid-East Policy while the poor Palestinians have no money to give to US Congress and U.S. politicians.

The US Government and Congress should never be bought, bribed, dragged by money in any manner by anyone at any time.

While the U.S. summoned the whole world to hunt down the terrorists, meantime US must also summon the whole world to protect the suffering Palestinians who suffered and continue to suffer for more than 50 years from the brutality of Israelis.

While we praise President Bush's success in cracking down terrorism, however, for the sake of America and world PEACE, America must all be awaken the bottom line causes of the world terror and unrest and try all it can to correct them urgently. Many of us are Christians. An Eye For An Eye blindly is only creating more Terror, Bloodshed and Pain. It simply can Not solve problems permanently.

We will only vote for the politicians who have the strong will, courage, compassion, wisdom, integrity, righteousness for the weak, for the poor and for the innocent. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Your Name, Your Address, City, State, Zip Country U.S. Constituent(s) or U.S. Voter(s) (if you live in US.)

IMPORTANT REFERENCES:

#1: http://www.cactus48.com/fightingterror.html http://www.cactus48.com/

#1.A: http://www.cactus48.com/intifada2000.html http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7891/law_sharon_history.html

#2: http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20011116/3631567s.htm

#3: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37601-2001Nov15.html

#4: http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Weekly/Egypt/20011112.html http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/011115/2001111533.html http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/011117/2001111704.html #5: http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/011117/2001111704.html

#6: Children become orphans after the 30-year-old woman died after being hit in the chest inside her home by Israeli occupation troops. http://www.jordantimes.com/thu/index.htm http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/al-Tantura/Story560.html http://www.palestineremembered.com/ http://www.jordantimes.com/fri/news/news2.htm http://www.jordantimes.com/fri/news/news4.htm

#7: http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/011113/2001111349.html

#8: http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=2001111705355429 http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/al-Tantura/Story560.html

#9: http://www.jordantimes.com/Thu/news/news4.htm

#10: The Jordan Times Editorial: " A day in the life of an Afghan" http://www.jordantimes.com/Thu/opinion/opinion1.htm

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CONTACT INFORMATION:

There are 7 major CONTACTs below. ALL of them are very important to reach them. Please be patient to Email/Fax them. thanks.

1: CONTACT PRESIDENT BUSH and some Cabinet members:

ATTENTION PLEASE :

*A: Please put your name and detail address at the BEGINING and the End of your letter and sign as Constituent(s) or Voter(s), if you live in U.S.

B: Please send Email/Fax both, just in case Email being overlooked.

The President George W. Bush The White House Tel: 202-456-1414 (in USA) Fax: 202-456-2461 (in U.S.A.) EMAIL: president@whitehouse.gov (@whitehouse.gov) Please also Copy the following very important address list and Paste it into CC field in your email.

Note: it must have COMMA between addresses. (already provided).

first.lady@whitehouse.gov, vice.president@whitehouse.gov, mrs.cheney@whitehouse.gov, DEvans@doc.gov, whitman.christine@epamail.epa.gov,, ann.veneman@usda.gov, gale_norton@ios.doi.gov, AskDOJ@usdoj.gov, Secretary@state.gov, The.Secretary@hq.doe.gov, Rod.Paige@ed.gov, adela.backiel@usda.gov, contactustr@ustr.gov, hhsmail@os.dhhs.gov, contact-oasp@dol.gov, askpublicaffairs@state.gov, webadmin.hchr@unog.ch

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2: IT IS VERY IMPORTANT to write to Senators to let them know your opinion regardless whether you live in his/her State. (

* The public officials have obligation to know your opinions).

Please Copy and Paste the following list into BCC field in your Email. Then put your other Different email address in the TO field Before you hit Send, please carefully check everything correctly!

NOTE:

a: Please put your name and detail address at the BEGINING and End of your letter and sign as Constituent(s) or Voter(s), if you live in U.S.

b: It must have a comma between the addresses.

