------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Safeguarding Uranium
Osama plot revealed
Consultative Exercise on Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters
Lockheed, TRW Win U.S. Satellite Contract
Experts inspect troubled Czech nuclear plant
Government Reviving Ties to Scientists
This is not a test
Spent nuclear fuel vulnerable to attack - US lawmaker

MILITARY
Moving Toward A Police State or Have We Arrived?
Bombings kill 1,000 around Kunduz: Report
In caves, along border, search for bin Laden goes on
Several Taliban units agree to a surrender deal
No one controls Afghanistan
Nations discuss postwar aid for Afghanistan
No deal on Taliban surrender
Afghans Block Britain's Plan for Big Force
Foreign Fighters in Kunduz Left Out of Surrender Talks
Nerve gas find at camp
Investigators Liken Anthrax in Leahy Letter to That Sent to Daschle
Connecticut Woman Has Inhalation Anthrax
Crackdown on Bioterror Claims
U.S. sees Saddam as priority, cites biological weapons
U.S. fingers Iran, Iraq as germ warfare talks begin
War Boosts Popularity Of Satellite Telephones
Conneticut
India Says Pakistan Remains 'Source of Terrorism'
Today's News Quiz
Pressing for a Mideast Cease-Fire
WORLD - Are Americans getting the full picture?
Delaware
Support overwhelms Adopt-A-Sailor program
22,000 feet above NYC, F-16s keep wary eye out
4 Commanders Seek Staff Role for the F.B.I.
The Secret Warrior Gen. Wayne Downing

ENERGY AND OTHER
Montana
Danish Elsam mulls wind farms in Poland, Greece
Suncor forms venture with Spanish wind power firm
Scientists look north for alternative energy sources
Kentucky

POLICE / PRISONERS
Bush Defends Order For Military Tribunals
Is President Bush's Executive Order Legal?
In War, It's Power to the President
President signs aviation security bill
Too few police, too many bases
States: Alabama, Maine, Maryland
Missouri
More False I.D. Charges
Indictment by Spanish Judge Portrays a Secret Terror Cell

ACTIVISTS
California
Jeff Bridges cooks up an end to hunger in America
Afghan Women Gather for Faltering First March
Demand Integrity in the Yucca Mountain Project!



-------- NUCLEAR

Safeguarding Uranium

New York Times
November 20, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/opinion/L20URAN.html?searchpv=nytToday

To the Editor:

Senators Christopher J. Dodd and Chuck Hagel are right to say financing should be "drastically increased" for programs aimed at keeping weapons-grade uranium and plutonium in the former Soviet Union out of terrorists' hands (Op-Ed, Nov. 13).

The Bush administration's budget now calls for cutting funds to those very programs: $40 million from the Pentagon's cooperative threat reduction program and $100 million from the Energy Department's nonproliferation programs.

One hopes it will not take another catastrophic attack for the administration to get its priorities straight on this matter.

MARTIN MALIN Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 13, 2001 The writer is program director of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

----

Osama plot revealed:
How he got the bomb

November 20, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20011120-878328.htm

Osama bin Laden is not a Georgetown hostess's dream of the extra man for a dinner party, but he may be the man to invite to your next snipe hunt.

Rifling through discarded papers in abandoned Taliban safe houses in Kabul is all the rage among American and British reporters who followed the Northern Alliance into town, and a reporter for the London Times appeared to have struck the mother lode.

In a dispatch from Kabul, he described documents which he said appeared to be instructions on how to build "a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb." This discovery quickly fueled speculation that al Qaeda had assembled a nuclear-weapons factory in the heart of downtown Kabul.

"The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension," cabled the correspondent, describing his find and his difficulty deciphering it. "But there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction."

This was certainly enough to curl the beard (or burqa) of almost anyone, and, after the BBC followed up with footage of someone reading the notes, analysts in Washington and London felt compelled to say they were skeptical that Osama had actually assembled such a device.

But someone always has to ruin a good story, or, in this case, to make a good story better. What Osama and his rocket scientists and particle-beam physicists apparently were working from, visible in the television footage, was a publication of the University Physical Society at the University of Wisconsin, in turn taken from the Journal of Irreproducible Results - Volume 25/Number 4, 1979 - titled "How to Make an Atomic Bomb, a Construction Project." The full text fell into our hands late yesterday. (Actually, the full text fell from the printer attached to a computer plugged into rotten.com, but we like the way phrases like "fell into our hands late yesterday" sound.) What Osama and his men fell into was a snipe hunt, a snipe hunt of 21 years ago, or what the Wall Street Journal calls "monkeyfishing."

These are the relevant excerpts of the instructions from the Journal of Irreproducible Results on how to make a Nagasaki-type bomb:

"First, obtain about 50 pounds (110 kg) of weapons grade Plutonium at your local supplier perhaps the Junior Achievement in your neighborhood.

2. Please remember that Plutonium is somewhat dangerous. Wash your hands with soap and water after handling the material, and don't allow your children or pets to play in it. Any leftover Plutonium dust is excellent as an insect repellant. You may wish to keep the substance in a lead box if you can find one in your local junk yard, but an old coffee can will do nicely.

3. Fashion together a metal enclosure to house the device. Most common varieties of sheet metal can be bent to disguise this enclosure as, for example, a briefcase, a lunch pail, or a Buick. Do not use tinfoil.

4. Arrange the Plutonium into two hemispherical shapes, separated by about 4 cm. Use rubber cement to hold the Plutonium dust together.

5. Now get about 100 pounds (220 kg) of trinitrotoleune (TNT). Gelignite is much better, but messier to work with

6. Pack the TNT around the hemisphere arrangement constructed in step 4. If you can find gelignite, feel free to use TNT packed in with Playdo or any modeling clay.

7. Enclose the structure from step 6 into the enclosure made in step 3. Use a strong glue such as 'Crazy Glue'

8. To detonate the device, obtain a radio controlled (RC) servo mechanism, as found in RC model airplanes and cars detonator caps can be found in the electrical supply section of your local supermarket. We recommend the 'Blast-O-Matic' brand because they are no deposit-no return.

9. Now hide the completed device from neighbors and children The hall closet or under the kitchen sink will be perfectly suitable.

10. Now you are the proud owner of a working thermonuclear device. It is a great ice-breaker at parties, and in a pinch can be used for national defense."

Some discovery. The good guys are closing in on Osama and his cave and it is not clear that Osama and his team of highly paid mullahs actually assembled a mighty Muslim bomb. He is reported to have fled with several of his wives, though it is not clear, either, why a man who thinks he's about to receive 72 virgins, untouched by human hands, would take wives with him. But if some of the virgins turn out to be reconditioned Beirut hookers, he could consult Volume 26 of the Journal of Irreproducible Results, "in which we learn how to clone your neighbor's wife Common kitchen utensils will be all you need.

Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.

-------- britain

CERRIE - Consultative Exercise on Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters

From: "Nuclear Free Local Authorities" <nfznsc@gn.apc.org>
Tue, 20 Nov 2001 12:36:19 +0000

Dear All

The first meeting of the Consultative Exercise on Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE), chaired by COMARE's chair, Prof Bryan Bridges, takes place in early December and a note from meetings will be posted on the DEFRA Website after each meeting.

This refers to radiation inside the body not outside for example inhaled or ingested radioactive material.

I am helping the CERRIE Secretary, Ian Fairlie, collate a list of email addresses of people who would like to be alerted when new information goes onto the Website. Please return this E-Mail with if you want to go onto the list.

Thank you Clare Frisby

Michael Meacher's press release issued at end of July about CERRIE is pasted below and attached as a word file for your information:

31 July 2001
Michael Meacher Announces New Review Of Radiation Risk Models

Environment Minister Michael Meacher today announced that the Government's independent advisory Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) has been asked to establish a new broad based working group to review the risks associated with internal radiation emitters and the need for further research. Membership of the working group will be announced soon and its remit will be "To consider the present risk models for radiation and health that apply to exposure to radiation from internal radionuclides in the light of recent studies and any further research that might be needed."

The working group is the outcome of recent discussions between the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Health and COMARE about the best way to evaluate the risks from radiation to ensure that the most valid risk models are used in radiation protection. The Working Group will produce and publish a report that will be considered by COMARE who will then advise the Government.

Michael Meacher, Environment Minister, said:

"There are significant differences of view among experts about the precise impacts of the internal ingestion of radionuclides and these need to be resolved. "This new Working Group will reach across all parties in the debate on risks of radiation, to assess the impact and reach a consensus on whether the current risk models continue to be valid."

Professor Bridges, Chairman of COMARE welcomed the exercise. He said:

"The Government has recently given Chairmen of Scientific Advisory Committees the responsibility of ensuring that all views are heard and taken into account when Committees formulate their advice. The risk from internal radioactivity is an area where, despite broad international consensus, there are several dissenting and sometimes mutually opposed viewpoints.

"The working group will provide a real challenge to the holders of all viewpoints to argue their case and try and reach agreement. COMARE regards this as an important consultative exercise and will be listening carefully to the proceedings."

Notes for editors

1. The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) was established in November 1985 in response to the final recommendation of the report of the Independent Advisory Group chaired by Sir Douglas Black (Black, 1984). The Black Advisory Group had been commissioned by the Minister of Health in 1983 to investigate reports of a high incidence of leukaemia occurring in young people living in the village of Seascale, 3 km from the Sellafield nuclear site and the suggestion that there might be an association between the leukaemia incidence and the radioactive discharges from Sellafield. COMARE is an independent expert advisory committee with members chosen for their medical and scientific expertise and recruited from Universities and Research Institutes. Members are appointed by the Chief Medical Officer, but the Committee advises all Government Departments not just the Health Departments. The Committee offers Government independent medical and scientific advice on the health effects of ionising and non-ionising radiation in the environment, whether natural or man-made. COMARE's terms of reference are "to assess and advise Government and the devolved authorities on the health effects of natural and man-made radiation in the environment and to assess the adequacy of the available data and the need for further research".

2. Radionuclides are radioactive elements, some occur naturally but others are produced in processes such as nuclear power generation. People may be exposed to radiation from external sources, however radionuclides can also be ingested and inhaled.

3. Estimates of risks from radiation exposure are based mainly on the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These survivors include large numbers of men and women of all ages, who received a wide range of radiation doses and whose health has been studied over many years. The risk estimates also incorporate information from some groups of people who received radiation for therapeutic or diagnostic purposes; for example, those exposed to diagnostic x-rays in the womb. The atomic bomb survivors and some of the medically-exposed groups were exposed to external sources of radiation. To estimate risks for internal exposures due to intakes of radionuclides, doses are usually calculated to various parts of the body and combined with information on risks from the studies of external exposure. However, for some types of cancer, risk estimates are based directly on studies of people exposed internally to radionuclides. For example: lung cancer from studies of uranium miners who inhaled radon; liver cancer from studies of patients injected with Thorotrast, an x-ray contrast medium that contained thorium; and bone cancer from studies of patients and dial painters exposed to radium.

Nuclear Free Local Authorities Secretariat
Manchester City Council
PO Box 463 Town Hall
Manchester M60 3NY UK
Tel: + 44 161 234 3244
Fax: + 44 161 234 3379
Web Site: http://www.gn.apc.org/nfznsc/

-------- business

Lockheed, TRW Win U.S. Satellite Contract

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2001; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55676-2001Nov19?language=printer

Two of the country's largest government contractors, Lockheed Martin Corp. and TRW Inc., will build the next generation of secured satellite systems under an Air Force contract worth more than $2.6 billion.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems and TRW Space and Electronics will launch satellites beginning in 2006 that advance the military's communications capabilities in wartime scenarios. For example, while many submarines currently use low-frequency systems such as Morse code to transmit information, the new satellites will quickly transmit detailed maps and large data documents.

