------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Indian PM Willing to Meet Pakistan Leader
IRELAND: SUIT OVER BRITISH NUCLEAR SITE
Pakistan Continues Probe of Nuclear Scientists
Union says ATG owes severance pay
ATG closes; 120 workers laid off
Residents Near Indian Point Plant Question Evacuation Plans
Mix of Physics and Politics May Produce Lab in Mine
Energy Northwest accident plans inadequate
Is it Clammy in Here?

MILITARY
Tajikistan Expected to Let French Jets Use Base
Hundreds of Kunduz Taliban Give Up, More Hold Out
US Searches Sites for bin Laden Clues
Democrats urge women to take part in new Afghan government
Taliban agree to surrender Kunduz and hand over foreign fighters
U.N. Group Urges Ban On Imports From Congo
Mugabe Targets Reporters
Richard Winter Dies; Arms Dealer Executive
Maoists in Nepal resume attacks
In New York, On Alert for Bioterrorism
Security Concerns Enrich Background-Checking Companies
German Greens Back Using Troops for Afghan Campaign
German Minister Pleads With Greens
Israeli Missiles Hit Palestinian Positions in Gaza
Palestinians Vow Revenge for Israeli Killing
U.N. Panel on Torture Urges Further Steps by Israel
Hamas Pledges Revenge for Killing
South Korea tests missile
NATO Sees Warmer, Not Uncritical Ties with Russia
In the freest press on earth
RUSSIA: AGREEMENT ON MOLDOVA REBELS
CHINA: PLANNING A TRIP TO THE MOON
35 Special forces killed

POLICE / PRISONERS
Spain Sets Hurdle for Extraditions
A Full Charge of Genocide for Milosevic
Closeup: 2 Homeland Security Proposals
Democrats Say Now Is Time to Raise Security Spending
Is President Bush's Executive Order Creating Military Tribunals Legal?
1878 Military Law Gets New Attention

ENERGY AND OTHER
Russian crude cutback vexes OPEC
Russia To Cut Oil Output Slightly
Some anti-terror good news



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- india / pakistan

Indian PM Willing to Meet Pakistan Leader

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-pakistan.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said Saturday he was willing to meet Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf at a South Asian summit set for January in Nepal if both men attend the meeting. If the meeting takes place it would be their first since a summit in July that ended in deadlock over revolt-racked Kashmir, which both Pakistan and India claim.

Tensions between the nuclear-capable rivals have been rising in recent weeks, despite the two nations lining up behind the U.S.-led campaign to hunt down militants in neighboring Afghanistan.

``If the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) is held in Kathmandu, and if I go there and he comes there, then we can meet,'' Vajpayee told reporters at a luncheon.

A SAARC spokesman said earlier this week the leaders of the two nuclear-capable countries had confirmed their plans to attend the Jan. 4-6 conference in the Nepali capital.

After the July meeting, Vajpayee said there was no point in having further talks with Musharraf until Pakistan ended its support for Muslim separatist rebels fighting New Delhi's rule in Kashmir.

Islamabad says it provides moral, not military, support to the guerrillas.

Tensions reached a new peak when Islamabad accused India of using the situation arising out of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States to carry on a diplomatic campaign against Pakistan.

New Delhi links Kashmir rebels to Muslim groups hunted by U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan for their alleged ties with the suicide plane attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Vajpayee turned down suggestions for a meeting with Musharraf while at the U.N. General Assembly session earlier this month, saying it was not necessary to meet in New York.

The seven-nation SAARC has been in a limbo because of the tensions between India and Pakistan, which are its two most powerful members. The others in the group are Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

-------- ireland

IRELAND: SUIT OVER BRITISH NUCLEAR SITE

World Briefing
New York Times
Brian Lavery (NYT)
November 24, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/24BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

The government has filed suit at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a United Nations body in Hamburg, seeking an injunction to stop the operation of a new plant to process nuclear materials at Sellafield, on Britain's west coast. The existing nuclear site at Sellafield, across the Irish Sea from Dublin, has concerned Ireland as a potential target for terrorist attacks. The injunction seeks to halt the shipment of additional nuclear materials through the Irish Sea and the dumping of nuclear waste at a new plant there.

-------- pakistan

Pakistan Continues Probe of Nuclear Scientists

By Susan B. Glasser and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 24, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7815-2001Nov23?language=printer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 23 -- Pakistan's military intelligence service continues to detain two nuclear scientists for questioning about their alleged connections to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist group, senior Pakistani intelligence sources said today.

"We want to be absolutely sure before giving a clean chit to nuclear scientists who had confessed to having met Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and several al Qaeda leaders last year," said a senior Pakistani official.

Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid have acknowledged meeting bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar during at least three visits to Afghanistan last year, the sources said. But the scientists have insisted throughout the six-week investigation that those meetings were in connection with a relief agency they founded in 1999.

"We are still not satisfied with their answers," said an intelligence official when asked why the two scientists have not been allowed to return to their homes. President Pervez Musharraf "has ordered an extensive investigation in this matter and we can't let them go before we get to the bottom of this," the official said.

In an effort to allay international concerns about the security of Pakistan's nuclear program, Pakistani officials recently briefed a senior U.S. official on the status of the investigation of the scientists and their purported connections with bin Laden and al Qaeda, the sources said.

In comments to reporters Thursday, the chief government spokesman, Gen. Rashid Qureshi, confirmed that the investigation was continuing, but would not discuss the details. "We will continue to investigate for as long as it is deemed necessary," he said. Asked whether the scientists were being held, he said, "I don't think they are in continuous detention," but he would provide no details about their status.

Senior intelligence sources said that neither scientist had been formally arrested while the investigation continues. Mahmood helped lead Pakistan's efforts to enrich uranium, while Majid worked for Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission until 1999.

Senior Pakistani officials said Mahmood is at the center of their investigation, which seeks to reconstruct his days since he resigned to protest a transfer in March 1999. "Mahmood's personality profile, combined with his meetings with Osama bin Laden, make a lethal blend," said a senior intelligence official.

After 28 years of working in key jobs at Pakistan's three most crucial nuclear facilities, Mahmood was transferred to a less important desk job after he had vigorously advocated extensive production of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium enrichment with a view toward equipping other Islamic countries with nuclear capabilities, government officials said.

Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency argued that the transfer was necessary because Mahmood's beliefs were too dangerous for him to be allowed to continue as head of the country's plutonium-producing plant near Khoshab in the Punjab region.

"Mahmood was the strongest advocate of the view that only nuclear weapons could provide ultimate security to Muslim nations against infidel powers," said an MIT-trained Pakistani nuclear scientist who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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

Union says ATG owes severance pay

Hanford News
Wed, Nov 21, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1121.html

The union for about 120 terminated Allied Technology Group workers contends Monday's mass dismissal cheated its members out of two weeks' severance pay.

Operating Engineers Local No. 280 plans to field a grievance on this issue soon with ATG, said Debbie Hendrick, the local's business representative.

If ATG declares bankruptcy, the local will seek the severance money during those proceedings, she added. Federal Securities Exchange Commission records said ATG is consulting with bankruptcy attorneys.

Hendrick said the local's contract with ATG requires that any layofflike termination requires two weeks' advance notice. Employees were told Monday that they were "terminated," effectively that day, she said.

Termination with no advance warning or severance pay is allowed only for "wrongdoing" and "just cause" under the contract, Hendrick said.

A Herald phone call Tuesday to ATG's corporate leaders -- including founders and owners Doreen and Frank Chiu -- in Hayward, Calif., was not returned.

On Monday, ATG dismissed almost all its employees at its plants in Richland and Oak Ridge, Tenn., because of the company's massive debt problems. Nine employees remain at the shutdown Richland plant.

Monday's mass dismissal came with no warning -- not even through company grapevines, according to several accounts told to the Herald on Monday and Tuesday.

One terminated worker, Dave Milton of Richland, said employees last Friday were talking about whether they would pull a holiday shift this coming Friday.

ATG shut down its plant because it was more than $23 million in debt to several banks, with at least $9 million being long overdue for repayment, according to a document ATG filed Tuesday with the SEC. ATG also has about $2.8 million in unpaid bills with regional and Tri-City contractors.

The banks that lent money to ATG are very skittish about getting it back, SEC documents said. The banks -- using First Bank of California as their spearhead -- are demanding that ATG pay its debts.

"ATG's operations will not generate sufficient cash flow to allow the company to meet its past due obligations under the bank loan. If it cannot immediately modify or refinance this debt, it may be required to seek bankruptcy relief or to otherwise reorganize or sell substantially all of its assets," said ATG's Tuesday filing with the SEC.

Friday, the banks sent a final $1 million to ATG to pay off bounced checks and meet payroll obligations, the SEC document said.

Milton's last ATG paycheck, dated Nov. 8, bounced, he said.

Hendrick said Local 280 had not received any complaints about bounced paychecks as of early Tuesday afternoon.

ATG's business has been taking low-level radioactive and hazardous wastes, then filtering, crushing, incinerating or glassifying them into safer forms and smaller volumes.

ATG has not filed its required routine detailed financial statement with the SEC by a Sept. 30 deadline. ATG told the SEC that it does not know when it will be ready. Meanwhile, the NASDAQ stopped trading ATG stock Monday pending ATG providing required information to the securities exchange.

ATG's SEC filings Tuesday said two of six members of its board of directors resigned in October and have been replaced. Also, ATG's chief operations manager, Vik Mani, resigned a week ago but remains as an adviser to ATG President Doreen Chiu. And ATG terminated its chief financial officer, Phillip Jordan, in October. Frank Chiu, ATG's executive vice president, is temporarily holding that post.

---

ATG closes; 120 workers laid off

Hanford News
Tue, Nov 20, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1120.html

Allied Technology Group Inc. shut down its Richland and Oak Ridge, Tenn., plants Monday, laying off most of its employees.

That's more than 120 workers in Richland, plus 70 to 80 at Oak Ridge. The Richland plant had already laid off 55 employees in late September.

The shutdown also throws into doubt whether Hanford can meet legal deadlines to neutralize and dispose of 780 cubic yards -- equal to 3,000 55-gallon barrels -- of mixed radioactive and hazardous chemical wastes.

It is unknown whether financially troubled ATG will try to revive the plants.

Don Mazur, ATG's Richland manager, said its headquarters in Hayward, Calif., told him Monday to shut down the plant into a safe standby mode, to lay off most of the employees and to keep a skeleton crew of nine people to look after the site.

State Health Department employees were checking the site Monday to ensure the equipment -- which handles dangerous wastes -- was in a safe condition.

Mazur said his top priority is personnel matters, including ensuring the laid-off workers receive the pay owed to them. He said ATG's headquarters has not told him if the plant will be permanently closed.

Vik Mani, ATG chief operations manager, could not be reached Monday for comment.

ATG issued a one-paragraph news release Monday that said it must shut down operations because its working funds of about $3.5 million had been frozen by a bank to which ATG is deeply indebted. ATG said it is trying to negotiate with the unnamed bank.

The publicly traded company has flirted with bankruptcy for about a year, according to its federal Securities Exchange Commission filings. ATG had at least $12 million in overdue debt in September, the latest figures available.

That debt does not include $1.9 million the Department of Energy -- through Fluor Hanford -- advanced to ATG last spring to help it recover.

ATG's main business in Richland and Oak Ridge has been taking commercial and federal hazardous and low-level radioactive wastes from across the nation then filtering, crushing, incinerating or glassifying them into safer forms and into smaller volumes. The wastes are shipped back to their original owners or to permanent disposal sites.