Please address to: Dear Senator, or: Dear Honorable Senator,

Senator@Sessions.senate.gov, senator@shelby.senate.gov, senator.hutchinson@hutchinson.senate.gov, blanche_lincoln@lincoln.senate.gov, info@kyl.senate.gov, senator_mccain@mccain.senate.gov, senator@boxer.senate.gov, senator_allard@exchange.senate.gov, administrator@campbell.senate.gov, senator@dodd.senate.gov, senator_lieberman@lieberman.senate.gov, senator@biden.senate.gov, comments@roth.senate.gov, bob_graham@graham.senate.gov, connie@mack.senate.gov, senator_max_cleland@cleland.senate.gov, senator_coverdell@coverdell.senate.gov, senator@akaka.senate.gov, senator@inouye.senate.gov, chuck_grassley@grassley.senate.gov, tom_harkin@harkin.senate.gov, larry_craig@craig.senate.gov, dick@durbin.senate.gov, senator_fitzgerald@fitzgerald.senate.gov, senator_lugar@lugar.senate.gov, sam_brownback@brownback.senate.gov, pat_roberts@roberts.senate.gov, jim_bunning@bunning.senate.gov, senator@mcconnell.senate.gov, senator@breaux.senate.gov, senator@landrieu.senate.gov, senator@kennedy.senate.gov, john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov, senator@kennedy.senate.gov, john_kerry@kerry.senate.gov, senator@mikulski.senate.gov, senator@sarbanes.senate.gov, michigan@abraham.senate.gov, senator@levin.senate.gov, michigan@abraham.senate.gov, mail_grams@grams.senate.gov, senator@wellstone.senate.gov, john_ashcroft@ashcroft.senate.gov, kit_bond@bond.senate.gov, senator@cochran.senate.gov, senatorlott@lott.senate.gov, max@baucus.senate.gov, conrad_burns@burns.senate.gov, senator@edwards.senate.gov, jesse_helms@helms.senate.gov, senator@conrad.senate.gov, senator@dorgan.senate.gov, chuck_hagel@hagel.senate.gov, mailbox@gregg.senate.gov, opinion@smith.senate.gov, frank_lautenberg@lautenberg.senate.gov, senator_torricelli@torricelli.senate.gov, senator_bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov, senator_domenici@domenici.senate.gov, senator@bryan.senate.gov, senator_reid@reid.senate.gov, senator@dpm.senate.gov, senator_dewine@dewine.senate.gov, senator_voinovich@voinovich.senate.gov, jim_inhofe@inhofe.senate.gov, senator@nickles.senate.gov, Oregon@gsmith.senate.gov, senator@wyden.senate.gov, senator@santorum.senate.gov, senator_specter@specter.senate.gov, senator_chafee@chafee.senate.gov, jack@reed.senate.gov, senator@hollings.senate.gov, senator@thurmond.senate.gov, tim_johnson@johnson.senate.gov, senator_frist@frist.senate.gov, senator_thompson@thompson.senate.gov, administrator@gramm.senate.gov, senator@hutchison.senate.gov, senator@bennett.senate.gov, senator_hatch@hatch.senate.gov, senator_robb@robb.senate.gov, senator@warner.senate.gov, vermont@jeffords.senate.gov, senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov, senator_gorton@gorton.senate.gov, senator_murray@murray.senate.gov, Russell_Feingold@feingold.senate.gov, senator_kohl@kohl.senate.gov, senator_byrd@byrd.senate.gov, senator@rockefeller.senate.gov, senator@enzi.senate.gov, craig@thomas.senate.gov, senator@collins.senate.gov, senator2@levin.senate.gov, comments@roth.senate.gov, senator@feinstein.senate.gov, tom_daschle@daschle.senate.gov, senator_carnahan@carnahan.senate.gov, senator@schumer.senate.gov, olympia@snowe.senate.gov, phil_gramm@gramm.senate.gov, senator@clinton.senate.gov, senator@ensign.senate.gov, senator@stabenow.senate.gov, tim@johnson.senate.gov, tom_harkin@harkin.senate.gov, webmaster@sec.senate.gov, historian@sec.senate.gov, curator@sec.senate.gov, info@dpc.senate.gov, postmaster@dpc.senate.gov, mailbox@rpc.senate.gov, mailbox@aging.senate.gov, admin@energy.senate.gov, comments@JEC.senate.gov, webmaster@small-bus.senate.gov, Year2000@y2k.senate.gov, webmaster@repub-conf.senate.gov, senator@bennelson.senate.gov, senator@bayh.senate.gov