The system will deliver "the coverage, capacity, connectivity and flexibility needed to provide unprecedented levels of assured communications . . . for our armed forces," Jeff Harris, president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said in statement.

The Advanced Extremely High Frequency Program (known as Advanced EHF) will eventually replace the military's Milstar program, which suffered a setback in 1999 when one of its $800 million satellites didn't reach orbit. That has left the global communications system vulnerable to gaps in coverage, similar to the gaps customers sometimes find in cellular telephone service.

The Milstar program also was criticized by the General Accounting Office as outdated and inefficient. In fact, the program was designed by Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, TRW and Boeing Co. during the Cold War to withstand the radiation from a nuclear blast. "Milstar was designed for a world that no longer exists," said John Pike, director of the nonprofit think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

In comparison, virtually the same contractors are now being commissioned to build the Advanced EHF. The new system will help U.S. forces securely swap real-time video, battlefield maps, targeting data and other tactical military communications. The new system can still withstand a nuclear blast but will have a wider bandwidth that will allow it to transmit substantially more data.

Still, the Advanced EHF system has suffered its own delays. The program was originally expected to begin launching satellites in 2004, but the military requested more technological capabilities, which delayed the start to 2006, Lockheed Martin said.

As the first two satellites launch, the U.S. Air Force will analyze alternatives for rest of the program, which may include launching three more satellites, a Lockheed Martin spokesman said.

Last week, Boeing withdrew from the program, which has been in the works for nearly 10 years. Boeing was to build a segment of the program's electronics, but it said in a statement that its share of the contract shrank while "the technical and financial risks we were being asked to take on this challenging program were disproportionate to our role."

"Ultimately, our decision has allowed the team to reduce their price by eliminating one of the program offices and enabled them to get within the fixed-price structure," the company said in a statement. TRW will take over Boeing's responsibilities on the project.

-------- czech republic

Experts inspect troubled Czech nuclear plant

Tuesday, November 20, 2001
By Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11202001/ap_czech_45627.asp

PRAGUE, Czech Republic-- An 11-member international group of nuclear experts launched a weeklong inspection of the troubled Temelin plant Monday, officials said.

"This mission is aimed to boost safety in the final stages of the plant's construction," said David Kyd, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Vienna-based international watchdog conducting the inspection.

The Temelin plant, located just 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of the Austrian border, has been a source of friction between the Czech Republic and nuclear-free Austria for more than a year.

The IAEA is set to inspect implementation of safety recommendations outlined in the agency's 1996 report.

"We will have a week of talks and finally a walkdown of the entire plant," Kyd said.

According to the plant's spokesman, Milan Nebesar, the inspection team includes experts from France, Germany, Britain, Spain and Bulgaria as well as an Austrian representative with observer status.

Drawing bitter protests from neighboring Austria, power generation testing started last year, but the plant was shut down several times because of technical problems.

It is currently down after an oil pump leak was discovered on Oct. 31, but officials said testing would be renewed shortly.

"We plan to start up the plant by the end of the week," Nebesar said.

In Austria, the Temelin reactor has been in the news for weeks, largely because each political party seems to have its own agenda on the issue.

Efforts last week by the four parties in parliament to reach a common stand on Temelin ended in failure because the far-right Freedom Party, which is in the government alongside Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's Austrian People's Party, insisted on vetoing the Czech Republic's admission to the European Union in 2004 unless Temelin is shut down.

However, Schuessel has rejected such a boycott, and it is yet unclear what the government will do to arrive at a joint position. There has been even talk of Schuessel's Cabinet falling apart over the issue.

Meanwhile, about 25 activists of the environmental groups Global 2000 and Greenpeace staged a sit-in at People's Party headquarters in downtown Vienna, displaying a "Stop Temelin" placard and other slogans.

"We must prevent it (the People's Party) from betraying the anti-nuclear fight of the Austrian population," said activist Jens Karg of Global 2000.

Reports from Brussels suggest the Austrian government cannot expect any support from other EU member countries in its opposition to Temelin, a Soviet-type nuclear plant upgraded with Western technology.

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

Government Reviving Ties to Scientists

New York Times
November 20, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/science/20ADVI.html?searchpv=nytToday

Anew sense of urgency about terrorism has prompted the Bush administration to try to repair federal relations with the nation's scientific elite - ties forged during the cold war that shriveled with the demise of the communist threat as advisory panels went out of existence and agencies dropped scientists in droves.

A main focus is the National Academies of the United States, which are perhaps the world's most prestigious scientific organizations. They have been asked to rally not only their own 5,000 members but the nation's other scientists as well. Last week, the academies ran a private meeting to help federal officials better protect the mail from anthrax, and have recently begun advising the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well.

"We need to understand what ideas are out there," said Dr. John H. Marburger III, president Bush's science adviser and former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. "And we need to let the intellectual community know what is needed from our perspective."

Dr. Lewis M. Branscomb, a Harvard physicist, who is helping to direct a new academies panel on antiterror technologies, said the developing bond between science and government promised to rejuvenate the partnership that built the atomic bomb, landed American astronauts on the moon, won the cold war and cured many diseases.

"Our model is before World War II and after," Dr. Branscomb said. "It could be a turning point." He said the whole scientific enterprise of the country might need to be different now that suicide jets and germ attacks had driven home the reality of new kinds of terrorism.

The new focus of federal officials is welcome news to the academies, made up of the National Academy of Engineering; the Institute of Medicine; the National Research Council, which carries out detailed studies; and the National Academies of Sciences, the oldest of the groups, founded by Congress at the height of the Civil War to advise the government "upon any subject of science or art."

Government officials "are recognizing that they need help, and that's a step forward," said William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering.

In a sense, the administration is taking small steps toward conditions that prevailed during the cold war, when the government financed much of the nation's basic scientific work. For obtaining technical guidance, many departments and intelligence agencies had their own science staffs, and Congress could seek advice from its Office of Technology Assessment, which became known for its detailed reports on topics as diverse as oil deep underground and weapons in space.

With the end of the cold war, though, demand for scientific advice fell. The changing atmosphere was exemplified by the fate of the Office of Technology Assessment, which in 1995 was abolished after more than two decades of existence. Experts judge the Clinton administration, despite good intentions, especially as voiced by Vice President Al Gore, as just adequate in fighting the reduction trends.

With the Bush administration, scientists complained it was leaving key advisory jobs unfilled and generally paying only perfunctory notice to the nation's research agenda.

All that changed on Sept. 11. Now, the government is scrambling to get wide-ranging advice from the academies on outwitting terrorists and better protecting Americans from threats of germ, computer, chemical and nuclear attack.

Teaming with Dr. Branscomb to run the academy's antiterror panel is Dr. Richard D. Klausner, a molecular biologist who directed the National Cancer Institute for six years before leaving in September after the terror attacks.

The White House is "very interested in reaching out and getting input," Dr. Klausner said. "The science communities have a lot they must do, giving the best possible advice. So many things are going on. Our hope is to synthesize and integrate."

Among the Bush administration bodies seeking academy advice is a little-known task force called the Technology Support Working Group, which identifies promising ways to fight terrorism and provides money to develop them. The task force was founded in 1986 and has representatives from the C.I.A., F.B.I., Secret Service and Departments of State, Energy and Defense; it has never before asked the National Academies for help, officials said.

Now, though, it is seeking guidance on making devices that can peer through walls and buildings to recognize bombs or bodies. Another aim is to develop ways to protect computer networks, electrical power grids and other vital systems. Still another goal is to find improved ways to sense, track and eliminate biological and chemical arms.

Dr. E. William Colglazier, executive officer of the National Academies, said another administration body, which he would not name, was seeking help from social scientists to better "understand the motivations of terrorist groups and the things they value."

He said the National Academies were becoming a "science broker" to the White House and the wider government in a time of crisis. In doing so, he said, they are setting aside their usual practice of convening expert panels to deliberate for months and then produce detailed reports. Instead, they are identifying scientists who can do quick studies and run expert meetings on short notice.

Dr. Marburger, the presidential science adviser, said a major function of the academies and their members at the nation's universities would be to help evaluate hundreds and even thousands of ideas pouring in from around the globe about how to thwart terrorism.

"There's not enough expertise in agencies to deal with them in a timely fashion," he said.

A more basic challenge, Dr. Marburger added, will be helping the government to brainstorm to make sure it was "covering everything you need to do to protect yourself" against terrorism. "That's obviously a key element in providing maximum protection," he said.

Some leading scientists question whether the Bush administration's quick embrace of the elite will be deep or effective. Dr. Richard L. Garwin, a top physicist who has advised Washington for decades, said the sheer size of government today reduced the influence of outsiders.

"It was easier in World War II because there wasn't a standing bureaucracy," Dr. Garwin said. "Now we have such a big defense infrastructure. People are going to argue, `That's my turf!' It's going to be extremely difficult."

Complicating things, trends in research financing have widened the rift between top science and Washington. In decades past, the government was the major source of money for basic research, giving it ready access to the best scientific minds. But now it is private industry that pays for most of the nation's science, making it harder for Washington to reach the intelligentsia.

Perhaps hardest of all, most science analysts fault the Bush administration as getting off to a very slow start with science, saying the White House showed little enthusiasm for research spending or getting sound guidance on science policy.

"Bush took longer than any other president to appoint a science adviser since the office was created in the Eisenhower administration," said Matthew G. Bunn, assistant director of the science, technology and public policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School.

He added that when Dr. Marburger was appointed, it was not as assistant to the president, as his predecessors had been, but simply as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. As a result, the science adviser is now lower on the White House pecking order. The Bush administration also dropped two of the adviser's four Senate-confirmed associate directors (for the environment and national security), leaving ones for science and technology.

Mr. Bunn said he believed the Bush administration had shown no interest in making the science adviser a serious player in policy formulation, limiting his influence in the war against terrorism.

Dr. Marburger, who was not confirmed as science adviser until Oct. 23, said such criticism was unfair.

"There is a certain value in symbolism," he said. "But I'm more interested in performance." He added that he had suffered no loss of influence with President Bush or in policy development. Such complaints, he said, "reflect an unrealistic view of how things get done in Washington."

Experts agree that the Bush administration's new love of science and the academies builds on an early reliance on the elite institutions for help with specific problems, as when the White House sought out advice on climate change early this year.

But it remains to be seen whether the administration will act on the science advice it is beginning to seek out. For instance, the White House recently asked for $202 million in the 2002 budget, down from $271 million in 2001, to help Russia make its nuclear weapons more secure. Critics see such cuts as potentially abetting the rise of nuclear terrorism. "There's a mismatch between the rhetoric on reducing the nuclear threat and the budget," said Dr. Frank von Hipple, a physicist who advised the Clinton White House and now teaches science policy at Princeton.

But Dr. Marburger, the science adviser, while calling such financing a good investment, said it had to be weighed against competing demands emerging in the overall antiterror war.

"That's one among many things you need to think about," Dr. Marburger said of the Russian aid program, adding that lots of other challenges were more immediate. No one, he said, should underestimate the power of science to address many of these challenges by engaging in simple, quick, smart analysis.

"That," he said, "is appropriate to the urgency of these issues."

-------

This is not a test

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
November/December 2001 Vol. 57, No. 6, pp. 50-51
By Stephen I. Schwartz
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2001/nd01/nd01schwartz.html

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. government implemented emergency plans that until then had been envisioned for use only in the event of an all-out nuclear war.