All waste shipments headed toward Richland have been turned back, Mazur said. The Richland site also has low-level radioactive and hazardous wastes either awaiting treatment or sitting after being treated. Information on the amounts of those wastes was not available Monday.

Mazur said one of his tasks is to plan how ATG will deal with the remaining wastes.

The shutdown also stops work on fixing ATG's "GASVIT" operation designed to convert mixed wastes -- a combination of radioactive wastes and dangerous chemicals -- into glass.

ATG has had the nation's only mixed waste glassification plant in place with a chance to get permits in time to meet some Hanford deadlines for glassifying mixed wastes.

State and federal regulatory agencies have not yet approved the GASVIT facility. A much-delayed test run to get that approval was supposed to occur a year ago.

The GASVIT facility was supposed to get ATG out of debt. ATG has a dozen contracts worth at least $67 million with companies wanting to use the facility. But a series of setbacks left ATG with $9 million in overdue debt.

ATG also has not paid 10 contractors -- including six Tri-City companies -- $2.8 million for work on the GASVIT facility, according to Benton County records. And ATG owes $189,964 in unpaid county taxes.

Fluor had planned to use the GASVIT facility to glassify or incinerate 312 cubic yards of Hanford mixed wastes by Dec. 31, 2002, and an additional 468 cubic yards by Dec. 31, 2005.

Fluor advanced ATG the $1.9 million, which originally was intended to pay for glassifying the wastes, and also filed a lien against ATG last spring to safeguard that money.

Fluor is still sorting out what happened Monday at ATG and does not know yet what it will do, said Fluor spokesman Jerry Holloway.

-------- new york

Residents Near Indian Point Plant Question Evacuation Plans

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By ROBERT F. WORTH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/nyregion/24EVAC.html?searchpv=nytToday

Before Sept. 11, people in New York City's northern suburbs used to crack jokes about the booklet they were mailed every year telling them what to do in the event of a disaster at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, about 30 miles north of the city on the Hudson River. With its colored maps and refrigerator magnet cheerfully reminding people where to go to escape radioactive fallout, the booklet seemed too absurd - and the threat too unlikely - to be frightening.

No one is laughing now. Over the last two months, residents and elected officials have been asking what would happen if terrorists were to strike Indian Point, in Buchanan, N.Y., where two operating reactors and three spent fuel pools sit in the most densely populated area around any nuclear plant in the country. Many say the government's evacuation plans are wildly impractical and could not even protect people who live close to the plant in the event of a major release of radiation, much less the 20 million people who live within a 50- mile radius.

The concern is prompting not just widespread worries about the evacuation plan but also something more: the most serious groundswell since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 in favor of shutting down the plants.

Federal officials say a successful terrorist attack is exceedingly unlikely, and the Indian Point emergency plans, which involve the possible evacuation of people up to 10 miles downwind of the plant, have been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, like those at the country's 81 other reactor sites. The plant has been heavily guarded since Sept. 11, with fatigue-clad National Guard troops standing watch and Coast Guard cutters patrolling the Hudson.

But those assurances mean little to the parents who want to know how they would find their children if a cloud of deadly radiation were to spread across the suburbs.

Under the emergency plan, officials in Westchester, Putnam, Rockland and Orange Counties would respond either by telling people to remain in their houses with the doors and windows closed, waiting for the radiation cloud to pass over, or evacuate. If an evacuation were to occur, the counties would begin by sending fleets of buses to pick up schoolchildren and people without cars within the evacuation zone and take them to reception centers beyond the 10-mile zone. Sirens and radio alerts would not start for the general public until after the evacuation of the children had begun, so that roads would remain clear for the buses, said Anthony Sutton, deputy commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Emergency Management.

Many parents and officials say word of a disaster would surely leak out before the evacuation plan could get going and the roads - many of them clogged under normal circumstances - would be packed with panicked drivers.

"The roads are jammed on ordinary days, and parents have told us that they would not wait and see if the bus drivers were willing to pick up their kids," said Michael B. Kaplowitz, a Westchester County legislator.

Residents cited other concerns. "At some point I will have children in three different schools, going to three different reception areas," said Lisa Rodrigues, the president of the Lakeland School Board, whose district is partly within the 10-mile emergency planning zone. "Which one do I go to first?"

There are no plans for summer, when children are at local summer camps, she added. Also, most of the Lakeland district's bus drivers are women, yet women of child-bearing age are not allowed to participate in the evacuation.

In neighboring Putnam County, the evacuation route takes some people straight north into Dutchess County, and then back south to reception centers in the eastern part of Putnam - where they might be directly in the path of radiation.

Even Alfred B. Del Bello, who helped write the original emergency plan as Westchester County executive in the early 1980's after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, said, "It doesn't work."

Mr. Del Bello, who also was New York State's lieutenant governor, added, "For the first time, I'm really worried about the plant."

The federal government also runs periodic tests of emergency readiness within what is called a 50-mile "ingestion plume pathway," where radiation levels are expected to be lower. Evacuation might be necessary in that broader area, which in Indian Point's case includes New York City, the reservoirs that supply its drinking water and parts of three other states. But because officials have always assumed that there would be more time for such a wider evacuation, it is not part of the emergency plan.

Doubts about the evacuation plan have contributed to a growing tide of fear over the last two months. Hundreds of parents have crowded into PTA meetings convened to discuss a possible evacuation, and many want potassium iodide, which was helpful in reducing thyroid cancer among children exposed to radiation during the Chernobyl accident in 1986, said Dr. Marjorie E. Castro, the superintendent of the Croton-Harmon school district, located a few miles from Indian Point. A number of local groups have flowered overnight to urge the plant's closing, including one that boasts a Web site with a lurid map showing the plant at the center of a 50-mile-wide blood-red circle.

Local and state officials say the fears are exaggerated. "The plan keeps getting revised and upgraded," said Donald L. Maurer, a spokesman for the New York State Emergency Management Office. "Every time the roads change, we look at our ability to evacuate people safely."

Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy Corporation, which owns the Indian Point plant, said the emergency plan did consider a worst-case scenario, and that even a severe accident or attack might not result in a serious release of radiation.

But Mr. Maurer and the county officials who maintain the plan conceded that it was designed to handle a nuclear accident rather than a sudden and devastating terrorist attack. And they said there were a number of risks in the plan, like the possibility that children with cellphones would alert their parents as soon as the evacuation began, quashing the county's hopes to keep the roads clear.

Lurking behind all these concerns is a broader worry. "The public gets hysterical about nuclear contamination," said William Waugh, a professor of public administration at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who has studied evacuation procedures. "Any sort of reasoned evacuation would probably not be possible at all, because everyone would run like hell."

That possibility has led many to question having a nuclear plant so close to New York City in the first place. And it is not the first time that the issue has been raised: in 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown, Robert Ryan, the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of State Programs, said, "I think it is insane to have a three- unit reactor on the Hudson River in Westchester County, 40 miles from Times Square, 20 miles from the Bronx."

He added that it was "a nightmare from the point of view of emergency preparedness."

Emergency planning measures were strengthened throughout the country after the Three Mile island accident, and worries about the plant's proximity to New York faded gradually over the next two decades. But the need for viable evacuation plans remained a concern. In the 1980's, surveys on Long Island suggested that an accident at the Shoreham nuclear power plant would cause people well beyond the 10-mile zone to flee, and the plant was closed after officials concluded that no safe evacuation would be possible.

Now the fear of terrorism is spurring elected officials throughout the region to raise similar questions about Indian Point. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesmen have said that they are revising the threats on which their emergency plans are based, and do not know if a nuclear plant could withstand a suicide attack by commercial jets. Some nuclear analysts have said that in a worst-case scenario, a meltdown at Indian Point could spread clouds of radiation to New York City and beyond, if the winds were right.

Some residents' fears have been further inflamed by Entergy's proposal last week to build eight gas- fired power plants only a quarter mile from the Indian Point reactors. The combination of combustible gas and radioactive waste, they say, will only heighten the danger.

Worries about evacuation were among the concerns cited by four members of Congress and a number of state and local politicians who signed a petition two weeks ago urging the N.R.C. to close the Indian Point plant until its safety can be guaranteed. Some others, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, have called for the emergency planning zone to be extended from 10 to 50 miles. But no one has proposed any clear ideas on how to carry out an evacuation in such a densely populated area.

As for evacuating New York City, Mr. Maurer said, with a sigh, "It would be a challenge."

-------- south dakota

Mix of Physics and Politics May Produce Lab in Mine

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/science/24NEUT.html?searchpv=nytToday

A century-old gold mine in the town of Lead, S.D., just a few miles from where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are buried, would be converted into the world's deepest underground physics laboratory under a bill passed in the Senate last week with the sponsorship of Senator Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat who is the majority leader.

The bill awaits action in the House, where it is sponsored by another South Dakota lawmaker, Representative John R. Thune, a Republican. But first it will have to survive criticism from taxpayer groups who call the bill a giveaway, from environmentalists who fear that it will saddle the federal government with millions of dollars in cleanup costs, and from some scientists who wonder whether the laboratory is really needed.

The scientists who originally proposed the laboratory, which would cost $281 million to create and could come to $1 billion once scientific experiments like a huge neutrino detector are installed, remain convinced that it can become a place like no other to study things like neutrinos, the wispy particles that pass through the earth almost as if it were not there.

The site, called the Homestake mine, would enable scientists to detect neutrinos because it is shielded by 7,400 feet of earth and rock from cosmic rays, the abundant but relatively uninteresting particles that arrive from space.

"Homestake provides depth, great depth, the primary criterion for a national underground science laboratory," said Dr. John Bahcall, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The gold mine, Dr. Bahcall added, could become "the best lab in the world for underground science."

In an unlikely turn of events, however, those neutrinos, along with other items of scientific interest like underground bacteria and geologic formations, have seemingly been caught up in the fight for control of the closely divided Senate in 2002.

Representative Thune has announced that he will challenge South Dakota's other senator, Tim Johnson, a Democrat in a largely Republican state, in next year's election. The gold mine, owned by Barrick, a Canadian company, is closing, ctheareation of the underground laboratory would preserve some of those jobs for the small town of Lead (pronounced leed).

If the bill is eventually signed into law, this strange mix of particles and politics could produce an international research center in a way that officials at the National Science Foundation say has little or no precedent.

"As far as I know, N.S.F. has never had a situation exactly like this before," said Dr. Robert Eisenstein, assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences at the science foundation.

Much of what would make the deal unusual is the nature of Mr. Daschle's bill. It would not actually provide any money to build the laboratory; that would eventually fall to the science foundation if its reviews determine that the project is worthy. That determination has not yet been made. The bill allows the company that owns Homestake to transfer ownership of much of the mine to the State of South Dakota, while transferring all future liability for the site to the federal government.

The transfer of liability - in essence, an assurance that the United States will take care of any environmental cleanups that may become necessary in the future - has proved controversial.

"Taxpayers are buying a pig in a poke, because we're assuming a liability for something which is totally unknown," said Jill Lancelot, a co- founder and the legislative director of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a private group in Washington. "It's pretty outrageous."

Such mines often leach toxic metals into groundwater over time, said Max Dodson, assistant regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mr. Dodson said that Homestake had been a good environmental citizen over the past several decades and that his main concern was that water purifying measures in place now be maintained in any transfer. Other officials pointed out that the bill provided for an environmental assessment of the site, and that the company would retain responsibility for polluted areas on the surface.

"I don't have a single person that advises me that tells me there's going to be any environmental problem at all in the mine," said the South Dakota governor, William J. Janklow, who supports the bill.