The following Senators do not have Email address. However, you can send email thru their web sites. Please click each one of them:

http://www.senate.gov/~craig/webform.html http://murkowski.senate.gov/webmail.html http://cantwell.senate.gov/mailform.html http://miller.senate.gov/email.html http://crapo.senate.gov/email.htm http://grassley.senate.gov/webform.htm http://roberts.senate.gov/email.htm http://thomas.senate.gov/html/contact.html http://allard.senate.gov/contactme/index.cfm http://daschle.senate.gov/webform.htm http://baucus.senate.gov/EmailMax.htm http://wellstone.senate.gov/webform.html http://domenici.senate.gov/contact/contactme.cfm

The following Senator does not have Email address nor Website either, please Fax to: Senator Mark Dayton (D - MN) Fax (202) 228-2186

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3: CONTACT all of the important Congressmen. For the world Peace, we must patiently educate them with the facts and documents. The following list may not have all of the accurate addresses for all of US Congressman, however, it may reach many.

Please COPY the following list and PASTE it into the BCC field. Then put your other Differnet Email address in the "TO" field.

All of the Addresses below have @mail.house.gov)

Please address to : Dear Honorable Congressman, or Dear Congressman, (note: it must have comma between addresses.)

NOTE: Please put your Name, Address , City, State, Zip code and sign as US "Constituent(s)" or "Voter(s)" at the BEGINING and End of your letter.(if you live in USA).