The most dramatic of these was the decision by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Federal Aviation Administration to ground all non-military aircraft in U.S. airspace (or in transit to the United States). At 9:25 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, all aircraft nationwide not already in the air were grounded, and those in the air were ordered to return to where the flight originated or to land at a nearby airport. By 2:07 p.m., all domestic aircraft were on the ground and by 5:30 p.m., all international flights were either on U.S. or Canadian soil. All commercial flights remained grounded until September 13, and significant restrictions on small, general aviation aircraft remained in place at the time this issue went to press.

The plan under which this order was implemented is known as Security Control of Air Traffic and Navigation Aids, or Scatana. Developed in the 1960s, Scatana was originally intended to clear the skies following confirmed warnings of an attack by the Soviet Union. This would have provided unrestricted airspace for U.S. bomber aircraft and missiles, as well as air defense interceptor aircraft, emergency airborne command posts, and associated support aircraft like refueling tankers. Until September 11, 2001, Scatana had never been fully implemented, although it was partially activated by accident during a 1979 false alarm at NORAD.

According to Defense Week, NORAD issued a "notice to airmen" implementing a modified version of Scatana approximately five hours after American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Although all civilian aircraft were grounded, ground navigation aids were not turned off (as they would have been during a nuclear attack), allowing airliners to safely navigate to their new and unexpected destinations.

Also activated in full for the first time on September 11 were plans for ensuring "Continuity of Government," or CoG. Shortly after watching the attacks in New York City on a television in his White House office, Vice President Dick Cheney was evacuated by the Secret Service to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), a hardened bunker buried beneath the East Wing of the White House. Once there (along with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and a few other staff members), Cheney used a secure telephone to contact President George W. Bush, who was in Sarasota, Florida, visiting a school. As Cheney told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press on September 16, in his conversation with the president he "strongly urge[d] him to delay his return" because of fears that Washington, D.C. was going to be attacked (those fears were compounded by a telephone call to the Secret Service indicating that Air Force One was an intended target).

Bush subsequently boarded Air Force One and took to the air as officials scrambled to ascertain what was happening. At one point, the Secret Service considered sending him to NORAD's headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado. After touching down briefly at Barksdale Air Force Base near Bossier City, Louisiana (site of the U.S. Strategic Command's alternate underground command post), to deliver a hastily prepared statement, the president headed to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, communicating with Cheney, military leaders, and the National Security Council via secure teleconference and videoconference links from Stratcom's primary underground command post, before eventually returning to Washington, D.C. in the evening.

It is probable that Stratcom's fleet of airborne command posts, including those based near Omaha nicknamed "Looking Glass," were placed under increased security and that preparations were made to make them airborne. It is also likely that the president's specially shielded and outfitted airborne command post, known as the National Airborne Operations Center or NAOC (code-named "Night Watch"), was also readied (it is normally kept on 15-minute ground alert). Indeed, the president's diversion to Omaha suggests that officials were at least contemplating moving him from Air Force One to NAOC where he could, if necessary, remain aloft for as long as 72 hours while directing a military response.

From the White House bunker, Cheney ordered the evacuation of everyone designated as a successor to the president, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Cong. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois; the president pro tempore of the Senate, Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia; and the entire Cabinet (except Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who remained at the Pentagon), as well as the rest of the congressional leadership. The Secret Service tried at least twice to convince Cheney to evacuate as well, "but I didn't want to leave the node that we'd established there in terms of having all this capability tied together by communications . . . and if I'd left . . . all of that would have been broken down . . . so I thought it was appropriate for me to stay there in the White House."

Hastert, and presumably most if not all the others who were in the Washington, D.C. area, were picked up at designated assembly points by Marine Corps helicopters kept ready for that purpose. They were transported to "a secure facility," most likely the Federal Emergency Management Agency's bunker known as the High Point Special Facility, inside Mount Weather near Berryville, Virginia, 48 miles (approximately 20 minutes by air) from Washington. (Senior officials who happened to be away from Washington would have been taken to one or more of the many emergency relocation sites located throughout the country. According to a former official from the White House Military Office, by 1980 there were reportedly more than 75 such facilities.) The underground complex at Mount Weather, which was built over four years at a cost of more than $1 billion and opened in 1958, contains an estimated 600,000 square feet of floor space. The facility, which was designed to accommodate several thousand people, includes a hospital, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, an emergency power plant, a radio and television studio, a direct link to the White House, storage tanks capable of holding 500,000 gallons of water, and a crematorium. The only previous time High Point was fully activated was November 9, 1965, during a major power blackout across much of the northeast United States.

Alternatively, some or all of these officials may have been sent to Site R, officially known as the Alternate Joint Communications Center. Since 1953, Site R has served as the backup Pentagon, with more than 700,000 square feet of floor space, sophisticated computer and communications equipment, and room for more than 3,000 people. Located inside Raven Rock Mountain about six miles north of Camp David on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, Site R continued to operate as a major CoG facility even as other facilities were mothballed in the 1990s. As recently as 1997, it had more than 500 military and civilian personnel reportedly working there (although not on round-the-clock shifts, which ended in February 1992).

During the Cold War, every federal agency had its own emergency relocation site for use during and after a nuclear war. Senior officials at the Treasury Department apparently worked from their site on September 11 and it is likely officials from other departments did as well.

Fear and uncertainty about the terrorists' plans, the whereabouts of any accomplices, and ongoing concerns about the safety of the president in Washington, D.C., led Vice President Cheney to spend his evenings and perhaps some days of the remainder of that week at the presidential retreat at Camp David, where there is also a secure, if rather austere, underground shelter. At least one television report suggested Cheney was also spending time at Site R during this tense period, a wholly plausible scenario. Even as late as September 20, when President Bush ventured to Capitol Hill to address the nation, security concerns kept Cheney away, reportedly the first time a vice president has not appeared with a president before a joint session of Congress (Senator Byrd took his seat on the dais). House majority leader Richard Armey, Republican of Texas, also skipped the event at the request of security officials.

How well all of this worked is as yet unknown and is, in any event, highly classified. While there are still regular emergency evacuation drills for designated senior officials, and although the White House Communications Agency and FEMA still track the location of each duly designated presidential successor, there were almost certainly a few problems locating everyone and getting all the equipment and communications links up and running.

While the CoG plans evidently worked well, the mass evacuations of all federal government buildings and many private office buildings in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and elsewhere created massive traffic jams, bringing traffic in some areas to a standstill for hours. This demonstrated once and for all the utter unreality and futility of civil defense plans devised by government officials, who from the 1950s through the 1980s promoted orderly citywide evacuations to the countryside as the best means of defense against a nuclear attack.

Stephen I. Schwartz is publisher of the Bulletin and executive director of the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science. He is the editor and co-author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (1998).

-------- us nuc waste

Spent nuclear fuel vulnerable to attack - US lawmaker

Chris Baltimore,
Reuters:
20/11/2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13376/story.htm

WASHINGTON - A U.S. lawmaker yesterday warned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that depleted radioactive fuel stored at the nation's 103 nuclear power plants is "extremely vulnerable" to attack.

Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, warned in a letter to NRC Chairman Richard Meserve that an aircraft attack on spent nuclear fuel depots could release the same amount of radiation as a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb.

"These facilities are extremely vulnerable and yet the consequences of a terrorist attack ... could release enough radioactive material to make entire communities uninhabitable for years," Markey said in a statement.

U.S. nuclear plants have come under increased scrutiny since the deadly Sept. 11 attacks, in which hijackers crashed airliners into the the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Some state governors have ordered National Guard troops to guard nuclear plants as an extra precaution.

Markey asked the agency to analyze the impact that a potential fire, caused by the crash of a Boeing 757 or Boeing 767 carrying over 20,000 gallons of fuel, would have on spent fuel stored at a nuclear plant

A previous letter from the agency to Markey said an airplane crash into spent fuel casks would have "minimal" consequences, Markey wrote. But that judgment was based on about 200 gallons of burning fuel, not the amount carried by a freshly fueled commercial jet, he wrote.

Nuclear power plants use radioactive fuel rods to produce steam within a generator, which creates electricity.

Once the rods are depleted, they must be removed and new ones installed. Old rods are still radioactive, and are usually stored on the secured grounds of operating nuclear plants.

Markey specifically referenced a proposed spent fuel storage facility in Skull Valley, Utah.

About 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste would be "concentrated in one location ... that will be easily visible from the air and from a nearby road" and could be vulnerable to attack, he warned.

The lawmaker's 10-page letter contained a series of questions on nuclear safety. Markey gave no deadline for the agency to respond.

Government and private industry officials say all nuclear power plants have been on high alert since the Sept. 11 attacks and have adopted stricter security measures.


-------- MILITARY

Moving Toward A Police State or Have We Arrived?
Secret Military Tribunals, Mass Arrests and Disappearances, Wiretapping & Torture

by Michael Ratner
HumanRightsNow.org
November 20, 2001
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ratner1.html

I live a few blocks from the World Trade Center. In New York, we are still mourning the loss of so many after the attacks on our city. We want to arrest and punish the terrorists, eliminate the terrorist network and prevent future attacks. But the government's declared war on terrorism, and many of the anti-terrorism measures, include a curtailment of freedom and constitutional rights that have many of us very worried.

I wrote the above paragraph and much of the article that follows toward the end of October. At that time, the repressive machinery then being put into effect was already terrifying. Since that time the situation has gotten unimaginably worse; rights that we thought embedded in the constitution and protected by international law are in serious jeopardy or have already been eliminated. It is no exaggeration to say we are moving toward a police state. In this atmosphere, we should take nothing for granted. We will not be protected, nor will the courts, the congress, or the many liberals who are gleefully jumping on the bandwagon of repression guarantee our rights. We have no choice but too make our voices be heard; it is time to stand and be counted on the side of justice and against the antediluvian forces that have much of our country in a stranglehold.

The domestic consequences of the war on terrorism include massive arrests and interrogation of immigrants, the possible use of torture to obtain information, the creation of a special new cabinet office of Homeland Security and the passage of legislation granting intelligence and law enforcement agencies much broader powers to intrude into the private lives of Americans. Recent new initiatives -- the wiretapping of attorney-client conversations and military commissions to try suspected terrorists -- undermine core constitutional protections and are reminiscent of inquisitorial practices.

Although it is not discussed in this article, the war on terrorism also means pervasive government and media censorship of information, the silencing of dissent, and widespread ethnic and religious profiling of Muslims, Arabs and Asian people. It means creating a climate of fear where one suspects one's neighbors and people are afraid to speak out.

The claimed necessity for this war at home is problematic. The legislation and other governmental actions are premised on the belief that the intelligence agencies failed to stop the September 11th attack because they lacked the spying capability to find and arrest the conspirators. Yet, neither the government nor the agencies have demonstrated that this is the reason.

This war at home gives Americans a false sense of security, allowing us to believe that tighter borders, vastly empowered intelligence agencies, and increased surveillance will stop terrorism. The United States is not yet a police state. However, even a police state could not stop terrorists intent on doing us harm. In addition, the fantasy of Fortress America keeps us from examining the root causes of terrorism, and the consequences of decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Unless some of the grievances against the United States are studied and addressed, terrorism will continue.

MILITARY COMMISSIONS: THE PERUVIAN OPTION

On November 13, President Bush signed an executive order establishing military commissions or tribunals to try suspected terrorists. Under this order non-citizens, whether from the United States or elsewhere, accused of aiding international terrorism, at the discretion of the President, can be tried before one of these commissions. These are not court-martials, which provide far more protections. The divergence from constitutional protections the executive order allows are breathtaking. Attorney General Ashcroft has explicitly stated that terrorists do not deserve constitutional protections. These are "courts" of conviction and not of justice.