Dr. Eisenstein said that politics had not influenced the review process and that Mr. Daschle had been careful to defer to the foundation's complicated procedure for reviews. And project scientists said the hurry to secure the site occurred only because the company, in a standard procedure, would have flooded the mine with water in closing it by the end of this year if no other provision had been made.

"Once it floods, it's gone," said Dr. Wick Haxton, a physicist and director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory at the University of Washington in Seattle, who leads the underground laboratory project.

Although Dr. Haxton said review boards outside the science foundation had given the underground laboratory a high priority, some scientists find the arguments for its construction to be unconvincing.

"At this stage, we've yet to see an absolutely compelling, flagship experiment that requires this facility," said Dr. Jordan Goodman, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland.

For his part, Mr. Daschle said, he was willing to follow the scientific winds.

"When a group of prominent scientists said that this South Dakota location was ideal for a major scientific project that would benefit the entire nation, I was very interested," Mr. Daschle said. "From the beginning, I've made clear that it is entirely up to the scientists whether to move forward with it.

"It will certainly benefit South Dakota with new jobs and learning opportunities, but the decision must be made based on science and the national interest."

-------- washington

Energy Northwest accident plans inadequate, officials say

Hanford News
Thu, Nov 22, 2001
By Chris Mulick Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/1122.html

Federal officials believe Energy Northwest's procedures may be inadequate for notifying workers at defunct plants Nos. 1 and 4 if an accident occurred at the nearby Columbia Generating Station.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a yellow inspection finding, indicating a possible "substantial safety significance."

A yellow finding is the second highest of four classifications but not serious enough to warrant shutting down the 1,150-megawatt Columbia Generating Station.

It is Washington's only operating nuclear plant.

"It's not an urgent safety issue," said NRC spokesman Breck Henderson.

The NRC is scheduled to meet Monday in Texas to discuss its findings with officials from Energy Northwest, the 16-member public power consortium that owns the plants.

The findings do not relate to any activity inside the fence at Columbia. But from time to time, outside contractors and businesses bring workers to other parts of the nuclear site for various reasons. Contractors were recently on site, for example, to remove material from the partially finished cooling towers at Plant No. 1.

A brake drum manufacturer also is a tenant, a Hanford contractor occasionally sells surplus equipment at Energy Northwest and another company leased land at Plant No. 1 earlier this year to bring in temporary diesel generators.

The NRC believes procedures for notifying workers associated with those companies of an accidental radiation release at Columbia and follow-up plans for radiological monitoring are faulty.

"They were left out of the procedure," Henderson said. "They were not on the call list."

Energy Northwest maintains there always has been a plan for such workers but acknowledges it is guilty of an "implementation weakness."

The utility has sirens that cover all of the site and a public address system that reaches most of it, spokesman Don McManman said.

It also has procedures for notifying workers by phone, a chain of command responsible for ensuring workers leave the site and a plan for directing traffic off the site.

"We've got sirens you can hear for miles," McManman said.

Several additions to the plan already have been implemented, including giving security crews more responsibility to ensure proper evacuation.

-------- us nuc other

Is it Clammy in Here?

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By SAM ROBERTS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/weekinreview/25CLAM.html?searchpv=nytToday

GLENDO, Wyo., bought a potato cellar to house all of the town's 294 residents. The Rand Corporation proposed a $150 billion complex of tunnels with 91 convenient entrances into which four million New Yorkers could flee in case of atomic attack. The notion of retreating underground for days or weeks to wait out nuclear war even became the stuff of fiction (remember the sex scene in Robert Henlein's ''Farnham's Freehold'' and the inevitable hierarchal order of death in Mordecai Roshwald's ''Level 7''?).

Americans were scared witless by the Soviet threats on Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis, so that by 1965 they had built as many as 200,000 fallout shelters. They came in all shapes and sizes. Cheapskates made do by digging holes and shielding them with old doors. And those willing to spend $5,000 or more could afford to bury family-sized, steel-reinforced cylindrical chambers in their backyards.

The government's relentlessly upbeat advice was just as loopy.

One 1950 study recommended dropping to the ground in a fetal position for 10 seconds after seeing a sudden flash of light, ''after which . . . it is permissible to stand up and look around to see what action appears advisable.'' Parents, who doled out dog tags to their kids and reinforced the advice of the government-created character "Bert the Turtle" (he advised children to "duck and cover"), were reassured that although shelter life could get monotonous, participants in dry runs had survived. ''Children,'' one guidebook advised cheerfully, ''were no more restless in shelter than they normally are on long automobile trips.''

Still, most Americans eventually shunned shelters as elitist and anti-urban, and as posing divisive moral dilemmas. (Should you let your neighbor in, for instance, when there were only enough supplies for your own family?). Robert Moses, the prolific builder of public projects who rarely turned down a development idea, characterized shelter-builders as believing that ''abandoning our way of life and crawling into cellars will terrify the enemy and thus prevent war'' - a claim he called stupid.

The yellow and black fallout signs survive, but most shelters have been transformed into game rooms and museum pieces. In 1994, one was installed as an exhibit in the National Museum of American History. And a recent Federal Emergency Management Agency handbook suggests shelters as protection against hurricanes and tornadoes, but doesn't mention nuclear war or radioactive fallout - in part because the immediate threat has evaporated, but also because the practical value of shelters was never proved.

Skepticism about bomb-proofing was expressed as early as 1945 by Gen. Leslie R. Groves, who became commander of the Manhattan Project after building the world's largest - and ostensibly bomb-proof - office fortress. Witnessing the first test of an atomic weapon, he declared: ''I no longer consider the Pentagon a safe shelter from such a bomb.''


-------- MILITARY

Tajikistan Expected to Let French Jets Use Base

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-france-tajik.html?searchpv=reuters

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Tajikistan is expected to allow the deployment of French fighter planes at a Tajik base for operations in neighboring Afghanistan, France's cooperation minister said on Saturday.

The French aircraft -- six fighter jets and two refueling planes -- and about 200 crew and support personnel would join ''operations against (Saudi-born dissident Osama) bin Laden and his al Qaeda network,'' Charles Josselin told reporters in the Iranian capital Tehran.

``The Tajik president (Imomali Rakhmonov) has agreed in principle to the deployment,'' said Josselin, who visited Tajikistan on Friday.

He said the agreement to deploy the French planes at a Tajik base would be formally announced in the next few days.

Josselin was speaking after holding talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi.

Iran's state media quoted Kharrazi telling Josselin that the deployment of foreign forces in Afghanistan would ''complicate'' the situation there because of the Afghans' historic opposition to foreign intervention.

France said on Wednesday it would send a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to the Indian Ocean next month to boost its role in the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan.

Paris said one mission for the carrier group would be to help prevent the escape of bin Laden, Washington's prime suspect in the September attacks on the United States, and other leaders of his al Qaeda network of Islamic militants.

-------- afghanistan

Hundreds of Kunduz Taliban Give Up, More Hold Out

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-afghan.html?searchpv=reuters

BANGI/MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Hundreds of Taliban fighters poured out of Kunduz to surrender on Saturday after 10 days of bombing by U.S. warplanes and artillery barrages from the encircling Northern Alliance.

But thousands of Taliban troops, including foreign fighters loyal to Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, were still holed up in the northerly enclave as night fell and a deadline passed, facing the prospect of a new assault unless they laid down their arms.

The determination of an unknown number of Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters to fight to the last kept alive fears of a bloodbath among what was left of Kunduz's 15,000 defenders.

``The Afghan Taliban have decided to surrender,'' one Taliban fighter who laid down his arms told Reuters. ``But the foreigners have taken the decision to fight. They will not surrender.''

Meanwhile hundreds of Taliban troops dug in at the dusty town of Maidan Shahr, 30 km west of the capital, Kabul, downed arms and agreed to join Alliance fighters -- a common practice in the civil war that has wracked Afghanistan for a decade.

Some Taliban fighters were also reported to have swapped sides after surrendering at Kunduz, the hardline Islamic movement's last redoubt in northern Afghanistan. CNN television showed Taliban soldiers shaking hands with Alliance fighters.

About 600 Taliban, including foreign as well as Afghan fighters, headed west to a surrender site near Mazar-i-Sharif, base of Northern Alliance warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Looking despondent, many tried to hide their faces from cameras. A separate truck carried the weapons they had given up.

``We will now separate the local Taliban forces from the foreigners,'' Dostum told Reuters.

``We will also find out where the foreigners are from and we will find out how many Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks and Uighurs there are and we will separate them all.''

Alliance commanders told Reuters 800 Taliban fighters had also surrendered east of Kunduz, bringing with them eight tanks, five anti-aircraft guns, seven rocket launchers and 40 vehicles.

FOREIGN FIGHTERS TO FACE JUSTICE

Under the surrender terms negotiated over the past week, Afghan Taliban fighters will be disarmed and freed, even though the United States opposes letting the defenders melt away.

``We will send home the Afghan Taliban soldiers who were not killing ordinary people and were forced to fight and also those who came from madrassas (religious schools),'' Dostum said.

He said foreign soldiers who surrender would face an Islamic court. But the foreign volunteers, loathed by their adversaries, fear the justice will be summary.

A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that up to 600 bodies had been found in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, captured two weeks ago by the Alliance, underscored concerns about a potential bloodbath.

U.S. air raids entered their 49th day, although reporters at the front said the morning bombing was relatively light.

The fall of Kunduz, the Taliban's last bastion in the north, would permit Northern Alliance forces and U.S. warplanes to concentrate on pressing the radical militia out of its last strongholds in and around the southern city of Kandahar.

RELENTLESS PRESSURE

U.S. warplanes have been applying relentless pressure around Kandahar, which the Taliban have vowed to defend at all costs out of duty to their strict interpretation of Islam.

Washington's bombing campaign is to punish the Taliban for harbouring bin Laden, suspected of masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 4,000 people.

The U.S. military said up to 70 long-range bombers and tactical jets had concentrated strikes on Kandahar and the rugged mountains where bin Laden and militants from his al Qaeda network might be holed up in caves and tunnels.

The U.S. military's Central Command said it had used a 15,000-pound ``Daisy Cutter'' bomb on Wednesday for just the third time since bombing began on October 7.

The bomb, dropped near Kandahar, produces a huge blast that devastates an area about 600 yards across.

U.S. media reported that U.S. special forces had also moved up a gear on the ground, conducting lightning raids to cut Taliban supply lines by intercepting and blowing up transport trucks and oil tankers.

Although bin Laden's whereabouts remain a mystery, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Saturday ruled out the possibility that he had slipped over the border into Pakistan.

``We've made all arrangements to seal the border and to ensure checks. That includes even the army doing this. Also we have got the cooperation of the local tribals holding the border areas to ensure that no such thing happens,'' he told a news conference with a visiting European Union delegation.

Musharraf said he agreed with Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, whose government holds the rotating EU presidency, and European Commission President Romano Prodi on the need for a multi-ethnic post-Taliban government in Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance, dominated by ethnic minority Tajiks and Uzbeks, has been backed by Iran, Russia and India, Islamabad's nuclear rival, fanning fears in Pakistan of a hostile government on its western border.

Islamabad is particularly nervous that political talks due to start in Germany might marginalize the ethnic Pashtuns, who make up about 40 percent of Afghanistan's population as well as about 15 percent of Pakistan's.

But Musharraf said he was very satisfied with how the political process was unfolding.

``This is a very good beginning and we would certainly like the whole world community to back this process up,'' he said.

------

US Searches Sites for bin Laden Clues

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Attacks-al-Qaida-Clues.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The safe houses and camps where Osama bin Laden's network did business in Afghanistan are the focus of U.S. teams looking for clues to his whereabouts and how his al-Qaida organization worked.