adam.smith@mail.house.gov, albert.wynn@mail.house.gov, alcee.pubhastings@mail.house.gov,amo.houghton@mail.house.gov, annagram@mail.house.gov, asa.hutchinson@mail.house.gov, ask.gene@mail.house.gov, ask.heather@mail.house.gov, ask.helen@mail.house.gov, Baldacci@mail.house.gov, Barbara.Cubin@mail.house.gov, Barbara.lee@mail.house.gov, barr.ga@mail.house.gov, bart.gordon@mail.house.gov, ben@mail.house.gov, bernie@mail.house.gov, bill.luther@mail.house.gov, bill.mccollum@mail.house.gov, bill.pascrell@mail.house.gov, bishop.email@mail.house.gov, blunt@mail.house.gov, bob.clement@mail.house.gov, bob.etheridge@mail.house.gov, Bob.riley@mail.house.gov, bobby.rush@mail.house.gov, bobney@mail.house.gov, bobwise@mail.house.gov, bozrah@mail.house.gov, brad.sherman@mail.house.gov, brian.baird@mail.house.gov, brian.bilbray@mail.house.gov, budget@mail.house.gov, budmail@mail.house.gov, c.pickering@mail.house.gov, callearl@mail.house.gov, campbell@mail.house.gov, cannon.ut03@mail.house.gov, cass.ballenger@mail.house.gov, cbass@mail.house.gov, christopher.cox@mail.house.gov, christopher.john@mail.house.gov, Cong.Merrill.Cook@mail.house.gov, congjones@mail.house.gov, congmcintyre@mail.house.gov, congressman.cooksey@mail.house.gov, congressman.issa@mail.house.gov, cstearns@mail.house.gov, cubin.webmaster@mail.house.gov, curtpa07@mail.house.gov, cymck@mail.house.gov, dana@mail.house.gov, danny.davis@mail.house.gov, darlene@mail.house.gov, davecamp@mail.house.gov, david.bonior@mail.house.gov, david.phelps@mail.house.gov, david.price@mail.house.gov, david.wu@mail.house.gov, dearsue@mail.house.gov, debbie.stabenow@mail.house.gov, degette@mail.house.gov, delauro.ct03@mail.house.gov, delaware@mail.house.gov, dennis.moore@mail.house.gov, dhastert@mail.house.gov, dkildee@mail.house.gov, Donald.Payne@mail.house.gov, Donna.Green@mail.house.gov, doolittle@mail.house.gov, doug.ose@mail.house.gov, dunnwa08@mail.house.gov, eclayton1@mail.house.gov, ed.pastor@mail.house.gov, ed.royce@mail.house.gov, ed.whitfield@mail.house.gov, edolphus.towns@mail.house.gov, ehrlich@mail.house.gov, ellen.tauscher@mail.house.gov, ernest.fletcher@mail.house.gov, faleomavaega@mail.house.gov, fl01@mail.house.gov, fl09@mail.house.gov, fla15@mail.house.gov, floyd.spence@mail.house.gov, frank.mascara@mail.house.gov, Frank.Pallone@mail.house.gov, franksnj@mail.house.gov, ga06@mail.house.gov, gary.condit@mail.house.gov, gene.taylor@mail.house.gov, George.Miller-Pub@mail.house.gov, George.Miller@mail.house.gov, George.nethercutt-pub@mail.house.gov, george.radanovich@mail.house.gov, gephardt@mail.house.gov, gil.gutknecht@mail.house.gov, gloria.charlie@mail.house.gov, grace@mail.house.gov, greg.walden@mail.house.gov, guamtodc@mail.house.gov, henry.bonilla@mail.house.gov, Howard.Berman@mail.house.gov, howard.coble@mail.house.gov, ike.skelton@mail.house.gov, istook@mail.house.gov, j.shadegg@mail.house.gov, jack.kingston@mail.house.gov, jack.metcalf@mail.house.gov, james.mcgovern@mail.house.gov, jan.schakowsky@mail.house.gov, Jay.Inslee@mail.house.gov, jay.inslee@mail.house.gov, jclyburn@mail.house.gov, jdhayworth@mail.house.gov, JER@mail.house.gov, jerrold.nadler@mail.house.gov, jerry.moran@mail.house.gov, jerry.weller@mail.house.gov, jerry4wi@mail.house.gov, jfc.il12@mail.house.gov, jim.barcia-pub@mail.house.gov, jim.demint@mail.house.gov, jim.kolbe@mail.house.gov, jim.mccrery@mail.house.gov, jim.mcgovern@mail.house.gov, jim.moran@mail.house.gov, jjduncan@mail.house.gov, jmoakley@mail.house.gov, joann.emerson@mail.house.gov, joe.moakley@mail.house.gov, joe.skeen@mail.house.gov, john.boehner@mail.house.gov, John.Conyers@mail.house.gov, John.Hostettler@mail.house.gov, john.lewis@mail.house.gov, john.linder@mail.house.gov, john.mica@mail.house.gov, john.olver@mail.house.gov, john.tanner@mail.house.gov, jserrano@mail.house.gov, jthune@mail.house.gov, judiciary@mail.house.gov, ken.bentsen@mail.house.gov, kuykendall@mail.house.gov, lane.evans@mail.house.gov, lazio@mail.house.gov, leach.ia01@mail.house.gov, lloyd.doggett@mail.house.gov, lobiondo@mail.house.gov, lois.capps@mail.house.gov, loretta@mail.house.gov, agriculture@mail.house.gov, democratic.caucus@mail.house.gov, louiseny@mail.house.gov, luis.gutierrez@mail.house.gov, Lynn.Rivers@mail.house.gov, lynn.woolsey@mail.house.gov, m.thompson@mail.house.gov, mac.collins@mail.house.gov, mail.gibbons@mail.house.gov, major.owens@mail.house.gov, mark.foley@mail.house.gov, mark.green@mail.house.gov, mark.udall@mail.house.gov, martin.frost@mail.house.gov, martin.sabo