The Secretary of Defense will appoint the judges, most likely military officers, who will decide both questions of law and fact. Unlike federal judges who are appointed for life, these officers will have little independence and every reason to decide in favor of the prosecution. Normal rules of evidence, which provide some assurance of reliability, will not apply. Hearsay and even evidence obtained from torture will apparently be admissible. This is particularly frightening in light of the intimations from U.S. officials that torture of suspects may be an option. Rules of evidence help insure the innocent are spared, but also that law enforcement authorities adhere to what we thought were evolving standards of a civilized society.

Unanimity among the judges is not required even to impose the death penalty. Suspects will not have free choice of attorneys. The only appeal from a conviction will be to the President or the Secretary of Defense. Incredibly, the entire process, including execution, can be conducted in secret and the trials can be held anywhere the Secretary of Defense decides. A trial might occur on an aircraft carrier and the body of the executed "buried" at sea. The President is literally getting away with murder.

Surprisingly, a number of prestigious law professors (e.g. Lawrence Tribe and Ruth Wedgwood) have accepted and even argued in favor of these tribunals. The primary claim is that it might be necessary to disclose classified information in order to obtain convictions. This is a pretext. There are procedures for handling classified information in federal courts as was done in the trial of those convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It certainly does not provide a reason for sending suspects into a "justice" system akin to that which the US condemned in Peru. The 1993 trials also demonstrate that these trials can be held in federal courts.

Trials before military commissions will not be trusted in either the Muslim world or elsewhere. Nor should they. They will be viewed as what they are -- "kangaroo courts." How much better to demonstrate to the world that the guilty have been apprehended and fairly convicted. A better solution would be for the US to go to the U.N. and have the UN establish a special court for the trials. Judges from different legal systems including that of the US, Muslim and civil law countries could constitute such a court.

WIRETAPPING ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATIONS

At the heart of the effective assistance of counsel is the right of a criminal defendant to a lawyer with whom he or she can communicate candidly and freely without fear that the government is overhearing confidential communications. This right is fundamental to the adversary system of justice in the Untied States. When the government overhears these conversations, a defendant's right to a defense is compromised.

Now, with the stroke of pen, Attorney General Ashcroft, has eliminated the attorney-client privilege and will wiretap privileged communications when he thinks there is "reasonable suspicion to believe" that an "inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further facilitate act of violence or terrorism." He says that approximately one hundred such suspects and their attorneys may be subject to the order. He claims the legal authority to do so without court order; in other words without the approval and finding by a neutral magistrate that attorney-client communications are facilitating criminal conduct. This is utter lawlessness by our country's top law enforcement officer and is flatly unconstitutional. This wiretapping of attorney-client communications has already begun.

THE NEW LEGAL REGIME

The government has established a tripartite plan in its efforts to eradicate terrorism in the United States. President Bush has created a new cabinet-level Homeland Security Office; the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating thousands of individuals and groups and making hundreds of arrests; and Congress is enacting new laws that will grant the FBI and other intelligence agencies vast new powers to wiretap and spy on people in the United States.

THE OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY

On September 20th President Bush announced the creation of the Homeland Security Office, charged with gathering intelligence, coordinating anti-terrorism efforts and taking precautions to prevent and respond to terrorism. It is not yet known how this office will function, but it will most likely try to centralize the powers of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies -- a difficult, if not impossible, job -- among some 40 bickering agencies. Those concerned with its establishment are worried that it will become a super spy agency and, as its very name implies, that the military will play a role in domestic law enforcement.

FBI INVESTIGATIONS AND ARRESTS

The FBI has always done more than chase criminals; like the Central Intelligence Agency it has long considered itself the protector of US ideology. Those who have opposed government policies -- whether civil rights workers, anti-Vietnam war protesters, opponents of the covert Reagan-era wars or cultural dissidents -- have repeatedly been surveyed and had their activities disrupted by the FBI.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack, Attorney General John Ashcroft focused on non-citizens, whether permanent residents, students, temporary workers or tourists. Normally, an alien can only be held for 48 hours prior to the filing of charges. Ashcroft's new regulation allowed arrested aliens to be held without any charges for a "reasonable time," presumably months or longer. (See below for new legislation regarding detention of immigrants.)

The FBI began massive detentions and investigations of individuals suspected of terrorist connections, almost all of them non-citizens of Middle Eastern descent; over 1,100 have been arrested. Many were held for days without access to lawyers or knowledge of the charges against them; many are still in detention. Few, if any, have been proven to have a connection with the September 11 attacks and remain in jail despite having been cleared. In some cases, people were arrested merely for being from a country like Pakistan and having expired student visas. Stories of mistreatment of such detainees are not uncommon.

Apparently, some of those arrested are not willing to talk to the FBI, although they have been offered shorter jail sentences, jobs, money and new identities. Astonishingly, the FBI and the Department of Justice are discussing methods to force them to talk, which include "using drugs or pressure tactics such as those employed by the Israeli interrogators." The accurate term to describe these tactics is torture. Our government wants to torture people to make them talk. There is resistance to this even from law enforcement officials. One former FBI Chief of Counter-Terrorism, said in an October New York Newsday article, "Torture goes against every grain in my body. Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them."

As torture is illegal in the United States and under international law, US officials risk lawsuits by such practices. For this reason, they have suggested having another country do their dirty work; they want to extradite the suspects to allied countries where security services threaten family members and use torture. It would be difficult to imagine a more ominous signal of the repressive period we are facing. The FBI is also currently investigating groups it claims are linked to terrorism -- among them pacifist groups such as the US chapter of Women in Black, which holds vigils to protest violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The FBI has threatened to force members of Women in Black to either talk about their group or go to jail. As one of the group's members said, "If the FBI cannot or will not distinguish between groups who collude in hatred and terrorism, and peace activists who struggle in the full light of day against all forms of terrorism we are in serious trouble."

Unfortunately, the FBI does not make that distinction. We are facing not only the roundup of thousands on flimsy suspicions, but also an all-out investigation of dissent in the United States.

THE NEW ANTI-TERRORIST LEGISLATION

Congress has passed and President Bush has signed sweeping new anti-terrorist legislation, the USA Patriot Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), aimed at both aliens and citizens. The legislation met more opposition than one might expect in these difficult times. A National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom of over 120 groups ranging from the right to the left opposed the worst aspects of the proposed new law. They succeeded in making minor modifications, but the most troubling provisions remain, and are described below:

Rights of Aliens

Prior to the legislation, anti-terrorist laws passed in the wake of the 1996 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma had already given the government wide powers to arrest, detain and deport aliens based upon secret evidence -- evidence that neither the alien nor his attorney could view or refute. The current proposed legislation makes it even worse for aliens.

First, the law would permit "mandatory detention" of aliens certified by the attorney general as "suspected terrorists." These could include aliens involved in barroom brawls or those who have provided only humanitarian assistance to organizations disfavored by the United States. Once certified in this way, an alien could be imprisoned indefinitely with no real opportunity for court challenge. Until now, such "preventive detention" was believed to be flatly unconstitutional.

Second, current law permits deportation of aliens who support terrorist activity; the proposed law would make aliens deportable for almost any association with a "terrorist organization." Although this change seems to have a certain surface plausibility, it represents a dangerous erosion of Americans' constitutionally protected rights of association. "Terrorist organization" is a broad and open-ended term that could include liberation groups such as the Irish Republican Army, the African National Congress, or civic groups that have ever engaged in any violent activity, such as Greenpeace. An alien who gives only medical or humanitarian aid to similar groups, or simply supports their political message in a material way could be jailed indefinitely.

More Powers to the FBI and CIA

A key element in the new law is the wide expansion of wiretapping. In the United States wiretapping is permitted, but generally only when there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and a judge signs a special wiretapping order that contains limited time periods, the numbers of the telephones wiretapped and the type of conversations that can be overheard.

In 1978, an exception was made to these strict requirements, permitting wiretapping to be carried out to gather intelligence information about foreign governments and foreign terrorist organizations. A secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was established that could approve such wiretaps without requiring the government to show evidence of criminal conduct. In doing so the constitutional protections necessary when investigating crimes could be bypassed. The secret court is little more than a rubber stamp for wiretapping requests by the spy agencies. It has authorized over 13,000 wiretaps in its 22-year existence, approximately a thousand last year, and has apparently never denied a request.

Under the new law, the same secret court will have the power to authorize wiretaps and secret searches of homes in criminal cases -- not just to gather foreign intelligence. The FBI will be able to wiretap individuals and organizations without meeting the stringent requirements of the Constitution. The law will authorize the secret court to permit roving wiretaps of any phones, computers or cell phones that might possibly be used by a suspect. Widespread reading of e-mail will be allowed, even before the recipient opens it. Thousands of conversations will be listened to or read that have nothing to do with the suspect or any crime.

The new legislation is filled with many other expansions of investigative and prosecutorial power, including wider use of undercover agents to infiltrate organizations, longer jail sentences and lifetime supervision for some who have served their sentences, more crimes that can receive the death penalty and longer statutes of limitations for prosecuting crimes. Another provision of the new bill makes it a crime for a person to fail to notify the FBI if he or she has "reasonable grounds to believe" that someone is about to commit a terrorist offense. The language of this provision is so vague that anyone, however innocent, with any connection to anyone suspected of being a terrorist can be prosecuted. We will all need to become spies to protect ourselves and the subjects of our spying, at least for now, will be those from the Mid East.

The New Crime of Domestic Terrorism

The act creates a number of new crimes. One of the most threatening to dissent and those who oppose government policies is the crime of "domestic terrorism." It is loosely defined as acts that are dangerous to human life, violate criminal law and "appear to be intended" to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "influence the policy of a government by intimidation of coercion." Under this definition, a protest demonstration that blocked a street and prevented an ambulance from getting by could be deemed domestic terrorism. Likewise, the demonstrations in Seattle against the WTO could fit within the definition. This was an unnecessary addition to the criminal code; there are already plenty of laws making such civil disobedience criminal without labeling such time honored protest as terrorist and imposing severe prison sentences.

Overall, the new legislation represents one of the most sweeping assaults on liberties in the last 50 years. It is unlikely to make us more secure; it is certain to make us less free.

It is common for governments to reach for draconian law enforcement solutions in times of war or national crisis. It has happened often in the United States and elsewhere. We should learn from historical example: times of hysteria, of war, and of instability are not the times to rush to enact new laws that curtail our freedoms and grant more authority to the government and its intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The US government has conceptualized the war against terrorism as a permanent war, a war without boundaries. Terrorism is frightening to all of us, but it's equally chilling to think that in the name of antiterrorism our government is willing to suspend constitutional freedoms permanently as well.

Michael Ratner is an international human rights lawyer and vice-president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He has brought numerous suits against the illegal use of military force by the United States Government and specializes in opposing government spying. Mr. Ratner teaches International Human Rights Litigation at Columbia Law School, and is the author of The Pinochet Papers, International Human Rights Litigation in US Courts, and Che Guevara and the FBI.

-------- afghanistan

Bombings kill 1,000 around Kunduz: Report

The Times of India Online
November 20, 2001
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=592689913

ISLAMABAD: More than 1,000 people were killed by US airstrikes around the Taliban-held city of Kunduz over the weekend, a newspaper here reported Monday, quoting a militia commander.

The commander, Mulla Fazil, told the daily Dawn by satellite phone that heavy pounding from the air had killed some 800 people in the Kunduz area in northern Afghanistan and 250 in nearby Khanabad district.