But the abandoned sites also are being overrun -- by northern alliance fighters hunting for souvenirs, by curious Afghans and by reporters -- and that is raising questions about how much evidence, undisturbed and useful, will be left.

Americans are ``on the chase now,'' but al-Qaida ``seem awfully good at covering tracks,'' said Richard Murphy, a former assistant secretary of state now with the private Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

After the Kosovo conflict, the United States sent dozens of FBI forensic experts to look for physical evidence that Serbian forces had committed atrocities. The region essentially became a giant crime scene.

This time, the United States does not need such evidence to bring before military courts; it already has plenty, many legal experts say, including bin Laden's own words urging attacks on Americans.

Instead, U.S. special operations teams are after information about how bin Laden operated, whether he sought weapons of mass destruction -- and especially where bin Laden, his al-Qaida fighters and Taliban protectors have gone.

Intelligence officials say the most current information about bin Laden's whereabouts more likely will come from defectors.

The American teams are searching and taking samples from sites where bin Laden or his followers may have been making chemical or biological weapons.

On the ground, Afghans say there seem to be few systematic efforts to protect such sites to keep evidence undisturbed.

Journalists have found documents relating to deadly chemicals and bacteria in houses abandoned by al-Qaida in Kabul, the capital. Material in Arabic, Urdu, Russian and English indicate al-Qaida was studying chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons.

At a training base on the southern edge of the city, reporters found a letter home from a recruit that indicated al-Qaida trainees were there earlier this month.

Two journalists, one Spanish and one Italian, who visited a site in the eastern village of Farmada said they found a vial with Cyrillic letters reading ``sarin,'' a nerve gas. But reporters who later visited the same compound, where bin Laden reportedly lived, said it had been cleaned out since then.

Bin Laden has said his group has chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons. U.S. officials have said al-Qaida probably has crude chemical or biological weapons but not a nuclear bomb.

After the fighting in Kosovo, the FBI teams gathered physical evidence that was used to corroborate witness statements alleging that Serbian forces committed war crimes against ethnic Albanian civilians.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted for war crimes in Kosovo by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, based in part on that evidence. Just this week, the tribunal also accused Milosevic of genocide in Bosnia.

In Afghanistan, in contrast, the United States probably only has to show bin Laden's own fatwas -- a religious ruling -- that call for attacks on Americans, and prove that someone was a member of al-Qaida, to convict under a military tribunal, said Ruth Wedgwood, an international law professor at Yale University and Johns Hopkins University.

``Bin Laden has simplified the job of any prosecutors by issuing his indiscreet fatwas,'' Wedgwood said.

-----

Democrats urge women to take part in new Afghan government

CNN
November 24, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/11/24/democrats.radio.address/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Citing the need to ensure that women will be able to participate freely in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald -- delivering the Democrats' weekly radio address -- called on Americans to stand up for women's rights in that war-torn country.

"After years of being subjugated and brutally repressed, it is time for [women] to return to the level of governance and participation that they once enjoyed and were guaranteed by the Afghan constitution," the California Democrat said.

Millender-McDonald said now is the time to push for a strong role for women in Afghanistan as that nation seeks to establish a new government following the ouster of the Taliban from power in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

She said the women of the House of Representatives are working with other international groups to urge Afghan women who have fled the country to "return as a collective voice for the basic rights for women and their children."

That, the congresswoman said, is at the forefront of establishing a democratic society.

"We can be certain that any future government of Afghanistan will not be sustainable unless all elements of Afghan society are included, especially its women," she said.

---

Taliban agree to surrender Kunduz and hand over foreign fighters

Montreal Gazette
Thursday, November 22, 2001
Canadian Press
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={08DA3159-C771-431D-B563-59D0B85C8571}

BANGI, Afghanistan (AP) - Tanks rolled across the front line and Taliban shells crashed near refugees fleeing the besieged city of Kunduz on Thursday, just as the northern alliance announced the Taliban fighters there had agreed to surrender.

Details of the apparent surrender agreement remained murky, and neither Taliban fighters inside Kunduz or alliance soldiers making a sudden drive to capture the city seemed aware of it.

Kunduz is the last stronghold held by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan after the Islamic militia abandoned the capital Kabul and most of the country this month.

Alliance commander Atta Mohammed said by satellite telephone from the town of Mazar-e-Sharif that the surrender came late Thursday afternoon in a meeting with top Taliban commanders, including Deputy Defense Minister Mullah Fazil.

"We told them, 'You are safe. We can transfer you to your provinces,"' Mohammed said.

He said the Taliban agreed to hand over the Arabs, Pakistanis and other foreign fighters in Kunduz, but didn't say how soon. He said he believed the Taliban would be able to persuade the foreigners to surrender because "the Taliban are in the majority and the foreign fighters are in the minority."

Even as Mohammed announced the surrender, fighting raged around Kunduz after a lull that had accompanied the talks.

Northern alliance fighters streamed toward the front line in trucks, tanks and on foot, and commanders already at the front led troops on mountain paths closer to Taliban positions. Alliance forces fired artillery and rockets toward the city.

"When we conquer Kunduz, make sure you get some of the cars," one commander told a line of men trudging through the dust and mud of an abandoned front-line village.

The Taliban responded with their first mortar attack in days, sending shells onto a heavily trafficked front-line road out of Kunduz.

Refugees streaming out of Kunduz by foot, donkey and car dashed for cover, some women in head-to-toe white shrouds flapping around them. One group of women, confused, dived into a ditch exposed to the incoming mortar fire, their fingers tearing desperately at the dirt as shells pounded around them.

"The United States is bombing and the people are escaping," said refugee Mahmedi, breathless and too much in a hurry to stop to talk. "The city is empty."

Refugees said they were escaping both the anger of foreign fighters trapped in the city and the U.S. bombs.

Several refugees said U.S. bombs hit three mud houses in a front-line village Tuesday, killing many civilians. One refugee, who said he helped bury the dead, put the toll at 40. Their reports could not be confirmed.

A U.S.-led coalition launched attacks on the Taliban in early October for their refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden, the chief suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Coalition partners have been urging alliance commanders to show restraint if they do capture Kunduz. Coalition commander Gen. Tommy Franks, on a visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday night, urged two top alliance leaders "that if there are prisoners, they should be humanely treated," said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In Islamabad, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, expressed concern over the fate of Pakistanis fighting with the Taliban. Musharraf urged the Red Cross to do all it can to prevent massacres of foreign fighters at the hands of the Afghans.

But Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in Islamabad that although the organization is worried about the fate of trapped fighters, it is not in a position to help arrange any safety guarantees.

"It cannot get involved in political negotiations on conditions of a surrender," he said.

The northern alliance has agreed to attend power-sharing talks for a post-Taliban government next week in Bonn, Germany, and the search is on for leaders to represent the dominant Pashtun ethnic group. Officials of the U.S.-led coalition have said the Taliban are not welcome at the talks.

Coalition spokesman Kenton Keith said Taliban control over their main base, the southern city of Kandahar, was "loosening." Over the past week, ethnic Pashtun tribal leaders from across the border in Pakistan have been trying to persuade the Taliban to surrender the city.

But Taliban spokesman Syed Tayyab Agha vowed that the Taliban would fight to keep the one-quarter of Afghanistan they still hold, particularly Kandahar, their spiritual base.

Also Thursday, the Taliban lost their last diplomatic contact with the outside world when Pakistan informed the staff of the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad - controlled by the Taliban - that it should shut down.

Diplomats came to their offices early in the morning, but left after a few minutes, embassy official Mufti Yousuf said.

"We are delighted to know that Pakistan is severing diplomatic relations with the Taliban," Keith said.

And U.S. servicemen held Thanksgiving celebrations in the region even as their war effort continued.

In the Arabian Sea, the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt said prayers and watched Miami Dolphins cheerleaders wave pompoms to the tune of James Brown's "Living in America."

"This Thanksgiving, people back home, they have the opportunity to be thankful for their lives," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Dorian Fears, 23, of Cincinnati, Ohio. "Although there are some people who had lost their lives, their families in mourning can feel assured that we are protecting them from this kind of stuff happening again."

-------- africa

U.N. Group Urges Ban On Imports From Congo
Panel Links Looting of Resources to War

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 24, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7295-2001Nov23?language=printer

NAIROBI, Nov. 23 -- A new U.N. report calls for a temporary ban on the purchase of minerals, timber and coffee from parts of Congo occupied by foreign armies, saying the unabated plundering of resources is prolonging a three-year civil war in the Central African country.

"There is a clear link between the continuation of the conflict and the exploitation of natural resources," a panel of experts on Congo's natural resources reported. "It would not be wrong to say that one drives the other."

This week the panel presented a 38-page report to the Security Council recommending a moratorium on imports of diamonds, gold, cobalt, copper and columbite-tantalite, or "col-tan," an ore essential to the manufacture of electronics such as mobile phones and Sony's PlayStation 2.

The report was billed as an update of an April report of the commercial aspects of the Congo war. That report was attacked both inside and outside the United Nations as unbalanced and intemperate, and yet acknowledged as broadly accurate. It sharply criticized Uganda and Rwanda -- which invaded Congo in 1998, citing security concerns -- for using their armed forces to loot diamonds, gold and col-tan. The price of col-tan has since plummeted from a high of $300 a pound earlier this year.

The new report repeats the charges. But this time the U.N. experts devoted most of their attention to Zimbabwe, one of three countries Congo invited to defend it against the invasion. The other two principal allies, Angola and Namibia, appear to have small commercial interests in Congo.

Zimbabwe, however, demanded huge mineral and timber concessions in exchange for sending its military to Congo, effectively ransoming some of the host country's richest resources for decades to come, according to the report. The diamond fields granted to the Zimbabwe Defense Forces are described as the "the last strategic diamond reserves" held by Congo's government. The timber concessions may cover 163 million acres, or 15 percent of Congo's vast territory, according to Global Witness, a London-based resource watchdog group cited in the report.

The report was condemned by government spokesmen for both Zimbabwe and Congo.

"I can tell before reading it that it's guaranteed to be heavily opinionated, false and malicious," said Zimbabwe Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, according to the Panafrican News Agency.

Congo Information Minister Kikaya Bin Karubi drew a distinction between commercial activities by invaders and "countries that came to our rescue."

"Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia are here at the request of the government . . . and in the process we have signed legitimate agreements to go into business ventures," Karubi said on Zimbabwean state television.

A U.S. official, who was critical of the April report, called the new report valuable. "This coalesces the general view that, invited or uninvited, the Zimbabweans have become a major part of the problem," the official said. But he said that the prospect of the Security Council approving even a temporary ban on mineral sales from Congo appeared remote.

The panel also called for the Security Council to establish an independent body to help Congo's President Joseph Kabila, who took office in January following his father's assassination, to "review and revise" resource deals made under pressure. It asked for international support for Congo's efforts to rebuild the government, law enforcement system and other institutions whose decline under longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko left the country a haven for armed groups.

Under the so-called Lusaka peace plan that has brought about a cease-fire monitored by U.N. peacekeepers, Congo's political future will be determined by an "inter-Congolose dialogue." An attempt to conduct that dialogue in Ethiopia last month fell short. The next attempt is tentatively slated to take place in South Africa in January.

----

Mugabe Targets Reporters

Associated Press,
November 24, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7873-2001Nov23?language=printer

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- Foreign news correspondents who reported indiscriminate beatings of whites a week ago will be treated as terrorists, a spokesman for President Robert Mugabe warned.

The statement appeared in the state-owned Herald newspaper on the same day a European Union delegation said the embattled Mugabe heatedly rejected EU demands for international observers during elections scheduled for early next year.