@mail.house.gov, matt.salmon@mail.house.gov, max.sandlin@mail.house.gov, mcintosh@mail.house.gov, menendez@mail.house.gov, mhinchey@mail.house.gov, mike.forbes@mail.house.gov, mike.mcnulty@mail.house.gov, mike.oxley@mail.house.gov, millender-mcdonald@mail.house.gov, miller13@mail.house.gov, mn03@mail.house.gov, mtmeehan@mail.house.gov, murtha@mail.house.gov, myrick@mail.house.gov, nc12.public@mail.house.gov, neil.abercrombie@mail.house.gov, nick.lampson@mail.house.gov, ninthnet@mail.house.gov, nita.lowey@mail.house.gov, njohnson@mail.house.gov, nrahall@mail.house.gov, nussleia@mail.house.gov, ok01.largent@mail.house.gov, owen.pickett@mail.house.gov, patrick.kennedy@mail.house.gov, paul.kanjorski@mail.house.gov, pawizard@mail.house.gov, pdeutsch.pub@mail.house.gov, pease@mail.house.gov, petemail@stark.house.gov, peter.defazio@mail.house.gov, peter.king@mail.house.gov, petes@mail.house.gov, pitts.pa16@mail.house.gov, porter.goss@mail.house.gov, portmail@mail.house.gov, pryce.oh15@mail.house.gov, public.dingell@mail.house.gov, rangel@mail.house.gov, rborski@mail.house.gov, rep.barton@mail.house.gov, rep.boehlert@mail.house.gov, rep.boswell.ia03@mail.house.gov, rep.boyd@mail.house.gov, rep.brady@mail.house.gov, rep.cardin@mail.house.gov, rep.carolyn.maloney@mail.house.gov, rep.carson@mail.house.gov, rep.charles.canady@mail.house.gov, rep.coburn@mail.house.gov, Rep.Cummings@mail.house.gov, rep.doyle@mail.house.gov, rep.e.b.johnson@mail.house.gov, rep.earl.pomeroy@mail.house.gov, rep.ehlers@mail.house.gov, Rep.Ganske@mail.house.govrep.gonzalez@mail.house.gov, rep.goode@mail.house.gov, rep.harold.ford.jr@mail.house.gov, rep.hinojosa@mail.house.gov, rep.hulshof@mail.house.gov, rep.james.walsh@mail.house.gov, rep.jcwatts@mail.house.gov, rep.jenkins@mail.house.gov, rep.kaptur@mail.house.gov, rep.morella@mail.house.gov, rep.northup@mail.house.gov, rep.packard@mail.house.gov, rep.paul@mail.house.gov, Rep.Reynolds@mail.house.gov, rep.roukema@mail.house.gov, rep.saxby.chambliss@mail.house.gov, rep.schaffer@mail.house.gov, rep.shays@mail.house.gov, rep.smith@mail.house.gov, Rep.Spratt@mail.house.gov, rep.sununu@mail.house.gov, rep.talent@mail.house.gov, rep.tom.tancredo@mail.house.gov, rep.tomallen@mail.house.gov, rep.toomey.pa15@mail.house.gov, RepCharles.Taylor@mail.house.gov, repcharles.taylor@mail.house.gov, replucas@mail.house.gov, resources.committee@mail.house.gov, richard.burrNC05@mail.house.gov, rick.hill@mail.house.gov, rob.andrews@mail.house.gov, robert.aderholt@mail.house.gov, Robert.Matsui@mail.house.gov, robert.weygand@mail.house.gov, robin.hayes@mail.house.gov, rodney.frelinghuysen@mail.house.gov, roger.wicker@mail.house.gov, ron.kind@mail.house.gov, ron.lewis@mail.house.gov, ronnie.shows@mail.house.gov, rush.holt@mail.house.gov, samfarr@mail.house.gov, sanford@mail.house.gov, saxby.chambliss@mail.house.gov, sbachus@mail.house.gov, sensen09@mail.house.gov, sf.nancy@mail.house.gov, shelley.berkley@mail.house.gov, sherrod@mail.house.gov, shimkus@mail.house.gov, silvestre.reyes@mail.house.gov, slevin@mail.house.gov, snyder.congress@mail.house.gov, sonny.callahan@mail.house.gov, souder@mail.house.gov, speaker@mail.house.gov, stephanie.tubbs.jones@mail.house.gov, stephen.horn@mail.house.gov, steve.rothman@mail.house.gov, steven.rothman@mail.house.gov, stupak@mail.house.gov, talk2.fsu@mail.house.gov, talk2bob@mail.house.gov, talk2geb@mail.house.gov, talk2jay@mail.house.gov, talk2jim@mail.house.gov, talk2tom@mail.house.gov, TalktoBobFilner@mail.house.gov, tammy.baldwin@mail.house.gov, ted.strickland@mail.house.gov, tell.bill@mail.house.gov, tellbuck@mail.house.gov, tellhoek@mail.house.gov, telljim@mail.house.gov, telltom@mail.house.gov, terry.Everett@mail.house.gov, texas.granger@mail.house.gov, texas17@mail.house.gov, thompsonms2nd@mail.house.gov, thurman@mail.house.gov, tiahrt@mail.house.gov, tim.roemer@mail.house.gov, tocollin.peterson@mail.house.gov, Tom.Bliley@mail.house.gov, tom.davis@mail.house.gov, hans.hogrefe@mail.house.gov, tom.latham@mail.house.gov, tom.tancredo@mail.house.gov, tom.udall@mail.house.gov, tompetri@mail.house.gov, tx02wyr@mail.house.gov, tx18@mail.house.gov, van.hilleary@mail.house.gov, vento@mail.house.gov, vito.fossella@mail.house.gov, wes.watkins@mail.house.gov, william.delahunt@mail.house.gov, write.earl@mail.house.gov, write.kenlucas@mail.house.gov, write2joecrowley@mail.house.gov, zoegram@lofgren.house.gov, rpombo@mail.house.gov, don.young@mail.house.gov, agriculture@mail.house.gov, democratic.caucus@mail.house.gov