Fazil gave the air attacks as the chief reason for a decision by the Taliban to surrender Kunduz if the handover to the victorious Northern Alliance forces could be conducted under UN supervision.

With thousands of Taliban troops backed by hardcore Chechen, Arab and Pakistani loyalists making a stand at Kunduz, US 52 bombers and fighters have intensified their attacks in recent days. (AFP)

------

In caves, along border, search for bin Laden goes on

USA Today
11/20/2001
By Jonathan Weisman and Jack Kelley, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/20/binladen-search.htm

His hiding places are shrinking, the forces pursuing him are growing stronger, and the Taliban militia that harbored him have lost control of Afghanistan. But Osama bin Laden is still proving to be an elusive foe who may not be captured for some time to come, Pentagon officials warn. "As enemy leaders become fewer and fewer, that does not necessarily mean that the task will become easier," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday. "People can hide in caves for long periods." The hunt for the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington is part cat-and-mouse game and part brute force.

Hundreds of special operations forces are sealing escape routes, gathering intelligence and helping Afghan fighters search caves and tunnels for bin Laden. As many as 1,600 combat-ready Marines are expected to soon join 300 to 500 special operations forces already on the battlefield to bolster the hunt.

But even with some 2,000 U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, the search for bin Laden would still be akin to hunting for a needle in a haystack, says Michael Vickers, a former special operations forces officer and CIA operative who is now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. U.S. ground forces still must rely on southern Afghan tribesmen to do the cave-to-cave searches.

"Adding a thousand troops here, a thousand troops there won't make a real difference," he says. "The key is the southern opposition" to the Taliban.

Several defense officials say they believe air power will ultimately kill the Saudi exile and the other leaders of his al-Qaeda terrorist network. There is no reason to risk U.S. casualties in risky cave-to-cave searches unless President Bush was bent on capturing bin Laden alive, one senior Pentagon official said. But, the official added, the president is not.

That explains why so many of the daily airstrikes are aimed at crushing bin Laden or trapping him underground by pummeling cave and tunnel complexes. F-15 fighter-bombers are pounding cave openings and limestone rock formations with 5,000-pound, GBU-28 bunker buster bombs and 2,000-pound, AGM-130 missiles.

Unmanned Predator drones, many of them operated by the CIA, hover over head, sometimes firing Hellfire anti-tank missiles, sometimes "painting" buildings and bunkers with laser beams that guide bombs to their targets. Last week, a Predator above the capital, Kabul, guided the bomb that killed bin Laden's military chief, Muhammad Atef.

The Air Force is also hoping to rush 50 to 70 warplanes to a Soviet-built airfield in Tajikistan. Also, defense officials say Air Force engineers are scouting out several airstrips in Afghanistan for a new base for commando operations.

The biggest fear now is that bin Laden could shave his beard, cut his hair and slip out of Afghanistan, intelligence officials in Pakistan say. The remnants of al-Qaeda are already trying to sneak into Pakistan.

Pakistani guards at the Chaman border crossing near Quetta detained three Yemeni women and their two children trying to cross into Pakistan last Saturday, U.S. officials say. The three women claimed their Arab husbands had been killed in the U.S. bombing as they fled south from Kabul, the officials say. But the women wore expensive head-to-toe coverings, called burqas, believed to be from Saudi Arabia. They were interrogated for any possible links to bin Laden or al-Qaeda.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that he believes bin Laden still is in Afghanistan, an opinion shared by other senior Bush administration officials.

The problem for bin Laden is that he has nowhere to go, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. Nations that might have welcomed him in the past - Libya, Sudan and Iraq - now want nothing to do with him because they don't want to incur the military wrath of the United States.

"I can't imagine any nation in the world that would harbor him," Wolfowitz said.

Powell added: "I don't think this fellow is going to be welcome anywhere. He is an outcast. He is a murderer, he's a terrorist. ... He is on the run. And we will get him."

Weisman reported from Washington and Kelley from Islamabad, Pakistan

------

Several Taliban units agree to a surrender deal

USA Today
11/20/2001
By Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/20/surrender.htm

Thousands of trapped Taliban fighters in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, under heavy pressure from U.S. bombing, have tentatively agreed to surrender, a commander of the opposition Northern Alliance said Monday. Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum told the BBC that the agreement had been reached in a telephone call with Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban commander in the city, one of two remaining enclaves in Afghanistan occupied by Taliban forces. In exchange, Dadullah's Afghan troops would be allowed safe passage from the town, Dostum said. But he added he had rejected Dadullah's demand that the amnesty also extend to foreign fighters who have taken the side of the Taliban. That issue could remain a stumbling block to a surrender deal.

The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, acknowledged that the forces cornered in Kunduz were negotiating to give themselves up to the United Nations. Estimates of the number of fighters there varied wildly, from a few thousand to Zaeef's figure of 24,000.

The Taliban troops remained under heavy bombardment Monday from U.S. warplanes and from artillery and rockets of the Northern Alliance.

Refugees reported that hard-line, foreign Taliban fighters - mostly Arabs, Pakistanis and Chechens - were using death threats to stop Afghan comrades from surrendering. One report said up to 300 fighters were believed shot by the hard-liners in recent days.

Similar talks were going on about the fate of Taliban forces occupying Kandahar, their stronghold in the southern part of the country. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States opposed safe-passage deals for terrorists or for Taliban leader Mohammad Omar.

Asked what would happen if Omar struck a safe-passage deal, Rumsfeld said: "If the thrust of that question is would we knowingly allow him to get out of Kandahar, the answer is no, we would not."

He said he would do everything possible to prevent such a deal for al-Qaeda supporters. "My hope is that they would be killed or taken prisoner," he said at the Pentagon.

President Bush said rooting the Taliban out of their last strongholds could be time-consuming.

"The degree of difficulty is increasing as we work hard to achieve our objectives," he told reporters at the White House. "The American people must know it may take longer than some anticipate."

In other developments:

- Four journalists were apparently killed as they tried to make their way in a convoy along a road leading from Pakistan to Kabul. They included a cameraman and photographer for the Reuters news agency, and Spanish and Italian newspaper reporters. It was unclear whether the ambush was related to the war, or whether they were victims of bandits.

- A conference bringing together all Afghan factions to work toward a new government was set to begin on Saturday in Germany.

Contributing: Gary Strauss in Islamabad, Pakistan

---

No one controls Afghanistan

USA Today
11/20/2001
By Tim Friend and Thor Valdmanis, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/20/control-usat.htm

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Northern Alliance says it controls up to 85% of this country, a stunning reversal from just 10 days ago, when Taliban forces laid claim to at least that much territory. But in truth, Afghanistan is now a chaotic country where no one group or person is in charge and gun-toting "armies" loyal to local warlords are patrolling cities, provinces and regions. In many places, those armies are basically rival gangs. Their presence is a major reason Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous places on the planet, even though the U.S.-led bombing campaign has been significantly scaled back since the Taliban gave up most of its territory.

The apparent killings Monday of four journalists - none of them American - underscore the dangers in this now largely lawless nation. The journalists were traveling in a four-truck convoy of foreign correspondents from Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border, toward Kabul. Six armed men stopped the two front vehicles and demanded that the four get out and follow them into the mountains.

A translator and a driver accompanying the group escaped after begging for their lives. The translator reported to local alliance commanders that the four reporters were marched behind a hill near a narrow gorge and that he later heard gunshots.

One of the journalists was reporter Maria Cutuli of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra. Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero told reporters in Brussels that the four are dead and that their bodies had been found. The other three were Julio Fuentes of Spain's El Mundo newspaper, Australian TV cameraman Harry Burton and Afghan photographer Azizullah Haidari. Burton and Haidari were working for the Reuters news service.

Reporters here are always at risk. "It's not like Kosovo or other wars," says Tom Carew, a former British Special Air Service officer in Afghanistan who now runs a survival school in Belgium. "It's fluid and you can suddenly find yourself in a very dangerous situation." Unlike when covering professional soldiers, who understand the role of the media, "it's more like being with a load of (soccer) hooligans."

Journalists are especially in danger because it's well known in Afghanistan that many of them are carrying thousands of dollars in cash. They need lots of money to pay for transportation, lodging, food and other necessities in a country where credit cards are of no use. It wasn't known late Monday whether the four journalists were targets of robbers or Taliban forces seeking a measure of revenge against Western reporters.

But what's happening to journalists is by no means the only sign of the Wild West nature of life in Afghanistan.

For foreigners, the differences start at the nation's border. At a crossing from Tajikistan, for example, passports are stamped in a mud-walled hut lit by a single kerosene lamp. Outside, young men wearing baggy, ragged fatigues and carrying Russian-built assault rifles stand guard. Drivers of barely running four-wheel-drive vehicles offer rides to the nearest towns, at prices running into the hundreds of dollars.

The only remotely safe way to travel is as part of a convoy, ostensibly protected by troops loyal to the alliance. But even then, a 50-mile journey through northern Afghanistan can take 6 hours or more because roads are little more than bomb-scarred ruts and land mines are a constant danger.

Convoys must stop at night to avoid running into roving gangs of local soldiers who may be part of the alliance but who also look for opportunities to plunder. A convoy last week that was making its way from northern Afghanistan to Kabul came to a halt at dusk. It was reported that the village ahead was controlled by a local warlord. His 300 soldiers were known to have robbed such processions, just as outlaws in the American West once held up trains.

In many cities reported to have been taken over by alliance forces, "control" remains elusive. Taloqan, a city in the north that the Taliban gave up last week, was still dangerous days after that militia's troops supposedly left. Some were still hiding inside the town. Gunbattles continued into last weekend.

In Kabul, though Taliban forces have reportedly fled well to the south, nerves remain on edge. Armed men, all saying they are alliance fighters, are everywhere. Monday, after a minor traffic accident caused a truck's tire to blow out, several of those soldiers opened fire on the driver. They thought he had fired a shot and might be a Taliban fighter. There was no word of his fate.

The simple answer to why Afghanistan is lawless now, of course, is that there is no government. The Taliban, which took effective control in 1996, is in tatters.

But the forces churning the country are more complicated than that simple answer implies.

The alliance is in reality a confederation of many warlords who have shifted allegiances several times in recent years - from the communists who ran Afghanistan in the '70s to the Soviets in the early '80s and then to mujahedin guerrillas.

To further complicate matters, most of the alliance's leaders are from northern Afghanistan and are not Pashtun, the country's largest ethnic group. Pashtuns are predominantly southern.

So the alliance leaders' interests don't always agree either with one another or with those of Pashtun tribal leaders. And all the leaders want to maintain control over "their" territory.

International efforts to forge a plan for a new government are still in the early stages. A meeting tentatively set for this weekend in Germany of representatives from Afghanistan's various ethnic groups could kick-start that process.

Throw into the mix decades of fighting and the bitterness it engenders, and chaos is inevitable. So is danger.

"Obviously, citizens need to be cautious in a country that has seen 23 years of war and has thousands of weapons unaccounted for in the hands of Taliban and other Taliban splinter groups," says Hashmatullah Moslih, a deputy in the alliance's foreign ministry. Left unsaid: the fact that there are thousands of weapons in the hands of other fighters as well.

Contributing: Gary Strauss in Islamabad, Pakistan; Vivienne Walt in Quetta, Pakistan; and Steven Komarow in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

------

Nations discuss postwar aid for Afghanistan

USA Today
11/20/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/20/afghan-aid.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Twenty-one nations and the European Union assembled Tuesday at the State Department to consider a massive assistance program for postwar Afghanistan. Secretary of State Colin Powell launched the conference with a pep talk. He said reconstruction must begin quickly, as areas of the South Asian country are freed from the Taliban control.