Mugabe's government is being strongly criticized for alleged human rights abuses and a crackdown on the opposition that have escalated since governing party militants began violent occupations of white-owned farms in March 2000.

With the economy near collapse, Mugabe's popularity has plummeted, and Western diplomats and political analysts have speculated he is trying to engineer a chaotic situation that would allow him to declare a state of emergency and toughen his crackdown before elections.

-------- arms sales

Richard Winter Dies; Arms Dealer Executive

Saturday, November 24, 2001
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7862-2001Nov23?language=printer

Richard Winter, 78, who retired in 1998 as executive vice president of the Alexandria-based corporation known as Interarms, the world's largest arms merchandising firm, died of cancer Nov. 21 at his home in McLean.

Mr. Winter was chief executive officer of North American operations for International Armament Corp., where he worked for 40 years. It was founded in 1953 by former Central Intelligence Agency employee Samuel Cummings. He died in 1998.

Interarms at one point had an estimated 700,000 weapons in storage in its Alexandria waterfront warehouses. The company sold an estimated $80 million worth of rifles, pistols, machine guns, hand grenades and other low-tech weapons to foreign nations each year. It also supplies rifles, shotguns and pistols to customers in the United States and abroad....

-------- asia

Maoists in Nepal resume attacks

World Scene,
Washington Times
November 24, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011124-68501600.htm

KATMANDU, Nepal - Maoist guerrillas attacked police stations and government installations in Nepal yesterday, two days after pulling out of a four-month cease-fire following unsuccessful peace talks, officials said. No deaths or injuries were reported.

Police said the rebels rampaged in at least 15 towns across the Himalayan kingdom, firing guns and stealing weapons from at least one police station.

On Wednesday, the rebel leader known as Prachanda said the Maoists were unilaterally withdrawing from the cease-fire. He said attempts by the rebels to find a peaceful resolution had been foiled and that there was no justification to continue with the truce.

-------- biological weapons

In New York, On Alert for Bioterrorism
City's Tracking System Is Viewed as a Model

By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7665-2001Nov23?language=printer

NEW YORK -- Just before noon on Nov. 13, Farzad Mostashari gazed down at his computer printout and wondered aloud if he was staring into the face of a biological attack.

In the previous 24 hours, ambulance calls and emergency room visits for respiratory distress had spiked in Queens. Mostashari, the city health department's epidemiologist, asked his medical detectives to check it out.

That afternoon and into the evening, teams of public health experts pored over patient charts at three Queens hospitals, looking for any sign that pulmonary anthrax was the cause of the respiratory cases. What they found instead was asthma, anxiety attacks and -- as Mostashari had suspected all along -- smoke inhalation from the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 on Nov. 12.

On the bioterrorism front, it was a false alarm, but the sort of false alarm that should give New Yorkers comfort. The city has what is widely regarded as the finest system in the country for monitoring public health problems and quickly detecting outbreaks of disease, including a biological assault.

"The events of the past couple months have made people get real serious about the need for surveillance systems with some sensitivity and some specificity," said Thomas Milne, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. "We need public health departments to get the information in as close to a real-time basis as possible."

The anthrax attacks that have struck Washington and four states -- Florida, New York, New Jersey and most recently Connecticut -- were relatively small and delivered in some cases with clear warning signs: white powder and threatening letters. But a future attack, such as smallpox released in a sports arena or anthrax spores introduced through air ducts, could be stealthy.

Treating the sick would be an unprecedented challenge for a generation of physicians who have no experience with such diseases, especially at a time when many state and local health departments have been starved for resources. Even more terrifying to many in the medical community is the notion that they might not know for some time that an attack had occurred.

New York's solution is an elaborate health surveillance system that tracks 911 calls, walk-in emergency room visits, pharmacy sales of anti-diarrhea medication and illnesses among city transit workers.

"One doctor working in one ER may not be able to see the forest for the trees," Mostashari said. "These systems are designed to detect the earliest signs of a massive, widespread bioterrorist attack."

Think of health surveillance as a set of medical smoke detectors, sounding the alarm before a deadly disease sweeps through an entire community, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"If a whole bunch of alarms go off, we may need to get to a large number of people with antibiotics or vaccine," he said. "We are not just here to record history, but to change history."

In some states, public health reporting is still done with "pencil, paper and snail mail," as one official put it. Milne's organization estimates that 40 percent of local health departments do not have high-speed Internet access. Detecting a biological attack in those communities could take days.

As part of a $3.3 billion emergency bioterrorism package, Congress is considering giving cities and states up to $425 million for "health surveillance." Still, public health experts say that would represent only a down payment on fixing what they describe as a woefully underfunded system.

For decades, the termhealth surveillance conjured up images of dusty annual reports cataloguing births, deaths and the occasional batch of spoiled eggs at a church social, said Margaret A. Hamburg,a bioterrorism expert and former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But in recent years, the AIDS epidemic and tuberculosis prompted New York health officials to take a more active role.

As New York City's health commissioner in the 1990s, Hamburg helped move from a "word of mouth" approach that relied on doctors and nurses to one that combines traditional disease reporting with high-tech tracking of symptoms, a system known as "syndromic surveillance."

The heart of that system is daily monitoring of every 911 call in the city, about 1 million a year. Each night, fire department logs are transferred electronically to the health department, where a sophisticated computer program helps spot anomalies. "It actually turns red on the graph," Mostashari said.

With the data coded by medical complaint and Zip code, health officials can track localized problems such as the smoke-filled air in Queens. It is the first department in the nation to apply spatial cluster maps to symptoms, said Commissioner Neal L. Cohen.

Skeptics such as Osterholm say they are waiting for evidence that syndromic tracking -- which costs New York about $1.5 million a year -- works better or faster than highly trained doctors and nurses.

"The New York experiment is worth watching, but it's subject to a lot of random variations" such as bad weather triggering more 911 calls, said Alan P. Zelicoff,senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. He has developed a touch-screen program for doctors that he said has the virtue of "capturing physician judgment about the severity of illness."

In the diverse city of 8 million, New York's system is already paying dividends as the "eyes and ears" of the health department, Cohen said. For the past three winters, the computer announced the start of flu season two to three weeks before traditional reporting by health care professionals.

The early warning can save lives, said Gregg Husk,chairman of emergency medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center.

"If I were a medical director at a nursing home and heard of a flu outbreak, that would light a candle under me to get people vaccinated," he said. Similarly, health department alerts about syphilis outbreaks tip doctors off to ask the right questions and perform extra tests, he said.

After some 300,000 Milwaukee residents were infected in 1993 with cryptosporidium, a parasite that can cause severe intestinal illness, New York added a diarrhea surveillance program that tracks lab results and pharmacy sales. The first clue in Milwaukee, said Marcelle Layton, assistant commissioner of health in New York, was an uptick in purchases of Kaopectate.

One Monday morning a few winters ago, Layton's team arrived at work to see a similar increase in sales of Imodium, another anti-diarrheal medication.

"It turns out Imodium had been a sponsor of the Super Bowl that weekend," Layton said, laughing in retrospect. "I now know more about pharmaceutical marketing than I ever expected."

Still, Layton said it is easier to weed out false leads than not to have any data. She hopes to expand the pharmacy surveillance program to include popular flu medications, since many people try them before visiting a doctor.

After the Sept. 11 hijackings, health officials broadened their surveillance to hospitals, asking emergency workers to fill out an extra form on every patient. Epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were stationed round the clock in hospitals to assist, but when they left for a brief period, compliance plummeted, Layton said.

Within a few weeks, the process was computerized. Now, 28 hospitals in the five New York boroughs ship a daily log to the health department. The system is still "clunky," said Husk, who each morning excises confidential patient information by hand before sending the report to the health department. But he expects the technical glitches to be smoothed out.

Often, the real value of surveillance is ruling things out. After New York hospital worker Kathy T. Nguyen was initially diagnosed with inhalation anthrax on Oct. 29, Layton's team watched the computer charts, waiting to see if her case foreshadowed a new wave of attacks. "We especially wanted to see if there were clusters around where she lived or worked," she said.

As three, four and five days went by without a blip on the graphs, health officials began to breathe easier. "It was very reassuring," Layton said.

More than most, New York health officials are keenly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of syndromic surveillance. An astute doctor -- not syndromic surveillance -- first alerted Layton to a possible outbreak of West Nile virus in 1999. Yet city doctors had hospitalized 15 people with the disease, cases that were never reported.

A computerized chart doesn't lie, but it also doesn't tell the whole story, Mostashari said.

"It's just one arrow in the quiver," he said. "But if this adds a 20 percent chance of giving us 24 hours earlier notice of a massive bioterrorist attack, I'm sure people would say it was worth it."

-------- business

Security Concerns Enrich Background-Checking Companies

By Kirstin Downey Grimsley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2001; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7513-2001Nov23?language=printer

With terrorism on their minds, employers around the country are swarming to companies that do background checks to start or improve systems to weed out job applicants with cloudy or troubled pasts.

At HireRight, a background-checking firm in Irvine, Calif., employer inquiries are up fivefold since the Sept. 11 attacks. At Backgroundchecks.com, based in Irving, Tex., revenue has risen almost 50 percent. SureStaff Personnel, an employment agency in Dallas, reports a similar surge.

"It's the mood out there," said Gary Kirksey, SureStaff's president. "The risk-management departments are requiring it. . . . I don't know if a background check could have stopped any of those terrorists, but now people want to do their due diligence before they hire people."

More than two-thirds of companies conduct some kind of background searches on prospective hires, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, including more than 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies.

The growth is coming from large companies seeking more-complete checks, and small and medium-size companies that are using them for the first time.

One big new customer may be the federal government.

The Transportation Department is hiring 28,000 airport-security screeners, who must withstand intensive scrutiny to be hired. It's unclear what other airport personnel might also have to be checked.

A spokesman said the department is studying the new airport-security law to determine how thoroughly applicants should be screened, what methods can be used and whether private contractors can be hired to do the job.

Botched background checks by Argenbright Security Inc., one of the largest private companies to screen airline passengers and baggage, helped convince Congress that airport security should be federalized.

In October, the Transportation Department's inspector general reported that Argenbright had hired convicted felons as security screeners and had been convicted of making false statements to the Federal Aviation Administration about whether it was verifying the backgrounds of its employees.

Last year, in Philadelphia, Argenbright was placed on three years of probation for those failures and was fined $1.5 million.

A subsequent investigation found that at other airports, too, Argenbright had hired workers with criminal records or who were illegal immigrants.

Some activist groups are asking that extensive background checks be required for other kinds of workers, including truck drivers (particularly those who haul hazardous materials), shipping-company employees, private pilots, limousine drivers, construction workers and security guards (especially at nuclear plants). Some have proposed that background checks also be done on foreign students entering the United States.

Eric Boden, president and chief executive of HireRight, said of his clients: "People don't want to be known to have hired a terrorist even if he didn't cause problems for their companies. And companies certainly don't want to subsidize terrorists and furnish them with their financial wherewithal."

The expansion of background checks in the public and private sectors worries worker advocates and civil libertarians, who fear that job seekers will be penalized in the workplace for events in the distant past, or that immigrants might be excluded from jobs because they are not U.S. citizens.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Work Rights Institute, said that while "nobody wants to hire an airline screener with an arson conviction," widespread background checks could mean that workers with minor indiscretions could be barred from jobs they could do well.

"They'll find people who were solid employees for 10 years who had a teenage shoplifting conviction," Maltby said. "And the person [in the personnel department] will decide not to hire him. That's going to happen."