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4: CONTACT your two Senators and one Representative:

Click http://politics.yahoo.com/freps Please FAX and EMAIL to them: Please Enter your address, click "Get District" then contact your Two Senators and One Representatives. (click "Send Email" to send your email. click "Profile" to make a FAX or CALL to them.)

Again, please put your Name, Address, City, State, Zip code and sign as US "Constituent(s)" or "Voter(s)" at the BEGINING and End of your letter. (if you live in USA).

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5: CONTACT Media:

All of the media need to be educated. Most of them have no idea what is going on behind. Mostly they have is twisted fake truth. The US news mostly muted on the Palestinens suffering especially.

Please Email/Fax to all of the Major media and your local media. Please click: http://capwiz.com/vision/dbq/media/

Then enter your local Zip Code, then click right side "Go", then click on each Media Name itself, it will show all of the important Editor's names and then click on each name, you will find their corresponding email address and contact info.

Send your Letter to Editor by clicking: http://www.opedletters.com/html/ Then click your State in USA.

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6: CONTACT member countries in the United Nations:

Please let's educate them. Most of them are unaware of the facts.

Please COPY the following list and PASTE it into the BCC field. Then put your other Differnet Email address in the "TO" field.)

All of the Addresses below at the end of each address has @un.int, Please address to: Dear UN, or Dear United Nations,

NOTE: Please put your Name, Address, City, State, Zip code and COUNTRY NAME at the BEGINING and End of your letter. Please include all of the important References in your letter. Note: All addresses must have comma between addresses.