"We must act as fast as we can," Powell said. "We must act as soon as possible."

President Bush committed $320 million in assistance to Afghanistan last month, even as U.S. bombers were blasting Taliban targets in retribution for refusal to surrender Osama bin Laden and dismantle his al-Qa'eda terrorism network.

Powell said the onset of winter underscores a need for prompt relief for refugees and others in need.

"We do not yet know how much money or other forms of rehabilitation and reconstruction assistance will be needed from the international community," he said.

With a war on and the country unsettled, a comprehensive assessment of needs is not possible, he said.

Japan co-sponsored the meeting with the United States. The media were barred from listening to the discussion.

On another front, Richard Perle urged the Bush administration to use troops, bombers, dissidents and opposition forces to destroy President Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq.

Perle, a senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, said Iraq should be the next target after the Taliban is defeated because "it poses the greatest threat to the United States."

There is evidence linking Saddam to the al-Qa'eda organization, Perle said in a breakfast with reporters, and "the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein is to destroy his regime."

He said the United States would not need much support from other Arab countries. Whatever they might say officially about a U.S. attack, "there will be dancing in the streets" when Saddam is overthrown, Perle said.

His defeat will serve as notice to other nations that support terrorism that they may be targeted, as well, Perle said.

He is a member of a defense policy board that offers advice to the Bush administration. But Perle said he was speaking for himself.

------

No deal on Taliban surrender

November 20, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20011120-84189184.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday there will be no deals to protect Taliban leaders or foreign terrorists fighting in Afghanistan.

"The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. "Nor are we in a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground, to accept prisoners."

Mr. Rumsfeld said he hopes the several thousand foreign terrorists and others engaged in fierce fighting near the northern city of Kunduz will not be allowed to escape.

"The idea of their getting out of the country and going off to make their mischief somewhere else is not a happy prospect," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "So my hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner."

U.S. warplanes yesterday conducted strike missions against Taliban positions in northern and southern Afghanistan on the 44th day of the bombing campaign.

President Bush, meanwhile, said the United States and its allies are closing in on terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

"We're hunting him down," Mr. Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting. "He runs and he hides, but as we've seen repeatedly, the noose is beginning to narrow, the net is getting tighter."

U.S. and British special forces commandos yesterday continued the search for bin Laden, believed to be in the southern part of the country.

Mr. Rumsfeld said a reward of $25 million has been offered to anyone who helps capture bin Laden and other terrorists in Afghanistan. He said several hundred U.S. Special Forces troops are on the ground as part of the hunt for bin Laden - chief suspect in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

A Northern Alliance spokesman in neighboring Tajikistan said forces stopped shelling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters near Kunduz yesterday in an effort to negotiate the surrender of the surrounded Taliban units.

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said U.S. warplanes on Sunday carried out 138 attack sorties in a round-the-clock campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The discussions between the Taliban and Northern Alliance forces came amid reports that the pro-Taliban fighters were killing their own in an attempt to prevent defections or surrenders.

"Every day the Northern Alliance reinforces its siege of Kunduz. The alliance is trying to carry out talks with the Taliban in Kunduz, so that they will lay down their weapons and surrender," Ariyonfard Shamsulkhak, press attache at the Northern Alliance Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, told the Associated Press.

"If the Taliban do not lay down their weapons, then the fighting will begin. There is no other way out. And then, unfortunately, another city will be sacked," Mr. Shamsulkhak said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said discussions for a surrender of Taliban forces are continuing in Afghanistan, but the United States hopes "they will not engage in negotiations that would provide for the release of al Qaeda forces; that would provide for the release of foreign nationals, non-Afghans, leaving the country and destabilizing neighboring countries, which is not your first choice either."

Asked if the opposition forces in the south reached a deal that would allow Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar to leave his base in Kandahar, Mr. Rumsfeld stated bluntly: "If the thrust of that question is would we knowingly allow him to get out of Kandahar, the answer is, no we would not." Mr. Rumsfeld said fighting between southern tribes and Taliban forces in Kandahar is "still a standoff."

"There are southern tribes that are applying pressure and engaged in discussions and there is firing and the coalition forces have provided some air support," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States hopes its large rewards and use of special operations commandos will lead to the capture of al Qaeda leaders.

"Our hope is that the dual incentive of helping to free that country from a very repressive regime and to get the foreigners in the al Qaeda out of there, coupled with substantial monetary rewards, will incentivize a large number of people to begin crawling through those tunnels and caves, looking for the bad folks," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Without large numbers of troops on the ground, the United States cannot accept surrendering forces, Mr. Rumsfeld said. "If people try to, we are declining," he said.

The defense secretary cautioned reporters that the battle to defeat the terrorists and their supporters was not over and would be long and difficult.

"I also want to emphasize that as enemy leaders become fewer and fewer, it does not necessarily mean that the task will become easier," he said. "People can hide in caves for long periods, and this will take time."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the commandos have helped aircraft locate targets, reported on enemy troops and blockaded roads in the search for fleeing Taliban leaders and al Qaeda leaders.

"The war on terrorism is still in its early stages," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Perseverance and will and patience and sacrifice is going to be required in the months ahead, and while the nature of what's taking place is changing, it is going to be no less difficult."

Mr. Rumsfeld said the CIA also has been working closely with military officials in Afghanistan.

----

Afghans Block Britain's Plan for Big Force

New York Times
November 20, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/international/asia/20FORC.html

LONDON, Nov. 19 - Prime Minister Tony Blair's much publicized plan to dispatch thousands of British troops to Afghanistan has been put off as diplomats and Afghan leaders wrangle over the future of the country.

On Thursday, about 100 commandos from Britain's Special Boat Service flew into the Bagram air base and established a bridgehead at the sprawling airfield north of Kabul. Top British officials indicated that it was just the beginning of a substantial force that would provide security in areas the Taliban had abandoned.

But no sooner did the British forces arrive than the Northern Alliance indicated that they were not invited. The British commandos were allowed to stay. But the expected reinforcements have yet to be sent, transforming the troops from a vanguard to a lonely garrison, one that is being eyed suspiciously by the Afghans it was intended to help.

Alastair Campbell, Mr. Blair's director of communications, insisted that the British plans had not gone awry. But he acknowledged that the question of how to secure the peace had been caught up in the thorny issue of Afghanistan's future government.

"All these things are related," Mr. Campbell said in an interview. "Things are bound to look and feel a bit ragged for a time."

British and American officials sought to dispel reports that they had differences over the British plan. Still, the Bush administration was circumspect about London's plans for a stabilization force.

Asked if Washington believed that thousands of British forces were needed soon to stabilize the situation in northern Afghanistan, a State Department spokesman said only, "We appreciate the important role contributed by the armed forces of the United Kingdom in the campaign against terrorism."

The issue of security has been a difficult one for some time. The problem is not that there is no plan; rather it is that there is an abundance of them.

In recent weeks, there have been proposals for an all-Afghan security force. That is the favorite option of the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, but one which even Mr. Brahimi acknowledges is not practical in the short run. There has also been discussion of an all-Islamic security force, but little action to make it a reality.

Britain and France, for their part, clearly think that a substantial Western military presence is necessary to keep order, a view endorsed by some aid organizations nervous about operating in territory that is controlled by rival warlords or, in some cases, not controlled at all.

British officials say Mr. Blair would never have gone public with his proposal if it did not have the support of President Bush. Mr. Campbell said that Washington was in charge of the military strategy and that it was up to the United States to decide how and when to use the more than 4,000 British forces that London is offering for a security force. "There is not a delay or a hold," Mr. Campbell said. "What there is is a commitment by the British government being outlined."

Still, last week senior British officials indicated that a deployment was imminent. Clare Short, Britain's top official for international assistance, said on Thursday that the situation in Afghanistan was so urgent that British forces needed to start deploying there "in days."

That day, the British commandos moved into Bagram, a sprawling air base 22 miles north of Kabul, which was built by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan. The move raised expectations of a sizable British deployment but soon sputtered to a halt, confounding military experts and embarrassing the British government.

It was not clear whether the delay reflected a fundamental rethinking of the troops' mission or was simply a tactical adjustment that would allow issues to be settled about the post-Taliban government before international troops were deployed. While British officials say there was agreement at the highest levels of the British and American governments, Bush administration officials have not always spoken with one voice.

While a senior administration official said today that there would be some role for British and French forces in northern Afghanistan, a Pentagon official suggested last week that they might not be needed.

The Northern Alliance has made no secret of its concerns. It is plainly skeptical about the idea of a large international peacekeeping force, though it says there might be a role for foreign troops in providing relief assistance.

Critics say the alliance fears that a peacekeeping force might dilute its authority over the capital and therefore diminish its negotiating leverage with other anti-Taliban groups in the coming talks about the coalition that will govern Afghanistan. Alliance officials, however, insist that the issue is sovereignty and that Afghans are not eager to see the deployment of foreign troops on their soil.

Steven Evans, Britain's new representative in Afghanistan, said today that some headway was being made on the issue, but clearly tensions remain. "The indication is that progress is being made in discussions with the Northern Alliance, but you have to understand the alliance is not one coherent group," Mr. Evans said.

Haron Amin, the Northern Alliance's envoy to Washington, said that if international forces were to be deployed, their duties must be spelled out in advance and the move must be coordinated with the United Nations and the Northern Alliance.

If there is any confusion, he suggested, it was caused by the British who sent commandos to Bagram without advance notice. "Initially, they made a mistake which created some apprehension," he said.

------

Foreign Fighters in Kunduz Left Out of Surrender Talks

New York Times
November 20, 2001
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/international/asia/20CND-KUNDUZ.html

TALIQAN, Afghanistan, Nov. 20 - Leaders of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were poised to strike a deal today at the expense of thousands of foreign fighters trapped in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan.

The leaders began arriving tonight in Emam Sahib, a town about 30 miles north of here, for negotiations on the fate of the Taliban fighters in the besieged city. The Northern Alliance general in charge in northeastern Afghanistan, Daoud Khan, said thousands of Afghan Taliban soldiers in Kunduz appeared willing to surrender. A senior Taliban leader was said to be on his way to Mazar-i-Sharif to talk to commanders there.

But shut out of the talks are the non-Afghans fighting with the Taliban, thousands of men from Pakistan and other Muslim countries who retreated to Kunduz as the Northern Alliance rolled through northern Afghanistan. General Khan said the foreigners, who refugees say have executed hundreds of Afghan Taliban trying to surrender, are not even being told of the negotiations.

"We are not speaking for the foreigners," General Khan said at his headquarters here in Taliqan. "They have no part in the negotiations."

Today's developments raised the prospect of a bloody end to the siege of Kunduz, which began last week when the Northern Alliance cut off all roads leading out of the city. According to refugees, foreign Taliban fighters have vowed to fight to the death. They are apparently so distrustful of their Afghan counterparts that they have barred them from many parts of the city and the front lines.

The prospects for an evacuation seem slim. General Khan said he would consider allowing a United Nations-sponsored evacuation of the foreign fighters, but he has not asked for one. United Nations officials said today that they had been contacted by representatives of the Taliban about a possible evacuation, but these officials said they did not have the means to carry one out. They urged the forces surrounding the city to respect the conventions of war regarding humane treatment of the defeated.

Earlier this week, Red Cross officials scouring the battlefield outside Kabul found the bodies of 30 men, believed to be foreigners fighting for the Taliban, of whom at least half had apparently been executed.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ruled out any measure that would allow Kunduz's defenders to escape.