Maltby also warned that credit-reporting agencies and other data-collection firms used by background checkers frequently make errors and don't take responsibility for them, and could end up costing people jobs.

The elements of a background check can vary widely because there is no industry standard.

Some Web-based services offer to perform simple database searches for as little as $1 per name for high-volume customers.

A more complete check can cost $200 per applicant and includes a look for criminal records; employment and education verification; Social Security name and number verification; driving history; military records; state licensing records; compensation history; drug screening; personal references; and notices of bankruptcy or liens.

Credit checks are done on applicants for accounting and financial positions.

Applicants are required to sign waivers permitting such reviews. Typically, if they want the work, they agree.

In addition, some employers now ask the screening companies to check a public FBI list that gives the names of people identified as terrorists, drug traffickers or organizations believed to have done business with them, Boden said.

Dean Suposs, general manager of ADP Screening and Selection Services in Fort Collins, Colo., acknowledged that some background information could be misused. But, he said, a simple analysis of the data produced by background checks shows that searches are necessary.

Last year, Suposs's company found that 24 percent of applicants it checked had misrepresented their employment or education records, or both; 35 percent had one or more moving violations on their driving records, including convictions for driving drunk; 26 percent had financial judgments against them or had filed for bankruptcy; and 6 percent of applicants had been convicted of crimes in the preceding seven years.

"It's a balancing act between the right to privacy for employees and the employer's need to know," Suposs said.

-------- germany

German Greens Back Using Troops for Afghan Campaign

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 7:24 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-germany-greens.html?searchpv=reuters

ROSTOCK, Germany (Reuters) - Germany's pacifist Greens party voted by a large majority to back the deployment of troops for Afghanistan on Saturday, averting the collapse of the coalition government.

Greens co-leader Claudia Roth described the vote at the party's congress as the ``most difficult decision in the history of our party.'' Environment Minister Juergen Trittin estimated that about 75 percent of delegates had been in favor.

A vote against the deployment could have triggered the collapse of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrat-Greens government, forcing him to find a new coalition partner or to call an early general election.

Germany is due to begin its troop mobilization for Afghanistan on Monday with an initial deployment of air transport and medical crew.

Parliament voted narrowly a week ago for the deployment after some Greens ended their opposition at the last minute. All but four of the Greens' 47 members of parliament backed the decision to mobilize 3,900 soldiers for the U.S.-led Afghan campaign.

Greens leaders at the party congress in the northern port city of Rostock were keen to stress the prospects for peace as Afghan ethnic and political leaders prepare to gather in Bonn next week for talks to forge a post-Taliban interim government.

PLACARDS AND WHISTLES

Anti-war demonstrators greeted the 750 delegates with placards and whistles and a number of regional party leaders had quit the Greens in disgust at the party's support for the U.S.-led campaign.

Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister and best-known Green, looked highly relieved after the vote.

Fischer, who had talked of ``trouble, trouble, trouble'' this weekend, made an impassioned appeal to fellow Greens.

``I ask for your confidence. I want you to support my politics here with this congress and not to leave me alone,'' he said, ending his speech near to tears.

Fischer endured a few hecklers, but many delegates gave him a standing ovation for nearly three minutes.

Other leaders urged members not to jeopardize a three-year alliance with Schroeder's Social Democrats that has forced through major Green policies -- phasing out nuclear power, raising energy taxes and legalizing same-sex marriages.

The Greens leadership put forward a proposal in favor of staying in government, but stressed its anti-war credentials and ``critical'' support of the United States in contrast with Schroeder's pledge of ``unlimited'' backing.

The vote gave the ecologist party vital breathing space in the face of a slump in popularity. Recent opinion polls showed the party's support hovering at around five percent, the minimum required for representation in parliament.

Protesters outside carried posters portraying Fischer in combat gear and with a rifle in hand.

``If Germany goes through with this policy, we've learned nothing from two world wars,'' said Werner Kuhn, a long-time Greens member who quit in 1999 when the party supported sending German troops to Kosovo.

Heinz Born, a World War Two veteran, produced a small fragment of a mortar round.

``I've experienced war and an American bomb put this into my lungs. War kills the innocent and this is happening again,'' the 83-year-old said.

---

German Minister Pleads With Greens

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Government.html?searchpv=aponline

BERLIN (AP) -- Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer won the backing of his Greens party Saturday for sending German troops into the war on terrorism, averting the risk of a government collapse.

A national party conference passed a motion endorsing the troop pledge after an emotional plea for support by Fischer, who demanded solidarity with the United States and warned the Greens that they would risk political oblivion by bringing down Germany's center-left coalition.

Faced with strong pressure from Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats, delegates meeting in the northern city of Rostock overwhelmingly rejected pacifist proposals that would have disavowed Fischer and taken the party out of the government.

``This is a clear mandate,'' said Greens lawmaker Albert Schmidt, who supported sending German troops.

The vote signaled a fresh move away from the Greens' anti-war roots and bolstered Fischer's position as his nation's chief diplomat.

Delegates, in a show of hands, overwhelmingly approved a proposal by party leaders to stay in the government and to ``accept'' parliament's decision offering up to 3,900 German troops to help fight terrorism. But Schroeder has stressed there are no immediate plans to send German ground troops to Afghanistan.

Greens members faced the sharpest dilemma in their party's two-decade history after Schroeder called a confidence vote this month to force lawmakers of his coalition of Social Democrats and Greens to endorse the deployment in solidarity with Washington.

``I ask for your trust,'' Fischer said earlier in a fiery speech mixing horror at the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States with sarcasm against pacifist opponents. ``I plead with you: Don't leave me and my policy in the cold.''

Some 800 delegates followed Fischer's speech with rapt attention, many breaking into cheers and a standing ovation when he finished. Some booed, however, when he said Germany ``must stand at the side of our alliance partner, the United States.''

``I wish we could have been spared what happened on Sept. 11,'' Fischer said. ``But that doesn't make this war any less real. In the world of the 21st century, we won't be able to avoid the use of military force as a government party.''

He insisted the U.S.-led attacks on Afghan targets were only part of a broader strategy including diplomacy and humanitarian aid.

Opponents of German military involvement criticized civilian casualties in the U.S.-led bombing of Afghan targets and expressed fear that Germany was moving too fast in breaking postwar taboos on sending soldiers abroad.

``This war has not solved the problem of international terrorism, and it will not,'' Annelie Buntenbach, a leading left-wing Greens lawmaker. ``It is disproportionate. The West is running straight into a battle of cultures.''

Much of the dispute reflects a gulf between ordinary members -- who cherish the Greens' roots in the peace movement against the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles in Germany in the late 1970s -- and party leaders who have to make government policy decisions on a daily basis.

Fast-moving events in Afghanistan may have increased the leadership's chances of swaying the rank-and-file. A U.N. conference of Afghan factions opens Tuesday in Bonn, Germany, in hopes of setting up a broad-based interim government, just the sort of civilian conflict resolution the Greens have always approved.

-------- israel

Israeli Missiles Hit Palestinian Positions in Gaza

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-mideast.html?searchpv=reuters

GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli helicopters fired at least eight missiles at Palestinian targets in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, destroying a security position but causing no casualties, Palestinian security officials said.

The officials said that a position belonging to the Palestinian maritime police was destroyed north of Gaza city after helicopters fired three missiles.

They said three more missiles hit targets in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza including offices belonging to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. Two were believed to have struck a security position in Khan Younis in south Gaza.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.

The missile strikes followed a day of rising tension in which an Israeli was killed in an apparent Palestinian mortar attack in Gaza and thousands of Palestinians vowed revenge for an Israeli missile strike that killed a leader of the militant Hamas group on Friday.

The violence was likely to complicate a new U.S. mission intended to help end 14 months of regional violence. Former U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns are due to arrive in the region on Monday.

---

Palestinians Vow Revenge for Israeli Killing

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html?searchpv=reuters

JENIN, West Bank (Reuters) - More than 60,000 Palestinian mourners in the West Bank and Gaza vowed Saturday to launch revenge attacks inside Israel, a day after an Israeli missile strike killed a senior member of the militant group Hamas.

Some 50,000 Palestinians took to the streets of the West Bank city of Jenin for the funeral of Hamas military leader, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, who has long been on Israel's most-wanted list for alleged involvement in suicide attacks on its citizens.

Hanoud's deputy Ayman Hasaikah and his brother Ma'moun Hasaikah were also killed when Israeli helicopters fired missiles at their car near Nablus Friday.

Mourners in Jenin called on Hamas's military wing, Izz el-Deen al-Qassam, to prepare booby-trapped cars to be used in explosions in Israel.

``Wait and see (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon. The Brigades will dig your grave,'' they chanted.

In Gaza City, more than 10,000 demonstrators, many masked and pumping bullets from machine guns into the air, read from a statement issued by the al-Qassam Brigades.

``Our revenge will be very soon and very strong against Israel inside Tel Aviv,'' the statement said.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, around 4,000 Palestinians took to the streets for the funerals of two men killed a day earlier, possible while preparing a bomb.

Loudspeakers positioned on cars in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and Khan Younis refugee camp called on locals to begin a three-day general strike to mark Hanoud's death.

Considered a crack commander by Hamas, he had eluded at least two Israeli attempts to kill him in the past.

HEAVY TOLL

The attack on Hanoud brought to at least seven the number of Palestinians to die violently Friday, one day after five Palestinian boys were killed in an explosion in the Gaza Strip that Palestinian authorities blamed on an Israeli booby-trap.

Palestinian hospital officials said that at least three boys under the age of 15 were wounded by live Israeli gunfire after throwing stones at soldiers in Khan Younis Saturday.

The rising tensions were certain to complicate a new U.S. mission to end 14 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence that is due to begin Monday.

A statement issued by Ariel Sharon's office said Israeli security forces had killed Hanoud who it claimed was involved in ``a long string of attacks against Israelis'' including a bomb attack on a Tel Aviv disco in which at least 20 people died.

Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo accused Israel of trying to sink the U.S. peace effort. Former U.S. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni and Assistant Secretary of State William Burns were due to arrive in the region Monday.

The United States wants calm in the Middle East to bolster Arab support for its efforts to capture Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, who it says was behind the suicide plane attacks on Washington and New York on Sept. 11.

Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner differentiated between what he said was Israel's commitment to achieving a cease-fire and its ongoing war against terrorism.

``Hanoud was a master terrorist who was for a long time on our prime list of terrorists. The Palestinian Authority should have arrested this man a long time ago. Unfortunately they did not, so we had to do the job ourselves,'' he told Reuters.

At least 720 Palestinians and 188 Israelis have been killed since a uprising against Israeli occupation erupted in September 2000, shortly after peace talks stalled.

VOWS OF REVENGE

Hamas political leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi told crowds during the Gaza rally that Israel had not ``assassinated the will of our people,'' and implicated the United States in the strike.

``This attack comes under American sponsorship ... It is a war between us and them ... We tell Sharon our response will come without a doubt and God willing it will be painful,'' he said.

Hamas has killed scores of Israelis in suicide bombings in recent years and has played an important role in the uprising.

The Palestinians accuse Israel of assassinating more than 70 Palestinians since the uprising began. Israel says its internationally condemned policy is aimed at militants who plan or carry out attacks, but Palestinians say the killings have included several senior political activists.

In the violence earlier Friday, Israeli troops also killed a Palestinian in a stone-throwing confrontation in Gaza.

Soldiers killed a Palestinian man and critically wounded a woman near Gaza's Rafah border crossing with Egypt after firing at a civilian car. Israeli sources said soldiers fired after it approached their position and did not heed warning shots.