gustafik@un.org, newellk@un.org, ochany@un.org, information@icj-cij.org, mail@icj-cij.org, webmaster@icj-cij.org, ictr-press@un.org, buchanane@un.org, dsd@un.org, sgpun@prodigy.net, ukrun@undp.org, RedCrossCommittee@un.int, ec@un.int, redcross@un.int, isa@un.int, coi@un.org, inquiries@un.org, albania@un.int, algeria@un.int, andorra@un.int, angola@un.int, antigua@un.int, argentina@un.int, armenia@un.int, australia@un.int, austria@un.int, azerbaijan@un.int, bahamas@un.int, bahrain@un.int, bangladesh@un.int, barbados@un.int, belarus@un.int, belgium@un.int, belize@un.int, benin@un.int, bhutan@un.int, bolivia@un.int, bosnia@un.int, botswana@un.int, braun@delbrasonu.org, brunei@un.int, bulgaria@un.int, burkinafaso@un.int, burundi@un.int, cambodia@un.int, cameroon@un.int, capeverde@un.int, caf@un.int, chad@un.int, chile@un.int, china@un.int, colombia@un.int, comoros@un.int, congo@un.int, costarica@un.int, ivorycoast@un.int, croatia@un.int, cuba@un.int, cyprus@un.int, czechrepublic@un.int, drcongo@un.int, djibouti@nyct.net, dominica@un.int, dr@un.int, ecuador@un.int, egypt@un.int, elsalvador@un.int, eqguinea@un.int, eritrea@un.int, estonia@un.int, ethiopia@un.int, fiji@un.int, finland@un.int, france@un.int, gabon@un.int, gambia@un.int, georgia@un.int, germany@un.int, ghana@un.int, greece@un.int, grenada@un.int, guatemala@un.int, guinea@un.int, guinea-bissau@un.int, guyana@un.int, haiti@un.int, honduras@un.int, hungary@un.int, india@un.int, indonesia@un.int, iran@un.int, iraq@un.int, ireland@un.int, italy@un.int, jamaica@un.int, jordan@un.int, kazakhstan@un.int, kenya@un.int, dprk@un.int, korea@un.int, kuwait@un.int, kyrgyzstan@un.int, laos@un.int, latvia@un.int, lebanon@un.int, lesotho@un.int, liberia@un.int, libya@un.int, liechtenstein@un.int, lithuania@un.int, luxembourg@un.int, macedonia@un.int, madagascar@un.int, malawi@un.int, malaysia@un.int, maldives@un.int, mali@un.int, malta@un.int, marshallislands@un.int, mauritania@un.int, mauritius@un.int, mexico@un.int, micronesia@un.int, moldova@un.int, monaco@un.int, mongolia@un.int, morocco@un.int, mozambique@un.int, myanmar@un.int, namibia@un.int, nepal@un.int, netherlands@un.int, newzealand@un.int, nicaragua@un.int, niger@un.int, nigeria@un.int, oman@un.int, pakistan@un.int, palau@un.int, panama@un.int, png@un.int, paraguay@un.int, peru@un.int, philippines@un.int, poland@un.int, portugal@un.int, qatar@un.int, romania@un.int, rwanda@un.int, samoa@un.int, sanmarino@un.int, stp@un.int, saudiarabia@un.int, senegal@un.int, seychelles@un.int, sierraleone@un.int, singapore@un.int, slovakia@un.int, slovenia@un.int, solomonislands@un.int, somalia@un.int, southafrica@un.int, spain@un.int, srilanka@un.int, stkn@un.int, stlucia@un.int, stvg@un.int, sudan@un.int, suriname@un.int, swaziland@un.int, sweden@un.int, syria@un.int, tajikistan@un.int, thailand@un.int, togo@un.int, tto@un.int, tunisia@un.int, turkey@un.int, turkmenistan@un.int, uganda@un.int, ukraine@un.int, uae@un.int, tanzania@un.int, uk@un.int, usa@un.int, uruguay@un.int, uzbekistan@un.int, vanuatu@un.int, venezuela@un.int, vietnam@un.int, yemen@un.int, yugoslavia@un.int, zambia@un.int, zimbabwe@un.int, nsai@algeria-un.org, coi@un.org, inquiries@un.org

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7: If you do not live in USA, please write to your country's leaders, for example: your President, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, as well as all of major media in your country:

You may get their information by clicking the following: http://www.politicalresources.net/ Then click on your continent, then click your country. It may take some time to search, but please be patient, you will find them. Thank you.



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