"It would be most unfortunate if the foreigners in Afghanistan - the Al Qaeda and the Chechens and others who have been there working with the Taliban - if those folks were set free and in any way allowed to go to another country and cause the same kind of terrorist acts," he said. "It would be most unfortunate."

Northern Alliance commanders said they were not contemplating a plan in which turncoat Afghan Taliban soldiers inside Kunduz would attack the foreigners. But they reiterated their stark ultimatum to the foreigners: surrender for trial or die. "If they resist, I am sure they will be killed," General Khan said.

Hundreds more Afghan Taliban soldiers defected today to the Northern Alliance. At the same time, reports surfaced that the foreign Taliban fighters had killed Afghans trying to defect. Together, the defections and the reports of massacres conveyed an impression of near-chaos in the ranks of the Taliban in Kunduz.

Northern Alliance leaders said they would wait at least until the end of the week for the negotiations to play out; after that, they said, they would be ready to attack.

Foreigners have made up a large part of the Taliban's army since its inception in 1994. The foreign Taliban are considered to be among the most committed in the movement.

The Northern Alliance says some 20,000 Taliban troops are hunkered down in Kunduz, including as many as 6,000 foreigners. Pentagon officials estimate that about 3,000 Taliban troops are holed up in the city. By either estimate, Kunduz is one of the largest Taliban strongholds left in the country.

General Khan said many Afghan Taliban fighters trapped in Kunduz had asked for safe passage to Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, which is also under attack on all sides. He said he and his commanders were considering the request.

As the siege dragged on, there were signs of deepening division among the Taliban in Kunduz.

Overnight, two Afghan Taliban commanders walked across the front lines with about 350 of their troops, handed over their weapons and declared their allegiance to the Northern Alliance. The soldiers and commanders said that the defections were negotiated in secret, and that they came across at night to avoid being shot by foreign Taliban soldiers.

"We left very quietly," said Muhammad Israel, one of the Taliban commanders who came to Taliqan. "If we had left during the day, the foreigners would have killed us."

Commander Israel echoed reports here that foreign Taliban soldiers had carried out several killings of Afghan Taliban troops trying to defect. Refugees and Northern Alliance officials have said that foreign Taliban fighters have killed as many as 450 of their Afghan comrades. Refugees have also reported that more than three dozen young Uzbek and Tajik men were gunned down by foreign fighters who suspected they were trying to cross the front lines.

Northern Alliance commanders added another report to that list today. They said that on Monday, foreign fighters had killed 200 Afghan Taliban at Angurbagh, a village near the Kunduz airport, when the Afghans tried to cross the front lines.

None of the reports could be confirmed.

"All the Afghans are going to defect from the Taliban," said Abdullah Bashir, a Taliban soldier who defected this morning. "The Afghans are tired of fighting. We want to go home."

Indeed, the scene at General Khan's headquarters, where the defecting Taliban soldiers had gathered, seemed more like a homecoming than a place where erstwhile enemies faced off.

Commander Israel said that he and his men were sitting around a fire at sunset on Monday, breaking their Ramadan fast with bowls of chicken soup. They talked about it for a few moments, he said, and then decided it was time to go.

"I got on the radio, talked to General Daoud, and he sent some soldiers over to meet us," he said.

By his own reckoning, Commander Israel's decision to join the Taliban five years ago was made with no more deliberation than if he had been picking out a new turban.

"There was a man I was feuding with who was in the Northern Alliance at the time," he said, "So I decided to go with the Taliban."

Commander Israel said he never identified with the strict Islamic code of the Taliban, and never brutalized civilians the way they did. As an ethnic Tajik, he said he went easy on the locals, who were largely from his own ethnic group.

The locals in Taliqan seemed to sympathize. As the commander strolled around the general's courtyard, an old acquaintance, Nur Ahmed, walked up and embraced him.

"My friend," Mr. Ahmed said, wrapping his arms around Commander Israel. "How have you been?"

-------- biological weapons

Nerve gas find at camp

Tuesday November 20, 2001
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4302535,00.html

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network had been preparing terrorist attacks with the lethal sarin nerve gas before its infrastructure in Afghanistan was destroyed, according to a Spanish journalist who found phials marked as containing the gas at a camp outside Jalalabad.

El Mundo correspondent Julio Fuentes, who was last night reported dead after a convoy of journalists was attacked on the road to Kabul, found 300 of the phials at an abandoned al-Qaida base known as Farm Hada, 20 km south of Jalalabad.

His report, published yesterday, stated that they were in boxes of 10 which bore, in Russian cyrillic script, the words "SARIN/V-GAS". The phials were about seven centimetres long and contained a clear, yellowish liquid.

The Farm Hada base had been abandoned in a rush and was strewn with empty test tube racks, landmines, grenades and artillery shells.

Sarin gas was used by the Aum Supreme Truth cult in its attack on Tokyo's underground rail system in March 1995.

That attack killed 12 people and left nearly 1,000 ill.

----

THE INQUIRY
Investigators Liken Anthrax in Leahy Letter to That Sent to Daschle

New York Times
November 20, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER and DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/20/politics/20INQU.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - A plastic bag holding the sealed letter sent to Senator Patrick J. Leahy was so contaminated that federal investigators strongly suspect that the anthrax is comparable to the highly refined material sent last month to Senator Tom Daschle, law enforcement officials said today.

Scientists for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in interviews today that a sample taken late last week from the bag showed the presence of 23,000 anthrax spores. This, the scientists said, was roughly three orders of magnitude more spores than found in samples from any of the other 600 bags of mail the bureau examined before isolating the letter to Senator Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

One F.B.I. microbiologist said that this number of spores equated to more than two lethal doses of inhalation anthrax - making the bag itself highly dangerous.

Law enforcement officials disclosed their findings today in a broad discussion of an intensive week's work that resulted in the discovery last Friday of the Leahy letter among some 280 barrels containing 600 plastic bags of quarantined, unopened mail destined for Capitol Hill and now stored in a warehouse outside Washington. The officials described how dozens of specially trained F.B.I. and Environmental Protection Agency officials sorted and sampled the bags and their contents, isolating those that tested positive for anthrax.

Postal investigators said the letter also provided clues about the route it followed in the postal system. Daniel Mihalko, a spokesman for the postal inspectors branch of the postal service, said tonight that an optical reader misread the hand-written 20510 ZIP code for the Capitol as 20520, which serves the State Department.

"The one was made in such a way with a serif on the bottom that it was read by the optical character reader as a 2," Mr. Mihalko said. He said the agency assumes the letter was sent to the State Department, which could explain how that agency's mail system became contaminated and a worker there contracted inhalation anthrax.

Until today, the F.B.I. had not even confirmed that the Leahy letter contained anthrax, let alone the possibility that the material was comparable to the Daschle letter's finely milled particles, which wafted through the air and spread quickly in the Hart Senate office building after the envelope was opened in the office of Senator Daschle, the Democratic leader, on Oct. 15.

In a statement issued today, the F.B.I. said that "from the outside, the Leahy letter appears virtually identical" to the Daschle letter.

One official called the effort that led to the discovery of the Leahy letter a "large and unique operation." He said it was based on a study plan, or protocol, specifically devised for a dangerous and new situation.

"We had no idea if we would get positive hits or if everything we tested would be hot," one scientist said.

"We had never done anything quite like this before," another official said.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. and the United States Army laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., have devised an elaborate new plan for analyzing the sealed Leahy letter - evidence that they consider the best clue yet as to who might have leveled the attack of anthrax-tainted letters against senators and news organizations.

The plan, which officials said was completed earlier today, is the result of intensive consultations among anthrax and forensics experts from throughout the world who quietly assembled in Washington this weekend to discuss how best to extract all the forensic clues from the Leahy letter.

Maj. Gen. John Parker, the commander of the Fort Detrick laboratory, said in an interview that the protocol was "coordinated' with the F.B.I. and "carefully plans the analysis of the newly discovered letter."

Both the Army laboratory and the F.B.I. are eager to avoid the lack of coordination that produced last month's conflicting assessments from two separate laboratories of the potency and characteristics of the Daschle anthrax.

Another law enforcement official said that scientists from the F.B.I. and the Fort Detrick laboratory would begin analyzing the Leahy letter "side by side" on Tuesday.

Though neither General Parker nor law enforcement officials would discuss the tests that were planned, some experts said the letter would certainly be closely checked for forensic evidence, like fingerprints or DNA, and its contents subjected to many of the same tests done on the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle.

"From a forensic standpoint," said a law enforcement official, the discovery of the sealed Leahy letter is "our best opportunity to date" to solve a case that has so far baffled investigators. At least 17 people have been infected with anthrax in either its inhalation or skin form; four people have died. An additional 30,000 people have been put on antibiotics.

Investigators today also reported finding trace amounts of anthrax in the mailroom of the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Prisons, said a spokeswoman, Traci Billingsley. The mail room has been sealed off, she said. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they had detected "scant contamination."

During the seven-day search that ended with the discovery of the Leahy letter, about 6 of the 600 bags of mail were found to contain what officials said were moderately high concentrations of anthrax - from about 100 spores to 300 spores.

One bag had a huge anthrax spore count compared with the others. Investigators carefully carried the bag to a specially enclosed room and emptied the letters into a closed biological safety cabinet kept clean by air flows and special seals.

An official said that the investigators worked in teams of two: a "clean" investigator who did not handle contaminated material and a "dirty" investigator who handled the bags and contaminated letters.

It was about 5 p.m. on Friday when an agent found the letter. It was encased in plastic tape.

An F.B.I. microbiologist who was standing outside the room looking in through a window recalled the scene. "I saw someone's hands go up in the air," he said. He was unable to hear any words from the agent, who was wearing a respirator. "They were looking for a letter that looked just like the others, and there it was."

After the discovery of the contaminated letter to Mr. Daschle on Oct. 15, the mail to Capitol Hill had been set aside in the plastic bags that were then packed into 286 drums. At an undisclosed site, F.B.I. agents and Environmental Protection Agency employees constructed a large room sealed in plastic to handle potentially contaminated material.

The air flow into and out of the room was filtered and carefully monitored. Outside the work floor was a decontamination area kept free of microbes. Each investigator involved in the search for the letter was offered antibiotics. Those who worked in the "hot zone" were required to take them. Their clothing was checked for anthrax when they left the work area.

The tests progressed slowly. Investigators cut a small hole in each plastic bag, swabbing the inside to locate anthrax spores. The initial testing turned up the roughly six bags that showed traces of anthrax.

"We took all the bags we considered hot and narrowed it down," the official said.

"This was a large operation," said one official, "the largest hazardous material investigation of its kind in the F.B.I.'s history."

---

THE DISEASE
Connecticut Woman Has Inhalation Anthrax

New York Times
November 20, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Anthrax-Connecticut.html

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- An elderly woman who lives on her own in the farm country of southwestern Connecticut has inhalation anthrax, according to initial test results disclosed Tuesday.

The patient, who is in her 90s, was hospitalized in critical condition, Gov. John Rowland said. He said more test results were pending and there was no indication of a criminal act.

The woman tested positive for the more deadly inhaled form of the disease in five separate tests conducted by the Department of Public Health and Griffin Hospital in Derby, Rowland said.

More tests were being conducted by experts at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Results are expected Wednesday.

``Testing by the CDC could prove negative,'' Rowland said.

Rowland said the woman lives in Oxford, a rural community of about 9,800 people 30 miles southwest of Hartford. She was originally treated for pneumonia and admitted Friday to the Derby hospital after being brought in by a family member, said the hospital's president, Patrick Charmel.