The Palestinian Authority said the five schoolboys who were killed in Khan Younis Thursday were blown up by an Israeli booby-trap and demanded an international inquiry.

The United States called the incident a tragic accident which Israel must investigate. Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said the boys' deaths were a ``human tragedy'' and that an inquiry was underway.

---

U.N. Panel on Torture Urges Further Steps by Israel

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/middleeast/24TORT.html

GENEVA, Nov. 23 - The United Nations Committee Against Torture said today that while Israel had made progress in ending some practices that amounted to torture, it should install "effective complaint, investigative and prosecution mechanisms" to handle continuing protests.

The committee, with 10 independent experts, said in a statement that it was "fully aware of the difficult situation of unrest faced by Israel, particularly in the occupied territories, and understands its security concerns," but that "no exceptional circumstances may be invoked" to justify torture.

Israel signed the 1987 Convention Against Torture and is required to report periodically on its compliance.

The committee also reviewed Indonesia, Benin, Zambia and Ukraine. Saudi Arabia submitted a report, then wrote the committee earlier this month that it was unable to attend.

No country got a top report from the committee, which typically recommends more careful monitoring and bringing laws into conformity with the rules set out in the 14-year-old convention, which has been ratified by 126 states.

The committee, concluding its two- week session, said it was concerned about the "climate of impunity" for abuses by Indonesian security forces because many victims were afraid to complain or failed to get a fair hearing.

It specifically cited parts of the country where antigovernment forces have been active, like Aceh, Irian Jaya and the Moluccas.

Indonesian officials said they were trying to educate security forces to observe human rights. But the panel highlighted gaps in the country's laws, such as the failure to define torture as an offense, making it difficult to pursue cases of human rights abuse.

The committee also criticized Ukraine for what it said was the widespread use of torture in its jails, despite recent laws aimed at stemming it.

Many detention centers, it said, were overcrowded, had inadequate sanitary facilities and high rates of tuberculosis, and lacked adequate access to medical care.

Regarding Israel, the committee said that despite "numerous" allegations of torture and ill treatment of Palestinian detainees, particularly as fighting intensified over the past year, a Supreme Court ruling in 1999 apparently had improved the treatment of detainees.

However, because the decision left open the possibility of torture in extreme "ticking bomb" cases, the committee chairman, Peter Burns, said "certain types of conduct slip through the net," including depriving detainees of sleep.

The panel also noted that there had been "very few prosecutions" against reported torturers in Israel.

One improvement would be to change Israeli law to remove "necessity as a possible justification to the crime of torture," the committee said. Also, it urged Israel to assure that all detainees were brought promptly before a judge and had access to lawyers so they were not held for unduly long periods.

Israel maintained that its security agents did not torture while questioning detainees, and that it fought terrorism with "its hands tied behind its back" while trying to balance security concerns with human rights.

---

Hamas Pledges Revenge for Killing

By Karin Laub
Associated Press Writer
Saturday, November 24, 2001; 6:42 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8828-2001Nov24?language=printer

JERUSALEM -- The Islamic militant group Hamas threatened bloody revenge Saturday after the leader of its military wing in the West Bank and two other activists were killed in a targeted Israeli missile attack.

The killing of Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, suspected mastermind of several major suicide attacks in Israel since 1997, is expected to plunge the region into more turmoil as the United States is launching a new Mideast peace mission.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Abu Hanoud was a "professional terrorist" responsible for the deaths of scores of Israelis, and that Israel acted in self defense in killing him. Peres, speaking on Israel Radio, said Abu Hanoud, 34, had planned to carry out more attacks.

Nabil Abu Irdeineh, an adviser to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accused Israel of trying to sabotage U.S. peace efforts by killing Abu Hanoud.

Two mediators, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, are expected to arrive in the region on Monday. Their mission is to revive a truce deal and restart peace talks.

The targeted killings came at a time of growing tension. On Thursday, five boys from the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip were killed when they stepped on explosives Palestinian police say were planted by Israeli forces. Israel's defense minister said the deaths were being investigated.

Abu Hanoud, his deputy Ayman Hashaykah and Hashaykah's brother, a lower-ranking Hamas activist, were driving in a van between the West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin on Friday evening when their vehicle was hit by several Israeli missiles fired from a helicopter, Palestinian security officials.

Mustafa Abu Hanoud, a brother of the Hamas leader, said he was told by a witness that the van was hit by six missiles and heavy machine gun fire. Abu Hanoud's body was torn apart in the attack, the brother said.

"I hope that the Izzedine al Qassam brigades will cut the Israelis to pieces, as they did to my brother," Mustafa Abu Hanoud said, referring to the Hamas military wing. Izzedine al Qassam said in a leaflet that it is "committed to avenging the blood of one of our leaders."

Hamas declared a three-day period of mourning and asked Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to observe a strike Saturday.

Hamas has carried out a series of suicide bombings in Israel in recent years, including several that came as revenge for the killings of senior members by Israel. In response to Israel's killing of a top Hamas bombmaker in 1996, Hamas carried out four major suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis.

Israel has tried to capture Abu Hanoud in the past.

In August 2000, three Israeli undercover troops were killed by friendly fire in a botched attempt to arrest Abu Hanoud in his home village of Assira al-Shamaliya near Nablus. Abu Hanoud fled and was taken into custody by the Palestinian Authority.

In May 2001, he was injured when Israeli warplanes retaliating for a suicide attack at a shopping mall in Israel bombed the Nablus prison where he was being held. Israel said he was released after the air strike.

In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Palestinian school children observed a moment of silence Saturday for the five boys killed in the explosion at the Khan Younis camp earlier in the week. The five, ranging in age from 7 to 14, were on their way to school when the blast went off.

Palestinian security officials have said the booby-trapped device was planted by Israeli forces targeting Palestinian gunmen who have been shooting from the area at nearby Israeli settlements.

Several Israeli politicians called for a swift investigation by the military. "This must be investigated thoroughly, and conclusions must be drawn, both to know what happened, and so that such things don't happen in the future," Peres said. "We cannot let this pass."

-------- korea

South Korea tests missile; American military says it's not involved

Montreal Gazette
Thursday, November 22, 2001
Canadian Press
http://www.canada.com/montreal/story.asp?id={460C3463-D5A1-47BD-A3A5-C27FDFA0E3CF}

SEOUL (AP) - South Korea test-fired a missile with a 100-kilometre range that landed in the Yellow Sea between South Korea and China on Thursday, the Defence Ministry said.

In a brief statement, the ministry said its Agency for Defence Development launched the missile from a launch station on the country's western coast, about 200 kilometres south of Seoul.

"The missile flew to a target 50 kilometres to the west, and it hit the target after a few minutes," the statement said.

It said South Korea has notified the United States of its missile test, as it was required to under a bilateral treaty on missile tests. It also explained its test to Japan, officials said.

Stephen Oertwig, a spokesman for the U.S. forces in Korea, said the American military was not involved.

Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted officials at the Japanese Defence Agency as saying that they had been told by U.S. forces in Japan that the missile launch did not pose a danger.

South Korea has expressed wishes to develop missiles with a longer range. After months of negotiations, Seoul obtained U.S. approval in January to develop missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometres, capable of striking Pyongyang and other key North Korean cities.

Under a 1979 accord with the United States, South Korea had been barred from developing missile with a range longer than 180 kilometres. Washington agreed to revise that accord on condition South Korea join the Missile Technology Control Regime.

In March, South Korea signed the regime, which required it not to give any other country technology to build missiles with a range longer than 300 kilometres.

The United States, Russia and Japan and 30 other countries have signed the 14-year-old agreement. Holdouts include Middle Eastern countries, India, Pakistan, China and North Korea.

North Korea is believed to be armed with missiles capable of hitting all of South Korea and most of Japan. It alarmed the region by firing a long-range missile in 1998 which flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific. The North reportedly has completed development of a more powerful missile that experts say could reach Hawaii and Alaska.

-------- nato

NATO Sees Warmer, Not Uncritical Ties with Russia

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-nato-russia.html?searchpv=reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - NATO's relationship with Moscow may grow closer but it won't be uncritical, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said on Saturday after a three-day visit to Russia.

Robertson was asked whether he'd felt a moral unease at building closer links between the 19 NATO member states and Russia after the September 11 attacks on the United States, given Western concern about human rights abuses in Chechnya.

``No I didn't because I reiterated the NATO position and that is an appreciation, maybe at the moment a deeper appreciation, of the problems that Russia faces with terrorism and the effect of international terrorism in Chechnya,'' Robertson told the BBC.

``But I raised as we always do the genuine concerns we have about the methods they're using and about the reports of breaches of human rights,'' he said.

In the light of the September attacks the West has reevaluated Russia's campaign in Chechnya, which President Vladimir Putin has equated with the international war against terrorism declared by the West.

Robertson also denied Russia would have an effective veto on NATO's actions if a proposal by British Prime Minister Tony Blair for Russia to join a 20-strong group with NATO aimed at reaching key decisions on the basis of consensus goes ahead.

``We want joint decision-making in certain areas which would need consensus 'at 20' and obviously we would work to get it, on the other hand nobody can deny the right of NATO to act as 19 if it decides to do so,'' Robertson said.

Asked whether NATO's intervention in Kosovo, which Russia opposed at the time, would have been possible had the proposed consensual arrangement been in operation, Robertson insisted that the campaign would have gone ahead regardless.

``Yes of course it would because there would be no veto over NATO operations by Russia or any other non-NATO members, that's never been the situation and Mr. Putin has made it clear that he does not want it either,'' Robertson said.

But he said there were a number of areas where he foresaw the possibility of closer cooperation and joint decisions.

``One most obviously is counter-terrorism, another might be proliferation of weapons of mass destruction where we've got a common concern and a common objective, maybe further Balkan operations would come under this territory,'' he said.

``The subject of theater missile defense is one on which we're working together at the moment and where we could explore the possibilities of working at 20.''

Robertson returned on Saturday from a three-day visit to Russia during which he met Putin, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defense Minister Sergey Ivanov and visited the site of World War II's bloodiest battle, Stalingrad.

Putin told Robertson on Friday Russia was ready to match the alliance's desire to boost ties, but was not trying to join the military pact or have a veto right over its activities.

Putin has made integrating Russia into Western institutions a top priority, despite strong reservations among Russia's military and parts of the foreign policy establishment.

But many obstacles remain within both Russia and the Atlantic alliance. Many practical difficulties remain and the new format has yet to be endorsed by NATO states.

-------- propaganda wars

In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US power

John Pilger
20 Feb 2001 (Posted to NucNews 11/24/01)
http://pilger.carlton.com/articles/47638

Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?"

The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is the opposite. Constitutional freedoms unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship; the press is a "fourth estate", a watchdog on democracy. The journalism schools boast this reputation, the influential East Coast press is especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of record, the New York Times, with its masthead slogan: "All the news that's fit to print."

It takes only a day or two back in the US to be reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by omission, and voluntary. The source of most Americans' information, mainstream television, has been reduced to a set of marketing images shot and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola commercial that flow seamlessly into the actual commercials. Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is the model, with its peep-shows of human tragedy.Non-American human beings are generally ignored, or treated with an anthropological curiosity reserved for wildlife documentaries.

Not long ago, Kenneth Jarecke was talking about this censorship. Jarecke is the American photographer who took the breath-catching picture of an Iraqi burnt to a blackened cinder, petrified at the wheel of his vehicle on the Basra Road where he, and hundreds of others, were massacred by American pilots on their infamous "turkey shoot" at the end of the Gulf war. In the United States, Jarecke's picture was suppressed for months after what was more a slaughter than a war. "The whole US press collaborated in keeping silent about the consequences of that war," he said.

The famous CBS anchorman Dan Rather told his prime-time audience: "There's one thing we can all agree on. It's the heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." What he omitted to say was that a quarter of them had been killed, like their British comrades, by other Americans. He made no mention of the Iraqi dead, put at 200,000 by the Medical Educational Trust. That American forces had deliberately bombed civilian infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, was not reported at the time. Six months later, one newspaper, Newsday, published in Long Island, New York, disclosed that three US brigades "used snow plows mounted on tanks to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 70 miles of trenches".

The other day, both the Washington Post and the New York Times referred to Iraq without mentioning the million people now estimated to have died as a direct result of sanctions imposed, via the UN, by the United States and Britain. That, writes Brian Michael Goss of the University of Illinois, is standard practice. Goss examined 630 articles on sanctions published in the New York Times from 1996 to 1998. In those three years, just 20 articles - 3 per cent of the coverage - were critical of the policy or dwelt upon its civilian impact. The rest reflected the US official line, identifying 21 million people with Saddam Hussein. The scale of the censorship is placed in perspective by Professors John and Karl Mueller, of the University of Rochester. "Even if the UN estimates of the human damage to Iraq are roughly correct," they write, sanctions have caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history."

A third of the people of East Timor were put to death by the Suharto dictatorship during Indonesia's 24-year occupation. Yet the American media skirted this epic crime until shortly before the 1999 referendum. Their silence was in striking contrast to the saturation coverage of the "genocide" in Kosovo, used to justify the Nato bombing campaign, and was in line with suppression of the post-bombing disclosure that there was no genocide. In East Timor, the United States helped Suharto execute his invasion, secretly and illegally, with weapons and aircraft. For most of the 24 years of bloody occupation, the US media maintained a virtual blackout on East Timor.

In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to American power. Kosovo was a major story; it demonstrated the "credibility" of Nato and America's control over the Balkans. East Timor was a non-story, "a road bump on the way to Indonesia", according toa State Department official. In a study of the New York Times and Washington Post cited by Goss, 75 per cent of the sources were government officials - a record not that far behind the old Pravda. Truly independent reporters such as Seymour Hersh are described, revealingly, as "dissidents" and "advocates". What is most telling is the media's presumption of innocence of the rapacious American imperial role, rather like Hollywood's post-Vietnam celebration of America as a noble victim. In a lead editorial recently, the New York Times identified the problems of the world, ranging from poverty to terrorism to disease, as "challenges to American safety and well-being". That the United States consumes a quarter of the world's resources, controls the channels of world trade and the institutions of inequality, and squeezes whole nations, such as Iraq, to death, is simply not news.

-------- russia

RUSSIA: AGREEMENT ON MOLDOVA REBELS

World Briefing
Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT)
New York Times
November 24, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/24BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

President Vladimir V. Putin and his Moldovan counterpart, Vladimir Voronin, pledged to cooperate on reining in Transnistria, a separatist region of the impoverished former Soviet republic of Moldova. Transnistria, which borders Ukraine and is primarily Russian speaking, declared independence from Moldova in 1992, spurring a short, brutal war. Moldova borders Romania and Ukraine and is populated mostly by ethnic Romanians but depends completely on Russia for its energy supply. Russian forces are still based in Trans-Dniester but Russian officials say they have withdrawn all military hardware and will soon cut the force to 1,500 troops.

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CHINA: PLANNING A TRIP TO THE MOON

World Briefing
Erik Eckholm (NYT)
New York Times
November 24, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/24BRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

Chinese officials affirmed their goal of sending a person into space by 2005, to be followed eventually by a manned mission to the moon. In 1999 and last year the country sent unmanned capsules into space and retrieved them but a top scientist said more test flights were needed before a manned flight is tried, The China Daily reported. China is pursuing space flight for national prestige and is investigating economic and military uses.

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35 Special forces killed

Agence France Presse
24nov01
http://www.couriermail.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,3309888,00.html

AT least 35 US special forces soldiers were killed and many injured in a firefight with pro-Taliban troops in southern Afghanistan, a Pakistani newspaper has reported.

There has been no confirmation of the report in the daily newspaper, The News.

US officials were not immediately available for comment.

The News quoted unnamed sources as saying the Americans took heavy casualties in an attack launched on Thursday on the Taliban militia and troops of the al Qaeda network of terror suspect Osama bin Laden.

The US troops were backed by helicopter gunships in the attack "but were caught by surprise and had to withdraw quickly," the daily said.

"At least 35 personnel of the US Special Forces were killed and many injured" in the battle," The News said. It gave no other details of the fighting.

The newspaper said 35 bodies and an unspecified number of injured were flown by helicopter to Jacobabad Airbase in Pakistan.

Ten C-130 transport planes were ready to fly the bodies back to the United States, it said.

"The Pentagon and the Centcom (US Central Command) are very much perturbed over this development and there are reports of immediate measures being contemplated to counter the situation," The News said. It did not elaborate.


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THE LEGAL FRONT
Spain Sets Hurdle for Extraditions

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By SAM DILLON with DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/europe/24SPAI.html

MADRID, Nov. 23 - Spain will not extradite the eight men it has charged with complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks unless the United States agrees that they would be tried by a civilian court and not by the military tribunals envisioned by President Bush, Spanish officials said today.

The officials said the United States was informed this week of the Spanish stance, and several experts predicted today that other countries in the 15-nation European Union would balk at handing prisoners over to the Americans without similar guarantees.

Mr. Bush's announcement that the United States could use emergency military courts in terrorism cases has stirred criticism in Europe, and the arrests last week in Spain of eight Islamic extremists could provide an early test of foreign cooperation with the administration.

"Military trials would be the worst of all possible worlds if you wanted to get people back from Europe," said Geoffrey Robertson, a British human rights lawyer.

A senior European Union official who asked not to be identified said he doubted that any of the 15 nations - all of which have renounced the death penalty and signed the European Convention on Human Rights - would agree to extradition that involved the possibility of a military trial.

In Washington, a senior law enforcement official described the development today as "a setback." But the official said investigators were hopeful that Spanish investigators would share with the Americans any information about the eight Islamic extremists' dealings with the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackings, Mohamed Atta.

Government officials and legal scholars interviewed today in London, Berlin, Paris and other European capitals cited a series of objections to the American tribunals that the president's Nov. 13 order would allow for foreigners charged with terrorism. The objections include the secret nature of the hearings, suspects' inability to choose their defense lawyers, and the potential bias of the United States officers who would sit as judges.

The use of hearsay evidence, which would be allowed in the tribunals under Mr. Bush's order, would not trouble some European nations, but would raise hurdles in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where it is forbidden, the senior European Union official said.

"In Europe, we're very suspicious of special courts," said Marie Elisabeth Cartier, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Paris. "Everybody stands behind the U.S., and we understand that these events are exceptional. But we'd rather have normal procedure, one that is not military."

The United States has not yet lodged an extradition request. But a Spanish investigative judge, Baltasar Garzón, formally accused the eight Muslim defendants last Sunday of helping to prepare the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

If American law enforcement officials determine that the evidence backs Judge Garzón's accusations, the defendants would be subject to prosecution under American law.

In a meeting here on Wednesday between senior Spanish prosecutors and American diplomats, including a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the prosecutors warned that any future American extradition request would run into trouble because a military tribunal would not meet European standards for judicial proceedings, one of the prosecutors said today in an interview.

"No country in Europe could extradite detainees to the United States if there were any chance they would be put before these military tribunals," said the prosecutor, who is helping to coordinate the criminal procedures against the eight men, whom prosecutors believe to be associates of Osama bin Laden.

A spokesman for Spain's Foreign Ministry confirmed the prosecutor's account today, saying Spain could extradite detainees only to countries that offer defendants the legal guarantees provided by Spanish courts.

"And if we're talking about a tribunal in the United States with summary procedures and military judges, then these are not the same conditions that would characterize a trial in Spain or France or England or anywhere else in Europe," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. "Extradition would be impossible."

The law enforcement official in Washington said that Mr. Atta was believed to have made two visits to Spain this year, and that Washington was eager to know more about those trips.

"All we could get from the Spanish authorities is he rented a car each time and put 1,000 kilometers on the car each time," the official said, referring to 600 miles. "So we'd like to get a better idea of what he was doing in Spain, and who he met with."

The debate about the American tribunals comes as antiterrorism cooperation between the United States and the European authorities, especially in Spain and Germany, is accelerating. Three times this year, Spain has rounded up Arabs accused of preparing terrorist acts, and arrests have been made in Belgium, France, Britain and Germany. American law enforcement and intelligence officials have been working closely with their European counterparts, exchanging information that has advanced investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

The United States is used to negotiating certain conditions - like promising that prosecutors will not seek the death penalty - in order to extradite suspects in criminal and even in terrorist cases. In one recent case, the United States made such a promise to German officials to secure the extradition of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, who now faces trial in New York on charges of charges of taking part in a terrorism conspiracy led by Mr. bin Laden.

It is not known whether American officials would be prepared to promise that suspects extradited from Europe in the Sept. 11 attacks would not face the military tribunals mentioned by Mr. Bush.

The European Union already has a policy stating that no member nation must extradite a suspect to a country unless it gets believable assurances that the death penalty will not be asked for or applied.

So far, the extradition questions posed by the administration's plan appear to have been faced only in Spain, and have not been discussed formally by any European Union institution.

The issue appeared to take the officials of several European governments by surprise. Officials of the British, German, Dutch and Italian governments declined comment and the acting spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Madrid, did not return phone calls.

"We are just starting our reflection on this case," said a spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry. "We have no official position."

Germany has a long practice of extraditing to the United States in capital cases only if it receives assurances that conviction will not bring a death penalty, a legal expert at the German Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law said. Were the United States now to request extradition of a suspected terrorist, a German court would have to examine whether the proposed military trial in the United States would be "contrary to the rule of law."

"And that could be a problem," the German expert said.

Mr. Robertson, the British human rights lawyer, said the proposed American tribunals fell "far short of the fair trial standards" required by a key passage in the continent's basic legal affairs treaty, Article 6 of the Convention on Human Rights.

"Military officers in the pay of the U.S. government are not regarded as independent or impartial," he said, adding that European treaties require public, not secret, trials.

"In effect, there would be little or no chance of extraditing from Europe," Mr. Robertson said.

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WAR CRIMES
A Full Charge of Genocide for Milosevic

New York Times
November 24, 2001
By SUZANNE DALEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/international/europe/24MILO.html

PARIS, Nov. 23 - The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague issued a sweeping new indictment today of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, charging him with genocide in connection with the war in Bosnia in 1992-95.

In its third and gravest indictment, the tribunal charged that Mr. Milosevic "participated in a joint criminal enterprise, the purpose of which was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs from large areas of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina."

In addition to genocide - the most serious charge the tribunal can bring - the indictment contains charges of complicity to commit genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.

The indictment lists 29 counts against Mr. Milosevic, the first head of state to be charged with genocide, who has defiantly appeared before the tribunal three times in recent months to face charges of war crimes in Kosovo and Croatia.

Throughout, he has refused to appoint a lawyer or to defend himself, calling the tribunal a farce and vowing to fight to "topple this tribunal" and the "mastermind behind it."

Added to the earlier indictments, involving war crimes in Kosovo in 1999 and Croatia in 1991, the new accusations appear to complete the prosecution's picture: that Mr. Milosevic was the chief architect of three Balkan wars that tore up Yugoslavia.

The new indictment links Mr. Milosevic to the Bosnian Serb leadership that carried out the ca