``It's difficult to explain how the person contracted anthrax,'' Rowland said. ``There is no evidence they contracted the disease as a result of a criminal act.''

The FBI and state police have secured the woman's home and are conducting a criminal investigation, Rowland said. The woman lives by herself and has a limited routine.

Nationwide, four people have died and 13 have been sickened by anthrax since early October. It's the first case of inhaled anthrax since a New York City hospital employee died Oct. 31.

Joxel Garcia, the state health commissioner, said the state received positive tests from the hospital Monday and immediately began conducting its own investigation.

Rowland said there was no indication the woman is related to any government official or had any public activity that would cause her to be a target of terrorism.

``I continue to say that Connecticut has never been a (target) of attack from any terrorist,'' Rowland said. ``We still can't determine it's a terrorist attack. It could be an accident.''

Still, Derby Mayor Marc Garofalo said the city sent its emergency response team to the hospital immediately after he learned of the case Tuesday evening.

``We want to assure the public that the city and all its resources are standing by,'' he said.

------

Crackdown on Bioterror Claims
FTC Warns Operators of Sites Selling Dietary Supplements

Washington Post
By Bill Brubaker Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2001; Page E11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55734-2001Nov19?language=printer

The Federal Trade Commission yesterday warned about 40 operators of Web sites to stop making what it called false claims that dietary supplements can prevent, treat or cure anthrax, smallpox and other health hazards.

The warnings followed a massive "Internet surf" by the FTC, Food and Drug Administration and state attorneys general in more than 30 states, including Maryland and Virginia.

J. Howard Beales III, the FTC's director of consumer protection, said the probe found more than 200 Web sites marketing bioterrorism-related products, including gas masks, protective suits, mail sterilizers, homeopathic remedies and biohazard test kits, in addition to dietary supplements.

"We started right after September 11, both monitoring complaints and organizing a surf of the Internet to look for all the different ways people might try to take advantage of the September 11 tragedy to make money," Beales said in an interview.

"We found claims that a variety of dietary supplements like colloidal silver or zinc mineral water or oregano oil would be remedies for anthrax or other biological agents. So far as we know there's no scientific evidence whatsoever that even suggests those kinds of claims might be true."

The FTC announcement, which does not identify any Web sties, came four days after the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered three publicly traded companies to stop issuing false press releases "to exploit the public's anxiety over bioterrorism."

One Florida company made false claims that it had technologies capable of killing anthrax in mail and packages, the SEC said. The company also promoted a purported remedy for anthrax contamination of food, water and mail.

In e-mails sent out yesterday, the FTC instructed about 40 site operators to remove misleading claims from the Web.

"We're going to follow up," Beales said. "We asked them for a response telling us what they did within seven days. We will look to see how the sites have changed. And if they haven't changed we'll take law enforcement action."

Web sites are subject to state or federal prosecution for making false marketing claims, he said.

Beales recalled a recent FTC case against an Internet company touting colloidal silver, a dietary supplement. At the time, the company claimed it was a "cure-all . . . for 650 different diseases," he said.

"After September 11, it was 651."

The FTC said five trade associations representing the dietary-supplement industry support the government contention that "there is no scientific basis for the promotion of dietary supplements as a treatment for anthrax."

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U.S. sees Saddam as priority, cites biological weapons

By Alexander G. Higgins
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 20, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20011120-70377512.htm

GENEVA - The United States yesterday said Saddam Hussein's drive to develop offensive biological weapons was "beyond dispute," laying out a case that could make Iraq the next front in President Bush's global war on terrorism.

"The United States strongly suspects that Iraq has taken advantage of three years of no U.N. inspections to improve all phases of its offensive biological weapons program," said Mr. Bolton, who was in Geneva for an international conference to review a proposed treaty on biological weapons. "The existence of Iraq's program is beyond dispute."

In addition to Iraq, Mr. Bolton said Washington strongly suspects that North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan also are seeking to develop germ-warfare programs.

But he refused to say whether any of the named states have assisted Afghanistan-based Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden in his reported quest for biological weapons.

Mr. Bolton's comments were the latest in an escalating series of remarks recently by senior Bush administration officials singling out Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The administration has been internally divided over whether to expand the war on terrorism to Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, on Sunday left open the possibility that Iraq could become a target in Mr. Bush's war on terrorism.

"We do not need the events of September 11 to tell us that [Saddam Hussein] is a very dangerous man who is a threat to his own people, a threat to the region and a threat to us because he is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction," she said.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, briefing reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, lumped Iraq with bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization as critical to the international network of "terrorist-sponsoring states."

"There is no question but that there has been a good deal of interaction" among these groups, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan told the official INA news agency yesterday that Iraq "was capable of standing up to the challenges posed by the United States in a bid to undermine [Iraq´s] security and weaken its resolve."

The Iraqi newspaper Babel, which is run by Saddam's elder son Uday, said that the failure so far of the U.S.-led campaign to capture bin Laden increased the chances Washington would go after Iraq.

Iraq "will be the focus of attention of the U.S. administration, as will be Syria, Somalia and Sudan," the paper theorized.

In Geneva, Mr. Bolton told the 144 nations that have signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that the United States finds North Korea's biological weapons program "extremely disturbing."

He said the United States believes that North Korea has a dedicated, national-level effort to achieve a biological weapons capability and that it has "developed and produced and may have weaponized" biological agents.

He also said the United States was "quite concerned" about Iran, Libya, Syria and Sudan, all of which appeared to have biological weapons programs.

Mr. Bolton said the United States knows "that Osama bin Laden considers obtaining weapons of mass destruction to be a sacred duty and wants to use them against the United States."

"We are concerned that he could have been trying to acquire a rudimentary biological weapons capability, possibly with support from a state," he added.

But he said the United States was "not prepared to comment whether rogue states may have assisted" bin Laden in the plan.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Iranian ambassador to the conference, said the accusation that his country was developing biological weapons is "unjustified and baseless."

The United States, which has rejected a legally binding inspection plan under the treaty, said it would rather set up a mechanism under which the U.N. secretary-general would order inspections when violations are suspected.

Other countries, including Japan, said the binding commitment is necessary if the treaty is to be effective.

American officials in July rejected more than six years of negotiations on enforcement measures of the 1972 treaty, arguing they were ineffective.

Mr. Bolton was speaking at the start of a three-week meeting in Geneva planned as a review of the agreement. He was presenting to other countries the new U.S. approach since the United States has come under an anthrax attack.

The emergence of anthrax-tainted letters in the United States in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attack has thrust the issue of biological warfare into the spotlight.

Mr. Bush has demanded that all 144 countries that have signed the treaty enact "strict national criminal legislation" against violations of the treaty and apply strict extradition requirements.

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U.S. fingers Iran, Iraq as germ warfare talks begin

Tuesday, November 20, 2001
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/11/11202001/reu_germ_45626.asp

GENEVA--Washington accused Iraq, North Korea and probably Iran on Monday of violating a ban on biological weapons at the start of a conference designed to beef up an international treaty outlawing germ warfare.

With the United States reeling from anthrax attacks that followed the September 11 plane hijackings, John Bolton, U.S. Under-Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, said the first step was to ensure existing rules were obeyed.

"I plan to name names. Prior to September 11, some would have avoided this approach. The world has changed, however, and so must our business-as-usual approach," he told the opening session of the three-week conference.

Besides the three countries -- all signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) -- Bolton said that Syria and Libya might also be in a position to produce small quantities of germ weapons, while Sudan had expressed strong interest in developing a program.

Syria and Sudan have not signed the 30-year-old pact.

The fifth review conference of the Convention had been due to examine a proposed new protocol intended to make it easier to verify whether states were cheating on the treaty, which prohibits the making or stockpiling of biological weapons.

Arms control treaties of the 1990s banning chemical arms and underground nuclear tests have strict inspection regimes, but the biological weapons pact lacks any verification mechanism.

But the United States rejected the plan at a preparatory meeting in July, arguing that it would have opened its military and industrial research centers to prying foreign eyes while not giving guarantees that other nations were playing by the rules.

Although the United States was heavily criticized for blocking the protocol, the result of more than five years of negotiations, Bolton said the plan would have been ineffective.

"Countries that joined the BWC and then ignored their commitments and certain non-state actors would never have been hampered by the protocol," he said.

CONCERNED ABOUT IRAN

Bolton said Iraq had "developed, produced and stockpiled biological warfare agents and weapons" despite signing the treaty.

"We are also quite concerned about Iran, which the United States believes probably has produced and weaponized BW (biological weapons) agents in violation of the Convention," he added.

Washington has made alternative proposals for tightening the Convention, including a call to member states to impose severe penalties on anybody involved in violating the treaty. It also wants extradition to be made easier.

Other measures would involve empowering the United Nations secretary-general to order inspections of sites when there is suspicion that the treaty may have been broken.

But conference sources said the charges against Iran and the others -- all of which deny them -- could harden attitudes at the meeting, making it more difficult to seal an accord on further action against the menace of germ weaponry.

First-day speakers, including China, Russia and Canada, stressed their support for a multilateral, legally binding treaty commitment rather than the individualist approach favored by the United States.

Some non-governmental organizations accuse Washington of yielding to its bio-technology industry which feared intrusive inspections be used to poach industrial secrets.

In a message to the conference, U.N. chief Kofi Annan said that the September suicide plane attacks in the United States and the discovery of anthrax in U.S. mail highlighted the need for an accord to make the anti-germ warfare rules stronger.

Four people have died of anthrax in the U.S. scare.

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War Boosts Popularity Of Satellite Telephones

By Christopher Stern
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2001; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55317-2001Nov19?language=printer

Ismael Khan, a Northern Alliance commander who heads an army of 4,000, was preparing to dislodge a group of Taliban fighters from the strategically important city of Herat last week when his satellite phone rang. It was a journalist calling, wanting to confirm a rumor that Kahn was about to enter the city.

Three minutes later, the Reuters reporter posted his scoop that Kahn, also known as "the Lion of Herat," was set to retake his hometown.

Andrew Marshall, a Reuters staff writer who roams some of the world's most remote regions for the wire service, said a new generation of relatively small, lightweight satellite phones has allowed him to report stories in ways that would have been too cumbersome to manage just five years ago.

"In the days before [handheld] satellite phones, Afghanistan would have been a black hole for news," Marshall said.

Stories of such successes are drawing new interest to an industry better known for its bankruptcies than its technological successes. Long considered an expensive, bulky alternative to land-based wireless service, satellite phones are enjoying something of a renaissance since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 and amid the war that followed.

Satellite phone retailers report a sharp uptick in business from journalists and humanitarian groups preparing to travel to Afghanistan. They also are hearing from local governments that want to establish a backup to local wired and wireless networks, after seeing those systems get damaged or clogged with calls during and immediately after the attacks. The military was already one of the satellite phone industry's biggest customers.

But analysts say it is far too early to tell whether the new demand for satellite phones will rescue an industry buffeted by financial troubles.

Just last week, Globalstar LP, one of the two main providers of handheld satellite phones, announced it would be filing for bankruptcy protection after struggling for months to restructure debt related to its $3.3 billion in start-up costs. Its main rival, Iridium Satellite LLC, had to shut down commercial service for a year. It emerged from bankruptcy last year after a group of investors acquired assets once valued at $5.5 billion for just $25 million.

Hershel Shosteck, a Wheaton-based industry analyst, said the financial difficulties suffered by Iridium and other companies were caused by a classic case of "tech-tosterone," a term he uses for investors and engineers who allow their new technology to get ahead of their busin